Category: Books
Book Review: Downtown Owl
Bill Simmons gets the credit for this one. I had heard Chuck Klosterman‘s name before, but really didn’t know much about him. Then I heard Simmons, aka The Sports Guy (I’m linking to his own site, not the ESPN one),…
Book Review: Election
I don’t know why I hadn’t gotten around to reading “Election” by Tom Perrotta until recently. I had read “The Wishbones” and “Joe College,” his two funny books which bookended the novel ultimately made into a film starring Matthew Broderick…
Book Review: Gods Behaving Badly
I had long summer reading lists pretty much every year in high school. At one point, I read both “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey.” Or, to be more accurate, I skimmed those Greek mythological tomes and read the Cliff’s Notes…
Book Review: Love Will Tear Us Apart
Because the one big piece of fiction I have written (attention agents – you can read it if you want!) revolves around the impact of music on the lives of people in their 20s, I could not resist picking up…
Book Review: How to Talk to a Widower
I found Jonathan Tropper by accident. While scanning the shelves at a local bookstore for something to read, the cover for The Book of Joe caught my eye. I had never heard of the author, but found the summary interesting…
Book Review: 1949
I have a decent background with Ireland. I traveled there once, did my senior thesis for college on Irish literature and have read several different books on the island’s history. Still, I almost didn’t read Morgan Llyewen’s historical novel 1949….
Book Review: Taverns and Drinking in Early America
Now that I work at an academic publisher, I sometimes have the opportunity to get my hands on books I might otherwise not know about. My most recent read, Taverns and Drinking in Early America, falls squarely in that category….
Book Review: Dart League King
Book covers get a bad rap. They say you can’t judge a book by one, but that totally leaves out the importance of drawing in a customer with a strong cover. If it weren’t for the image of darts on…
Book Review: Bloody Confused
I am really glad I did not troll the Intertubes for reviews of Chuck Culpepper’s book Bloody Confused!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer before I recently read it. I should have known that anything relating to…
Book Review: Plan B
Tying the entire plot of a book around the angst which accompanies a milestone birthday can be a bit risky. Good thing that in Plan B: A Novel, the device is in the hands of Jonathan Tropper. This is the…