April 30, 2010
The Songs of the Kings by Barry Unsworth * (of 4)
Winner of the Booker Prize totally boring Midrash of the Iliad. I couldn’t finish it.
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Category: Book Reviews
April 29, 2010
Snow by Orhan Pamuk ** (of 4)
Ostensibly there is a plot based on the return of a Turkish exile to his small eastern hometown where the national debate about the politicization...
Read More about Snow by Orhan Pamuk ** (of 4) April 29, 2010
Small Island by Andrea Levy **** (of 4)
There’s a reason this book won the Whitbread Award for best book of the year, one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards. It captures the...
Read More about Small Island by Andrea Levy **** (of 4) April 29, 2010
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut ** (of 4)
As a twenty year old soldier Vonnegut was one of the few people to survive the allied bombing of Dresden in World War II. For...
Read More about Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut ** (of 4) April 29, 2010
The Secret River by Kate Granville *** (of 4)
The British caste system of the 18th century was unendurable for average citizens and petty crime was often a necessity. Read Dickens, for example. In...
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Saturday by Ian McEwan ** (of 4)
Both of my parents, and the critics, raved about this book, so take my review cautiously. The story revolves around the meticulously described single day...
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Red Sea by Emily Benedek *** (of 4)
A well-researched post 9/11 thriller with Middle Eastern jihadists sending dirty nuclear bombs toward American ports while being hunted down by an Israeli secret agent,...
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QBVII by Leon Uris *** (of 4)
About a trial of a libelous author who writes about Nazis, autobiographical. Uris is a class-act story teller making big books go by in quickly.
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The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
A novel about tuning pianos in 1856 British Army in Burma. I found it painfully slow and predictable. A remake of the Heart of Darkness....
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Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz *** (of 4)
A larger-than-life father, a household dictator, terrifies his 1920s Cairo household into submitting to his divine will. Divine, in the sense, that his actions are...
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