A small tortoiseshell butterfly in my garden. And yes, I know it's not a moth. Let me start by saying what this book is not. It is not a polemic about the evils of megacorporations, capitalism and Big Oil. It is not a bludgeon loaded with mind-numbing and soul-deadening eco-facts, figures and data sets designed … Continue reading The Moth Snowstorm by Michael McCarthy →

To describe this book as a history of Central Asia would be a horrible simplification. It does not tell the history of a place, or even a region. It offers, instead, a survey of the enormous wealth, glorious civilizations and marauding hordes that rose and fell in the wake of the caravans, railways and pipelines … Continue reading Peter Frankopan’s “The Silk Roads” →

This is a great book! Intelligent and intense, the story moves through forty-eight hours in the life of a very disturbed young woman named Amy. Plagued by a pack of very nasty fairies—who may or may not be the products of her own imagination—Amy struggles to fight against the fairies' (or her own psychosis') urgings. And … Continue reading Waters and the Wild by Jo Zebedee →

Some of you will say I'm wandering off topic again. Some of you will say this is neither fantasy nor science-fiction. My reply is that Kathleen Jamie's The Tree House is a work of compelling and subtle imagination. And that's a good enough reason for me to review it. The Tree House is a collection … Continue reading The Tree House by Kathleen Jamie →

First, I should say that this was just (as in this week) voted "Fantasy Book of the Year" on Goodreads. Second, the readers there got it right. In Circe, Madeline Miller delivers the full package. Compelling characters? Check. Excellent storytelling? Check. Powerful, subtle, simple yet elegant prose? Check. Compelling characters? What, did I say that … Continue reading Circe by Madeline Miller →

"NO LIVE organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." With an opening sentence like that, how can you not read this book? And it just gets better from there. First published in 1959, The Haunting of Hill House has … Continue reading “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson →

This is a curious little book. First, it is a curious in that it is a fictionalized account of an actual murder in which dozens of people knew that the crime was about to occur, yet no one did anything to stop it. The events covered in the book happened in 1951 in Sucre, Colombia, … Continue reading Review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold →

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories is a collection of short stories, most of which are set in the same world as Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. If you’re not familiar with the novel (or the BBC TV adaptation), it takes place in late 18th-, early 19th-century England and features … Continue reading Review of The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke →

Remnant Population tells the story of a woman who stays behind on an alien world when all of her fellow humans abandon a failed colony. Imagine the love-child of Robinson Crusoe and Enemy Mine with Ursula K. LeGuin acting as midwife and you’ll get some idea as to what to expect from Remnant Population. There … Continue reading Review: Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon →