Sometimes, a book is not at all what you expected it to be. You pick up a novel for the mystery but get sucked into the romance along the way, or a piece of historical fiction turns out to be more educational than any college textbook. Of course, this can also be disappointing, as in the case of Refuge on Crescent Hill by Melanie Dobson. The blurb didn’t mention that this was Christian fiction, which is usually a red flag for me. I am sure there are some great writers in the genre, but in everything I have run into so far, the plot is far less important than the moral the writer wants to convey. In this case, we have the seed of a good story that never really blossoms into a great book. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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A page from Malcolm Gladwell’s moleskine:

I haven’t slept for days. No idea when I last ate. My mind is on fire. Synthesizing all that data has turned my head into a furnace. Seriously, my ears feel hot. Correction: my hair is on fire. I must have nodded off on the stove again. It looks like my snap decision to work in the kitchen today was one of those snap decisions with adverse effects. Which only confirms my thesis: Sometimes the decisions made in the blink of an eye have positive outcomes, though, in certain cases, the outcome is negative. That’s the “50/50 Effect.”

Or consider it this way:

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Tags: books & writing, race & culture by Peter Mann
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Dear Diary,

Today I started reading Eclipse. This was after I told myself I was not going to read any of the books in the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer. I’m a thirty-(cough)-year-old woman, and not a twelve year old girl. I’m too mature to be reading this, right? But I read Twilight and New Moon, and now I’m reading Eclipse. And I really don’t like reading it because it’s taking up my whole day and I can’t get anything done. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, ends & odd by Nancy DeGregorio
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… Thomas M. Disch, the great and too much unsung author of The Genocides, Camp Concentration and 334 who on this day two years ago declared his own independence from a  world he could no longer endure by opening up his skull with a liberating blast from a gun.

Mr. Disch, your prose was pure, joyous darkness and your poetry was damn fine too. I still visit the ghost ship you left us from time to time.

Rest in peace.

Tags: art & entertainment, books & writing by Daniel Kalder
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Last year, I wrote a piece here called “The Future of Literary Fiction” , which included a list of authors that I regularly search for at Amazon.com for their upcoming novels or short story collections. In essence, it’s a personal version, exclusive of age or nationality, of other recent attempts to list the best writers of fiction. I referenced the list of authors in the 1999 “Future of American Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, which has held up extremely well. Now, TNY has published a new list of “20 under 40”, which doesn’t pretend to be a “best of” list as much as a grouping of representative voices for our current culture. This has generated a number of alternate lists, including this one at The Guardian of British authors and this tiresome and nearly incoherent screed by Lee Siegel in The Observer informing us that fiction is dead. Nonsense. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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The Killing of Mindi Quintana presents a scenario we see in the newspapers every day: a murder has occurred, and the press is far more concerned with the murderer than the victim.  The accused gets to make his or her case to the press; he turns up on Larry King or Oprah, interviews present them in the best possible light and reporters are willing to kiss up to a killer for a chance at an exclusive or a book deal.  Defense attorneys use the media to try their case before the accused ever sets foot in a courtroom and district attorneys use high-profile cases to launch political careers.  Lost in all this is the victim; if they are mentioned at all, it is only when some lurid detail from their past is dredged.  But what if someone decided they weren’t going to play the game? That’s the case study Jeffrey A. Cohen presents in his first novel. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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In My Little Chickadee the late, great comedian W.C. Fields played a wily card sharp.

In this classic comedy film an eager sucker sees Fields spreading cards across a table and asks excitedly, “Is this a game of chance?”

“Not the way I play it, no,” was Fields’ classic answer. [Read more →]

Tags: on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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Angel and Apostle takes up the story of Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter, Pearl, and fills in the gaps left in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  At the end of the earlier novel, Hester and Pearl leave Boston and no one knows of their whereabouts.  Years later, Hester returns to Boston alone, still wearing her scarlet A. There are occasional letters from Pearl, who is married and living in Europe, and Hester lives out the remainder of her life alone.  Such a cheerful story, and one that infuriated all my budding feminist sensibilities as a teenager.  Why did Hester bear her burden alone?  Why didn’t she publicly declaim them — the man who dishonored her and the husband who abandoned her?  I’ve still got no satisfactory answers to those questions, but Deborah Noyes has given us the tale of Pearl’s childhood and marriage. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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John Timoney, the man Esquire magazine called “America’s Top Cop,’ has written a book about his experiences commanding police forces in New York City, Philadelphia and Miami. The book is called Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities (University of Penn Press).

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Tags: on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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In Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen, an unhappy woman makes an impulsive decision that leads to tragedy.  Stranded, cold and in danger, she has plenty of time to contemplate the choices that lead her here.  Pretty standard stuff, really, as far as mysteries go.  Luckily, Ice Cold has a handful of plot twists that keep the story moving along.  Good beach reading, when you need to cool off a little. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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I love a good memoir! I tend not to enjoy celebrity memoirs as much as I do those books written by relatively ordinary folks who have lived really interesting lives. I’ve reviewed a number of them over the last few years, but The Bucolic Plague is by far the funniest — from the title, which would have made me pick it up all on its own, to Josh’s thanks to Martha Stewart in the Acknowledgments. I started out marking funny passages that I might want to share in this review, but the book quickly became a forest of pink and green Post-It flags.

The names of some characters have been changed, and some are composites of various people, experiences and conversations I had then. If you think that’s unfair, you’ve obviously never lived in a small town and written a memoir about your neighbors.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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Happy birthday to Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond thrillers.

Fleming was born on May 28, 1908. He died on August 12, 1964. 

You can read three of my On Crime & Thrillers columns that dealt with Ian Fleming here  

Tags: on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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When I think of Boston I think of George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

For more than a dozen years when I worked for a Defense Department command in Philadelphia, our regional headquarters was located in Boston. During that time I visited the city quite often.

Boston has fine bars and restaurants and fine historical and cultural scenes, and I’ve had some fine times there – yet to me Boston will always be first and foremost the home of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. 

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Tags: on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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What makes someone a freak?

It’s the question at the heart of The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson.  The story revolves around P.T. Barnum’s American Museum and the “freaks” who entertained the masses there.  There were midgets and fat ladies, savages from exotic lands, musclemen and other oddities.  But what made them freaks, and what would they choose, if they could choose another fate? [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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The premise behind The Dark End of the Street is simple:

When we proposed this book to writers from both banks of the stream dividing crime writing and literary writing, we thought we had a particularly alluring idea.  Write your heart out on the twin subjects of sex and crime.  Define each however you want, take any approach you like.  What writer could resist?

The result is a terrific collection of stories from some of my favorite writers.  Editor S.J. Rozan (author of one of my favorite mystery series), introduces the collection and provides a particularly chilling story, “Daybreak”, near the end of the volume.  Great writers and great writing are the rule here, and there is a little something for everyone. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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When he isn’t evoking a smart, funny cyber reality that one could easily mistake for our future, Pop Apocalypse author Lee Konstantinou polishes off doctoral dissertations, loiters in the Mission District, imagines future futurist fiction, and shotguns espresso in the back of the BART or takes his caffeine by intravenous drip. We were lucky to have him take time out from his hectic schedule to drop by our virtual offices and respond to these questions. Thank you so much for your time, Lee.

Lee: Thanks, Alex. I’m always looking for excuses not to work, and I appreciate this chance to chat. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, politics & government by Alex Kudera
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I’m not big on graphic novels and I’ve not read comic books or adventure comic strips since I was a kid, but The James Bond Omnibus, Volume I interested me.

I was first introduced to Ian Fleming’s iconic secret agent when I saw Dr No at the Colonial movie theater in South Philadelphia in 1962 when I was 10-years-old. But for many British children and adults, their first visual introduction to James Bond was through a daily comic strip that appeared in the newspaper the Daily Express.  

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Tags: on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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Little Bee is the sort of book I find hard to review.  I want everyone to read this book — I want to tell you enough to encourage you to run out and put this on your wishlist.  What I don’t want to do is spoil the story, and if I tell you too much, I will.  The story at the heart of this amazing book is revealed slowly, piece by piece, a word here, a hint there.  There is a certain build-up to the story that could be easily derailed and I don’t want to do anything to take away from your enjoyment.  Author Chris Cleave has crafted a novel that literally took my breath away — confrontations that were like physical blows and passages that burned in my chest and made it hard to breathe — and I want you to enjoy the build-up as much as I did. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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… than the way students at our Early College High School were passing time and pursuing studies, yesterday on the Midland College campus – reclining on the grass, in the shade of trees, reading one of the great works of American literature. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, education by Jeff McDonald
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I’ve been a fan of David Cross since the late 1990s when his sketch comedy show, Mr. Show with Bob and David, aired on HBO. He is a harsh, vulgar, and insightful comic who calls attention to serious issues through exaggerations so extreme most people are instantly offended. I remember one sketch that assaulted America’s public schools by juxtaposing Hitler and Anne Frank — brilliance. So, when I saw his book, I Drink for a Reason, I was psyched to download the audio book from iTunes and give it a listen. Wow! Does it suck! The comedy takes a turn for the worse about two hours in; it moves quickly from amusing social critique to the trite ramblings of a tired comedian. 
[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, fan boy says by Steve Mazzeo
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