Thank you, Susan Choi, for writing about every single kind of love there is, short of interspecies couplings. This is the story of  Regina Gottlieb as she powers through college and the years thereafter, racking up a list of relationships that would make my mother faint dead away, as if she didn’t have a […]

  It is awful that we judge books by their covers — and by their titles — but I have been told by people who know things that the title and cover are essential elements when trying to sell a book.  That’s why I knew I had been cleverly duped when I checked out a […]

I have never read two books in a row with characters who did something so mind-bogglingly unforgivable that I had a hard believing they could live with themselves.  In Apology by Jon Pineda, fourteen-year-old Mario destroys an entire family with a single toss of a football, runs away, and in a remarkable example of restraint […]

I liked The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, by Jonathan Evison and I am going to go out and get his other books, All About Lulu and West of Here.kI’m a snot when it comes to books. There are so many really bad ones out there.  Sometimes I get about 60 pages into a book, and […]

Eric Nuzum’s memoir boils down to a sentence he writes near the very end of his book: “…I don’t believe that places are haunted, but I do believe that people are haunted.” And poor Eric Nuzum is haunted indeed. I don’t think that all the mind-numbing drugs and alcohol he ingested as a teenager were […]

    Louise Erdrich’s newest called The Round House was a surprise, even though I always carefully scour the New York Times Book Review section to be sure I don’t waste my time.  … I hate that.  I usually get 6-7 library books at a time so if I get a lousy one, I can […]

I really wanted only to write about books I love so that my friends could read them, too, but I must warn you about TOWNIE by Andre Dubus III.  You may have, like me, fallen in love with HOUSE OF SAND & FOG – the book and the movie – and you may be tempted […]

I began my love affair with Richard Ford (I wish!) when I read The Sportswriter in 1986. Actually I think it was Frank Bascombe I fell in love with, that hapless, overly intelligent hero of Ford’s triptych: The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. Bascombe, twice divorced, grieved father of a son […]