True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, by Michael Finkel

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa by Michael Finkel My rating: 5 of 5 stars I don’t think I could accurately estimate the percentage of time I spent with my mouth hanging open or the number of times I exclaimed, out loud, “Oh, my God!” while reading this book. The sheer audacity and calculated rationalizing […]

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Orange is the New Black, by Piper Kerman

Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’d seen the Netflix series before reading Piper Kerman’s prison memoir, and the two are quite different creatures. Whether by design or actual fact, the memoir seems to me to be less harsh and dramatic but also more wearing and demoralizing. […]

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Passage, by Connie Willis

Passage by Connie Willis My rating: 4 of 5 stars I didn’t expect this book to impact me as profoundly as it did. It took the entire first section of this nearly 800-page work for me to really engage with the story ? and that’s unusual in my experience with Willis’ books; her stories normally […]

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In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’ll admit that I read this book for research. There’s a book of my own I’ve been kicking around for about thirteen years now, and I’d not known quite how to approach it. Having settled (at least for now) on long-form journalism, I […]

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Time and Again (Jack Finney)

Time and Again by Jack Finney My rating: 4 of 5 stars It’s not often that I finish reading a book with my mouth literally hanging open, but that’s what happened with Finney’s Time and Again. The conclusion was simple and perfect, and I realized it couldn’t have been any other way. I honestly wasn’t […]

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Matters of Doubt (Warren C. Easley)

Full disclosure: I normally don’t read mystery thrillers, and I’ve known Warren Easley since I was in grade school. Also, I had really wanted to fall in love with this book. The author certainly knows how to write. I enjoyed the “hard-boiled crime” voice of this novel and the author’s use of the Pacific Northwest […]

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Lincoln’s Dreams (Connie Willis)

Lincoln’s Dreams by Connie Willis My rating: 5 of 5 stars I didn’t expect to be impacted so deeply by this slender volume. But then nearly anything having to do with the Civil War has a tendency to tug at me. I was surprised and delighted to find so much of the narrative set in […]

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