From the category archives:

Book Reviews

Books and Body Pillows: Your Valentine’s Day Reading List

by Derwood Hunsdale-Talbot on February 12, 2010

Dateless for V-Day?

Down in the dumps?

Don’t be. Because while all your friends and family are out cavorting out on the town or in between the sheets, they are not reading. Their fancy dinners will last a few hours and might give them food poisoning. Unlike the book you read. A book knows how to treat you right.

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Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger

by Derwood Hunsdale-Talbot on February 4, 2010

In 1953 J. D. Salinger published Nine Stories and this week he died. These two occasions represent triumph and tragedy, respectively, and this particular online book review is dedicated to the memory of a brilliant American author.

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The Broken Teaglass, by Emily Arsenault

by Derwood Hunsdale-Talbot on January 18, 2010

For a book that could have been the Holy Grail for wordies everywhere, Emily Arsenault’s The Broken Teaglass was a let down. The setting for a brilliant mystery novel is there: an intriguing job, a saucy love interest, an unsolved murder, creepy neighbors – books greater than you and me have been built [...]

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Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace

by Derwood Hunsdale-Talbot on January 8, 2010

Wallace’s 2005 collection of essays is by no means new media, yet worthy of note this month, the half-birthday of DFW’s unfortunate demise.
Consider the Lobster, like all of Wallace’s prose, is hard work to read. These days, where drippy, thin works like Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight and Jodi Picoult’s entire repertoire are widely touted, [...]

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Those who have enjoyed any of Doctor Sacks’ other popular books, such as Awakenings (which was made into a major motion picture starring Robert De Niro) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat will be familiar with the structure used here….

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