It has been 14 years since Abraham Verghese published Cutting for Stone, a book that easily ranks in my top five favorites of all time. […] Read More
Tag: Book Reviews
This may be less a book review of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as it is a reading review – as in, if you’re going to read it, this is how I’d recommend you go about it.
The Story of Lucy Gault by Willam Trevor is a heart-wrenching story of love withheld because of guilt and misunderstandings. Ann Patchett recommended this book […] Read More
Barbara Kingsolver’s latest tome is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ classic David Copperfield. Told in first person, Demon Copperfield escorts readers through his life from the difficulty of getting born to an addicted mother, navigating abusive foster situations, to devising survival routes at any cost.
Towles gives readers another excellent literary read with The Lincoln Highway. Four boys head east on a journey to claim an inheritance and settle some old scores. This one begs to be discussed.
There’s a new genre of fiction emerging – COVID Lit. Two of the last few books I’ve read have commenced with the “shelter in place” orders that came in March 2020. And this is where Elizabeth Strout places Lucy Barton from her Amgash Series in Lucy by the Sea, the fourth in the series.
Where the Crawdads Sing hits theaters. The review I posted about the book in 2019 has garnered 144,000 hits and 135 comments. That post alone catapulted the number of Lit&Leisure’s unique visitors to nearly 60k in 2020 and has kept the monthly average above 2k. Obviously, something I wrote resonated.
The Sea, The SeaThis Booker Award winner from 1978 is the story of Charles Arrowby, a retired theater director who leaves London and rents a […] Read More
I had the privilege of being a guest on Lisa Hedger’s podcast Everyone Loved it but Me about Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds. Whether or not you liked The Four Winds, the conversation is worth a listen. We talk about the book’s shortcomings, but we also address where it has merit.
For those who visit regularly, you know that thrillers aren’t my go-to genre. But when a few of my colleagues at work started telling me about this great book a co-worker had published, I was intrigued. I purchased and read it in the course of a weekend – completely engaged and thoroughly entertained. But because I don’t normally review thrillers, I felt less up to that task. So instead, I asked Matt if he’d be willing to participate in a Q&A with me, and he agreed.