1. State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey: I love stories that create a sense of place, so this anthology of 50 essays by 50 authors, each about his or her own state, was a jackpot. Every three or four pages, you get a completely different tone and [...]
This year I read twenty books that earned my coveted 5-star rating. Here, in no particular order, are the ten I feel were the best of those twenty. 1. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language: Arika Okrent [review] [...]
In no specific order: In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami: Kenji is a young guide who takes tourists through Tokyo’s seedy underground. It’s an illegal job that brings him into contact with the seemingly plastic-faced and socially awkward Frank, whom Kenji suspects is a murderer. This book is absolutely chilling. In my favorite scene, [...]
I feel bad making this list on December 27th when I’m in the midst of two books that are really quite good (A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg) what if they turn out to be [...]
Hello Minnesota Readers, We’re going to be taking the rest of the week off to enjoy the Christmas festivities. We hope your holiday is filled with love, joy, bourbon, and gift certificates to your favorite bookstore. If you come back on Monday, we’ll have some helpful suggestions on what to buy with your ill-gotten booty [...]
When we last saw that saucy Julie Powell, she was a sweaty rosacea mess of marrow-crusted fingernails and damn-near oozing butter from her pores at the finish line of a year-long Julia Child marathon fraught with self flagellation, hard liquor, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” quotations. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, is [...]
Bill Scheft doesn’t need me to tell you how funny his book is. Larry David has a blurb on the front cover. Larry fucking David (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld). Also, Lewis Black (The Daily Show) weighs in with a blurb on the back. Which makes me wonder if 50-year old white comedians from New York [...]
It’s not a good idea to write a review of a book when your eyes are still wet with the tears it caused you to shed. So I waited an entire day to see if the raw emotion evoked by David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches would abate a little before I told you about this [...]
Whenever I open a book by Carol Shields, I prepare myself to walk into a folksy Midwest version of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood, starring sassy old biddies who turn scrapbooking a full-contact sport. I’m not sure where I got the idea that she writes Hot Flash Fiction, but I’m always wrong, and I’ve never been more [...]
We just wanted to let you know that Rain Taxi’s annual fundraising auction ends tomorrow (Sunday, December 20th). There’s still time to place your bid on some of the awesome stuff up for grabs.
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