Synopsis:
An aging rock star buys an old suit that brings with it a vengeful spirit with a personal vendetta.
Review:
Let’s just get it out of the way. Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. His debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, is a work of horror. And not only is it damn good, it’s good enough [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Synopsis:
A San Francisco lawyer finds herself magically spirited back to ancient Rome, where she ends up running a tavern and weathering a German invasion.
Review:
I’m reading Household Gods for an online book club, and the only reason I didn’t quit this book is because I really like the people in the book club. I am [...]

Popularity: 14% [?]

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Synopsis:
A retelling of the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast.
Review:
I suppose it’s because of all the babysitting I’ve done, but I just couldn’t shake the image of Belle in her big yellow dress as I read Robin McKinley’s Beauty. But setting that aside, I would have loved this when I [...]

Popularity: 28% [?]

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Synopsis:
While working on a novel in Tunisia, a writer encounters his own heart of darkness.
Review:
I had written a truly brilliant review of Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery, but it got eaten. Fie! The salient points were:

Patricia Highsmith plays cat and mouse with the reader just like her most famous creation Tom Ripley [...]

Popularity: 23% [?]

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Synopsis:
A young woman discovers her destiny among a cadre of psychic dragons, and hatches a radical plan to save her planet from a deadly threat using time travel.
Review:
I wish I had discovered Pern when I was in high school. Dragonflight, one of Anne McCaffrey’s books set in the dragon-strewn world, is perfect YA sci [...]

Popularity: 32% [?]

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Synopsis:
A collection of short stories set mostly among Indian immigrants in the US.
Review:
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake was one of my favorite reads of last year, so I decided I needed to check out her much-buzzed about collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. It will surprise no one who has read these tales that [...]

Popularity: 42% [?]

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What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never [...]

Popularity: 43% [?]

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Synopsis:
The first of two anthologies featuring short stories by George RR Martin, ranging from fantasy to science fiction to horror to genre hybrids.
Review:
I am one of those readers who had never heard of George RR Martin before encountering A Game of Thrones, book one in his Song of Ice and Fire series. [...]

Popularity: 81% [?]

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Synopsis:
Short stories, essays, and an unfinished novel by Shirley Jackson, queen of American Gothic and author of “The Lottery.”
Review:
My love for Shirley Jackson has been well documented in this blog, so I was delighted when my husband got me Come Along With Me for my birthday.
The collection opens with “Come Along With Me,” the novel [...]

Popularity: 52% [?]

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Synopsis:
Callously ravished by the man she hoped to love, an 11th Century Norwegian woman shapes her life around dreams of vengeance.
Review:
Gunnar’s Daughter is an early novel from the Sigrid Undset, author of the Nobel Prize-winning Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, and it is no less of a powerful, shocking work not just for a book set in [...]

Popularity: 47% [?]

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