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: 87% [?]
Tags: American Literature
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: 56% [?]
Tags: American Literature
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: 50% [?]
Tags: Norwegian Literature
Synopsis:
The conclusion of the epic battle against the darkness.
Review:
I’m sorry to announce to everyone who has been excited I’m reading Kay that I found The Darkest Road to be a slog… around page 275 I realized that I had nothing invested emotionally in any of the characters or their journeys. I just never really [...]
Popularity: 43% [?]
Tags: Canadian Literature
Synopsis:
Book 2 of the Fionavar Tapestry finds five Canadian students returning to an alternate universe where they continue to fight an epic battle against a demonic demigod and step further into their unique destinies.
Review:
As with any good second book in a trilogy, The Wandering Fire deepens the Fionavar mythology and heightens the stakes for all [...]
Popularity: 46% [?]
Tags: Canadian Literature
Synopsis:
Five Toronto college students are pulled into an alternate world where they discover their true destinies at the outset of a war that could affect all worlds, including their own.
Review:
Yep, another hard-to-synopsize epic fantasy book. The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay employs one of the standard fantasy templates–ordinary people drawn into an extraordinary [...]
Popularity: 52% [?]
Tags: Canadian Literature
Synopsis:
A headstrong Upper West Side yearns to escape her family’s Jewish Bronx origins and become a Broadway star.
Review:
This is the third or fourth time I’ve read Marjorie Morningstar, and every time I find myself absolutely riveted for the first two-thirds, then bored and indifferent for the final third, only to be knocked out by the [...]
Popularity: 43% [?]
Tags: American Literature
Synopsis:
100 young men begin a walk that will not end until there is only one survivor, who will win everything he wants for the rest of his life.
Review:
I’ve read The Long Walk a bunch of times. It’s one of the best of the books Stephen King wrote under the name of Richard Bachman, a [...]
Popularity: 30% [?]
Tags: American Literature
Synopsis:
3 young women meet in the typing pool at Fabian Publishing, 1952, hoping for love and finding that life has more to offer than they ever imagined.
Review:
I haven’t done much rereading since starting this blog, mostly thanks to the TBR tsunami that Bookmooch yielded out of a few boxes of discarded books my mom cleaned [...]
Popularity: 41% [?]
Tags: American Literature
Synopsis:
After his release from prison, a troubled man befriends the man he crippled, and awakens his demons with tragic result.
Review:
Though strong in characterization (as always), Live Flesh doesn’t hold up as one of Ruth Rendell’s strongest. On its publication in 1986, I’m sure it made much more of an impact, but in today’s serial [...]
Popularity: 27% [?]
Tags: British Literature
