Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review:  Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

When Suleika Jaouad was only twenty-two years old, she was diagnosed with leukemia, and she was told that she had only a thirty-five percent chance of survival. It began with a maddening itch on her legs shortly after she moved … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

This book is a fantasy that includes a ghost haunting a bookstore and a book that seems to bring death to those who read it. However, these elements are peripheral for much of the story, although they prove to be … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border by Porter Fox

I love a good travel book, and I am grateful for the serendipitous discovery of this one on the library shelves. In it, the author writes of his journeys from east to west along the northern border of the United … Continue reading

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Book Review:  We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinkster

In We Are Satellites, the sole science fictional element is a device called a Pilot, which has a blue glowing light and is implanted in a person’s head to supposedly optimize their awareness and productivity. The story is told in … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Libraries have been some of my favorite places on Earth ever since I was a child. When our family lived on lower Capital Hill in Seattle, my mother would drive me and my siblings to the Henry Branch Library on … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Best American Short Stories 2021 Edited by Jesmyn Ward and Heidi Pitlor

This collection is comprised of what is considered by the two editors to be the best “literary” short stories of the year, as opposed to the best genre short stories, which appear in different collections. As usual, though, two of … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton

This book is relatively new, having been published in 2021. It was recommended to me by one of my sons; soon afterwards I found out that another of my sons was also reading it. In short, it is a superb … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Fated Sky is a sequel to The Calculating Stars, and they are both part of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series. The Calculating Stars is a superb novel; it blew me away when I read it a year and … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I saw this book on the library shelves for several weeks before I decided to give it a read. That’s because I was so disappointed by Weir’s second novel, Artemis. Weir’s first novel, the one that catapulted him to international … Continue reading

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Book Review:  One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon by Charles Fishman

I picked up this recently-published book thinking it was an updated history of the Apollo program but as I began to read I soon realized that it is not really that at all. Instead, it is a look behind the … Continue reading

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