Category Archives: Book Reviews

WRITERS AS READERS: READING THE WRITER’S LIBRARY

Late Last Night Books
The Writer's Library offers an intimate and fascinating glance of writers as readers.
The Writer’s Library offers an intimate and fascinating glance of writers as readers.

What is your favorite book? As a writer, this is the most common–and most dreaded–interview question I get. I know writers are supposed to be readers, and I am one. But my mind always goes blank.

In The Writer’s Library, literary mavens Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager ask this question of a slew of prominent authors. And these people know how to answer. This fascinating book is filled with 23 interviews with authors including T.C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Madeline Miller, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Donna Tartt, and Ayelet Waldman on books that “made them think, brought them joy, and changed their lives.”

Books that Change (Writer’s) Lives

This is a book you’ll want to keep around just for the lists at the back of every chapter naming the most influential authors and books each author cites.

THE DIALECT DILEMMA: LISTENING TO THE GIRL WITH THE LOUDING VOICE

Late Last Night Books

I’ve gone on and on about accents and dialect in audiobooks. They often drive me nuts as a listener. But I’ve never been as nuts as I became listening to Abi Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice.

Here the problem wasn’t just the dialect and accent, which I found hard to understand. It was the voice.

Distracting Dialect

This gripping and heart-wrenching story is told through the narrative voice of Adunni,  a 14-year-old girl from a small rural village in Nigeria. She speaks in what I believe is a version of pidgin English, which struck me as similar to the speech of many non-native English speakers. Many listeners praised this “Nigerian accent” in Amazon reviews.

I’m all for dialect, too.

FAVORITE BOOKS ON PANDEMICS, PLAGUES, AND SOCIAL ISOLATION

Late Last Night Books

Last month I asked readers about favorite books on pandemics, plagues, exile, quarantines, and social isolation–on many of our minds for obvious reasons. This month I wanted to share the list of selections in case you have a bit of time on your hands.

Thanks to everyone who helped me build these lists. I’m looking forward to reading some of the selections as the lock-downs promise to continue. Then again, perhaps I’ll just keep plowing through Proust.

Fictional Books on Pandemics, Plagues, and Social Isolation

Here’s a short list of fictional books on pandemics, plagues, and other human tragedies that require quarantines and other forms of social isolation:

  • The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Ten young Italian aristocrats flee Florence to escape the bubonic plague and self-isolate in a secluded countryside villa telling stories, some tragic, some bawdy and irreverent.
(Continue Reading)

Review of SILAS MARNER

Late Last Night Books
30 JULY 2020 Review of SILAS MARNER

SILAS MARNER by George Eliot tells the tale of a weaver in nineteenth-century England named Silas Marner, who finds himself fallen among hard times when he is falsely accused of a crime, and the woman he expects to marry suddenly marries someone else. Silas moves to another town after being effectively banished from his native Lantern Yard. Silas, through no fault of his own, must live as best he can in his new town of Raveloe. Through the story of Silas, the novel punctuates how cruel and then how fortuitous fate is in life.

Upon moving to Raveloe, Silas’ loneliness is compounded by a robbery. When he moves into a little house, Silas still has one aspect of his life that remains constant, his work.

Fallible by Kyle Bradford Jones

Late Last Night Books
30 APRIL 2020 Fallible by Kyle Bradford Jones

Fallible by Kyle Bradford Jones is a memoir about the author’s struggle with mental illness, particularly during his grueling training as a physician. Dr. Jones is never cured of his anxiety and depression, which he describes as an invisible omnipresent “gargoyle” that waxes and wanes through about a decade of his life.

Early in his medical training, Dr. Jones notices that his symptoms of anxiety are exacerbated by the stresses of medical school. Even the road to acceptance into a program has been rough for the young man, who is married and whose wife is expecting their first child. In addition, the couple moves out of state, away from the support of both of their families. Fellow students in his medical program begin dropping out or developing mental disorders of their own.

MANIC WARS by Trina Ann Pion

Late Last Night Books
30 JANUARY 2020 MANIC WARS by Trina Ann Pion

MANIC WARS by Trina Ann Pion is a raw look at mental illness and how those who suffer from it are poorly treated even in a developed nation. This novel follows Christina Wars, who suffers from bipolar disorder, and her life over the span of about two months in Montreal, Canada. Ms. Pion inflects her own degrading experiences with mental illness and the health and justice systems into the novel. The story illuminates a world of unfairness and distrust to which these patients are subjected.

It is clear from Christina’s first hospitalization that the odds are stacked against her as she navigates the health system. Or, as the story unfolds, the health system dictates what happens to her. Although she’s brought to a hospital against her will, it is for the best because she wrecks her house and is acting irrationally, but she can’t even have a cigarette until she has hounded the staff there.

IF ANYONE ASKS, SAY I DIED FROM THE HEARTBREAKING BLUES (Available Feb. 14, 2020)

Late Last Night Books

Fiction writers try to take universal experience and shape it into specific actions and feelings from authentic characters. In his latest novel, If Anyone Asks, Say I Died from the Heartbreaking Blues, author Philip Cioffari accomplishes this task in spades.  

On the surface, If Anyone Asks is the story of one night in the life of Joey “Hunt” Hunter. It’s a big night for him—both his 18th birthday and prom night at his high school. Self-conscious and unsure, he worries about impressing his prom date, the love of his life, Debby Ann. What he doesn’t realize—or maybe he does—is that he can’t impress her because her heart belongs to Sal, head of a local gang called the Brandos.

DROPLETS by Ajay Nair

Late Last Night Books
30 DECEMBER 2019 DROPLETS by Ajay Nair

This compelling memoir spans the author’s childhood and young adult years. Most of the story takes place in India and touches on the cut-throat competition among students to enter preferred schools that eventually lead to a university education. The author delves into the pressure that his parents exerted on him to get the grades as a child to enter into one of these schools.

In one Droplet, or chapter, Mr. Nair describes how his father wakes him up at 4:30 am every weekday when he is still in a non-preferred public school to study before getting ready for school. Unfortunately, the author isn’t as keen as his father about school and rebels against him in several instances.

While in his university, Mr.

THE FIVE WISHES OF MR. MURRAY MCBRIDE by Joe Siple

Late Last Night Books
30 NOVEMBER 2019 THE FIVE WISHES OF MR. MURRAY MCBRIDE by Joe Siple

The Five Wishes of Mr. Murray McBride by Joe Siple is a heart-warming story about a former Chicago Cubs player, Murray McBride, a hundred-year-old man who has recently lost his wife. With few friends and only a grandson as family, the old timer has lost the will to live until he meets the fragile Jason Cashman, a ten-year-old struggling with a failing heart.

The presentation of Murray grabs the reader from the start. The lonely man visits his internist, who understands Murray’s predicament and suggests he visit the hospital to comfort a sick young boy. This boy turns out to be Jason. Murray has a medical condition, too. He must faithfully take his medicine to prevent fluid from entering his lungs and a certain death.

HEADSTRONG WOMEN OF LITERATURE

Late Last Night Books
Marjorie Morningstar--Cover

Recently I got an ad from The New York Review of Books featuring “headstrong women” paraphernalia in their Readers Catalog (pillow covers, tea sets, necklaces, that kind of thing). They meant “headstrong women” of literature such as Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Gertrude Stein—women who took their lives into their own hands, I suppose.

Because I had just finished Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar, that email got me thinking about “headstrong” female protagonists. I can’t really say that Marjorie is headstrong. In the end she turns out to be quite conventional, at least externally, ultimately the poignant and ephemeral embodiment of a young man’s fantasy.

What on earth does headstrong mean anyway?

Still, Marjorie is in many ways a woman with a mind of her own, or at least a mind we got to see in depth in the novel.

Buried by the New York Times: How America’s Premier Newspaper Downplayed the Holocaust

Late Last Night Books

Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times (Cambridge, 2005)

One of the unfortunate casualties of the media’s war on Donald Trump and his ‘fake news’ response is a clear-eyed assessment of the extent to which outside factors influence what newspapers choose to print or not print. As a case in point, consider Laurel Leff’s thorough analysis of the New York Times coverage (or lack thereof) of the Nazi’s murderous campaign against the Jews of Europe. Leff exposes the Times’ intentional downplaying of what was happening out of a fear of being criticized for playing favorites due to the fact that the Times’ owner and publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was Jewish.

Sulzberger was a proponent of the idea that Judaism was a religion and not the cornerstone of a people, a nation.

Hail Mary by Patti Liszkay

Late Last Night Books
30 SEPTEMBER 2019 Hail Mary by Patti Liszkay

HAIL MARY, which will be published on May 7, 2020 by Black Rose Writing, is the sequel to EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTIONS by Patti Liszkay. This entertaining novel is a romantic comedy set in present-day Philadelphia. 

The colorful characters are a bona fide mixture of what makes up the population in this city. Silvio, the blue-collar plumber from Northeast Philly, Darren, a white-collar real estate agent living in the fancy suburb of New Conshohocken, and Angelo, a questionable, foul-mouthed business owner, are a sample. Liszkay does her native city justice through these characters’ portrayal because they match the city’s grit, new money, bluntness, and corruption. They mirror the blue-collar grit and bluntness in the famous movie, Rocky, but also the new wave of professionals living in the city and its suburbs these days.

Book Review: Hurry Up and Relax

Late Last Night Books

Perhaps, like me, you’re one of those people who, finding yourself in a crowd, looks around and wonders at the individual lives of each of the people surrounding you. The tattooed barista with half-shaved/half-purple hair, the guy with the sweat-stained underarms staring into the lingerie store display, the middle-aged business man shouting into his phone as though this were still 2005.

Hard as it is to imagine, all of these people have their own history, their own movie in which they star, their own universe in which they are the omnipotent point of view.

Well, Nathan Leslie imagines it. In Hurry Up and Relax—Leslie’s tenth book, coming out in October, the winner of the Washington Writers Publishing House 2019 Fiction Award—his darkly comedic eye takes in the refugees from the real estate bubble, the hostages of the gig economy, the Facebook stalkers, the Internet gamers trapped on the couch in permanent twilight.

SETTING THE FAMILY FREE—A GUIDE TO THE SPECIES

Late Last Night Books

Toward the end of Setting the Family Free by Eric D. Goodman, one of the main characters thinks about what has to be done to “end this bloody twenty hours, thereby closing the darkest ordeal of his life,” but he can’t bring himself to do it. The fact that he is so conflicted is indicative of the many opposing threads that Goodman weaves together to create suspense and compassion in this tale of the escape of dozens of exotic animals from a homemade zoo in Chillicothe, Ohio. It’s a compelling story told by a skillful, adventurous writer.

The novel opens with a series of comments about animals from famous people as well as fictional characters who play leading roles in the story that’s about to unfold.