book review

3 Short Reviews

The Suspect by Fiona Barton Barton, Fiona. The Suspect    Penguin Audio, 2019    Narrated by Susan Duerden, Fiona Hardingham, Nicholas Guy Smith, Katharine Lee McEwan    ISBN 9781524779962 When two British girls spending their gap year in Thailand disappear, journalist Kate Waters senses a possible big story. Always looking for the latest big scoop, […]

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Is ‘devouring’ books a sign of superficiality in a reader? Louise Adams discusses the history of the metaphor of eating as applied to reading. While the historical applications of the metaphor are informative, I’d like to focus on this point: This metaphor, however, hasn’t always seemed so benign. Two hundred years ago, describing someone as

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Books you can read in one day or less

Books You Can Read in One Day or Less

You’ve still got almost a month to hammer away at your reading goal for 2019. Here’s a list of short works (around 200 or fewer pages) that I’ve collected. And below my list you’ll find a list of other lists. Good luck. Read on! As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Can You Ever Forgive

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‘Your throat hurts. Your brain hurts’: the secret life of the audiobook star If you think narrating audiobooks is a dream job because all you have to do is sit there and read, you’d be wrong. Way wrong. Read all about the complex matters of matching specific books with appropriate readers, of preparing, and of

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Lists: Best Books of 2019

Let the Best of 2019 Lists Begin!

A few of these lists began appearing in early November, but I refuse to start my year-end summaries that early. I haven’t put my Christmas decorations up yet, either. Our Fiction Editor Shares Some Favorites From the Best Books of 2019 From the fiction editor of Kirkus The Best Books of 2019 Amazon’s portal to

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The first fairytales were feminist critiques of patriarchy. We need to revive their legacy Melissa Ashley finds the origin of fairytales to “a coterie of 17th century French female writers known as the conteuses, or storytellers.” Fairytales “crystallised as a genre” in this time when women, sometimes as young as 15, were married off—often to

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America’s First Banned Book Really Ticked Off the Plymouth Puritans A portrait of Thomas Morton, an English businessman who came to the New World with the Puritans but didn’t share their religious zeal. Morton “had the audacity to erect a maypole in Massachusetts.” The Rise and Fall of Booth Tarkington “How a candidate for the

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Domestic Thrillers

5 Domestic Thrillers: Terror at Home

Related Post: 5 “You Can’t Go Home Again” Novels The characters in “you can’t go home again” novels discover that going back home can often be a mistake because the secrets, lies, and betrayals they had hoped to leave behind are still there waiting to suck them back in.  The characters in domestic thrillers often

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In the rush to harvest body parts, death investigations have been upended Maybe I just read too many crime novels and watch too many cop shows. Or maybe I’m just gruesome by nature. Yet I often think of exactly this problem when I’m reading a novel or watching a show. A medical examiner needs time

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