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The Dinner and more.
Two new breakdowns for Insiders – on the Jose Veras trade and the Scott Downs trade. More to come as we get more trade action. Herman Koch’s The Dinner made it on to my to-read list about a year and a...
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The Return of the Native.
I was assigned two books in my Lit class in my senior year of high school on which I bailed after 20 or 25 pages, reading the Cliffs’ Notes for one and watching the movie for the other. I eventually...
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Middlemarch.
This week’s Behind the Dish podcast reunited me with my old Baseball Today co-host Eric Karabell. And you all thought I died when I went over that waterfall with Bias Cat, didn’t you? George Eliot’s...
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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
The titles listed in Bloomsbury’s 100 Must-read Classic Novels (actually 99 novels plus Chekhov’s short stories, which is totally cheating) were largely familiar to me before I’d even started working...
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The Yard & Adam Bede.
The Yard, Alex Grecian’s first prose novel – he’s previously co-authored the graphic novel series Proof – is a hopelessly formulaic, lurid crime story that feels far more like an attempt to create a...
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The Comedians.
What use to anyone was the body of an ex-Minister? A corpse couldn’t even suffer. But unreason can be more terrifying than reason. I’ve made my adoration for the novels of Graham Greene, particularly...
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The Cuckoo’s Calling.
J.K. Rowling published her first detective novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, apparently to see what kind of response she would get to a novel that didn’t have her name...
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Bleak House.
My second “mock” draft for 2014 is up for Insiders today. I’ve had mixed views on Charles Dickens over the years, loathing his work when forced to read Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities in high...
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The Casual Vacancy.
My Tuesday column this week covered the Javier Baez promotion, and I held my weekly Klawchat yesterday too. J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, met with huge commercial success...
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The Silkworm.
J.K. Rowling’s second detective novel starring Cormoran Strike, The Silkworm, continues to establish the detective character as the star of the series – a critical trait in any variation on the...
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The Painted Veil.
I appear to be totally out of step with the literary establishment on W. Somerset Maugham, whose roman-à-clef Of Human Bondage seems to be his magnum opus, appearing on the Modern Library list of the...
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The Teleportation Accident.
I had never heard of Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident before a conversation with a restaurant hostess in August, where she noticed I had a book with me (The Magic Mountain, which, let me tell...
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The City & the City.
China Miéville’s The City & The City, co-winner of the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel, takes the idea of the split city – Berlin, Budapest, Jerusalem – to an entirely new level, one where the...
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To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Connie Willis’ Hugo-winning novel To Say Nothing of the Dog is a tight mélange of three distinct styles of fiction: A comedy of manners, a time-travel novel, and a literary parody, all tied up into a...
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Among Others.
Jo Walton’s novel Among Others, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel in 2012, is nothing like any of the other major science fiction or fantasy titles I’ve read. The story is...
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The Tiger in the Smoke.
My writeup of Saturday’s A’s-Rays trade is up for Insiders. J.K. Rowling told fellow crime writer Val McDermid in a public interview last summer that she loved “golden age” crime novels, and...
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The Graveyard Book.
Neil Gaiman won his first Hugo Award for Best Novel for his modern epic American Gods, a masterful blend of pagan mythology and magical realism that breathes some life into the generally-overused...
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Mother’s Milk.
I have an Insider post up today on ten All-Star candidates, five who I think belong and five who probably shouldn’t make the cut. I’ll also hold a Klawchat today at 1 pm ET. Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose...
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Black August.
My latest boardgame review, of the family-friendly boardgame Flea Market, is now up at Paste. Molly Knight’s fabulous book on the 2013-14 Dodgers, The Best Team Money Can Buy, is finally out today, and...
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The Buried Giant.
I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and I reviewed the Spiel des Jahres-nomianted family boardgame Broom Service for Paste. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote two of my all-time favorite novels, the very British...
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