recent reading

Just finished Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. The ending is pat and disappointing, but the rest of the book is brilliant. The narrator (a 9-year-old named Philip Roth) is a gem, and the premise (that Charles Lindbergh wins the presidential election and the US is plummeted into an era of latent fascism) is so believable, at least as it gets played out in this book, that it reads as a cautionary tale. Four stars (out of five).

I can't recommend strongly enough that everybody read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I am a wimp about things like terror, injustice, suspense, gore... and I loved this book. I'd never read Capote before (never really liked the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's--don't tell my daughter the classic movie afficionado), but now I'm panting to read more. Don't think of it as a murder story. Think of it as a collection of beautiful character studies. Five stars.

Just started The Lost Men, by Kelly Tyler-Lewis. A Shackleton spin-off. Who knew there was another whole exploration party attached to the Shackleton trans-Antarctic mission? that did NOT all survive? Completely absorbing so far.

Now again, when I figure out how to get people to see my blog, can somebody tell me how to put things like "recent reading" in a sidebar?