I’m not sure how Katherine Hayton’s The Three Deaths of Magdalene Lynton ended up on my Kindle. But I gave it a whirl. It’s a workable murder mystery in which we have two detectives, Ngaire and Deb, possibly meant to be the Cagney & Lacey of Christchurch, New Zealand. A man walks in off the street and confesses to a forty-years-past murder. He’s got nothing to [...]
We’ve all harbored at least one impossible dream. Mine was to perform magic like Samantha from Bewitched. I’ve got a few others, too. But, based on how my prayers about twitching my nose got answered, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the rest of my list. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a black girl in an Ohio town wishes for blue eyes. [...]
Today is Rosanne Cash day. I’m listening to her on Pandora, in hopes that I’ll “get it.” I just read her memoir, Composed, and I can at least offer this lukewarm praise: 1) Some of us take awhile to find ourselves. Some of look for ourselves in New York and Paris. Some of us have a Daddy who pays the hefty rent while we spend [...]
At the request of a faithful reader, today I unveil my top-10 fiction list. And what does it take to make the list? A) The book has to be memorable. I read enough books that they almost whiz by like highway signs. Not all of them stick with me. Ah, but the ones that do, they’re like great road trips that I wish I could [...]
First off today, I made a guest appearance on this blog. ====================================== Now, back to our normal programming. Long ago, Nick Nolte starred in the movie Cannery Row. I never saw the movie. I just assumed that, with Nolte starring, it would be about a sad young drunk in a sad part of town. When I opened the by John Steinbeck, I braced myself for [...]
You might be one of the adoring fans of the 2004 BBC miniseries, North & South, the story of the Hale family, as they move themselves from the pastoral south of England to the grimy, industrial north.The television production is adapted from the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. In case you’ve missed both the book and the TV show, let me catch you up on things: [...]
Sometimes the cow patties in a book are like weeds in the sidewalk cracks. It’s hard to keep a few from springing up. Best not criticize, unless your own sidewalk is weed-free. But when Carl Hiaasen wrote Star Island, I’m pretty sure he hauled along a bag of weed seeds and poured them in the sidewalk cracks on purpose. That said, he wrote a pretty [...]
We need to keep this between you and me, OK? […]
If readers of Read Fast, Eat Slow would like to feast on some LDS books this summer, hurry over to New LDS Fiction and sign up for the Summer Book Trek. […]
You might be one of those people who resents the rich.But I think they fill a need in our society. They build castles to live in, and I get to walk by and admire them. I would certainly enjoy the country lane Nelson DeMille portrays in his novel, Gold Coast. […]
