Normally on Friday I review a book I’ve recently read. But three years ago today my stepson, Hunter Lurie, passed away. Hunter was a cinephile. He loved everything about filmmaking and his film critiques were extremely sharp and insightful. So in his honor, instead of a book review this week, I’m going to write a…
This Mournable Body by Zimbabwean writer, Tsitsi Dangarembga is a masterful, brutal work of art. It’s cinematic, compelling, shocking and emotionally challenging. It works as a stand alone novel, but I suspect I would have benefitted from starting with the first two in this trilogy: Nervous Conditions and The Book Of Not. Since I didn’t…
In my world, books photographed with my pup are the equivalent of giving a work of literature 6 out of 5 stars. I read Diane Cook‘s The New Wilderness months ago. Yet I can not stop thinking about it. I’m not even entirely sure how to categorize it. Is it literary fiction? Yes. Is it…
This one’s for my Sophie fans. In Borrowed Time, by Tracy Clark, Chicago based P.I. and former cop, Cassandra (Cass) Raines sets out to solve a mystery. Tim Ayers who hails from considerable wealth and privilege, has died while out on his boat. It could have been an accident. It could have been a suicide….
Yes, I know. I’m seriously late to the party on this one. I am an admirer of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I’ve read his works of fiction as well as many of his essays in the Atlantic and find him to be insightful and masterful in his use of prose. When Between The World And ME came…
I love this book. No qualifiers, no asterisk, just straight up love it. And I suspect a lot of my Sophie readers will too. The story centers around a young, female painter whose art and studio burn up in a fire just months before an art show she had hoped would make her career. Desperate…