The Man From Primrose Lane is pretty fucking great. Is it okay if I just end my review right here? After all, in an ideal world, one sentence of profuse praise for James Renner’s debut novel would be enough to convince you to go to Amazon right now and hit “purchase.” But that’s not how [...]

In Watergate, Thomas Mallon’s exceedingly entertaining, panoramic re-telling of the eponymous presidential scandal now forty years old, Richard Nixon’s downfall is framed as the inevitable, near-farcical conclusion of one of our most tragic national epics: the 1960’s. As the novel opens in 1972, Nixon is cruising toward a second term with an all-but-inevitable election victory [...]

Before the internet allowed us to watch footage of people being murdered for free, any aspiring video-age Percival had to search high and low for quality snuff. There was no relic so highly prized as the Grail of gross, Faces of Death. Often shelved in the back rooms of those pre-Blockbuster video stores located in [...]

Let’s just jump to the question you really want to ask: Does Alan Lightman’s new novel, Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, live up to the enormous accomplishment of his first one, Einstein’s Dreams? Comprised of chapters devoted to the dreams young Albert Einstein had while working on his theory of relativity, Einstein’s Dreams [...]

“Literary critics have labeled Michel Houellebecq’s novels ‘vulgar,’ ‘pamphlet literature’ and ‘pornography;’ he has been accused of obscenity, racism, misogyny and islamophobia.” Why couldn’t I have read that book? Considering that one of his previous novels focused on a travel agency that sold prostitution packages to Thailand and that several others contain enough sex and [...]

Alrighty, we’re down to my last group book report for BOOK WEEK 2, and we’re ending it with two ensemble pieces. My second book was an ensemble, so I was kind of shying away from these for a while. But my third book, which I’m currently working on, only has two main points of view, [...]

So you guys know I likes to mix it up, and I’m try to throw out a few hottie mm-bottie book reports from time to time. Well here are four romantica (romantica = explicit sex and language with a traditional HEA) novels guaranteed to steam up your e-reader. THE SWEET SPOT by Kimberly Kaye Terry [...]

2011 wasn’t just a good year for books, it was an AMAZING year, just an embarrassment of riches as far as reading is concerned. And unless something else ridiculously wonderful comes along, I’m fairly sure that I’ve nailed down my top three books of the year. One of them is SILVER SPARROW by Tayari Jone, [...]

I know, I know: “What the eff, Ernessa? Why no book reports since the summer?” All I can say is that things got just ridiculously busy, but I do fully intend to get my full 52 reports in by the end of the year. I’ve actually been reading tons to the point that I’m going [...]

Able to leap multidisciplinary subjects in a single bound, Umberto Eco is the college professor you always wanted to have.  His first novel, 1980’s international bestseller The Name of the Rose placed such seemingly inaccessible topics as semiotics and biblical hermeneutics inside the irresistible candy wrapper of a medieval monastery murder mystery.  Eco’s second novel, [...]