Paul’s Book Reviews
Eight short book reviews: fiction, science fiction, mystery, thriller, horror, young adult, fantasy.
Paul’s Book Reviews: My Top Reads for 2018
This is going to be a short list. Looking back over the books I read in 2018, only three stand out—and by “stand out” I mean books I’d happily read again. Two are new, published this year or in late 2017; one is from 1998 but new to me. Two are mainstream fiction with historical […]
Paul’s Book Reviews: Playing Catch-Up
My book review posts don’t normally have a theme. They are what they are: reviews of the latest books I’ve read, fiction, nonfiction, thrillers, whatever. This time, though, I include three books I’ve had on the to-read shelf for years … more than a decade in one case … that I finally got around to […]
Paul’s Book Reviews: Fiction, Thrillers, Mysteries, Space Opera, Duds
“One thing was certain: Rose had been wrong about the world becoming small again. Or at least it would not be the same small world it had been. Too much had changed. And amid those shifts and realignments, Anna had slipped through a crack and escaped.” — Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach Manhattan Beach by Jennifer […]
Paul’s Book Reviews: My Top Ten for 2017
This is collection of reviews previously posted on Paul’s Thing: these are the books, old and new, that I most enjoyed reading this year. I’m about to embark on Philip Pullman’s “The Book of Dust,” a potential contender, but doubt I’ll finish it before the end of the year (also, I’m sometimes disappointed with long-delayed […]
Paul’s Book Reviews: Fiction, Thrillers, Sci-Fi, & a Memoir
“It wasn’t for trash, my bookshelves would be mostly empty.” —Paul Woodford, unpublished memoir The Great Passage by Shion Miura Clearly, I’ve been reading too many mysteries and thrillers, where every new object or action introduced into the story comes back later in some significant way. In real life … and Japanese novels … the […]
Paul’s Book Reviews
“like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse—they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.” – James Hannaham, “Delicious Foods” Delicious Foods James Hannaham Seems like everyone wants to talk about the most interesting character in the book: Scotty, the personified voice […]
Paul’s Book Reviews: Memoir, Essays, Fiction
“Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air. Mountain ranges, no longer seen in profile, dwarf to anthills; seas lose their horizons; lakes have no longer depth but look like bright pennies on the earth’s surface; forests become a thin impermanent film, a moss on […]