“Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” L. Carroll

Fiction

Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina

I can’t remember exactly why I started reading Anna Karenina because it was so long ago, but I am somewhat confident it was a reference to C.S. Lewis’s book about love or maybe the one about grief. It was my hard book. I try to read two books at the same time, an easy...

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My Friends

My Friends

I loved this book. It's the first one I've read by Mr. Backman, but not the last. That's for sure. It's like John Irving, Wally Lamb, David Mitchel, Jennifer Egan, Michael Chabon, Hernan Diaz--if I see them on a shelf, I buy them. Which reminds me of "The Brief...

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The Road to Tender Hearts

The Road to Tender Hearts

As usual, looking for a good comp for The Song of Songs. At first I was excited, because it was a road trip and the protagonist was a 60+ year-old guy, and there was a whiff of magical realism with a sentient cat and a few other things, and it's funny. But. But it's...

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Water Moon

Water Moon

I read this at least a month ago. It was part of my unending search for comp titles. I read it because of the speculative fiction aspect and magical realism, and it was a love story, as most books are, but I can't use it. At least I could read it, and I liked the...

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The Real Aleph

The Real Aleph

Image Citation: OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com/query: “Draw a visual representation of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Aleph,” described as a small iridescent sphere containing everything everywhere and every time all at...

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