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Dark, soulful tales that haunt long after the last page.
In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck My rating: 4 of 5 stars While the story of In Dubious Battle is pretty good, I found the book most interesting as a reflection of where Steinbeck was in his career when he wrote this novel. He seemed to have found a niche as an author of populist…
It’s become something of a tradition for me to wrap up a year writing about the books I read during the past 12 months. So, here’s the best and worst of the 30 titles I read in 2013*. Let’s start with the worst. The good news is there was nothing so bad that I gave…
When you bother to speak to us these days, one of your favorite expressions is, “You don’t understand me.” You’re right about that. Fathers don’t understand teenage girls. We were never teenage girls ourselves, but that’s only part of the problem. You see, fathers are men, and while it’s usually bad to make generalizations about…
Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry My rating: 3 of 5 stars This has been a pretty popular book amongst my male students at the high school, and Jonathan Maberry is an acquaintance, so I figured it was time I give it a read. It’s a very enjoyable horror/adventure book with a good message about…
Dan Frontier by William Hurley My rating: 4 of 5 stars I decided to end 2013 by re-reading one of the first books I ever read on my own. (And because I was one book short of meeting my 2013 Reading Challenge, a children’s book was a sure way to get there.) I’m not sure…
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,300 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people. Click here to…
The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens My rating: 3 of 5 stars Charles Dickens gave us some of the best books ever written in English (David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol). He also gave us a few clunkers (Old Curiosity Shop), and some middle-of-the-road stories. The Cricket on the Hearth is one of those…
A Christmas Story by Jean Shepherd My rating: 3 of 5 stars There isn’t much I can say that hasn’t already been said about this book here on GoodReads. I enjoyed it, though it lacks the cohesion of the movie A Christmas Movie, which I think is one of the best Christmas movies ever. A…
Summer of Night by Dan Simmons My rating: 2 of 5 stars I wanted to like this book a whole lot more than I did. It had been a while since I read a straight-up horror novel and I wanted that visceral experience, that suspense, that fear of the unknown. But what I got was…
Steven E. Wedel 