Winner!

Only one giveaway this week, so only one winner!

The winner of India Black and the Widow of Windsor is ... Maria D.!

Congrats! Check out my current giveaways -- more coming this week!

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Weekend reads and birthday month...

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My wife's birthday was last weekend, which coincided with the ten year anniversary of our meeting! She got everything she wanted, from a homemade gourmet dinner to marathon-ing the Star Wars movies because I had never seen them. But we have a tradition in our family of celebrating the 'birthday month' which means my wife gets a few more weekends of fancy dinners made by me and dictating how we spend our weekends.  (Non-negotiable will be disassembling our Christmas tree, which we've obviously put off for weeks, oops!)

This weekend I'm reading Peter Swanson's The Girl with a Clock for a Heart. (The picture is from last night, not this morning -- I only do champagne before noon, and only on weekends!)

What are you reading this weekend?
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Book Review: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

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First line: Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.

I had to grit my teeth to get through this book. (All 209 pages.)

I'm ashamed to admit this since a surprising number of folks online and in person have cited this novella as one of their favorite books, but I found everything about this brief read to be agonizing -- the plot, the narrative style, the characters -- it and I just did not connect.

I went in expecting to love this book given its reputation and subject matter. Achebe depicts the story of a Nigeria broken by white colonialism; our hero is deeply flawed and stubbornly committed, living in a world with problems triply complicated by the unnecessary influence of white colonizers. Achebe's narrative style is straight-forward and clear, even as he articulates a world deeply foreign to modern audiences.

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Book Review: Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel

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First line: --Central, this is Lapetus. Target in sight.

This is the final novel in the Themis Files trilogy (I reviewed the previous two novels, Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods.) 

I'm not going to summarize the plot because I don't want to end up spoiling anything. As a concluding novel, it did everything I needed a final book to do: wrapped up plot threads, answered the mysteries, and provided some final flash bang.

As with his previous novels, I think some of Neuvel's characterizations are thin -- no doubt because the story is told through transcripts and journal entries -- and it left me a little impatient with the story.

These were fast reads, so if you want a Michael Bay-esque summer action flick in a book, this trilogy will do it.

Title:Only Human
Author: Sylvain Neuvel
Genre: Fiction (Sci Fi / Speculative / Mecha / Aliens / Parenthood / Social Commentary / Warfare)
Publisher/Publication Date: Del Rey (5/1/2018)
Source: Edelweiss

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