Howard McEwen

“Being alone with your thoughts is not pleasant when your thoughts are trending dark.” Rick Robinson has written a classic novel about male, middle-aged angst. Women, when you ask your man “Whatcha thinking about?” Here’s the answer for many men. But they won’t tell you. Robinson writes what most middle aged men left unspoken. He [...]

[Read more →]

Nightshade is the kind of story the Kindle is designed for. I found myself trapped at a Panera Bread waiting for a late meeting and luckily had my Kindle. I remembered I’d bought Stephen England’s short Nightshade and began reading at 7:15 AM.  By 8:15, I’d spent a nice hour reading a complete and satisfying [...]

[Read more →]

This was easily one of the better written local history books I’ve read. So many of them are badly written – simple sentences seem beyond them. The author has a light style that floats over the page. He doesn’t try to wow us with an expansive vocabulary nor get bog down in a dirge of [...]

[Read more →]

I hated this novel. I hated it not so much for what it was – which was not much – but what it could have been. I loved the first book. I loved the structure and the pacing. This one was a mirror image of that. It was a complete muck up. The novels are [...]

[Read more →]

Let me put get the usual sobriquets out of the way: this is a brilliant story. Tolstoy masterfully telescopes the life of a man from his colleagues and work life down to his household concerns and pastimes then down to his wife and daughter then his son. Finally, Tolstoy brings us into the very essence [...]

[Read more →]

I’m ambivalent about this novel. It’s good. It’s very nice. It’s a page-turner. It doesn’t suffer the fate of many, many novels — even some of my best loved — but there was something missing. That’s a convoluted way of saying I enjoyed it but it didn’t stick with me. Plot and pacing are excellent [...]

[Read more →]

There’s not many novels that are that are more hardboiled than The Postman Always Rings Twice. It’s hard as can be. You know the story: A drifter, a man, the man’s wife. The man ends up dead at the hands of the drifter and the man’s wife. I’ve read 50 Shades of Grey. You want [...]

[Read more →]

If I wasn’t reading this for a book club I’d have put it down half way through. While a fine document it’s dry as dust. The author didn’t seem to really get into the world that Anna lived in – I didn’t get a sense of the culture and smells of the time. The middle [...]

[Read more →]

I’m a beekeeper and I’m happy when anyone tries to make beekeeping more popular. Mr. Turnbull does a great job of telling a story and his writing is sharp, crisp and humorous (the hardest kind of writing). As an American however, the book peters out about 2/3rds of the way through when the topic of [...]

[Read more →]

Wodehouse’s brilliance is shown by not only his prose but that fact that he can keep a story going with it’s following the thinnest of threads. And it’s always hilarious. If you’ve not read Wodehouse. Do. Thirty minutes of reading about Jeeves and Wooster are a better tonic than any shrinks 50 minute hour.

[Read more →]