Circe
Circe, by Madeline Miller, came out early last year, and I’ve been keen to find time for it, so it seemed like a good book to kick off the spring season. It’s a re-telling the story of Circe, a character originated circa 8th century B.C. by Homer. In Homer’s in The Odyssey, Odysseus encounters her …
The Silent Patient
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides shows you exactly what type of book it’s aiming to be from the very first sentence: “Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband.” No messing around here. For people who like their thrillers-slash-mysteries to have twisty plots and straight-forward writing, this recent release is one …
Where the Crawdads Sing
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens opens with a picture of a map and the discovery of a dead body in the marshes of North Carolina. I was intrigued immediately when I saw it in the bookstore, though I put off reading it for a while. Ultimately, though, my curiosity won out as it …
The Dreamers
Early on in the The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker, two college students discuss the Trolley Problem, a very popular thought experiment in ethical decision-making. It’s a scenario (would you kill one person to save five?) that has made its rounds again and again in academics, pop culture and in meme form, sometimes referred to …
The Snow Child
“Like many fairy tales, there are many different ways it is told, but it always begins the same. An old man and an old woman live happily in their small cottage in the forest, but for one sorrow: they have no children of their own. One winter’s day, they build a girl of snow.” The …