I’m of two minds about Colin Woodard’s 2011 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. On the one hand, it provides an interesting and, I think, generally useful framework with which to view the...
Sometimes, a mystery novel, if the writer is ambitious, will have two puzzles to be solved. It’s a complicated gambit for an author since it can leave the reader totally befuddled unless it’s executed very deftly. So how mad does a novelist...
Two witches — Nanny Ogg and Agnes Nitt — don’t like the family of oh-so-courteous vampires who have decided to visit the small nation of Lancre in a mountainous area of Discworld. In their snooping around, they’ve come across the family’s...
In winter night, the boy sits in the dark kitchen of the flat with his grandfather Dzia-Dzia. Upstairs, the pregnant girl Marcy is playing sad Chopin on her piano as Dzia-Dzia follows along, playing an invisible keyboard on the kitchen...
Heron By Patrick T. Reardon . Great blue heron, white in high green, folds on self, forward falls toward water, clear space, wingspan wind-catch, rise in flight. . I am semi-trailer truck in someone else’s tender canoe — steep banks through...
The other day, I started reading Jane Austen’s delightfully droll and perceptive 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, and it’s gotten me thinking about the cancel culture. “Cancel culture” is a fairly new term predominately used by conservatives to...
Jim Butcher’s 2000 novel Storm Front, the first of the very successful series of Dresden Files novels — 17 so far with more on the horizon — is a rip-snorting, crackerjack, page-turner of urban fantasy. It features Harry Blackstone Copperfield...
After reading “State of Relax” by Eileen Myles By Patrick T. Reardon . “Cows kissing goats” — Bible-immersed — I see lions bedding with lambs. . Calliope of poem, lustful, subtle — nation un-uniting itself and sighing...
There is much that is surprising and interesting and fascinating in Paul Kriwaczek’s 2010 book Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. And much in Kriwaczek’s storytelling that is infuriating. It is astonishing that the...
Actually, Beowulf isn’t a character in Tom Holt’s 1988 comic novel Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (although that is, of course, a fun title). He’s not even mentioned until a few pages from the end. One of the dozen of his Norse contemporaries who...
Andre Norton’s 1970 novel Dread Companion opens with Kilda c’ Rhyn detailing for the reader the mystery at the heart of her story. She was 16 when she landed on Dylan as the servant/nanny of a rich family. That was in the year 2421 After...
For me, the high point of my reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice came near the end of the 1813 novel when Elizabeth Bennett receives a letter from her aunt, Mrs. Gardiner. But, before I get to that, let’s go about a hundred pages earlier...
At the Chicago Tribune where I worked for 32 years, the story of Bill Recktenwald and the parking meters was legendary — and instructive. From 1984 to early 1987, Chicago suffered a huge loss in parking meter revenue — 42 percent — and city...
In 1958, Gregory Peck starred as the revenge-driven Jim Douglass in the brooding and beautiful western The Bravados. The movie was based on a novel of the same name, published the year before by Frank O’Rourke, and, as is the nature...
Frank Ryan has his 10 rules, and Stick — Ernest Stickley Jr. — buys into them. The result is very lucrative. Ryan’s Rules was the original title of Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel, called Swag in all of its later editions. And the rules...
On the night of March 9, 1860, a storm-driven schooner with only 15 boys aboard, ages 8 to 14, crashes into the shore of an unknown island. And so begins Jules Verne’s Two Years’ Vacation, also known as Adrift in the Pacific, a novel...
Rarely in literature does there appear someone as vitally alive as Fargo Burns, a character whose chaotically self-destructive actions and courting of danger and fragmenting psyche co-exist with — and, in a strange, odd way, complement — a...
One of the opening paragraphs of Sam Weller’s short story “All the Summer Before Us” is this: “We were eighteen, me and Dave and Bill; childhood friends on the cusp of adulthood. On a silent country road we had discovered an old concrete...
On September 9, 2017, I wandered over to Westminster Abbey because I was in London for the first time seeing the sights and I knew it was chockful of a lot of historical stuff. When I got inside, it was a magical place. For one thing, this...
Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians, echoes Etta James to say “at last” to the arrival of Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975 (the Monacelli Pres, $60, 343 pages). But this comment in her...
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