When it comes to history, including religious history, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, writes that it’s important to attempt “a real engagement with the strangeness of the past.” [...]

Over the past ten years, I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels pretty much in order, and it’s been a delightful journey. I’d read all of the novels before [...]

I am of several minds about this review, or, as Tiffany Aching would phrase it, I’m having First Thoughts, Second Thoughts and Third Thoughts. On the one hand, I’m thinking [...]

Based on its bright, attractive cover of the lakeshore skyline, Walking Chicago’s Coast looks like one of those ain’t-Chicago-great booster books. It has the look of a book written to [...]

Kathryn Davis’s strange, wonderful, courageous 2006 novel The Thin Place starts with three 12-year-old girlfriends walking down a trail to a lake. One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, [...]

The title of Ed McBain’s 14th novel about the detectives of the 87th Precinct in a fictional city very much like New York seems almost silly or grotesquely comic. After [...]

The Bible is so reverenced in Western civilization that it’s easy to miss all the layers of comedy at work. Indeed, Charles Baudelaire complained, “Holy Books never laugh, to whatever [...]