The Masthead is closing out its third quarter! A quick look at the past three months:

Books reviewed: 7
Translated fiction: 2 (from 2 languages: French and Spanish)
New-to-me authors: 4 (Forster, Benioff, Sijie and García Márquez)
Oldest book: Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
Newest book: Benioff’s City of Thieves (2009)
Longest book: King’s It (1153 pages)
Shortest book: García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (120 pages)

A pithy recap of each book read and reviewed here since July 15:

A Room with a View, EM Forster
Please, just say what you think, not what your friends think! A novel that lambasts with humor our need to be exactly like everyone else (bonus: excellent views of Italy)

Deadeye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut
Copious amounts of guilt for stupid mistakes and twists of fate. This one lacks in substance until the end – a patient read, but stick with it.

Where Angels Fear to Tread, EM Forster
Do you keep your in-law’s burdens even when the blood relation dies and the in-law takes a new (and reproachable) husband? Scandal, prejudice and rue grow out of a humble Italian town and creep their way across the Channel into upright English homes.

City of Thieves, David Benioff
A compact story of Leningrad; emotive and original, adventurous and brutal, but brought down a notch by its gratuitous sex jokes and off-the-mark diction.

It, Stephen King
A tightrope walk along the “kid line” of horror and imagination

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie
Simple prose delivers the irony in China’s re-education program with a cute (not cutesy, but cute) love story to boot

Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez
The townspeople – every last one of them it seemed – knew who was to be murdered and knew who the murderers were but not one of them did anything. A novel about passivity in the face of crime.

Q1 wrap-up
Q2 wrap-up
Browse the review archive