BOOK REVIEW: I never know what to make of Michel Faber. Each book he writes is completely different, and The Book of Strange New Things is no different. This book concerns a minister who is sent to a distant planet to teach the alien civilization about Jesus and the gospel. Meanwhile, back at home, his wife is struggling with natural and man-made disasters. They communicate through a kind of email system, and at one point in the book, his emails become censored, which lends a dark tone to the narrative. You keep expecting something to happen, but nothing ever really does. And while that may be enough to keep you turning the pages, ultimately, it leaves you feeling disappointed. Three Stars.

BOOK REVIEW: I should know not to listen to reviews in Entertainment Weekly. Judged as one of the ten best books of 2015, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch by Daniel Kraus, this overbloated brick posing as a young adult novel runs out of steam well before it runs out of pages. Never heard of it? There’s a reason. The premise is that a 17-year-old boy working with the criminal underworld in Chicago is gunned down on the shores of Lake Michigan in the late 1800s. He is then resurrected as a walking corpse that, I suppose, looks normal enough to pass for quite alive but only somewhat sickly. We follow Zebulon through important periods of the 20th century, only to find out after not caring for over 600 pages, that it’s only half of the story and we’ll have to find out what happens in the sequel. No thanks. Two Stars.

BOOK REVIEW: Not often does a book piss me off as much as The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson did. First things first: I’m a huge Bryson fan. I’ve followed his career since Notes from a Small Island, the book to which this one is a sequel. But as Bryson has grown older, he’s grown more curmudgeonly–that I can accept. What I can’t stomach is the condescending tone that has developed over the course of his career. Everyone, it seems, is an idiot…except for him, of course. A little humility from time to time goes a long way towards fostering sympathtic readers. And look…if you’re going to travel around England again because you’re out of new ideas, at least be sure to go see everything before calling it quits. He gets called away on a legal matter at the end and skips an entire section of the country. But the worst part? The endless political drivel that rears its ugly head, completely unnecessarily and annoyingly. I don’t like when anybody starts politicizing in a book, either for the right or the left. Shut up and tell me the story, not your political views. I returned this book, and will be Ebaying every Bill Bryson book I own. Anyone interested? One Star.