Book Review: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

“Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.”

Gillian Flynn's dizzying, addictive thriller wants to ask you a question: how well do you know the person you're married to? Are you confident you actually know what they're capable of?

Maybe you should keep some protection close by. Just in case.

Something terrible happens on the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth anniversary. Amy vanishes without a trace, leaving behind evidence of a struggle in their home on the Mississippi River. What happened that day gets teased out slowly as the narrative shifts between Nick's narrative of the investigation and

Book Review: Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell

"Being part of history is rarely a good idea."

Man, I really wish I had crossed this one off of my to-read list sooner. You see, I enjoy history, but I have a hard time getting into nonfiction books. Most of them are bone dry and deadly dull, in my experience. Wading through the options to find a good one was always excruciating to me. 

I always preferred taking a history class with an instructor who had a lot of personality. One of my high school history teachers got so into tales of medieval mayhem that he'd dart back and forth between two blackboards, desperately scrambling to find space to scrawl out more information as he told us about the black death. His enthusiasm and wit made the subject come to life for the first time,

Countdown: Chris Colfer's Struck By Lightning

I realize I'm in danger of turning this into a Chris Colfer fan page, since I've already written about The Land of Stories twice (OK, once was a review, but still). I promise that I'm going to get back in the habit of posting regularly so author love will be a little more spread out.

Phew. That out of the way, I can now tell you that our ambitious little Kurt Hummel is officially an over-achiever. Starring in Glee. Touring with Glee. Becoming a New York Times bestselling middle-grade author with The Land of Stories. Causing me to have a fanboy meltdown at BEA. Writing and starring in his own independent movie. And now, finally, turning that independent movie into a YA novel set to pub on November 20th. I know. I KNOW. You almost want to slap him for making your lazy

Book Review: Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick

“Maybe, thought Ben, we are all cabinets of wonders.”

As a devoted fan of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, I had high expectations for this book. To be perfectly blunt, I was disappointed. It would be easy to make a pun about being not-so-wonderstruck after all. I'm going to try not to do that (although I kind of just did).

To be fair, the artwork is superb. Selznick is nothing short of extraordinary when it comes to telling a story in pictures. It's just that the story itself was on the weak side here. Hugo worked because it was a great story that just so happened to be told primarily through well-crafted pictures. It would work just as well as a