Category: Essay

New Year, New Me… Yeah, Probably Not

I really love the concept of starting fresh each year — reinventing myself, making meaningful change — it’s powerful. In theory, New Year’s resolutions are great — not only do they force us to look back at what we’ve been doing and re-evaluate, but they also ask us to do better. Eating too much pie?…

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Magpie Murders: A Modern Day Agatha Christie Mystery

Set in a small English town, Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders features all the archetypes that whodunit connoisseurs have come to expect from the genre. There’s a nosy neighbor, a vicar, a small-town doctor, plenty of small-minded townsfolk, a wealthy man of power, and a ridiculously intelligent detective. Horowitz also slips in a few less-conventional elements,…

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Twin Cities Book Festival | Rain Taxi

I have been looking for ways to get involved with the local literary community since I moved to Minnesota, and was thrilled to have the opportunity to volunteer yesterday for the Rain Taxi-sponsored Twin Cities Book Festival. Gathered together, in a spacious building at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, were the city’s finest authors, readers, publishers,…

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Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment

I keep making the mistake of reading a good book, deciding that I would like to write a blog post about it, but then not… I have a pile of books that I read during my last reading sprint, and I’d love to share them with you, but unfortunately, the details are beginning to turn…

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Some Thoughts On Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

So. Much. Hype. Written by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, and published in 1988, this short novel exploded as an international bestseller roughly around 2009, when it was translated into sixty-seven languages. It has sold over sixty-five million copies and set the Guinness World Record for the most translated book by a living author (I guess…

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