Training as a Metaphor for Life

I do not feel anxiety often when reading, but Brian Platzer’s debut novel set me on edge before the end of the first page. Bed-Stuy Is Burning presents a fictional account of police shooting an unarmed 12-year-old-black kid in Bed-Stuy. The shooting...

I’ve been a voracious reader as far back as I can remember. In second grade, I read the entire Black Stallion series by Walter Farley twice through and regretted the ending of every installment—all eighteen of them—two times over, wishing I could remain in...

In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware is deliciously terrifying! When a “hen weekend”—a British term for “bachelorette party”—turns darkly sinister, Nora wishes she had followed her initial instincts and stayed far, far away. But the invitation from Clare, her best friend from childhood, held far more mystery than Nora could bear to leave unsolved. Why would Clare invite her after ten years of silence, not as much as a text shared between them in that time?

I’ve read a fair amount of literature about World War II, but I’ve never read any from the German point of view, so I was intrigued by the plot line for The Women in the Castle. I’ve always wondered how Germans viewed their involvement in the war, their complicity in the mass murder undertaken by the Nazi’s, in the evil that ruled the country for so many years. Did they claim ignorance of what Hitler’s army was doing before and during the war? Did they simply point their fingers at other citizens and lay responsibility elsewhere? Did they try to leave the past in the past and forget their involvement? Did they understand that their silence was complicity? Did they accept the shame and guilt and spend the remainder of their lives trying to find some semblance of absolution?

With its stories of courage, sadness, longing, romance, suspense, tragedy, and heroes, The Greatest Generation has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster. Except they’re all true! First hand accounts edited and organized with Tom Brokaw’s expert hand.

A quietly magnificent addition to the canon of war novels, Fives and Twenty-Fives by Michael Pitre is reassuringly tragic in its honesty. Michael Pitre, a two-tour Marine veteran, deftly weaves his experiences in Iraq into a heart-breakingly entertaining first novel.

With Righteous, Joe Ide has proven that IQ, his first novel, was no fluke. Using the gritty streets of Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas as the backdrop for his sophomore venture, Righteous solidifies Isaiah Quintabe, or IQ on the street, as the newest star player in the mystery/thriller category.

Killers of the Flower Moon details one of the most heinous mass murders in American history that you’ve probably never heard of because the perpetrators were white and the victims were First Peoples, the Osage natives of North America. In an ironic twist of fate, the Osage tribe’s reservation in Oklahoma hid copious amounts of oil under the surface.

A Man Called Ove put Fredrik Backman on the literary map, reaching the New York Times’ Best Seller’s List as well as scoring the envious honor of having his first novel successfully transferred to the big screen. With his fourth novel Beartown, Backman has established...