Alison Reads

One day the author, in his late 20s, realized that he had crushing bills and no way to pay them, plus he had gained more than 100 pounds since he graduated from college. So he decided to stop going to bars nightly and limit himself to $8 per week food budget and 800 calories per […]

In Paris the homely concierge of a wealthy apartment building hides the fact that she is well-read and has sophisticated tastes. A precocious twelve-year-old girl in her building forms a bond with her, and they both are befriended by the new tenant, a very cultured Japanese man. The girl has decided to commit suicide on […]

Twenty-five years after his best-selling Blue Highways, the author takes off again on the road less traveled, in a meandering search for “quoz” which is the word he coined for something unexpected and memorable, a special moment. From his home base in Missouri, he goes North, South, East and West. My favorite part is his […]

An unlikely best-seller, this is an account of the Puritan settlers in New England in the 1630s — not the Mayflower crew, but the founders of Massachusetts and Rhode Island which included John Winthrop and Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Vowell has done an impressive amount of research and she tries to get inside 17th-century […]

Set at the Endinburgh International Festival and Fringe Festival which are held for three weeks each August, this book starts out slowly and it’s hard to keep all the characters in one’s head, but gradually the characters become real and by the end all the separate threads are tied together. I enjoyed learning about pyrotechnics […]

Thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley knows more about the ecology of the tidal mudflat near his home in Olympia than anyone. That summer he finds a giant squid and a rare deep-sea fish that was thought to be extinct. He becomes a minor celebrity and members of a religious cult seek him out. Miles is passionate about […]

Jerry Oltion is a Eugene science fiction writer. I tried two other books of his and didn’t much like them, but I did like this one. When a friend of theirs develops a drive that enables interstellar travel in a converted pickup truck, Trent and his wife Donna decide to leave an increasingly dictatorial America […]

A fascinating book that starts with the premise that all people have suddenly disappeared and then examines various ecosystems to see what is likely to happen over the next ten or fifty or thousand or ten thousand years. By detailing the proliferation of plastics in the ocean and the long-lived residue of nuclear reactors, the […]

Landvik has done it again with her seventh book. She excels in writing about characters who survive terrible tragedies, so her books are not the best to listen to in a car–though the tragedy is not the central focus of the book. In this book, the main characters are a young man named Joe and […]

Those who have read Gabaldon’s Outlander series will remember Lord John Grey as a minor but important character. This is the first of a parallel series where he is the main character. It is London in 1757 and Major Grey must discreetly investigate the man who is enganged to marry his young cousin. He discovers […]