Alison Reads

Two children are raised by their father in rural New Mexico. They never leave their yard, never see TV, and are completely isolated from the modern world. When they are in their early twenties, Jimmy rebels and leaves home. Dorothea goes in search of him a year or so later when their father falls ill, […]

This is another book about a group of women who have nothing but knitting in common. They get together every Friday night and become close friends. Once of them gets a fatal illness and the others rally around. Competently written but nothing special.

Similar to The Omnivore’s Dilemma but predating it by 20 years, this book examines the ingredients of a simple dinner: corn, salt, butter, chicken, rice, lettuce, olive oil, lemon juice, and ice cream. The author explores the biology and social history of each food. I learned a lot about olive and lemon cultivation and harvest […]

The fifth in the Thursday Next series, and just as inventive as the first four. Thursday has only a few days to convince her son Friday to join the ChronoGuard and invent time travel, or time as we know it will cease to exist. Meanwhile, she is having trouble with two of her bookland alter […]

A Richard Jury mystery. Jury goes into a bar and is told a fantastic story by a stranger about a missing woman and her son. Jury is caught up in the story and investigates it, only to discover that it is much more complex than he at first thought. It helps to have read the […]

I picked up this book because books by Kidder are always worth reading. Among Schoolchildren, a year in the life of a fourth-grade teacher, is his best-known book, but he has written several others on diverse subjects and they are all excellent. Mountains Beyond Mountains is a profile of Paul Farmer, a Harvard-trained doctor who […]

I inhaled this book over the Labor Day weekend. It’s a fascinating book (by a woman, by the way) about a married woman who is tempted to kiss a man she meets one night. Alternating chapters cover the next five years of her life. In one reality she gives in to the kiss and leaves […]

I expected to like this book, but I didn’t. It’s a creepy book about a strange young forensic pathologist who is convinced that she was cared for by gorillas as an infant. She investigates a series of suspicious crib deaths and ends up learning more about her past. I didn’t like the character or the […]

The subtitle of this book is “the accelerating pace of human evolution”. The author discusses forms of natural selection and evolution in humans and proto-humans and chimpanzees and gorillas. He argues that natural selection is still going on today, at an accelerated rate because of the accelerated rate of change in our environment. An interesting […]

Originally published in 1978, this is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction book that I never got around to reading until now. It’s about a strong self-confident young woman, Snake, who along with her three special snakes is a Healer in a post-nuclear world. When her rare alien dreamsnake is killed, she tries to […]