I have a lot of respect for women who travel alone. And even more if they are slumming it. Dervla Murphy is probably one of the OGs. An Irish travel writer, she has hiked or biked across many places in the Global South. In this book, Murphy documents her walking journey across the length of Ethiopia from Misswah to Addis Ababa. On the way, along with her mule, she will hike the Simien mountains, dry …
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As we head off for a road trip in April to the former Yugoslavia (assuming, you know, we aren’t in the midst of WW3 by then), it makes sense to get context. I don’t see the point of travel if I don’t understand a little bit of the history of the place I am visiting. How did it come to be, who the local people are, how did they get to be there, and why …
Wanted to kick-start 2026 with an easy read for our monthly book club. My experience with Tana French has been positive; she is, after all, a great atmospheric writer with the ability to build a character-based thriller. If you haven’t read the Dublin Murder series, check it out. However, The Hunter is just not it. I am going to say it outright–this was the most tedious book I have read in a long time. Nothing …
Happy Month of Horrors! The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampire by Grady Hendrix is a fun gothic novel to dive into in case you are finding October dull and boring. “We’re a book club,” Maryellen said. “What are we supposed to do? Read him to death? Use strong language?” ― Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires Desperate Housewives meets The Twilight Zone and it works. In America’s favorite southern …
Gorgeously written, The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh was one of my top reads of 2024 and also my pick for non-choronlogical read for the 52Week Challenge. So much so that there were many moments when I couldn’t quite tell when things were happening. Its a novel without a central plot — told entirely through the fragmented nature of human memory . Evocative and layered, it’s a kind of memory-catcher, where our unreliable narrator pieces …
This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for easily over a decade. Somewhere down the line I outgrew Archer’s storytelling style, and with no genuine sympathy for a politician in jail, I never got around to reading it. For reasons unclear, I finally managed to pick it up and read it through the weekend, and I can confidently give this journal a solid 3 stars. “Prisoners and guards routinely line up outside my cell …