In August 2008, The New Yorker published a true story by David Grann called “The Chameleon” about a twenty-year-old Frenchman, Frédéric Bourdin, who pretended to be a missing teen, Nicholas Barclay, in San Antonio, Texas. Despite Bourdin’s French accent and his lack of resemblance to Nicholas, the teen’s family welcomed him with open arms, raising questions about their involvement in Nicholas’ disappearance. This story inspired Ted Staunton to write Who I’m Not….
Mark Twain
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Mark Twain Quotation
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” – Mark Twain –
Non-fiction
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Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman
In 1993, Piper Kerman had just graduated from college when she fell for the wrong girl: Nora was an older woman who was involved in an international drug smuggling ring. Piper started following her girlfriend in her frequent trips, and one day Nora asked her to smuggle a suitcase full of money from the United States to Belgium. When her baggage was almost lost in transit, Piper realized she was…
Ernest Hemingway
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Hemingway’s Documents Found in Cuba Have Been Digitized
In October 2011, I had read an article in Vanity Fair that detailed how Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway’s editor, orchestrated the rescue of documents stored in the author’s Cuban home, la Finca Vigia. I found it fascinating that there were still papers Hemingway wrote that nobody had seen. On February 10, 2014, a New York Times article announced that these documents have been digitized and are now…
Ian Rankin
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Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin
In Hide and Seek, the second book in the Inspector Rebus series, a young man is discovered dead from an apparent overdose in a shady part of Edinburgh. John Rebus takes on the case, but discovers troubling evidence that points to a murder: the body is found laid out cross-like between two candles, a five-pointed star has been drawn on the wall above, the body is covered in bruises, and…
Ernest Hemingway
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Hemingway and Cuba
A few weeks ago, I was on vacation in Cuba, the very country Ernest Hemingway fell in love with. He started going there in 1932 because he loved fishing. He first lived in the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Habana Vieja from 1932 to 1939. He later bought La Finca Vigia, a house located close to La Habana in San Francisco de Paula where he lived until the Cuban revolution in 1960. In…
Eleanor Catton
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The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Awards, drew my attention because I usually enjoy historical fiction, and I have always been fascinated by the gold rush and how people would risk everything they have in the odd chance of striking it rich. The book starts when 12 men meet on 27 January 1866 in the smoking room of a hotel to…
William Burroughs
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Did you know that William Burroughs…
… shot his wife in the head while playing a drunken game of William Tell at a party? She died instantly. He never went to prison for the crime, as it happened in Mexico, and he bribed his way out of the country. The author was also a drug addict and a drug dealer. He was constantly in trouble with the law in the US, so he moved a lot…
Quotation
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Stephen King Quotation
“Some people say that I must be a horrible person, but that’s not true. I have the heart of a young boy – in a jar on my desk!” – Stephen King.
Fiction
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Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
The books I have gone through lately have dealt with serious stuff, so I needed something lighter to read for the holidays. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding came out a few months ago, and I thought it would be a good time to go through the whole series again. For those of you who have been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years and haven’t…