Reviews 2025

These are the books I read over the last year, and a bit of what I thought about them…

Another roadside attraction - Tom robbins

This artifact of 60’s and 70’s counter culture sensibility is innocent, absurd, endearing, quizzical, crass, and flat out entertaining all at once. Tom Robbins writes in a choppy but easily approachable fashion, offering answers that beg more questions, spiraling forward and backward through time, understanding that the future is subject to the past—while the ambiguous past is rewritten to service our hopes and fears of an unknowable future. Curious, crude, and supremely confident; Another Roadside Attraction is a great big ball of yarn tied with interesting bits and bobs that’ll string you from the fever-inducing thunderstorms of the Arizona desert, through the misty hills of the Oregon back-country, all the way to the guarded vaults hidden under the Vatican. Like many of his other works, this attraction is a marvel to behold.

OnE Day in the life of ivan denisovich - Alexander solzhenitsyn

This plain language account of an ‘ordinary’ day in a Russian gulag highlights the dehumanizing effects of modern punishment. Miserable and chronically short of the bare necessities, the prisoners and guards suffer alike—though the former class suffers a fair bit more. Life at the edge of a frozen waste is hard on everyone, and yet the prisoners continue to struggle, sure that there is a better life at the other end—if only they can survive long enough to see it. A harrowing yet humanizing account of justice gone wrong.

Marathon Man - William Goldman

The tale of “Babe” Levy, and Scylla the Rock is a twisted and curious work that draws the reader into a split story with a jaunty pace and a lashing wit. Through half the book it is unclear how these divergent story lines will merge, but when they finally do, it with a series of shocks—and yet there are still so many unanswered questions!

Through the last half of the book, the stakes have been raised; and despite the ever increasing drama, Goldman never loses his scathing sense of humor. The answers come, the actors do as they will, and when the curtains close on a stellar ending, William Goldman proves that the genius of The Princess Bride was no mere accident. He’s simply that good at his craft. This book was an absolute pleasure!

Whirlwind - James Clavell

Although this is the 5th book in James Clavell’s Asian Saga, it is really only the third book about the Noble House of Struan; the first two being Tai-Pan and Noble House. King Rat ties in loosely—but not really since only one character from King Rat appears in Noble House, and he is a minor character with little involvement in the story (though I did enjoy his cameo).

Unlike Tai-Pan and Noble House, Whirlwind is the first book that doesn’t take place in Hong Kong, instead focusing on a subsidiary of Struan’s that operates heavily in Iran. The problem is, the Shah has fled the country, and Ayatollah Khomeini has returned from his banishment in France, thereby kicking off the Iranian Revolution of 1973. So begins the struggles of Andrew Gavallan, Duke McIver, and an assortment of pilots, mechanics, wives, girlfriends, servants, relations, associations, contacts, mullahs, militants, radicals, spies… Indeed, this book has such a large and colorful cast that it might have overwhelmed a lesser talent and become indecipherable—but Clavell is up to the task and manages to braid a half dozen major story lines into a harrowing tale of brotherhood, adventure, and love.

At 1149 pages, the book is over so quickly, tying up the last major plot-line in a bit of haste, and leaving a good deal of drama on the cutting room floor (what of Ian Dunross, Linbar Struan, and the fate of the Noble House?). One might expect another installment of this tale—but alas, the sixth and final book of James Clavell’s Asian Saga is a return to Japan that takes place a hundred years before the events of Noble House and Whirlwind, shortly after the end of Tai-Pan. Oh well. It was still very much worth the read—and isn’t that an important lesson in itself?—that when the main story ends, it really doesn’t end at all, but carries into the indeterminate future, on and on, forever.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie

This was not what I expected whatsoever. All I knew about Salman Rushdie going into this book was that a fatwa had been declared against him for whatever was said in his work, The Satanic Verses; so I expected something heady, controversial, and possibly blasphemous. What I got was a children’s story.

But it was a well written children’s story, engaging and enjoyable—though perhaps a bit simple—but then again, it was written for children, and I am not a child. I was expecting politics, philosophy, even heresy. What I got was something sweet and simple, though nourishing to the soul. Overall, this was an excellent work for children of all ages, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.