From the very first page of The President, the reader has the impression to be facing something new and fresh, and this impression keeps alive until the very last page of the work.

A fast-paced, punchy and poignant prose mix with a more essay-like side, giving light to a brilliant combination. Stewart is amazing in his characters’ creation, but he is also remarkable in his ability to depict a fictional world with many points in common with the real one. Last but not least, the philosophical, political and sociological message lying beneath the story leaves space to more and more interpretations.

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Waugh allows his Catholicism to prevent him from writing a great book. The end feels forced and too didactic. Too bad, it was really enjoyable till the very end.

A young college student gets to know and love the Brideshead family: a rich, upper-class eccentric family. An interesting look at English society in the early to mid 1900s.

This "young audiences" novel was very entertaining, and I devoured it over the weekend. Centering on the story of an out-of-favor lady-in-waiting, life as a servant to Lady MacBeth is well imagined. It follows the Scottish Play closely, and freely uses quotes from Shakespeare while entwining the minor characters' tales in among the bigger seize-the-crown story. The novel is pretty bloody and hints at some violent sexual situations, so it gets a PG rating from me - and a suggestion that it is more appropriate for girls of 15 or older.

The novel's opening is lovely, macabre, and poetic. Afterward, the book meanders back and forth between 1891 and 2007.

Maybe I've read too many of these kinds of dark stories, but I felt that it was too easy for me to see the path of each plot direction - and I ached for the story to move more quickly. When I read exposition describing a minor location's semicircular front step and realized I had already read those words describing an earlier site, I thought "why should this matter?" Try as I might, I could not envision that the two locations were supposed to be paired or symbolic, or ironic, or even that this was supposed to be a red herring in the storyline. No, I think it was an example of too many words and not enough editing.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the characters (especially 17 year-old Leonie) and was fully absorbed in the interwoven climax. The epilogue was a little contrived, but tied up the loose ends.

Feb - March 2008 - read all 1024 pages. It took about 7 weeks to do it.

This was the semi-autobiographical novel that inspired the film with Michael Fox. Written in 1979, it holds up well as an entertaining look at a rural hospital, its comical patients, and the wise-cracking big-city doctor who becomes stranded there without money or transportation. The ending isn't hard to guess, but the ambulance ride there is amusing.

Diana Gabaldon keeps writing longer and longer books. There are so many characters in this series now (the 6th in the Outlander series) that I've begun to confuse them. Nevertheless, I continue to read them because the original Outlander premise sucked me in so thoroughly that every couple years I am happy to immerse myself in the dual lifespans of time-traveling, Claire Fraser.

This 1400-page episode is much better written than the last installment (The Fiery Cross), and I found it entertaining escapism into the world of colonial America on the verge of revolution.

I read this book when it first came out in paperback and have wanted to read it again, but haven't. Nevertheless, portions of the story and the settings come back to me often. Places I'd never known before, Buckhead and food packaging plants, have become icons for me of the haves and have-nots.