After a long and distinguished run Gilian of Rose City Reader has retired as host of Book Beginnings on Friday. Luckily for us Anne of My Head Is Full of Books and Olivia of Bemused & Bookish h…

After finishing Robert Harris’s V2: A novel of World War II and Dawn Anahid MacKeen’s The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey I moved on to Katie Crouch’s Embassy Wife and Phyllis Rose’s T…

After a long and distinguished run Gilian of Rose City Reader has retired as host of Book Beginnings on Friday. Luckily for us Anne of My Head Is Full of Books and Olivia of Bemused & Bookish h…

Back in the early 1990s a friend loaned me a copy of Robert Harris’s international bestseller Fatherland. Set in the year 1964 of an alternate reality in which Germany emerged victorious from…

Wanting to scratch Turkey off my list for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge I decided to finally take a chance on Dawn Anahid MacKeen’s 2016 book The Hundred-Year Walk: An A…

After finishing Robert Olen Butler’s The Hot Country and Anthony Pinn’s memoir Writing God’s Obituary: How a Good Methodist Became a Better Atheist I felt like diving back into the Euro…

For a long time it felt like my blog featured all kinds of books by authors who’d walked away from their respective religions be it Islam, Judaism or countless varieties of Christianity inclu…

Podcast Episode · Bulwark Takes · September 14 · 29m

After having excellent luck with The Star of Istanbul,  the second book in Robert Olen Butler’s Christopher Marlowe Cobb series I thought it was wise to read the first novel The Hot Country. Just l…

Like I mentioned in a few of my previous posts, I’ve had my eye on Jennifer Teege’s 2015 memoir My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past for the…

After finishing David Downing’s historical novel The Dark Clouds Shining I moved on to The Hot Country, the first book of Robert Olen Butler’s Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. On top of…

Back in June I tried to read The Dark Clouds Shining, the fourth and final book in David Downing’s Jack McColl series but quickly realized I needed to read the novel’s predecessor Lenin…

After finishing David Dyer’s historical novel The Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the Californian I dived into more historical fiction with David Downing’s The Dark Clouds Sh…

Over the course of 2016 I came across several novels (all of which one had been published that year) while wandering the shelves of my public library that I didn’t read but made a big enough …

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 26 in 26 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Ch…

When one of your smartest friends recommends a book it’s always a good idea to read it. During the pandemic a friend I’ve known since college raved about Gordon Corera’s 2020 book…

After reading several very good historical novels and some surprisingly good nonfiction I dived into Dan McClellan’s The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Co…

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 26 in 26 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Ch…

I’ve been wanting to read Robert Olen Butler’s 2013 historical spy novel The Star of Istanbul for over 10 years yet during the entire time I’ve made no effort to read it. That is …

I don’t know why but I lately I’ve been wanting to read about that part of the world once known as the Silk Road. Perhaps I’ve been feeling nostalgic about Peter Frankopan’s…

Over the last month or so I read a nice series of historical novels. David Downing’s Lenin’s Rollercoaster, Kim Barnes’s In the Kingdom of Men,  Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Final P…

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 26 in 26 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Ch…

I’m a sucker for books about one particular year in history. Some faves that immediately come to mind are Fred Kaplan’s 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Andreas Killen’s 1973 Nervous Breakd…

Lately I’ve been trying to stay away from historical novels set during World War II but I couldn’t resist borrowing a copy of Armando Lucas Correa’s 2016 The German Girl when I st…

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 26 in 26 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Ch…

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 26 in 26 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Ch…

15 years ago almost to this day I featured Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte 2008 novel The Painter of Battles. I remember having mixed thoughts about it, calling the novel “a slightly unev…