Jeff Griffeth
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griffeth.bsky.social
Jeff Griffeth
@griffeth.bsky.social
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The Reformatory (Tananarive Due, 2023). The tag on this book lists it as “horror,” but that doesn't seem quite right. Sure, there is the abject horror of the Jim Crow South, and of course there is the horror of children with absented parents.

🧵1/7

#books #booksky #reading #thereformatory
December 16, 2024 at 7:53 PM
Long Bright River (Liz Moore, 2020). A literary thriller that leans a little more to the thriller side than literary, this book is very readable. The protagonist is a Philadelphia cop who is searching for her drug-abusing sister.

#books #booksky #reading #longbrightriver #lizmoore

🧵1/4
December 6, 2024 at 3:20 AM
The God of the Woods (Liz Moore, 2024). This is the book you’ve been waiting for. There’s a mystery, but don’t expect the thin parameters of genre here. This is a robust world-building novel.

🧵1/4

#books #booksky #reading #thegodofthewoods
November 23, 2024 at 1:46 AM
Calypso (David Sedaris, 2018). David Sedaris can perhaps best be described using words like eccentric, peculiar, odd, fey, outré, curious, and, more often than not, hilarious. Forty years ago he would have just been dismissed as a nut (or worse). I rather like him.

🧵1/5

#books #booksky #reading
November 20, 2024 at 2:00 PM
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum, 1900). Since my son was born, I’ve looked forward to the time when we’d share chapter books for bedtime reading, and that time has arrived. I’ve primed the pump a bit by telling him stories of Odysseus and Ali Baba, and he’s

🧵1/6

#books #booksky #reading
November 20, 2024 at 2:55 AM
Same energy
November 19, 2024 at 3:18 AM
The Dead Zone (Stephen King, 1979). This was my first time rereading this book since sometime in the mid-1980s. It has aged pretty well, and I rather zipped through it. For a book about a psychic to prove so downright prescient is (and there’s no better word for it)

#books #booksky #readng
🧵1/3
November 14, 2024 at 2:46 PM
The Alienist (Caleb Carr, 1994). A word about audio books. A good one can greatly enhance one’s reading experience. I often will borrow and download an audio book from my local library (using the Hoopla app, great stuff), and listen while

#books #booksky #reading
🧵1/5
November 14, 2024 at 2:37 PM
A Really Strange and Wonderful Time: The Chapel Hill Music Scene 1989-1999 (Tom Maxwell, 2024). They’ve got a Himalayan Bistro where the Hardback Café used to be. The previous spot of the Cat’s Cradle became a typical Franklin Street bar and grille.

🧵1/6
#books #booksky #reading
November 14, 2024 at 2:32 PM
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850). The last time I read (and, at the time, loathed) this time-honored American classic was in my high school English class. I’ve found, however, that as I’ve matured as a reader, I’ve developed a taste,

🧵1/5
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 4:13 PM
The Sisters Brothers (Patrick deWitt, 2011). Sometimes you can become only peripherally aware of a thing, yet already be pretty sure that it will be right up your alley before you dive fully into it. I didn’t know much about this book before reading it,

🧵1/5
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 4:09 PM
Disappearance at Devil’s Rock (Paul Tremblay, 2016). I catch myself double-checking the publication date when reading Tremblay, because his books always seem to be plugged directly in to the latest technology du jour.

🧵1/5
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 4:05 PM
The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America (Tommy Tomlinson, 2019). I don’t personally know Tommy Tomlinson, but like many folks who lived in Charlotte over the past few decades and read his columns in The Charlotte Observer,

🧵1/5
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:47 PM
A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles, 2016). Written in an elegant, mannered hand evocative of Kazuo Ishiguru’s best prose, this novel crossed my reading desk at just the right time to help quell the feelings of disassociation and ennui which had become

🧵1/5
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:41 PM
If it Bleeds (Stephen King, 2020). King hit a grand slam early in his career with Different Seasons, a book-length work comprised of 4 novellas. The central conceit was that each of the four seasons was represented in the tales within.

🧵1/5
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:38 PM
The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead, 2016) “An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields of underground or in an attic room,

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#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:34 PM
The Paying Guests (Sarah Waters, 2014). We’re in England post World War I, and the country is still in full recovery mode from that great trauma, a pall that hangs over every page of this novel.

🧵1/3
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:29 PM
You Like It Darker (Stephen King, 2024). The latest collection of stories from King. Like its predecessors, things are hit and miss here. His first two collections, Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, were much more solid than each collection that has followed.

🧵1/4
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:27 PM
Headshot (Rita Bullwinkel, 2024). This maybe could have been titled Long Shot. It’s such a strange, experimental book. Almost immediately after publication, novel wonks began lavishing on the praise. I was quite eager to pick it up.

🧵1/4
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:25 PM
Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965). One of the pillars of classic scifi, this book delivers on every front imaginable. It has whizbang contraptions, fascinating court intrigue, menacing baddies, and oh yes, gigantic killer sand worms!

🧵1/3
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:22 PM
A great quality of the novel Frankenstein is that its composition, full of starts and stops and disparate parts, makes something of a Frankenstein's monster in and of itself. Likewise this book, with its vast depth and peculiar mobility is -- to borrow from

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November 11, 2024 at 3:20 PM
The Golem and the Jinni (Helene Wecker, 2013). It’s hard to believe this is a first novel. The interweaving of fantasy and history are near seamless. The setting is New York City at the turn of the 19th century,

🧵1/5
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:53 AM
Shogun (James Clavell, 1975). What a novel. This doorstopper will pull you in and take over your life until you get to the last page. It’s simply spectacular, escapist fantasy with world building that holds up.

🧵1/3
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:50 AM
Roots (Alex Haley, 1976). Published in a year when our country was tripping over itself in patriotic displays to honor its bicentennial, Roots serves as a parallel history, one that is no less expansive and crucial to the country we live in today.

🧵1/5
#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:47 AM
Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry, 1985). Let me start by saying that my general perception of this book was way off. I was aware that there had been a TV movie or series or the like, and had somehow gotten the idea that it was of the

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#books #booksky #reading
November 11, 2024 at 3:38 AM