Quick Book Reviews Blog

While the modern man may seem to be shifting from the literary medium to the visual one, there is no doubt that books will continue to play a very powerful role in the lives of billions of people in the coming decades, if not centuries. As a matter of fact, their impact is so important and palpable that it often becomes the subject of a magnificent story, as is the case with The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

It feels counter-intuitive, but it seems to be commonly-accepted knowledge that air travel is safer than any other method, with the ratio of plane crashes to successful flights being negligibly low. As a matter of fact, when it the unthinkable does happen, we're often quicker to think of human error or some conspiracy rather than lay the blame on technical malfunctions.

A world falling apart is generally a rather complex issue, one that deserves to be explored from multiple angles... after all, world-changing events such as the apocalypse can give rise to many interesting scenarios. With the second book in The Passage trilogy, The Twelve , Justin Cronin continues to weave his ginormous web of narrative threads, both looking back at the beginning from a different angle and pursuing the stories unfinished in the first novel.

Since the days when we crawled out of our caves to create larger societies we have striven to become more and more civilized... that is, to abandon the urges considered primitive in favour of intellectual pursuits, effectively transcending the inner caveman. Of course, the world is far from being an ideal place, with practice often heavily differing from theory. Virtually all of us have to contend with the so-called inner caveman, the manifestation of base desires that often come into contradiction with what society has been teaching us.

While it is true that virtually all of us have or will at some point experience some turbulence when it comes to romantic relationships, most can rejoice for never experiencing something more emotionally-taxing than an angry break-up. However, as you might expect, there are those for whom questions regarding relationships get infinitely more complex and nuanced, as is the case with all the characters involved in Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us.

The idea of separating society into criminals and law-abiding citizens has taken hold in virtually every country, and it certainly makes a lot of sense: either you break the law and cause harm, or you don't and stay out of trouble. Of course, in practice things often turn out to be different, with lawbreakers escaping consequences while law-abiding citizens suffer unjust harm.

In the world of post-apocalyptic novels one would be hard-pressed to find a scenario that hasn't been covered yet. It seems that throughout the centuries we've managed to come dangerously close to exhausting all the possibilities for our specie's demise, and that's forcing authors to dig deeper and deeper into their creative genius to put new twists on things. Justin Cronin is one such author, and his efforts have brought us The Passage trilogy , with the first book being appropriately-titled The Passage .

There is a time many of us are too young to remember, while those who do see it as a distant past... but just over twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union was still alive, and a few years earlier was still prospering well enough. There was a sense of balance between the two superpowers of the world, and while their presence certainly did serve to keep the other in check, it also set the stage for an era of advanced espionage where information was the most valuable commodity.Tom Clancy often uses this setting as a backdrop for his celebrated novels, as he did for perhaps one of his more overlooked masterpieces, The Cardinal of the Kremlin .

We get small glimpses into their lives through cameras and newspapers, and what we see often furthers our belief that they really are different from us. We constantly yearn for what they have, yet at the same time we have no idea of what sacrifices that entails. Indeed, celebrities are somewhat of a mystery for many of us, almost seeming to live in an entire world apart, one reserved for a higher class of humans.

No matter which paths we choose to take through life, there comes a time when we realize that all roads to lead to Rome, a fate none of us can escape in the end. When the time comes, we all want to be able to look back on our lives with real pride and joy, pointing out both moments of great pain and happiness alike; after all, we are the sum of our experiences, both good and bad. For some, however, the moment to look back on life comes somewhere in the middle, as is the case with the relatively traumatized titular protagonist in My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout.

Some would argue that our identities are essentially confined to our collection of memories, to the important decisions we've made in our lives, and shaped by the mistakes that stay with us until the end of time (or until we get old enough to start forgetting). In one way or another, we always learn something from the big errors we make and the catastrophes we cause, but not everyone is lucky enough to escape from their own misfortune unscathed, as is the case in The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian.

Allen Eskens Personal site Allen Eskens is a writer whose first novel was The Life We Bury , with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Minnesota. In 2015 he was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. His grand goal is to give readers novels that challenge their creative thinking with magnificent twists but also respect them with intellectual honesty and appreciation. The art of writing is one very few (if any) can claim to have mastered completely, with even the titans of literature looking at it as a lifelong learning process. Today, we have the fantastic opportunity of looking a bit deeper into that process with reputed author Allen Eskens. He is responsible for writing the highly-acclaimed novels The Life We Bury and The Guise of Another , and is currently getting ready to release his next effort, The Heavens May Fall .Here are the words of wisdom he had to share with the rest of the world: Q: To start at the...