Jonas David Fiction Fridays #2, The Observer

I'm sure you've heard me mentioning this novella several times over the past year. Well, here it is, published and free for you to read and share! I used Smashwords just for the reason that I can make it free there (Amazon won't let things be free all the time) so please download and read …

Jonas David’s Fiction Fridays, Episode #1: Slice of Life

--1:22 PM and thirty-eight seconds on January third, 2018: Strategies for escape: Lift a pencil, sharpened, and place the point against the right tear duct. With the heel of your palm against the eraser, angle the utensil so it is parallel with the bridge of your nose. Thrust into the brain. Find the heaviest object …

Character quirks

I've been listening to my first Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep, and it's a lot better written and a lot less sexist than I'd expected.  What has stood out to me so far is how good he is at quickly putting a clear picture of a new character in your head. All of the …

The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald

Much like the others I've read by this author, this book deals heavily with memory, loss, and--more directly than the others--the holocaust.  The narrator recounts his experiences with four characters, in four sections of the book. Each character is an emigrant from Germany, and each, in some way, seems to want to forget some aspect …

The Handmaid’s Tale: a negative side of human adaptability

I finished this dystopian classic by Margaret Atwood and was both impressed and frustrated. I was impressed by how believable the story was. In the afterward the author talks about how she took great care to put nothing in the book that hadn't already happened somewhere in history, and no technology that didn't exist. She …