The Book Chubi

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara It is a Thursday evening in March. My husband and I have arrived early to  Skylight Books  in Los Angeles. The multitude of bookshelves are being rearranged for tonight's event. We pick up our copy of the book, pre-ordered weeks ago to save our spot in the signing line. Like many others there, we wanted to secure our opportunity to hear Patton Oswalt and get his autograph. There is another reason too. The book is intriguing with a backstory that is rarely heard.  I'll Be Gone in the Dark   is being published posthumously, which adds a grime yet alluring tag for a true crime book. We take our seats and I open up the hardcover to catch a glimpse of what is to come. The foreword, written by Gillian Flynn, sets us up to understand that while we will be reading about an investigation into a rapist and murderer what we are really reading is a memoir of...

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa If you are a member of Amazon Prime, make sure you are signed up to get the First Reads e-mail every month. On the first of every month an e-mail arrives in your inbox with a selection of Kindle titles of which you get to choose one to read. A River in Darkness  was one of those selections for December 2017. My interest in the novel came from the subtitle "One Man's Escape from North Korea". Since the subject of this country has been heavily populating the news cycle I figured it would be a great choice to broaden my understanding of the humanitarian angle of this subject. This is a very short memoir at only 172 pages, although you get plenty of what you are looking for in that compact time. Masaji's story is heartbreaking every step of the way giving an account of the immense difficulty in being poor, an immigrant, and asylum seeker, and an outsider. In his native country, J...