Agent Palmer

I’ve been alternating my reading habits between fiction and non-fiction for a while now, but most of my fiction has been realistic fiction. These are stories that exist in a made-up real world. It could be argued that The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is realistic fiction that feels like surrealistic fiction, which was one of the reasons I couldn’t put it down.

Finding something relevant in a book 20 years after I was supposed to read it seems par for the course.

Michael Crichton’s The Lost World is a melding of espionage, extinction, and evolution. It’s much more of a short story in scope than Jurassic Park is as a novel. But the tension and thriller aspects of the book make for a gripping read.

In All Families are Psychotic, author Douglas Coupland creates a sort of funhouse mirror of what family life is like. Sure, it’s often distorted and even frightening, perhaps, but there remains an element of our own truth staring back at us.

Winter: A Novel of a Berlin Family by Len Deighton is a familial masterpiece. Starting with Harald Winter and focusing on his two sons, Peter and Paul Winter, this novel follows the family’s journey as their spouses and friends are all intertwined in chaotic and random events as history unfolds with World War I and World War II.