Driven by James Sallis

Clocking in at an amazingly short 147 pages, Driven is a breath of fresh air when compared to the books I have been reading lately.  The writing is clean and simple.  The sentences short and to the point.  The vocabulary purely functional.    I liked it. Driven finds our mysterious hero Driver alive and well and living in Phoenix.  In the opening scene two men try to kill him. He kills them, but not before they kill his girlfriend.  This leads to the Jeremiah Johnson plotline where random men crawl out of the woodwork and do mortal combat with Driver. Cars…

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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The story of an odd family told through the eyes of a young woman who can taste people’s emotions from the food they prepare.  This kind of food mind reading is not fun and our hero tends to eat as many manufactured foodstuffs as she can.  Machines have no bad feelings to impart on their food. Author Aimee Bender just drops us into the story and lets us discover along with the young woman what it is like to taste her mother’s sadness and the baker’s anger and the harvester’s disgruntlement.   But the girl who can taste people is not…

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