“Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.”

- Willa Cather

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In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World by Tom Holland is a “characteristically eloquent and necessarily broad-brush study of the rise of monotheism in the eastern Mediterranean and Near-East from the third to seventh centuries AD,” says reviewer Richard Miles. (Financial Times)

Ellen Miller-Mack finds the “pleasure of reading a very talented young poet” in Carmen Giminez Smith’s The City She Was. (The Rumpus)

Adan Woog says Christopher Moore’s novel Sacré Bleu is a “a mind-bending tribute to artists, the creative process and the color blue.” (Seattle Times)

Fiona Wright goes between the covers of Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, edited by John Leonard, and discovers a “dextrous and talented lot.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

“Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”

- Bertrand Russell

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Seth Grahame-Smith’s Unholy Night earns an A from Anthony Breznican, who says the it’s author’s “depiction of sacred figures as flawed humans that makes the book feel like a secret account of events that have been sanitized by legend.” (EW.com)

Lucy Scholes suggests that Greg Baxter redeems himself with his novel, The Apartment. She apparently was not a fan of his memoir. (The Independent)

Don Oldenburg declares Clint Hill’s Mrs. Kennedy and Me the story of a “relationship of respect, protection and love.” (USAToday)

Tom Epperson’s “noir tale of revenge and greed,” Sailor, impresses Nancie Clare, who finds that “the solution to the deeply twisted calculus of the plot is surprising, sad and wholly satisfactory.” (LATimes)

“A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”

- Jean Cocteau

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David D’Arcy finds that implicit in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works “is the troubling truth that human capital is woefully underused, and that most economic activity is structured to make it irrelevant.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Thornton McCamish says that it is the “ordinary human mystery” P.A. O’Reilly’s characters in The Fine Color of Rust “that keeps us guessing and it is the novel’s unsentimental celebration of simply getting by that makes it sing.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

In Brothers (& Me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving, Donna Britt “gives us all a way to think about what it might mean to love ourselves without forgetting how to love those whom we feel obligated to protect, and without pretending that our desire to protect alone is enough to fend off all of the world’s waiting dangers.”  (Washington Post)

Janet Maslin goes between the covers of Ron Rash’s novel, The Cove. (NYTimes)

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”

- Meg Cabot

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John McMurtrie finds Anne Enright’s “unmistakably Irish sense of gloom,” but also her tenderness, in Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Ed Smith’s Luck: What it Means and Why it Matters prompts David Runciman to ponder whether “the pop-psychology genre starting to cannibalise itself.” (The Guardian)

In The Missing Shade of Blue, Catherine Taylor says that Jennie Erdal “prefers to take a discursive and dispassionate path, with uneven results.” (The Telegraph)

Carol Memmott declares Adriana Trigiani’s Shoemaker’s Wife a “perfect fit as a love story” and awards it four stars.  (USATODAY)

“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”

- Nikolai Gogol

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Rachel Hore finds a “stylish, witty and inventive” novel in Sadie Jones’ The Uninvited Guests, but worried that it “is perhaps too much about the writer at play to satisfy Sadie Jones’s hungry fans.” (The Independent)

Lisa Wells says that David Wagoner’s After the Point of No Return “gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.” (The Rumpus)

John Timpane goes along with Lauren Winner on her spiritual quest in Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. (Philly.com)

Jeff Ayers discovers “a pitch-perfect first novel” in Kieran Shields The Truth of All Things. (Seattle Times)

“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.”

- Gustave Flaubert
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Leeann Zouras offers up a double-dose of “postapocalyptic” young adult novel reviews: Dan Wells’ Partials and Julianna Baggot’s Pure. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Edmund Gordon has mixed feelings on Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears, saying that the author’s “storytelling skills are on display in a novel of love, grief and automata, but the tale lacks a human heart.” (The Guardian)

Korina Lopez awards Kate Alcot’s The Dressmaker 3 and 1/2 stars: “Seamlessly stitching fact and fiction together, Alcott creates a hypnotic tale.” (USAToday)

Upon experiencing Mark Leyner’s The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, Ben Marcus declares the author “either a genius or a freak, and it may not matter which, because his books are compulsively readable, created by a literary mind that seems to have no precedent.” (NYTimes)

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

- Evelyn Waugh

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Ron Charles says Anne Tyler’s “ability to survey the emotional terrain of grief remains sharp” in her 19th novel, The Beginner’s Goodbye. (Washington Post)

Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories “illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom,” according to Ana Grouverman. (The Rumpus)

While intrigued, Jon Ronson suggests that Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain, “can be a bit of a slog, not always a page turner.” (The Guardian)

Andrew Klausner shares his thoughts on The Start-Up of YOU, by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. (Forbes)

“Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.”

- Herman Hesse

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Lev Grossman cracks open Derf Backderf’s graphic novel My Friend Dahmer for “the creepiness factor” and finds “a devastatingly accurate fictional evocation” of his childhood. (TIME)

Leyla Sanai declares Patrick Flanery’s debut effort, Absolution, “an exceptionally intelligent, multi-layered novel encompassing politics, history, a gripping storyline and complex characters.” (The Independent)

Elysa Gardner discovers accounts “as compassionate as they are witty” in Frank Langella’s Dropped Names: A Memoir. (USAToday)

“For women . . . poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

- Audre Lorde

Sunsan Carpenter gets a kick out of Jennifer A. Nielsen’s The False Prince, calling it a “romp of a medieval-themed, middle-grade novel.” (LATimes)

Jeff Greenfield is intrigued by Matt Ruff’s alternate historical novel, Mirage, but ultimately finds it wearisome. (Washington Post)

Catherin Tung says that Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral’s collaboration on Chopsticks “yields a novel that makes our hearts move faster than our brains.” (The Rumpus)

Charles R. Cross finds in Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America “a complicated story, involving four separate defendants, several trials, various appeals, numerous defense attorneys, multiple judges and many different points of law.” (Seattle Times)

“Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute.”

- Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

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Jeff Giles finds an engaging memoir that rings true in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal and awards it an A-. (EW.com)

David Perlmen praises Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places as a “literate, often poetic and thoroughly entertaining book.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Janet Maslin declares The Master Blaster, P.F. Kluge’s new novel, “stingingly funny.” (NYTimes)

Martin Chilton discovers a “thrilling adventure story for young adults set in the world of top-level riding” in Lauren St. John’s The One Dollar Horse. (The Telegraph)