Catherine "Kater" Cheek is a writer and artist.
Apr 26
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar Not since Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic have I felt so engaged by a book about driving. Not just driving, but about the least-sexy part of driving: parking. If you live (as I do) in an American city in which driving is not a luxury but a …
Apr 02
The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science by Sam Kean The only time I remember enjoying a book about science history this much was when I read Sam Kean’s other book, The Disappearing Spoon, which is full of exciting tales from the periodic table. I …
Jan 24
We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen Zoe Wong and Jamie Sorenson both have psychic powers, but Zoe uses hers to beat up bad guys in her spare time while Jamie robs banks. The catch is that neither of them have any memories from before two years earlier. When they meet up at a memory …
Dec 20
We Are All the Same in the Dark by Julia Heaberlin On the surface, this book is a standard police procedural, but a few unusual twists and good writing make it memorable. It takes place in a small Texas town, depicted exactingly in its hot, backwards, narrow minded glory. Odette is a young cop, the …
Nov 15
T. Kingfisher is one of my go-to authors these days, so I snapped this one up even though it’s much shorter than her other works. The other reviewers said it’s a retelling of the Poe story “the Fall of the House of Usher,” a work I had not read. I read the spark notes for …
