wednesday november 04
This was my latest car book, The New Age of Adventure: Ten Years of Great Writing, a collection of pieces from National Geographic’s Adventure magazine.
Essays by Sebastian Junger, Tim Cahill, Peter Matthiessen, and other greats of travel, adventure, and nature writing are collected here. Plus a creepy look at the man-eating lions of Tsavo by Philip Caputo; the account of a stay with the last of the traditional reindeer herders in the far reaches of Russia by Gretel Ehrlich; and a horrifying account of an ebola epidemic by Tom Clynes.
This volume is a little different from earlier collections, as it includes some political writing and war correspondence. But it’s still a look at life on the outer edges by very talented people, and it’s a great read straight through or dipped into at coffee stops.
wednesday october 28
Ruth Rendell writes both intense psychological suspense novels and a traditional British police procedural mystery series. I have to confess that I can’t take the psychothrillers (some written under the name Barbara Vine), since I really don’t want to enter the mind of a serial killer, thank you. I prefer her Inspector Wexford mysteries.
But what I like most about the new Wexford novel, The Monster in the Box, is its odd little psychological twist on a serial killer plot.
Wexford sees a man get out of a van and cross the road, and it’s a man with whom he has a long though unacknowledged history. The man, Eric Targo, stared at him outside a murder scene years before; he walked his dog near Wexford’s windows; he nodded at him across the bar.
And these tiny connections over a long and relatively uneventful span of years have convinced Wexford that the man is a multiple murderer.
Continue Reading…
wednesday october 14
The slightly warped logic of that sentence (what is it, a developer’s advertising tag?) has been popping into my mind lately. For a slightly warped reason, I admit.
I’m rereading Flashforward, the 1999 novel by Robert J. Sawyer that is of course the basis for the hot new TV series of the same name.
What’s the connection? Just that the book has been in the library’s collection for ten years, a long time before Hollywood discovered it.
So why wait for blockbuster adaptations or bestseller lists or any of the other indications of mass demand? Come talk to your librarian if you want a good recommendation. There are all kinds of great books that are sitting waiting for you in the library stacks, and we’re happy to talk to you about them. If you can tell us about a few books you have enjoyed, we can find you others that you may love as much. Works for music and movies, too.
Hey, you’ll be so far ahead of the crowd that you could even go off and pitch adaptations to movie and TV studios. (Someone needs to tell George Clooney about Alan Furst’s The World at Night.)
Or you’ll just be snugly curled up in your own home with something wonderful to read.
wednesday october 07
I posted several months ago about John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s Novel, a complex literary/historical puzzler about Byron and his mathematically-minded daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace.
Crowley’s new novel, Four Freedoms, is very different, a very American story. It’s set on the homefront during World War II, when people’s lives were tossed up like decks of cards and came down in configurations they could not previously have imagined.
The novel’s main character is Prosper Olander, a young man with a severe curvature of the spine. Despite the botched operation that has left him unable to walk without crutches, he is an optimistic and curious person—qualities that make him more successful with women than other men might imagine.
Prosper has escaped his hometown and a charity job to work at a huge bomber manufacturing plant in Oklahoma. The prefab town that has mushroomed overnight to house the plant’s thousands of workers is home to many others who have left their pasts behind.
Continue Reading…
wednesday september 30
Whether you’re a baker or someone who reads cookbooks the way armchair travelers read travel guides, Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Rose’s Heavenly Cakes will transport you somewhere sweet.
Beranbaum is the author of The Cake Bible, one of the standard texts for bakers. That classic is filled with scientific detail (for those who want it) on how baking works, and filled with yummy recipes and pictures (and who doesn’t want those?) to demonstrate all of the wonderful things that cake baking science can achieve.
Rose’s Heavenly Cakes offers more of the same, beautifully precise and delicious recipes for a wide variety of cakes, cheesecakes, cupcakes, wedding cakes, and more. Some are simple and some are showstoppers that require multiple days in preparation.
Feast your eyes or feast your family! (And don’t miss Beranbaum’s wonderful cookie book, Rose’s Christmas Cookies, either.)
wednesday september 23
I’ve written posts about a few novels set in the Appalachian mountains—Serena, The Well and the Mine, the novels of Silas House—and here’s another one. Kentucky writer C. E. Morgan’s All the Living is another beautiful work with that setting.
Orphaned young, Aloma was sent to a mission school by her aunt and uncle, so she’s not quite as native to her native mountains as she was. She poured her heart and soul into her piano lessons, having few other joys or attachments in life, until agriculture student Orren Bell swept her up at a school dance, and they began an intoxicating affair.
Now, after his own family’s sudden death, Orren has inherited his family’s mountain farm, and Aloma has come to live with him, daringly unmarried. But the house is so grim, the work so unrelenting, and the piano he promised her an untuneable wreck. She learns to work in the house, at least, but her dreams of getting out clash with Orren’s dreams of rescuing his family farm.
Continue Reading…
wednesday september 16
The publishing news of the day is The Lost Symbol, the new novel by Dan Brown of (need I tell you?) The Da Vinci Code fame. Harry Potter himself hardly got more hype than symbologist Robert Langdon is getting this week.
If you're in the line for Brown's book--or have no intention of getting in line for it!--there are plenty of other historical puzzlers to enjoy. We posted a list back in 2004.
One of my favorites is Sarah Smith's Chasing Shakespeares. It's a really enjoyable work of scholarly conjecture and chase. About that other famous controversy, you know.
Continue Reading…
wednesday september 02
2:18 a.m. It’s a great time for a suspense novel to start. Greg Hurwitz's Trust No One opens on that moment.
Nick Horrigan is used to waking up at 2:18. It’s the time his stepfather, Secret Service Agent Frank Durant, bled to death in his arms. The 17-year-old Nick had snuck out of the house to meet a woman, undoing all of Frank’s elaborate security locks, and came back to find Frank shot.
The guilt has snapped Nick awake at that time nightly, his one faithful companion on his wanderings since that night when his stepdad’s colleagues on VP Jasper Caruthers’ security detail showed him a jail cell, bought him a plane ticket, and told him to go away.
The life Nick has finally begun to remake for himself in LA is shattered at 2:18 again when a SWAT team rappels onto his apartment balcony and takes him. It seems there is a terrorist threatening to take out a nuclear power plant, and he has said he will only talk to Frank Durant’s son.
Continue Reading…
wednesday august 26
I needed something pleasant to read the other day, so I picked up Eva Ibbotson’s 1985 romance, A Company of Swans. I was as charmed as I had hoped to be. Ibbotson’s romances are as sweet and elegant as meringues.
Harriet Morton is the dutiful daughter of a stern Cambridge don in the early years of the twentieth century. Since her mother died, her life is grey and repressed (so is the aunt who looks after her), and the only joy she has is her dance classes with a Russian prima ballerina.
An impresario comes to her class to recruit members of a company to tour South America. Of course, her father and aunt are horrified at the suggestion, but Harriet, obedient Harriet, rebels and runs away to join the troupe.
Naturally, she finds romance as well. She meets Rom Verney, who ran away himself many years before after a love affair went bad. Now he’s one of the leading citizens in his English expatriate community in Brazil.
This romance doesn’t run smoothly either, but of course any reader of the genre knows that all will end well. And sometimes that’s just what you want.
wednesday august 19
It’s too bad Steven Johnson’s name is so generic. I just read his 2004 Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life from cover to cover before realizing that he is the same author who wrote two other recent favorites of mine.
You can look back at my entry on The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was a marvelous work of science history and big-picture thought. (Do you remember that old TV series, Connections, and how it tied together wide-ranging theories to explain the sweep of history? You’ll love The Ghost Map.)
The other book I didn’t post about, but I recommend it, too—in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Johnson argues persuasively that videogames and other much-maligned forms of popular culture are far more cognitively challenging than we credit.
In Mind Wide Open, he reviews the science of how our brains work.
Continue Reading…
wednesday august 12
I just finished two books with something in common. They’re really good tales told by master storytellers, and they’re both in their own ways also about the importance of storytelling.
Both books are a little different from the last novel you may have read, but both will take you back to the enchantment of “once upon a time” and make you think about why those are such magical words.
The first is Here Lies Arthur, by Philip Reeve, based on a story we all know. The other is Nation, by Terry Pratchett, which bears some similarity to history as we know it but turns out rather differently in the inimitable Pratchett’s hands.
It makes for a long post to tell you about both of them, but I can’t resist, so read on.
Continue Reading…
wednesday august 05
I’m again enjoying some books recommended to me by other librarians. You can’t get a group of book people together without an exchange like that.
So it seems amusingly appropriate that one of the books recommended to me is about another group of single-minded eccentrics—The Mummy Congress, by Heather Pringle.
Pringle is a popular science journalist who writes about archeology. She heard of a scientific conference being held in a remote town in Chile: mummy experts gather every three years for an international convention. They all know each other and represent an astonishing collection of subspecialties, enthusiasms, and factions. Pringle attended and became obsessed with their obsession, and this book is the result.
It’s a somewhat meandering work, ranging from the controversy over medical dissection (the book’s creepiest section), the history of European fascination with Egyptian mummies, and the modern preservation of bodies like Lenin’s. Bog bodies, ice mummies, the find of Caucasian bodies in Chinese tombs, the sanctification of incorruptible saints’ bodies—there’s a little bit of everything here. It won’t be enough to satisfy your curiosity if the subject intrigues you, but it’s certainly a glimpse into a strange world few of us know much about.
wednesday july 29
Several writers have tried to write about the World Trade Center since 2001. I hope you have read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example, which was a deeply moving novel that addressed that grief head on.
Colum McCann does so only indirectly in his new book, Let the Great World Spin, which is set in 1974. But the gorgeous complexity and emotional depth of his novel can’t help but be a tribute to the towers and the city and all of the lives lost. As the author says in his endnote, “Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
On the day when a daring funambulist walks a tightrope between the newly built Twin Towers, the lives of several characters intersect in unforeseen ways.
Continue Reading…
wednesday july 22
There has been so much interest in the past few years in women’s stories from history. Sarah Dunant has written some wonderful ones—In the Company of the Courtesan, The Birth of Venus. Here’s another, Sacred Hearts.
Suora Zuana is a nun in the convent of Santa Caterina in Ferrara, Italy, in 1570. She didn’t enter the convent willingly, but there was nowhere else for her to go after the death of her father and teacher, a medical scholar.
But Zuana has come to terms with her destiny, and she now runs Santa Caterina’s infirmary and dispensary. Now she is called on to help another reluctant novice, young noblewoman Serafina, whose rebellion is upsetting the whole convent.
Serafina has brought the convent a dowry and the promise of the most splendid voice their famous choir has ever heard, but her voice is only being raised in furious screaming. She has been torn away from her lover, her old music master, to hush up scandal. The close community of Santa Caterina is unbalanced by Serafina’s fierce rebellion and by the power struggle to control her fate.
Continue Reading…
wednesday july 15
Norman Ollestad’s father was larger than life. He’d surf the wildest waves, ski the steepest slopes, race away from the federales and charm suspicious locals with guitar serenades—and take his little son with him.
Norman grew up in his mom’s beach house in Topanga Beach, California, loving and hating how his father swept him away. He’d miss birthday parties for terrifying, exhilarating adventures. He surfed as soon as he could stand and was in training as an Olympic skier. His father called him "Boy Wonder," but he was secretly ashamed of his fear.
On February 19, 1979, when he was eleven, they climbed into a rented airplane to get to a ski championship. Half an hour later, it crashed into an 8,600 foot mountain in the middle of a snowstorm.
Only Norman got down the mountain alive.
Crazy for the Storm is his memoir of that feat of survival and the story of his complicated relationship with his father, who put him into danger and taught him the skills to get out of it.
Continue Reading…
wednesday july 08
Here's another wonderful regional novel, The Signal, by Ron Carlson.
Mack knows this is the last hiking trip he will get to make into the Wyoming mountains with his ex—Vonnie agreed to come when Mack was at his lowest, in jail for smashing her boyfriend’s windshield.
What Vonnie doesn’t know is that Mack has a second purpose for the trip. He’s making some cash from a rather shady military man by tracking a signal from a downed aircraft.
What neither of them knows is that the trip is going to go terribly wrong. Besides the secret of the aircraft, there’s a group of poachers on the mountain. They’re willing to go to criminal lengths to keep their secret, too.
Continue Reading…
wednesday july 01
Here’s a lovely book. If you enjoyed Serena or The Well and the Mine recently, try this wonderfully moving novel, The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux, set a few years earlier in a nearby part of the South.
Sam Simoneaux gets the nickname “Lucky” in France, where his troopship lands just as the armistice is declared in 1918. He doesn’t leave the war entirely unscathed—a few weeks of clearing ordnance and an injury he causes to a little French girl haunt him—but he gets to go home to his wife.
But much of his life doesn’t seem quite that lucky. He was orphaned as a baby when a backwoods Arkansas family took vengeance against his Cajun father and slaughtered the rest of the family.
And now, though he has a nice job as a department store floorwalker, chance and a mistake give his life a painful new turn—a couple’s young girl is kidnapped in the store on his watch.
Continue Reading…
wednesday june 24
I was at the Art Museum last Saturday, talking at the From Author to Artist Book Club, which pairs books from the library to artworks in the museum. Do you know about the program?
We were discussing Portrait of an Unknown Woman, by Vanora Bennett. It’s a novel about Thomas More and one of his wards, and about the family portrait of the Mores that Hans Holbein painted during the reign of Henry VIII.
Bennett wrote the novel based on a theory she had read, that the symbols in the painting indicate a secret identity for one of the figures. To reveal more would be to say Too Much, but fans of historical conspiracies will enjoy that part of the plot. Readers interested in the roles of women in historical times will find lots more to enjoy.
It was an interesting discussion, and Libby from the Art Museum showed us some fascinating things about northern Renaissance painting.
But if you’re picking a Vanora Bennett novel to read, I actually liked her new novel, Figures in Silk, much better.
Continue Reading…
monday june 22
Remember a few weeks ago, when I posted about how you can find people who love books, music, and movies as much as you do, here at the library?
Now I'm hoping you're out there, too.
We just heard on Saturday that the governor's proposed budget, which will be finalized by June 30, will cut state library funding by 50%.
Just to clarify: this is entirely separate from the issue of a local library levy proposed for this November's ballot.
Since almost all of our library's funding currently comes from the state, you can imagine how catastrophic this change would be.
So, book lovers, library lovers, we're hoping for your support. We're asking that people contact their legislators before June 30 to make their concern known about the proposed cut.
For more information, take a look at the Call to Action posted on our homepage.
Meanwhile, I hope you're all enjoying the good reads you find in this blog. I felt triumphant last week when so many of you requested The Gone-Away World. Do you like it?
wednesday june 17
Don’t stop reading when I say this one’s science fiction. It’s for all of you who loved Catch-22, The Three Musketeers, Hunter S. Thompson, P. G. Wodehouse, Russell Hoban, and, well—hard to say what else. It’s a larger-than-life war story, a scathing satire told in laugh-out-loud-clever wordplay, and a postapocalyptic tale of friendship in the best buddy pic tradition—The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway.
The Haulage and HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company is as usual gathered in the Nameless Bar when they see on TV that the Jorgmund Pipe is on fire.
It can’t be on fire. It’s the only thing that’s holding back the strangeness that has swept the world since the recent war. The very unusual war in which Gonzo Lubitsch and his pals performed various raucously heroic and occasionally unspeakable acts, and formed their mercenary gang.
Naturally, they suit up to go to the rescue. And our narrator, Gonzo’s best friend and sidekick, fills us in on how the Pipe came to be, what the horrors are that it keeps at bay, and why this particular band of friends is the only hope to set the world at right again.
Continue Reading…
wednesday june 10
Here are a couple of peculiarly enjoyable little mysteries set in England. The instantly inimitable voice of the eleven-year-old narrator of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley, will leave you in no doubt that it’s in a class of its own. And the George Booth cartoon on the cover of The Herring-Seller’s Apprentice, by L. C. Tyler, will clue you in that it isn’t the usual sort of cozy either.
Flavia de Luce is overjoyed to stumble on a dying man in the garden of their English country house in the middle of the night. Along with her passion for chemistry and poisons, she has always wanted to solve a murder.
The man is an apparent stranger, but the enterprising Flavia suspects he is connected to the dead jacksnipe her father found on the doorstep a few days before with a penny stamp impaled on its beak.
Continue Reading…
wednesday june 03
Here's an eerie novel to put a chill in a hot summer day. It’s Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.
Dr. Faraday, the son of a former maid at Hundreds, a country house in Warwickshire, remembers vividly when he entered the house as a boy, just after World War I. He was entranced by its grandeur and the glimpse of the family life he saw.
Now he’s entering the house as an adult, called in to replace the Ayres family’s usual practitioner.
The old house is a wreck, the family just barely able to keep it open. The son of the family, Roderick, still suffers from the injuries and shellshock he suffered as an RAF pilot; his mother seems out of place in the now-crumbling house; and his sister, Caroline, a plain and awkward young woman, is struggling to keep them together.
Faraday is attracted to them all, and he can’t help feel pride that he, a boy of the servant class, is able to move in their social circle. He’s eager to step in when Roderick shows signs of nervous shock, imagining that an evil presence in the house is threatening the family.
Continue Reading…
wednesday may 27
I should probably preface this by saying that on a zero to ten scale of inappropriate humor, Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper clocks about a twelve. But if the image of yourself snickering madly over some truly appalling things doesn’t worry you, this is the book for you.
Peter Brown is an intern at a really bad New York City hospital, and he’s having a really, really bad day. The mugger he beats half to death on the way in to work sets the tone (he does carry the would-be criminal in to the emergency room), and the delicate mix of drugs needed to balance the day from there is very hard to maintain.
That’s the least of Peter’s problems, though. One of his new patients is a mobster, and the man recognizes Peter as Pietro “Bearclaw” Brwna, a mafia hitman who’s in witness protection after testifying in a notorious trial and throwing his best friend (son of a mob lawyer) out a sixth floor window. For some very good reasons, but it’s kind of hard to explain while fending off disasters, medical and personal, and anticipating being whacked.
Continue Reading…
wednesday may 20
I was in Joseph Beth a couple of weeks ago, and the staff there made a point of telling me to read an upcoming book they just love: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe, which will be published in June. Then I saw the book on our Hot Titles web page, too.
The Physick Book is an appealing historical/supernatural/romantic story in which a modern student of American colonial history gets more than she bargained for when she starts researching witchcraft accusations in New England. Because, it seems, one of the witches accused in Salem just might have been guilty after all.
You can put an advance hold on the book through the Hot Titles page if that sounds intriguing to you.
But my actual point is this: the folks at Joseph Beth loved telling me about the book. I won’t use the word fanatic (hi, Annette! hi, Barb!), but some people just light up when they talk about a really good read.
Naturally, you can find many more of those book people here at the library.
Continue Reading…
wednesday may 13
J. Adams Oaks’ Why I Fight is a teen novel, but it’s one that adults will find moving, too. It’s one of those stories about a young person where the difference between what the narrator understands and what the reader knows is a gaping chasm. Adult readers will find themselves on the right side of the gulf to recognize fully the story’s ironies and heartbreaks.
Wyatt Reaves starts the novel as a twelve year old, a big husky kid who is always mistaken for older. His Uncle Spade busts him out of a social worker’s office while his parents are screaming in the hallway, and they hit the road.
Life in the car and at his uncle’s various girlfriends’ houses seems pretty good to Wyatt, once his stomach settles down. And it all seems even better once Uncle Spade discovers something that Wyatt is really good at—bare knuckle fighting.
Continue Reading…
Elinor Lipman is back and in top giggle-inducing form in her newest satire, The Family Man. I might like this one even better than Isabel’s Bed.
Henry Archer, in a moment of weakness, sends his ex a note of condolence after her latest husband dies, even though Henry hasn’t spoken to her in years. Henry has come out and moved on since their decades-ago marriage, but once that door’s open again, it’s not closing anytime soon. Couldn’t Henry just take a look at Denise’s prenup and keep her greedy stepsons from selling her Park Avenue apartment? And by the way, couldn’t she fix him up with just one or two of her gay friends?
Meanwhile, another door has opened. The coat-check girl at Henry’s hair stylist’s turns out to be Thalia, Denise’s daughter, whom Henry adopted and then had to give up as a toddler when Denise divorced him. Henry might have a second shot at fatherhood here.
At any rate, his tidy life is about to get pretty messy.
Continue Reading…
wednesday may 06
Oh, goody is my reaction when I see there is a new Mary Russell novel by Laurie R. King.
If you don’t know, King is writing a continuation of the Sherlock Holmes canon from the point of view of Holmes’ much younger, half-American, Jewish wife. And in The Language of Bees, she gives Holmes a son and a granddaughter, too.
Unlikely? Yes, but marvelously clever. Mary Russell (who met the elderly beekeeper when she was a rebellious, grieving teenager in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice) is a match for her famous husband, a scholar and adventurer willing to research obscure languages, don disguises to roam London’s streets, or catch a fast camel or motorcar on a jaunt around the world.
Just back from a long international journey, Mary and Holmes are approached by the son of Irene Adler. A bohemian painter, an injured World War I vet, and the embittered child of that extraordinary woman, he is reluctant to acknowledge his famous father.
But he needs help.
Continue Reading…
wednesday april 29
Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map is a few years old now, but considering the recent swine flu outbreak, it’s timely.
In the mid-nineteenth century, London was a city of more than 2 million people with an infrastructure cobbled together in less urban centuries. The number of Victorian terms for occupations related to garbage picking gives a clue to how inadequate waste management was in the city, as should the incident known as the "Great Stink," brought on by a heat wave over the polluted Thames.
In the summer of 1854, in this densely populated, filthy city, a cholera epidemic began to sweep through the crowded neighborhood of Golden Square, Soho. Medical theory held that it was spread by smell, so measures were taken to deal with that. Of course, that had little effect on the propagation of the deadly disease.
Johnson sees that summer as a make-or-break moment in the history of cities, a time when the entire urban experiment in the history of humanity could have fallen through. But the persistence of a medical doctor, John Snow, and a neighborhood curate, Henry Whitehead, traced the epidemic to a single contaminated water pump, and they finally persuaded authorities to shut it down.
Continue Reading…
wednesday april 22
In the mood for something nice and old-fashioned? Sandra Dallas’s new book, Prayers for Sale, will fit the bill.
Hennie Comfort is an elderly woman living in the Colorado mining town of Middle Swan in the 1930s. A young woman stops by her house and asks Hennie to pray for her, having seen the sign, "Prayers for Sale," that Hennie’s husband jokingly put up on their fence years before to celebrate the fact that they had nothing to pray for themselves.
The girl, Nit Spindle, is new to town, lonesome and still grieving for her dead baby. Since Hennie herself arrived in town in that condition in her own youth, she decides to befriend the girl. Sharing her quilts, sharing her cooking, and above all sharing her decades of stories, she helps Nit settle in. And in the process she settles herself, too, finally letting go of an old secret sorrow.
If you like stories of women’s lives, you’ll find this comfortably appealing. Then try Nancy E. Turner’s These Is My Words and its sequels, more sweet and sturdy historical fiction with a real sense of what life was like for our grandmothers’ grandmothers.
wednesday april 15
I’m not sure what the gorgeous cover of this book signifies, except to signal the extravagant riches within. Amy Bloom writes like a magician, capable of pulling doves, scarves, and beautiful (if slightly bruise-mottled) fruit out of thin air.
I just read Away for my bookclub, and I kept telling myself to remember bits to discuss, thinking "This is my favorite part" each time. At one point I clapped my hand over my mouth and wailed, "Oh, no!" out loud, so absorbed was I in the story, which is both marvelously emotional and very deliberate in pacing and structure.
It’s the tale of a journey, and like the tale of every journey, it’s about coming home.
Continue Reading…
wednesday april 08
Trigger City, by Sean Chercover, was the other great recommendation I mentioned last week. It's a suspense novel that hits the genre bullseye: tough but damaged hero still fighting flashbacks to his last case, mysterious enemies arrayed against him, helpless victims he has to keep from becoming collateral damage, and the girl he wants to win back. Everything you need in a p.i. novel, with plenty of thrills and that essential spark.
Chicago PI Ray Dudgeon isn’t back to 100% after taking on the mob (Big City, Bad Blood), so he really needs the income when Colonel Isaac Richmond (US Army Ret.) asks him to look into his daughter’s death.
No one disputes how Joan Richmond died. The computer expert she hired for her company’s payroll department shot her to death, raving obsessively, and then committed suicide. It isn’t the facts of her death that the colonel wants to know, but more about his daughter’s life. Their relationship wasn’t close, what with his wife’s death and his own close-mouthed career in military intelligence.
So Ray goes looking. And what he finds is not the random violence of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Continue Reading…
wednesday april 01
I’m beginning to need one of those little admonitory signs, the kind you see in zoos: Please do not feed the polar bears. Mine would read: Please do not recommend books to the librarian.
It’s not that I don’t love book recommendations (the polar bears would sympathize here), but I’ve been gobbling them up at an alarming rate. And two of the most recent recommendations I received were for the second book in their respective series, which means that after I read them and adored them, I just had to go back and read the debuts, too.
I picked up Tana French’s The Likeness because one of my colleagues said it was one of her top three books of 2008.
Continue Reading…
wednesday march 25
If you don't mind standing in line a bit, here's a book worth standing in line for, Gin Phillips' debut novel The Well and the Mine.
This lovely short novel takes place during the Depression in the mountains of Alabama. Tess, the younger daughter of a coal miner, is sitting on the back porch of her family’s cabin, where she often goes to be alone. A woman she does not know walks up to the porch, takes the lid off the well, and drops her baby in. Then she disappears into the night.
The family at first doesn’t believe Tess’s story, but it turns out tragically to be true. Tess starts to suffer from nightmares. For the whole family, this act seems to undercut the solidity of what had seemed to be a good life.
The novel, which is told by turn from each family member's point of view, quietly takes them through this period of frightening uncertainty.
Continue Reading…
wednesday march 18
There are certain authors whose works seem so exactly observant that you can imagine them as anthropologists studying these strange creatures, human beings, and making field notes.
Barbara Pym, who wrote in England in the 1950s and (after a break of being considered old-fashioned and unpublishable) in the late 1970s and 1980s, is one of them. Her astringently fond satires of a certain segment of English society make me smile with their perceptive sharpness.
Which makes it all the more appropriate that some of her characters actually are anthropologists. Rather vague, scholarly types caught up in footnotes and interdepartmental warfare, but still, anthropologists. The rest of her characters are what she would (and does) call Excellent Women, those indispensable women, spinsters or clergymen's daughters, who make the tea for church fetes and staff the charity booths in jumble sales.
Continue Reading…
wednesday march 11
As I confessed a couple of weeks ago, I’m still catching up on the 2008 novels I had scribbled myself notes about last year. Of course, the most common reason for scribbling those notes was that somebody else had reviewed the books and made them sound wonderfully tempting to me.
Well, here are a couple of 2009 books that have already gotten many tempting reviews, including mentions elsewhere on our webpage. (Are you familiar with our Reading Recommendations page?)
That makes me feel a little sheepish blogging them—do you already have your own scribbled notes on these books, and will you all roll your virtual eyes if I add another review recommending them?
On the other hand, I really enjoyed these books and I’d hate for you to miss them! So on the principles of a) this blog is all about celebrating wonderful books, even if they are celebrated elsewhere, too, and b) it’s hardly the first time in my life that I’m behind the times, here are two gentle boosts onto the bandwagon for those of you who may want just one more nudge to place your holds on these books.
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wednesday february 25
2008 was a very good year for books. Unfortunately, it wasn't any longer than the average year, so I am behind, behind, behind in reading all of the 2008 titles I have had on my must list for months.
Rose Tremain's The Road Home (which was actually published in England in 2007, but let's not make me feel any tardier) was one I wrote down as soon as I saw the first notices, since her gorgeously literary and quirkily original novels always appeal to me.
I'm glad I finally got to it. It was a deeply satisfying read. And it's less odd than some of her other work, so it would be a good place to start if you haven't read any of her books.
Lev is an immigrant from eastern Europe to London. He has left his mother, young daughter, and best friend back home where work is scarce (the sawmill has closed) and he is lonely (his wife has died) to try his fortune in England.
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wednesday february 18
Numbers rule. Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot are the court jesters.
Their little book, The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life, is very amusing, an enjoyable evening’s read. But it has a serious purpose: to demystify the numbers that fill the daily news, dictate public policy, and determine our lifestyles.
How can the ordinary non-mathematicians among us make sense of the statistics, studies, and stupefying data thrown around by media and government? Blastland and Dilnot would say that even a child can tell whether the emperor is wearing clothes. They offer half a dozen simple ways to put public numbers to the test.
Eating that latest health food halves your chance of developing brain cancer. (Halves it from 1 in 4 or from 1 in 4 million?) The average person will save $1000 with the latest tax law change. (But what will most people save? After all, almost all of us have more than the “average” number of feet.) The crime rate is going down after a big push by local law enforcement. (Would it have gone down anyway?)
Considering the staggering numbers we’re all being asked to understand these days, this entertaining and informative book couldn’t be more timely.
wednesday february 11
Despite the food in the title of this post, I'm not talking cooking here!
I went to a workshop where library staff talked about their favorite books of 2008. One of the librarians described a nice, old-fashioned book as a sandwich: "It's like a really good sandwich. You finish it and you say to yourself, ‘Boy, that was a good sandwich.’" I thought it was a great way to describe the book: unpretentious, wholesome and satisfying.
A food metaphor I often use is "popcorn books." I mean those light, compulsive reads you finish in an evening. Maybe they're not great literature, but there’s something to them, and you've just got to have them. A little bit nutritious, tasty, and easy to devour.
Read on for one of my favorite popcorn authors and the title of the sandwich book.
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wednesday february 04
The King’s Last Song, or, Kraing Meas, Geoff Ryman’s historical novel about twelfth- and twenty-first-century Cambodia was published here in paperback in 2008. Like each of his preceding works, it’s arrestingly original and very different from the book before it.
Ryman gave us, for instance, speculative short fiction in The Child Garden; a heartbreaking riff on AIDS and The Wizard of Oz in Was; one of the first hyperlinked novels in 253; and science fiction both personal and political in an exotic near-future setting in Air, or Have Not Have.
This novel centers around an archaeological artifact, a book inscribed on golden leaves, found buried in a Cambodian field in 2004. It is the record of the almost-legendary King Jayavarman VII, who freed his country from a foreign usurper and tried to convert it to Buddhism.
The golden treasure book is stolen, along with the UN representative called in to translate it.
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wednesday january 28
Karen Maitland takes a familiar literary form–the tale of a group pilgrimage in medieval England—and gives it spooky little twist in her entertaining historical novel, Company of Liars.
A camelot (peddler of holy relics) reluctantly ends up shepherding a group of strangers toward the shrine of St. John Shorne as they all flee the terrible illness seeping inland from England’s port towns. It’s a difficult journey, as months of rain reduce the countryside to starvation and angry locals seek scapegoats for the coming of the plague.
Besides the camelot, we have a courtly musician and his passionate young apprentice; a fairground trickster with a wagon full of wonders; a storyteller with a swan’s wing in place of one arm; a young painter and his pregnant wife; and a ghostly, eerie girl who reads runes and predicts an evil fate for all of them.
Each of the characters has a secret, and the events of the journey expose each one in turn as misfortune and death snap at their heels like the wolves they hear in the night.
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wednesday january 21
Okay, this one’s not new, but it’s very seasonal. You’ll feel positively cozy during our current heat wave reading the bitter winter scenes in Claire Davis’s 2000 debut novel, Winter Range.
Sheriff Ike Parsons is an outsider in his small Montana town. He married a local girl, Pattiann, the daughter of one of the cattle ranching families, and has patiently tried to make a place for himself among the locals. They like him and tolerate him, and he likes and admires them, but he knows he still isn't one of them.
Now an unusually long, harsh winter is dragging toward spring. Chas Stubblefield, the son of one of the county's sternest ranchers, has given up the fight. He is letting his cattle slowly starve to death in a desperate, angry, shamed gesture toward the bankers and feed mill owners who have finally cut off his credit.
Ike can't let the situation continue.
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wednesday january 14
It’s 1929, and in the North Carolina mountains, George Pemberton brings his new bride, Serena, to his timber camp. A bold and unconventional woman, the daughter of a timber baron, Serena seems a good match for the hard young man who has worked beside his logging crews as well as run them.
And she quickly proves her toughness. Fifteen-year-old Rachel Harmon, pregnant with Pemberton’s bastard, approaches him at the rail head with her father. A knife fight between the two men ends in Abe Harmon’s death, and Serena coolly faces down the sheriff and dresses her husband’s wound.
That’s the first scene in Ron Rash’s novel Serena, a shockingly good historical novel. Read this for its gorgeous North Carolina mountain, Depression-era setting; read it for its chillingly vivid character study of the ambitious young couple; read it for the suspense (what will happen to Rachel and her baby?); read it for the grand end-of-days story as a magnificent American forest is laid waste and the livelihood of the mountain men goes with it. Definitely, read it.
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wednesday january 07
Some books pull you so deep inside the lives of nonexistent people that you have to shake yourself when you come up for air in real life again. Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency is one of those.
The story begins in 1974, as Katherine Glover throws a cocktail party for her neighbors in the northern English coal town of Sheffield. It’s a slightly unusual social occasion for the street, so everyone except the teenagers has on their party manners.
What they don’t know (and the reader gradually learns) is that their hostess’s bright chattiness is because she has invited Nick, her boss at the flower shop, with whom she is infatuated. And their host’s gentle but equally artificial pleasantness is because he believes that Katherine has taken Nick for a lover.
The way Hensher skims among the thoughts of the party guests and hints at the complicated relationships in the Glover family should set you right up for this rich, sympathetic, comic and tragic novel.
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wednesday december 17
It seems like a good time of year for feel-good books about dogs. Hollywood thinks so, anyway, since the movie version of Marley and Me, John Grogan’s bestselling memoir of life with his very unusual Labrador, premieres on Christmas. Here are a couple more to try.
I just finished listening to the audio version of The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein’s popular novel. Enzo, its narrator, is another irresistible canine. He’s a rather more philosophical creature than Marley. From a TV documentary about Mongolia, he has learned of a belief that dogs are reincarnated as humans, and he feels that he is ready for this step—certainly the ability to speak is something he looks forward to. The inability to communicate to and for his beloved master, racecar driver Denny Swift, is a frustration to him. Denny’s life is going through some terrible turns, with the illness of his wife and the potential loss of his daughter.
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wednesday december 10
I’ve written about Stuart Kaminsky’s Chicago police detective Abe Lieberman, but there’s another elderly detective closer to home, Ronald Tierney’s Deets Shanahan. The seventy-year-old Indianapolis p.i.’s latest appearance is in Bloody Palms. I just read that one, and then I just had to go pick up the couple that I had missed before it.
In Bloody Palms, Shanahan gets a call to come to Mexico for a meeting with his old army major, Jack Wenders. It’s been since Korea, so Shanahan is a bit surprised to hear from him. Wenders, it turns out, wants Shanahan’s help to deal with an international conspiracy. Which would seem a little over the top, except that the next day Wenders is murdered.
Meanwhile, back in Indiana, Shanahan’s younger fellow p.i. and friend Howie Cross suddenly has a case to investigate, too. His mother wakes him to tell him that his daughter, Maya, has disappeared from their farmhouse.
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wednesday december 03
For a novel about orphans, thieves, and grave robbers, The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti, is a suprisingly buoyant book. You can get a glimpse of its quirky, Dickensian charm from the marvelous jacket illustration.
Ren is one of the boys in St. Anthony's orphanage. Because he is missing his left hand, he knows that he is never likely to be adopted, and that he will some day be given to the soldiers. So he consoles himself with small thefts.
Then a man named Benjamin Nab shows up and claims that Ren is his little brother. He spins a wild tale of how they were separated. Perhaps no one quite believes it, but it solves the problem of Ren. And it turns out that Ren's affliction is useful to Benjamin--a piteous crippled child is a good draw for a conman and thief.
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"Caper novel" doesn’t seem like quite the right phrase to describe Duane Swierczynski’s debut crime novel, The Wheelman, since the body count is almost as high as the page count. But you’ll find yourself snickering anyway, and you’ll recognize the homage when the hero borrows a Donald Westlake pseudonym as an alias mid-novel.
Patrick Selway Lennon is the getaway car driver for a well-planned bank job in Philadelphia. The take is $650,000, and despite a few glitches, he gets them on the road out of town. But then the car is rammed by the Russian mob, and Lennon wakes up to find himself being dumped in a pipe on the construction site of the new children’s museum, along with a couple of other bodies.
Things only get worse from there.
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wednesday november 26
At Halloween, I heard a radio story that asked people about the frightening movie scenes they remembered most vividly from childhood. (The flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz seem to have scarred many otherwise healthy adults.)
In the kinder, gentler spirit of Thanksgiving, I have a different question for you: what are the childhood books that made you grateful you learned to read? All the way back to Green Eggs and Ham, or whatever that very first book was for you.
It isn’t just Thanksgiving that has brought this to my mind lately. I’ve been recommending some favorite books for a third-grader (hi, Nathan!), and it has been a lot of fun to root through old memories for things he might like. It turns out that he loves some of them as much as I did.
So what books are you grateful for? What childhood favorites would you recommend?
I’ll just pick one. Well, I’ll cheat, since it has a sequel: Elizabeth Enright’s 1957 Gone-Away Lake and its sequel, Return to Gone-Away.
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wednesday november 12
Here’s something cheerful.
Paula Marantz Cohen writes charming modern-day Jane Austen tributes. Her Jane Austen in Boca was a very funny take-off on Pride and Prejudice, set in a Florida senior community, where any widower with any means at all must be in want of a wife.
Now with Jane Austen in Scarsdale, she takes on Persuasion, in a tale of a mild high school guidance counselor who has lost in love.
Anne was once talked out of marrying a young travel agent, Ben, by her imperious grandmother. Ben has since gone on to found a wildly successful line of cultural travel guides. Now he’s back in town to enroll his nephew in Fennimore High School. All of the required complications ensue.
It’s hard to capture the spirit of an Austen novel, as the many readers of the many, many recent knock-offs can attest. Cohen hits the mark. No assembly balls or empire dresses, but plenty of gentle satire (the book’s subtitle, Love, Death, and the SATs, hints at the mockery of the modern college application frenzy) and a satisfying romance.
wednesday october 29
When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives in New York or Florida would pinch his cheeks and begin to cry. Daniel, it seemed, looked uncannily like his great-uncle Shmiel (Sam) Jaeger, who, along with his wife and daughters, died in the Holocaust.
Mendelsohn’s grandfather and most of his grandfather’s siblings were safe in America, having emigrated long before the war. Only one estranged brother stayed behind in Bolechow, Poland, with his family.
But to Mendelsohn, his grandfather’s mesmerizing tales of life in the old country made Bolechow almost a legend, and the family likeness between himself and his long-vanished great-uncle haunted him. Years after his beloved grandfather’s death, he decided to trace the clues to his uncle’s family’s fate.
The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million is the deeply moving account of how Mendelsohn worked from a few snapshots and letters, a few half-rumored family stories, to discover the fate of his uncle, his aunt, and their four daughters.
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wednesday october 22
As a Kansas high school student, Matthew Polly used to make lists of all the things that were wrong with him. “Ignorant” topped the list, and after he took care of that by getting himself into Princeton, he decided to work on the “cowardly” and “spiritually confused” items.
His plan for that? Leave college and travel to China, where he would find the legendary Shaolin Temple and study at the feet of the fabled Buddhist kung fu masters he knew from his religious studies readings, Chinese language classes, and countless martial arts movies.
With considerable charm and self-deprecation, this gawky, geeky laowai (white foreigner) takes us along on that surprising journey in American Shaolin : Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China.
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wednesday october 15
There have recently been so many fascinating books set at the intersection of psychology, neurology, sociology, and evolutionary biology to explain why people act the way they do. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink was probably one of the first to hit the bestseller lists. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others, and This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession are a few that I’ve blogged.
Add to those Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says about Us) and Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—And Put Ourselves in Greater Danger.
Technology writer Vanderbilt explains in the prologue to Traffic that one of his inspirations for writing his book was the firestorm of reaction he got when he posted to a question-and-answer website: is it better to be an early merger, getting over cooperatively as soon as the road signs tell you your lane is going to end ahead, or a late merger, making as long as possible a use of the emptier lane and tucking into traffic at the last second?
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wednesday october 08
I’ve been reading some old historical fiction lately since a friend encouraged me to try Kenneth Roberts’ novels of the American frontier and Revolution, which were written in the 1930s.
It’s taking me back to childhood, when that kind of sturdy, old-fashioned American adventure story was what I found on my parents’ and grandparents’ bookshelves.
Nowadays I’m seeing more books with courtiers and courtesans and queens on the covers than eighteenth-century American frontiersmen. But in recent years, there have been some American historical novels as transporting as any bestselling time travel romance. Very different from those earnest childhood tales, though.
Here are two splendid ones: The Old American, by Ernest Hebert, and Peter Loon, by Van Reid.
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wednesday september 24
Okay, have you eaten your Wheaties this morning? This novel based on a real-life survival story will make you want to start bulking up.
Michael Punke's 2002 novel The Revenant tells the story of frontiersman Hugh Glass. Hired as a hunter for a trapping expedition into the northern Rocky Mountain reaches of the Louisiana Territory in 1823, he is attacked by a grizzly and horribly mauled.
With winter coming on, hostile tribes nearby, and the expedition suffering from bad luck all around, the expedition leader makes the decision to move on, leaving two men to bury Glass after he dies of his wounds.
The two don't wait. They strip Glass of his weapons and hurry to catch up with their comrades.
But Glass doesn't die.
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wednesday september 17
I don't know which I like best of Silas House's books set in his native mountains of eastern Kentucky. They're loosely linked by characters, but you don't have to read them in order. The strong sense of connection between the people and the landscape they live in is vivid and deeply appealing in all three of the books.
The first book was Clay's Quilt, a surprisingly assured and graceful first novel, filled with deep affection for the mountain way of life. Clay is a young man who was raised by relatives in tiny Free Creek after his mother's violent death at the hands of a jealous lover. He finds what he has always felt was missing from life when he meets Alma, a fiddler who comes to the local honkytonk from another part of the county. Their romance is complicated by her pending divorce and the jealousy of her ex. Violence enters Clay's life a second time.
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wednesday september 10
I was talking about Richard B. Wright's 2002 Clara Callan with someone yesterday and realized I have never blogged it. It's a gorgeous book, an absolutely transporting work of fiction, so here you go:
The title character is the older of two sisters, small-town Canadian girls in the 1930s. Clara is a schoolteacher, living alone now that her father has died and now that her sister, Nora, has gone off to New York to work in radio. Her story and Nora's are told through the letters they exchange and through Clara's diary entries.
Compared to Nora's bit of glamor, Clara's life is very uneventful. She reads, plays the piano, and writes a little poetry, but she burns that because it doesn't come up to her standards. She struggles quietly with a sudden disillusionment about her faith and (slightly less quietly) with the cranky coal-burning furnace her father used to tend.
But this isn't a tidy little book. Something shattering happens to Clara that irrevocably changes her life.
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wednesday september 03
Englishmen in July 1860 opened their newspapers to accounts of a shocking crime: in a respectable Wiltshire country house, a child had been abducted from his bed, murdered, and flung into the privy just outside the stable yard.
Who could have committed the murder? To the horror of the nation, it soon became apparent that it must have been one of the household. The Victorian home was supposed to be a private sanctum, the “castle” of proverb.
The local police and public opinion quickly fastened suspicion on one of the live-in servants, the nursemaid who slept unusually near her employer’s bedroom. But the case went nowhere.
Enter Jack Whicher, one of the first professional detectives of Scotland Yard, summoned from London. His investigation focuses on an even more shocking villainess: the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house, the child’s half sister.
Uproar. The rushed case is dismissed, the detective is disgraced, and wild speculation ruins the lives and reputations of almost everyone involved.
So who really did it?
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wednesday august 20
Okay, here's one you probably haven't read. It's in a genre you may not have read in a while, either, the New York City satire of glittering literati and bright lights/big city excess. It's Kurt Wenzel's punningly titled 2001 debut, Lit Life.
Seven years before, Kyle Clayton was the latest Bret Easton Ellis, a hip, young, party-going, literary superstar. But he hasn't written a word to follow up his megabestseller, and he has just about hit bottom in drunken celebrity.
Richard Whitehurst is almost totally his opposite, a disciplined, prolific, literary writer who has achieved almost no recognition for his substantial oeuvre.
When the two meet at a disastrous PEN reception, Richard invites Kyle to stay at his house in the Hamptoms. Richard hopes Kyle will be his literary heir and will write a scathing roman a clef to punish the New York literary establishment that has rejected them both.
Kyle, his imagination sparked by Richard's suggestion, hope to prove that he really does have what it takes. But both pay a rather painful price for another go-round on the New York literary carousel.
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wednesday august 13
The subtitle of Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein’s Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar is Understanding Philosophy through Jokes. If you’ve ever regretted skipping (or taking!) Philosophy 101, this little book’s for you.
Cathcart and Klein explain the whole history of western philosophy in ten mini chapters and a hundred or so illustrative jokes. Not exactly clean and politically correct (neither the philosophy nor the jokes, be forewarned), but admirably clear and concise.
From essentialism to elephant jokes, from Karl Marx to Groucho Marx, you’ll be surprised at how much fun philosophy can be. So if life has been seeming unusually nasty, brutish, and short to you lately, pick up this short book.
wednesday august 06
This one’s irresistible. Look at the cover of Karen Tack and Alan Richardson’s Hello Cupcake! and you’ll see how adorable their ideas are for decorating cupcakes for all kinds of festive occasions.
Cupcake corn on the cob decorated with yellow jelly beans, fruit-chew “melted butter pats,” sugar crystal “salt and pepper” and real corncob holders. Chocolate donut and donut-hole penguins. Twinkie sharks with bright red fruit-leather grins. These are easy and utterly captivating ideas, all made from cupcakes, candy, and colored frosting.
So celebrate the dog days of summer with the charming terriers on the cover or the dozen other doggie breeds Tack and Richardson create with these easy ingredients. Equal time for cupcake kitties, too.
Sweet.
wednesday july 30
My to-be-read shelf is so overloaded that I'm starting to feel guilty about it, so I haven't gotten in line yet for Jennifer Haigh's new book, The Condition. But I remember her last one, Baker Towers, very fondly. It was one of those quiet books that doesn't seem like much when you describe the plot but has an emotional resonance that stays with you.
So let me describe the plot anyway! The Novaks are a family in a little Pennsylvania mining town. Rose is the Italian bride of a Polish miner, so she doesn't fit tidily into the town's social circles. Widowed young, she raises three daughters, Dorothy, Joyce, and Lucy. Each of the girls has to make decisions about whether to stay in their hometown or venture out into the wide world: Dorothy sees government service during World War II, Joyce dreams of escaping but finds it hard to cut family ties, and Lucy, much younger than her sisters, sees the town dying after the mines close.
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wednesday july 23
I wrote last week about a John Harvey mystery, an expert British police procedural. I’ve picked up two more dynamite mysteries since, one new, one old, also by masters of the genre. Some writers really know how to do it—I hope you’re reading these series.
The first was Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais. Crais’s Elvis Cole mysteries just crackle with sharp writing, eerie violence, and a hero who hits the perfect note of sarcasm that so few have gotten right since the early days of that other p.i., Spenser.
The second was Jan Burke’s Kidnapped, the 2005 volume in her series featuring California newspaperwoman Irene Kelly. Once again, wow—Burke spins a complicated plot as breezily as though she’s spinning plates, but she’ll have you deeply invested in the fate of all of her characters.
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wednesday july 16
How did I miss this one? One of my favorite mystery authors, John Harvey, has a new pair of detectives. Here’s hoping 2007’s Gone to Ground will be a series debut to sit on the shelf beside his Charlie Resnick and Frank Elder series.
DI Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker, of the Cambridge Major Investigation Team, are investigating the brutal beating death of Stephen Bryant, a film studies lecturer and writer.
The natural first suspect is Mark McKusick, the partner Stephen had recently broken up with. Mark seems like a mild man, but there’s something so personal about the crime that Will and Helen have to consider the possibility of a jealous ex. Or had Stephen picked up someone else? A missing computer that contains Stephen’s research on sultry 1950s film star Stella Leonard could point to robbery.
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wednesday july 09
I have a new car book.
Don’t worry, I don’t read while I drive. That would be taking this whole reading thing just a little bit too far.
My car book is for doctors’ offices, for impromptu coffee stops, or for waiting for late friends. Why read year-old magazines or pawed-through newspapers or check your watch two dozen times when you can carry around something great to fill the time?
I just picked up The New Kings of Nonfiction, a terrific collection of journalism pieces selected by Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life host Ira Glass.
So far it’s fulfilling all the requirements of a car book: able to be read in short, random chunks of time but absorbing enough to fill those waiting minutes completely. The only problem is that the pieces I have read so far are so interesting that I’m tempted to take it home and finish it.
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wednesday july 02
Golly. That's all I've got to say.
I picked up Matthew Reilly's 1999 novel Ice Station because I had seen it listed on best lists for suspense and thriller novels over the years. So I had some time for a quick book, and I thought, why not?
Golly.
The novel is set in Antarctica. The scientists at an American research station are using a diving bell to explore a deep ice cavern.
They find something.
To tell you what would spoil the first of many plot surprises. Anyway, they send out a distress signal, which they hope will get through the solar flare interference that has them locked down. More than one set of ears is listening, and more than one country responds. But not all of the listeners have rescue on their minds.
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wednesday june 25
The siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Stalingrad) by the Germans in 1941 has inspired many books. From literary novels like Helen Dunmore’s achingly beautiful The Siege or Debra Dean’s poignant The Madonnas of Leningrad, to military thrillers like David L. Robbins’ War of the Rats or the movie Enemy at the Gates, and of course many histories, the books try to bring to life the terrible struggle for survival during that winter of starvation.
David Benioff’s new novel, City of Thieves, falls at the suspense end of the spectrum. The narrator, a writer, decides to interview his grandfather, Lev Beniov, about Lev’s experiences during World War II. Family legend has always said that Lev killed two Germans before he turned eighteen, but Lev’s grandson has never known the details. Now Lev tells him how life changed when he stole a knife from a dead German paratrooper.
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wednesday june 18
Amanda Ripley, a writer for Time magazine has written a fascinating exploration of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why.
This isn’t a Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook, although Ripley certainly advocates planning ahead to meet the disasters you’re most likely to face in your life, since in a catastrophic situation you may not be able to rely on emergency response teams.
It’s more about the reaction process people go through as they face sudden disaster and how each individual’s combination of instinct and experience and training can be lifesaving or fatal in the circumstances.
Through interviews with experts and with survivors of well-known disasters—9/11, the 2006 tsunami, Katrina, the Columbine shootings, and even the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire—Ripley tries to trace the common factors in people’s reactions to catastrophe.
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I picked up Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others thinking it was going to be about the phenomenon that TV documentaries sometimes cover, that people who interest each other subconsciously mimic each other’s gestures and even synchronize their breathing and heartbeats.
Well, neuroscientist Marco Ioacoboni’s fascinating book touches on that topic, but it turns out to be about much more.
He describes the discovery, led by a team of Italian scientists, of “mirror neurons,” motor nerves that appear to play a basic role in the ability of people (and other animals) to recognize each other’s intentions, anticipate each other’s actions, feel empathy for the emotions of someone other than themselves, develop language, and participate in the whole complex process of social cognition.
Pretty cool, huh?
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wednesday june 11
Some books just make me grateful that I learned to read. Being able to sit down, open a book, and be astonished by the master craftsmanship and the unimaginable imagination of a writer is such a glorious pleasure. Ian McEwan’s Atonement made me think about that not too long ago. (I finally read it, and if you’ve only seen the movie, you need to read it, too.) Now Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street has made me grateful again.
This is a novel told from four viewpoints. Sean is living with Abigail, for whom he left his wife. Their relationship isn’t happy: Abigail may be cheating on him, and she is certainly leaving him far behind as he drudges through his dissertation while she’s off running her theatre company. Their downstairs neighbor, Dara, extends Sean some sympathy. But then Dara commits suicide.
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wednesday june 04
Okay, I’m recommending a fantasy novel here, and I know that will have many of you scrolling on past. Apart from the Harry Potter books or maybe Tolkien, fantasy is pretty hard to push. But if you enjoy a writer who can twist familiar storytelling elements into something just a bit different, try Lois McMaster Bujold.
Bujold is best known for her science fiction series, the energetically satiric Vorkosigan Saga (definitely something a bit different), but she has written a few volumes of fantasy, too. I recommended her historical fantasy The Spirit Ring last year, and she’s currently writing a more traditional light-romantic fantasy series, The Sharing Knife.
But I wish she’d find time to do more in the splendid series that began with The Curse of Chalion in 2001. Its mix of old-fashioned fantasy and complicatedly original religious mythology was really intriguing.
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wednesday may 28
G. M. Ford’s Leo Waterman and Frank Corso mystery series are good stuff. Here he branches out on a stand-alone thriller.
As Nameless Night opens, we meet Paul Hardy, a brain-damaged John Doe who was discovered next to a railroad car and has been living in a Seattle group home for the past seven years. Now surgery for a second brain injury in a car accident has strangely resurrected parts of his memory. Not, unfortunately, knowledge of his own identity, though he remembers a name that was important to him for some reason.
Who is he? Why are government agents pounding on the door as soon as the group home's director googles the name Paul remembers?
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wednesday may 14
Smalltown Canadian girl meets cosmopolitan Dublin girl in Emma Donoghue's long-distance love story Landing.
Jude is flying to London to bring her dying mother home. Sile is the airline hostess on the flight. Despite the circumstances and the complicated relationships they both are already involved in, they're attracted to each other.
It’s impossible, of course. Jude has hardly ever been out of spitting distance of her tiny town, where she is a museum curator. Sile is in a settled relationship, is part of Dublin’s vibrant twenty-first-century urban scene, and knows from her own Anglo-Indian heritage how complicated long-distance, cross-cultural romance can be.
But they make tentative contact again a few weeks later. A romance of emails, phone calls, and all-too-infrequent visits ensues. Something will have to give, though, as both of them know, if they’re to have a real relationship.
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wednesday may 07
Maybe it’s something about radio. I really loved Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, a marvelous little novel about the BBC during World War II. Now here’s a Canadian novel about a radio station crew, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, and I’m charmed and impressed by it, too.
It’s 1975 in the little town of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Here we meet Harry Boyd, an old-time radio man who is acting as temporary station manager. Harry was once a promising young broadcaster till he had a shameful failure in TV and got this second chance in this backwater radio station. He and Eleanor Dew, the cool, competent receptionist, hold the station together as they wait for corporate decisions on its fate. Two new staff members join them, rookie Gwen Symon and Dido Paris, a glamorous new announcer.
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wednesday april 09
Here’s one for readers who remember Mary Renault’s historical novels of the ancient world fondly. It’s Jo Graham’s reworking of the tale of Aeneas, the fall of Troy, and the founding of Rome, Black Ships.
Gull is a slave, a child of rape, whose mother is one of the conquered people of Wilusa (Troy). Lamed in an accident as a child, she faces a grim fate in her captors’ shore town of Pylos.
But her mother takes her to the Pythian priestess who serves the goddess of death. The visions Gull sees declare her the priestess’s successor as sibyl.
Growing up in her role as priestess, Gull continues to serve Pylos until a war party of Wilusans attacks to avenge further raids on their home and people.
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wednesday april 02
I'm passing this along to all of you who enjoy a nice, quirky memoir. Another librarian recommended Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table to me. It's not a new book, but that just means there are two sequels, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires to put on your list, too, if like me you didn't read them when they came out.
Reichl is a food writer, the editor of Gourmet magazine, a one-time chef, and most famously a former restaurant critic for the New York Times. Tender at the Bone is the story of her childhood and youth.
How she ever became a foodie is something of a mystery, given the stories she tells about her manic-depressive mother's odd ways of dealing with food, particularly her blithe habit of scraping the blue layer off of leftovers and declaring, "It's only mold."
But a long line of mentors and fellow enthusiasts helped Reichl to some memorable meals, and she lovingly remembers every friend and every bite. How a boarding school friend's French father introduced her to fois gras, how two courtly locals fed her couscous in Tunis on a college trip, the time she asked a lower Manhattan matron to teach her to make gefilte fish, to the days when she whipped up the daily specials at a Berkeley collective restaurant--Reichl fills her pages with warm and delicious stories.
And she includes recipes.
wednesday march 26
I’ve read a whole string of great new books lately. Some I won’t blog, like Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life, since you probably already have your place staked out in line for them (do if you don’t), but here’s one you may not have heard much about: Robert Hellenga’s The Italian Lover.
It’s a fairly direct sequel to his debut novel, The Sixteen Pleasures, but you don’t have to have read that novel (I haven’t yet), nor The Fall of a Sparrow (whose protagonist shows up in a major role here, too) to appreciate it.
Margot Harrington is an American book conservator living in Florence, where she came in 1966 to restore books damaged in the great flood of the Arno. In 1975 she wrote a book about her experiences as one of the foreign “mud angels,” her discovery of a book of Renaissance erotica in the convent where she was working, and the grand love affair she had then with an Italian art conservator. Now, some fifteen years later, there is going to be a film made of her memoir.
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wednesday march 19
Twelve-year-old Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike to run his morning paper route in the Indianapolis suburbs. He never comes home.
If you can keep reading past that gut-wrenching premise, keep reading. David Levien’s debut novel, City of the Sun, keeps tightening the suspense from there.
Jamie’s parents, Paul and Carol, spend a year anxiously following the police case on their son while their marriage falls to ashes and the case turns cold. Then a sympathetic patrolman passes them the name of a private investigator. Though they’ve already tried two, Paul finally makes the contact with p.i. Frank Behr. Behr is reluctant to take the case, as the odds of finding any information (much less the boy himself) are so remote. But Paul doesn’t know that the case has a hook that Behr can’t pull away from: Behr’s own son died at the age of seven.
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wednesday march 05
Of all the literary sisters of Bridget Jones, Hester Browne’s Melissa Romney-Jones (a.k.a. Honey Blennerhesket) is one of the most charming.
Not that Melissa would really find Bridget a kindred spirit. Melissa is a more old-fashioned girl who would never let her standards down far enough to drink and smoke and slack off at work as much as Bridget and her friends, and she wouldn’t be at home with their sarcastic humor. (Melissa never gets double entendres.) Though of course she would make perfectly cheerful conversation with any of them at a party—nice girls do, after all.
But her spunky optimism and determination to find true love make Melissa Bridget’s sister under the skin.
We first met Melissa in The Little Lady Agency, when Melissa decided to put her unusual talents to use by opening a business under that name. All of her old-fashioned domestic accomplishments (not to mention her busty figure that fits 1950s-era clothes better than modern fashions) and her firm belief in the social niceties made her the perfect advisor for London’s clueless bachelors.
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wednesday february 20
I keep seeing trailers for a new movie with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, but the Fool's Gold that pops into my mind every time I see them is a completely unrelated 1993 novel of that title by Albert DiBartolomeo. Only his second novel (and apparently his last), it was a crisp little mob thriller about a cache of gold coins.
As the book opens, Benny Bean, a violent young thug, steals those coins from a beach house. But before he has even got them out the door, someone in turn steals them from him. Furious, Benny tracks down the second thief and kidnaps his daughter, Claire, for ransom. But the second thief has already been robbed of the coins, too.
Those are just the opening twists in a spirallingly complicated plot. The coins (which belong to a mob boss) pass through several more pairs of hands while Benny keeps Claire a prisoner and Claire's boyfriend races to recover the coins that will buy her life.
Fans of the genre will appreciate DiBartolomeo's snappy plotting. I remember the book as being pretty violent, though with a comic edge, so keep that in mind. But let me know whether it stands up to my memory of it. And whether it would make a good movie itself.
wednesday february 13
Here’s one for all of you art history buffs, lovers of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and even readers of what are now popularly being called microhistories, those fascinating social histories that look at how a single insignificant object or place or event changed or reflected the course of world events.
In Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, Timothy Brook uses the objects glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings to explore how economy and culture became globalized in the seventeenth century.
The broad-brimmed hat of the dashing officer in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl becomes an emblem to explore the American fur trade and the search for the fabled Northwest Passage. A porcelain dish of fruit in the foreground of Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window leads to a discussion of the Chinese porcelain trade, and so on.
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wednesday february 06
A very popular genre in recent years has been the history-hopping novel where the author tells a story by tracing a work of art or literature through the centuries and illuminating each generation’s response to it. Girl in Hyacinth Blue, by Susan Vreeland, was one, The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears was another, and Lord Byron’s Novel, by John Crowley still another superb example.
Well, here’s a very readable and enjoyable novel based on the same premise, and this time the found object is both literature and art: a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain that finally turns up in twentieth-century Sarajevo. The novel that tells that manuscript’s story is People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks.
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wednesday january 30
I’m partly through this new book and I just noticed that it has two front covers, two editors, two tables of contents, two introductions, and two sub-subtitles. On one side, it’s called The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic: The Arctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert. On the other side it’s called The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic: The Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford.
Okay, so the publishers will be disappointed that I missed the clever upside-down, half-and-half presentation, but they should be pleased how much I’m enjoying the first inside half.
I started with the Antarctic, since as you may remember I’m a big fan of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Birthday Boys.
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wednesday january 23
I read Peter Carey's Jack Maggs years ago. That great, fiendishly ebullient Dickensian riff is still my favorite of his many splendid novels, but here's another one that will grab you by the throat, slam you in your seat, and keep you there cover to cover.
Theft: A Love Story is the tale of Michael "Butcher" Bones, a brilliant painter who has sabotaged his own career by his drinking, his scorching impatience with the Australian art scene, and a short stint in jail for ignoring the divorce court orders that keep him from his son and turned his works into his ex-wife's property.
Now Butcher is living in a patron's backcountry house, reducing it to a shambles as he works, and looking after his big, thick brother, Hugh. Into their lives walks gorgeous Marlene, who is attempting to reach the house on the next farm, where there's a painting by her father-in-law, the late, great Jacques Liebovitz.
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wednesday january 16
I have to confess that I have become completely addicted to our new New Arrivals service. If you don't know, it's a part of our website that lists every new title we receive. You can look at it whenever you're in the mood for something new, or you can subscribe to all or parts of it as an RSS feed so that you can make sure you never miss a thing in the categories you're interested in. Still better, you can put holds on anything that tempts your fancy. Some of the entries include reviews, and some of them include cover images.
That's of course why I put a hold on this book, Ellen Highsmith Silver's Floorquilts! Fabric Decoupaged Floorcloths--No-Sew Fun. The cover is gorgeous, showing a floor covering that looks like a quilt. Silver describes the process with which she treats artist's canvas and decoupages fabric onto it, using traditional quilt fabrics and design principles, for colorful and durable floorcloths. It seems like a very do-able project, though time-consuming.
Now, will I ever actually make one of these? Maybe not. (Well, to be more accurate, very, very probably not.) But I love the fact that I know this book is in our collection and that if I ever get inspired to get out the fabric scraps, I know exactly where to find my inspiration.
tuesday january 08
Bestselling author Sara Paretsky will be in town next week, speaking at a program and book signing sponsored by the library on Thursday, January 17.
She’s most famous of course as one of the “founding mothers” of crime fiction. Her mystery series featuring Chicago private detective V. I. Warshawski was one of the first to feature a female p.i., showing that a woman detective could be as at home on the mean streets as at the tea table.
In her latest novel, Bleeding Kansas, she returns to her roots for an eerie story of neighbor turned against neighbor. Like her other non-series novel, the 1998 Ghost Country, the story is a showcase for her passionate social convictions.
Paretsky draws on the legacy of violence in her home state—both the bloody battle over slavery in Kansas in the 1850s and the Civil Rights struggle and generational divide of the 1960s and 1970s.
The novel’s contemporary story parallels those historic conflicts. Paretsky sees another generation bitterly divided, this time over religious convictions, sexual practices, and the war in Iraq.
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wednesday january 02
You don’t really need me to tell you about Anne Enright’s The Gathering, since it won this year’s Booker prize. But I just read it in one big gulp, and I can’t resist telling you how gorgeous it is. And I have another book to suggest while you wait for your copy to be available.
The Gathering is a story of family and memory. An Irishwoman mourns her brother’s suicide while calling up the intensely tangible memories of him and their childhood and youth together, memories that coalesce around the year they spent living with their grandmother and what happened to them there.
Enright writes so beautifully, so specifically, evoking the dense physicality of memory and family emotions, that readers will be seduced with every perfect word and scene.
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wednesday december 19
I love minor novels. Don’t get me wrong, I love major novels, too—big, muscular novels of ideas and literary bravura—but sometimes a small-scale work is just the right size. Lately, that seems to be what I’ve been in the mood for. (Did you like Moon Women and Uninvited Daughters?)
Englishwoman Marika Cobbold’s 1994 debut, Guppies for Tea, is another graceful, assured, and deliberately small-scale work.
Amelia Lindsey, by nature rather vague and irresolute, finds herself forced to take up the role of caretaker for her widowed grandmother, Selma. The family has put Selma into a nursing home—nice enough in its way, but depressingly cheerful—and Selma hates it.
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wednesday december 05
Okay, last week’s entry was about a cool and formal book for readers who like to see how a writer thinks.
This week’s is for readers who like to plunge right into a sympathetic story about likeable characters.
Moon Women, by Pamela Duncan, is the story of three generations of Southern women learning to find peace with each other and with their changing lives.
Middle-aged, divorced mill worker Ruth Ann Payne is going to pick up her daughter, nineteen-year-old Ashley, from a rehab center. Ashley, always trouble, is now pregnant, too. Meanwhile, Marvelle, Ruth Ann’s mother, who has begun to suffer from dementia, has wandered away from her other daughter’s house, determined to stay with Ruth Ann. So Ruth Ann’s house becomes home for all three of them, and the delicate process of accommodating each other begins.
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wednesday november 28
Some people don’t like fiction that feels “cool,” where there’s a sense that the author has stepped back a pace from her characters. But it can be fascinating to watch a writer use the formalities of fiction to explore her subject. If you agree, try Andrea Barrett’s elegant new historical, The Air We Breathe.
The novel is set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks in 1916. The inmates (who speak as a kind of Greek chorus in an unusual experiment in first person plural narration) are eagerly curious about the newest arrival amongst them.
How that new arrival changes their society results in personal tragedy for several. And it serves Barrett as a catalyst to explore the interactions of science and social attitudes—attitudes toward medicine, poverty, immigration, patriotism, and war.
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wednesday november 21
Odessa Levin lives in a Vermont saltbox cottage sparely furnished with Shaker pieces of the sort she always longed for during her Long Island-Jewish childhood, which was, let’s say, somewhat more baroque.
She’s single, and she has pared the complications of her life down almost to nothing. But now she’s beginning to wonder whether that was a good idea.
Into her life walks Megan Vasquez, a lonely and eccentric ten-year-old who’s suffering through the divorce of her Mexican-American father and her New-Age, WASP-rebel stepmother.
Of course, as every experienced fiction reader or moviegoer can guess, befriending Megan will bring lots of sticky complications to Odessa’s tidy, pseudo-Yankee life. But of course that’s the delight of Elinor Spielberg’s 1993 debut, Uninvited Daughters.
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thursday november 15
Here are the rest of the titles I previewed last week.
The political love story is Letter to Lorenzo, by Amanda Prantera. Julia, the English wife of a wealthy young Roman, is devastated when she is told that he has been killed by a car bomb. Her agonizing grief for her husband is complicated by her bewilderment: why would Red Brigade terrorists kill her husband when the two of them were known for their own socialist convictions? It must be a neo-fascist plot to discredit him. But careful, relentless interrogation by the investigating magistrate reveals that the police think her husband was a terrorist transporting the bomb himself. Julia’s world is turned upside down again. Her grief is powerfully portrayed, and her painfully honest attempts to understand her marriage and her politics are utterly persuasive, as is the subtle characterization of the magistrate who forces her into this possible reconsideration of everything she believed.
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wednesday november 14
Last week I dug through my piles and files of books and reviews to post about some titles I thought you might have missed.
I got a little bit of response, including a few emails, from people who were curious about what the titles might be (no guesses, though!). No one commented about what kind of books they'd like to see more of in these posts, though, so I just want to repeat--don't be shy if there's something you're looking for. There's always more where these came from!
Anyway, read on if you were curious about any of the little blurbs and what the titles were. Did any of you recognize these titles?
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wednesday november 07
I knew a regular library user who carried a tiny notebook in his jacket pocket. It was the latest in a long line of notebooks he had kept over the years, stretching back to when he lived in Shanghai in 1945, neatly recording all of the books he had read since then.
I was always somewhat awestruck by this, but I couldn’t help but feel it was Too Late for me to follow his example, even if I weren’t Too Lazy to keep it up.
The wonderful LibraryThing, a website that lets you catalog your library and share it, is the modern equivalent (and much more!) of those notebooks, but even that strikes me as Too Exhausting when I look around at all of the books I’d love to add to it.
Still, looking around at all of those books does make me want to share them with you.
So here’s my question. What kind of books would you most like me to post about?
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wednesday october 31
Okay, I know it’s Halloween, but how about some romantic fantasy that’s a little less creature-of-the-night than the current crop of vampire romances?
The authors of these books would describe themselves as fantasy writers rather than romance writers, but I think their books have plenty of appeal for readers of both genres. Whether your heart lies with high fantasy or with grand romance, you’ll find yourself swept away.
I wrote last year about War for the Oaks, Emma Bull’s fantasy about a rocker chick who gets caught up in a faerie war. Here are just a few more suggestions of fantasies with strong romantic elements—lots more where they came from! Teen readers might enjoy these, too.
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wednesday october 24
One of the more interesting aspects of getting a bit older is watching the fashions and pop culture of your youth come back into style again—what decade are we updating now, the 1980s? (Another of the interesting aspects of getting older is that it’s okay to admit you don’t know exactly where the cutting edge finds itself these days.)
Anyway, once you’ve been around once, you recognize how cyclical pop culture is. Read Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz, and you’ll be amused at how familiar it all seems in our Paris Hilton–jaded, media-dominated age.
Zeitz’s book is a social history of that cultural icon whom Zeitz calls “part reality, part invention,” the post–World War I modern girl whose racy lifestyle dismayed her parents and fueled a national craze.
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wednesday october 17
I haven’t read Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, about the voyage of self-discovery she undertook after her marriage fell apart. (I’m in line behind many of you!)
But seeing her name in reviews brings back fond memories of her 2000 debut novel, Stern Men, a memorable coming of age story set in the islands off the coast of Maine.
Its heroine is young Ruth Thomas, born and bred on Fort Niles, one of two neighboring islands that survive on the lobster industry. (The island’s other main industry is suspicion of outsiders, including those from the other island.) Ruth is the daughter of a lobsterman and an outsider.
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wednesday october 10
The word “haunting” has shown up in virtually every review I’ve seen of The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney’s debut historical, which won the 2006 Costa first novel award (formerly the Whitbread).
Partly, that may be because of the book’s ending, which isn’t entirely resolved—fair warning if you like to close a book and have things wrapped up. But mostly it’s because the book is so eerily atmospheric. Fair warning number two: don’t read this book in February.
Dove River is a nineteenth-century settlement in Canada’s Northern Territory. Despite its tenderly peaceful name, it’s a harshly isolated place dominated by the majestic, menacing subarctic winter.
Mrs. Ross, one of the settlement wives, finds the murdered body of Laurent Jammet, a Hudson Bay voyageur turned hunter. She rouses the authorities, but then realizes she has a stake in the investigation—her seventeen-year-old son, Francis, Laurent’s friend, has disappeared and is soon a suspect in Laurent’s murder.
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wednesday october 03
Here’s an oddball little title that has stuck with me for years: Claudia Casper’s debut novel The Reconstruction. It begins as a well-done but fairly predictable story of a woman at a loss at the loss of her marriage. But midway through, things get considerably more quirky and charming.
Artist Margaret has been plunged into a stagnating depression since her marriage fell apart. She’s not working or doing anything else too constructive until she is hired to make a museum diorama figure of a (presumed) female Australopithecus afarensis hominid. This recreation is to show the hominid pausing, half-turned, as recorded in the famous fossil footprints of Laetoli.
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wednesday september 26
I just read Stuart M. Kaminsky’s The Dead Don’t Lie, the latest Abe Lieberman mystery.
I’ve enjoyed the series since its 1991 debut with Lieberman’s Folly. That volume introduced the Chicago police detective—sixty-ish, feeling the first twinges of mortality in his arthritic knees, a world-weary basset hound of a man whose mild manner hid decades of street smarts. We also met Lieberman’s partner, Bill Hanrahan, a decent but troubled man who was drinking too much since his wife left.
Great minor characters rounded out the cast, from Lieberman’s energetic wife, Bess (leading light of their local temple); to Iris, the quiet Chinese waitress whom the Irish-Catholic Hanrahan found himself courting; to Lieberman’s brother, Maish, and the chorus of “alter cockers” who frequent Maish’s deli.
In The Dead Don’t Lie, our heroes have a few more years on them. And this time around, they’re working a pair of puzzling mysteries.
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wednesday september 19
I wrote last week about a tragedy in the classic American Western genre. Here’s another elegant short novel that’s both adventure story and tragic character study. A pretty different setting, though.
The book is The Fencing Master, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.
In a Spain racked by political upheaval and rumors of revolution (it’s 1868), fencing master Don Jaime Astarloa abstains from politics and devotes himself to his ancient and honorable art. Though modern weapons are making sword work obsolete, Don Jaime continues to teach it to a small group of noble pupils, and still hopes to bring it to perfection by formulating the legendary unstoppable thrust.
Despite his academic isolation and his old-fashioned ideas of honor, he bends his principles enough to take on a very unusual pupil, the beautiful and mysterious Adela de Otero, who comes to him already an accomplished swordswoman and asks to learn his most advanced technique.
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wednesday september 12
I’m glad the new version of 3:10 to Yuma is getting good reviews. The Western is such a classic American genre, and it’s wonderful to see it rediscovered periodically both in film and on the page.
I’ve blogged previously about Elmer Kelton and how much I like his Western novels, elegantly simple frontier tales that are somehow as grand as the landscape in which they’re set.
Refugio, They Named You Wrong, by Susan Clark Schofield, is another favorite of mine.
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wednesday september 05
From Aesop to Animal Farm to the delightful mystery Mark blogged a few weeks ago, it’s a fine old literary tradition to dress up a sharp-toothed bit of satire in sheep’s clothing, so to speak, telling a telling tale by pretending you’re just talking about animals.
Or even insects. Yep, there’s precedent for that, too, of course.
So readers of Donald Harington’s The Cockroaches of Stay More shouldn’t be surprised to find a sly literary spoof and social satire between the covers of this cult classic, an immensely clever and entertaining novel that pokes fun at a whole range of human foibles—literature, sex, class, religion, and the atom bomb—all from the point of view of cockroaches.
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wednesday august 08
I suppose there’s a downside to being a literary wonder boy. Each of Michael Chabon’s novels has been so extraordinary (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland, and more--not to mention Wonder Boys) that I’m sure he’s kept awake nights thinking how to top them.
His newest, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is probably not my favorite, though for sheer whiz-bang originality it’s tough to beat—it’s a playfully sophisticated, Yiddish-drenched, noir, alternate-world satire. Sitka, Alaska, was designated a protectorate for Jews displaced during World War II , but sixty years later it’s about to be reassimilated into America, along with its melancholy protagonist, policeman Meyer Landsman—a process hardly likely to go smoothly.
I admired it more than I liked it. But the author of the 2004 The Final Solution: A Story of Detection can rest on his laurels for the rest of his literary career, as far as I’m concerned (though I’m glad he doesn’t). It’s another highly literary and original takeoff on a familiar genre, though it, too, got mixed reviews. I think it’s breathtaking.
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wednesday august 01
The lives of three generations of women are the fodder for British writer Penelope Lively’s latest rich and subtle work of fiction, Consequences.
Lorna, the diffidently rebellious daughter of well-to-do parents, sits weeping on a London park bench in 1935 after yet another pointless argument with her socially ambitious and conventional mother.
Matt Faraday is sketching nearby for a series of woodcuts he is working on. (Art college was his path out of a working-class life in a Welsh village.)
Their meeting leads to an unconventional marriage, launching a family quiet unlike the one either was born into. World War II, which cuts short their life together, brings changes to British society that make their descendants’ lives in turn unimaginably different from their own. But the bonds of love and family transcend the generations.
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wednesday july 25
Mark Merlis’s 2003 novel,
Man about Town,
is a low-key but wonderfully resonant story of midlife crisis.
Joe Lingeman is a mid-level advisor on legislative matters to Congress. It’s an interesting job, but not exactly earth-shaking.
He has been in a relationship with his lover, Sam, for fifteen years. Again, comfortable, but the earth doesn’t really move.
Then Sam leaves him. And on the job, he’s suddenly in bed (legislatively speaking) with a homophobic senator who wants to ban Medicare payments to gay AIDS patients. Joe is forced to face the fact that he doesn’t have any of the things he wanted to have by midlife.
And what were those things? He remembers the glimpse of infinite possibilities he got at fourteen, when he came across the photo of a beautiful youth in a swimsuit ad at the back of a suave men’s magazine. It seemed like a window into another world to the naïve, repressed boy he was.
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wednesday july 18
Thirty-something high school Latin teacher April Epner has never had any desire to find the woman who gave her up for adoption. Her adoptive parents were perfectly loving, if rather restrained, and she is contented with her single state and quiet career.
But into her tidy life bursts Bernice Graverman, a flamboyantly self-dramatizing woman who wears “toad sized clip-on earrings” and “wet-look white eyeshadow.” Bernice, who is a local talk show host, confessed to her TV audience that she once gave up a child for adoption, and the ratings were so good (“You didn’t happen to see the show, did you?”) that tracking down April was the inevitable next step.
That’s how Elinor Lipman’s 1990 debut novel Then She Found Me begins. The rest of it is just as wryly funny and perfectly pitched.
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wednesday july 11
I recently joined a book club where the members are all (we would admit this) women of a certain age. While we were making our list of must-reads, scribbling down titles of great books we always wished we had read, we discovered that not everyone in the group had read Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.
Well, that was that. Half the room leaned forward and said in chorus, “Oh, you’ve got to read it!”
There’s something about living through an era of social change that makes you want to tell people about it and gives you an enormous camaraderie with other people who went through it, too. (Any social change—this summer, ask someone older what life was like before air conditioning, for example.)
If someone can do that telling as vividly and hilariously as Atwood does in this 1969 classic of the early women’s movement, you’ve just got to pay attention.
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wednesday july 04
I’ve been blogging mystery and suspense novels for the past few weeks. This one’s a mystery, too, but a delightfully charming period mystery quite unlike those other titles.
Kate Ross’s series debut, Cut to the Quick¸ introduced Julian Kestrel, a London dandy of the 1820s. Invited to a country house to be the best man at a wedding, he finds that the groom’s aristocratic family is being blackmailed into accepting a former stable hand’s daughter as the bride.
More startling still, Julian finds the body of an unidentified young woman in the bed of his guest room. When his own manservant (a former cutpurse) is accused of her murder, Julian steps in to find the real culprit, and of course discovers that the murder and the blackmail are linked.
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wednesday june 27
Virgin Lies is the second suspense novel by Roderick Anscombe to feature forensic psychiatrist Dr. Paul Lucas. You don’t have to have read the first one, The Interview Room, to catch up, though—you’ll be caught up in the suspense from the very first scene, when Lucas fields a frantic phonecall from his wife, Abby, who wants him to use his professional skills to find a missing child—a child who may die while the adults who care for her stand helplessly by, just as their own child did.
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wednesday june 20
I just read Jo Bannister’s sixth Brodie Farrell mystery, Requiem for a Dealer. I’ve always liked her work—her Castlemere books are great police procedurals set in northern England—but I think I like these best.
Brodie is a brisk, resourceful woman who runs a finding service in a little coastal English town. She tracks down missing pets, locates china patterns in online auctions, whatever needs finding.
In the series debut, Echoes of Lies, she was given a photograph and asked to find the man in it. She quickly and cleverly identified him as a local teacher, Daniel Hood. What she didn’t know was that she was finding him for people who then tortured him for information they believed he had, and left him for dead.
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wednesday june 13
You wouldn’t guess it from the title, but Leaving Disneyland, the debut suspense novel by Alexander Parsons, is one I recommended to a fan of Walter Mosley and George P. Pelecanos.
The book’s main character, Doc, has served sixteen years of a twenty-year sentence in the grim and crumbling Tyburn Federal Penitentiary. He is almost due to face the parole board again when is assigned to a new cell. And it can’t be a coincidence that his new cellmate is a young druglord from a rival gang, whom honor requires Doc and his friends to kill.
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wednesday june 06
Big Red Tequila is a great title for a Texas mystery, isn’t it? This novel gets it right right on the title page.
Rick Riordan is probably more famous nowadays as the author of a teen fantasy series based on Greek mythology—his bestselling The Lightning Thief was our teen book choice for On the Same Page.
But back in 1997 he debuted an adult mystery series set in San Antonio. He got more than the title just right. All of you readers who enjoy a nice semi-hard-boiled mystery with an appealingly thoughtful but smart-talking hero and a well-realized regional setting should try the Tres Navarre series.
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wednesday may 30
How about a little suspense?
I’m looking back at a whole stash of good, nailbiting suspense novels and nice, twisty mysteries that I’ve read in the past few years, and I think my next several posts are going to be about those genres.
Maybe it’s the hot sunshine we’ve been having lately that has put me in a noir mood—I once read a definition that said a true noir movie had to have a shot somewhere in it of broken light slanting in through venetian blinds.
I don’t think my first title quite fits that definition, since it takes place in Glasgow. But it sure fills the bill for gripping suspense.
It’s Denise Mina’s award-winning 1999 debut, Garnethill.
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wednesday may 23
News of the death of children’s writer Lloyd Alexander last week sent me to the bookshelves to reread his Chronicles of Prydain. It's one of my all-time favorite works of fantasy, whether for children or for adults, a splendid work of high fantasy based on Welsh legend. Have all of you Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fans discovered it? The first volume is The Book of Three.
In quiet Caer Dahlben, the sheltered farm of the great enchanter Dahlben, orphaned Taran tends the oracular pig, Hen Wen, and helps out in the fields and the smithy.
But what he really longs for is to be a hero. Glory and grandeur fill his dreams—he’s sure he could do noble deeds, given the chance.
So when the war bands of the terrible dark lord Arawn threaten Caer Dahlben, causing Hen Wen to run off in a panic, Taran doesn’t think twice. He dashes off after her, plunging himself into perilous adventure.
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wednesday may 02
Michael Dibdin died on March 30. He was best known for his mystery series featuring Venetian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen. The final novel in the series, End Games, will be published in the fall.
As much as the character of Zen defines the novels—morose, psychologically complex, and world-weary—so does the character of Italy, where Dibdin lived for several years.
Each of the novels is set in a different part of the country, and the style of each novel seems to reflect the cultural differences among Italy’s regions. But all are richly cynical, darkly funny, intricate in plot, and acute in their understanding of modern Italian politics, religion, and everyday life.
My personal favorite among Dibdin’s novels is set in England, though. It’s one of his stand-alone works, the 1991 suspense/satire of Thatcher’s England, Dirty Tricks.
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thursday april 26
You're not imagining things if you've been seeing Imperial Stormtroopers at the library.
In conjunction with the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, we're launching GalaxyCon, an out-of-this-world celebration of all things science fiction.
It hasn't even started yet, and already it's a blast. I've had some great conversations with fans of all ages and families who plan to join us for the stellar events we have planned.
Science fiction is such a part of our culture, in fiction, film, and TV. Were you one of the wide-eyed kids who watched Flash Gordon serials on Saturday mornings, or did you stand in line for Spiderman and its sequels? Did you get your kicks from superhero comics or have your consciousness raised by the sociological sf of Sheri S. Tepper or Margaret Atwood? Are you hooked on Heroes or daffy for Dr. Who?
Even if you're not a techie, a Trekker, or a towel-carrying hitchhiker through the galaxy, how can you resist? (Resistance is futile, you know!)
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wednesday april 18
I think most people would be able to answer this question easily: Are you a re-reader?
I think we're pretty firmly divded, those of us who are from those of us who aren't. If you're not a re-reader, you wonder why people bother spending precious time reading things they've already read when there's so much else out there to read. If you are a re-reader, you wonder how people get along never revisiting beloved authors and characters and settings. (And we don't even need Maria's desert island as an excuse to re-read.)
I'm a re-reader, and there are certain authors I binge on over and over again. Currently, I'm re-reading every single Regency novel by Georgette Heyer. I love their sparkle and wit, their charming characters, and their sweetly humorous variations on the conventions of the old-fashioned historical romance.
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wednesday april 11
Now that we have a new category, Children’s Books, on our blog, I want to post about an enchantingly different book that adults as well as kids will enjoy. It’s already getting plenty of praise, and you may have to wait in line for a copy, but I promise you it is worth the wait. This thick block of a book looks like something you’d use for a doorstop, but open it up and suddenly you’re transported beyond the clouds.
It's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, a story told alternately in words and page upon page of black and white sketches. With the magical, herky-jerky stutter of early film scenes, these stop-motion, cinematic pictures tell a dreamlike story of an orphaned boy, a famous filmmaker, and the fantastic machines and still more fantastic visions that draw them together.
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wednesday march 14
I think Robert B. Parker started it--correct me if I'm wrong. I'm talking about the mystery genre tradition of the smart-talking p.i. with the silent and supremely lethal sidekick. Spenser has Hawk. Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar has Win. (Well, Win's not quite so monosyllabic, but he's even scarier.) And Robert Crais's Elvis Cole has Pike.
It's a useful mystery convention. Hero and super sidekick together can plausibly handle a lot more trouble than the hero could alone. Just as important, the author can go to any lengths to take care of the bad guys by the last page, but no matter how violent things get, he never has to let his hero go too far over the edge or permanently drop that oh-so-enjoyably sarcastic tone that helps makes these winning series crackle.
Messing with a great formula can be risky. But in Robert Crais's latest, The Watchman, we get the story from Pike's point of view.
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wednesday february 28
I recommended Eric Dezenhall to a fan of Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake a few weeks ago. If you like the Florida school of over-the-top satiric suspense, move up the coastline a little to meet New Jersey crisis management consultant (a.k.a. spin doctor) Jonah Eastman.
Eastman was introduced in Money Wanders. A Washington political pollster whose career was in trouble, Jonah found a new client at the funeral of his grandfather, a New Jersey mobster. Another mob boss was having image problems—Mario Vanni wanted to get a legitimate gambling license and leave a clean business to his grandkids. But how to rehabilitate the public image of the state’s biggest gangster? A little polling revealed the answer—make him look tough on drugs and neighborhood crime.
Dezenhall gleefully satirized pollsters, p.r. flacks, and public enemies in that humorous crime novel, the first in a series. Now there’s a new Jonah Eastman adventure, Spinning Dixie.
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wednesday february 21
I mentioned the trend for suspense standalones in a recent post. This one doesn’t quite stand alone (it’s loosely related to another of the author’s works), but it’s a real stunner, another example from a few years ago of a popular mystery writer pulling out all the stops for pulse-pounding suspense.
Laurie R. King is known for two very different mystery series, her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series that, beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, carried on the classic canon; and her contemporary series featuring lesbian San Francisco cop Kate Martinelli, which began with A Grave Talent.
But she did something more different still in Keeping Watch, a tense and complex psychological suspense novel that broke a lot of genre rules.
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wednesday february 14
It’s February—time for a big, fat novel to settle in with, so you don’t have to go out again till spring. At 406 pages, Keith Maillard’s The Clarinet Polka may or may not get you that far, but it will certainly sweep you away.
What makes it even more appropriately for the season is that it’s a big, fat valentine. It’s the Canadian-born author’s love song to the Polish-American community of the West Virginia steel towns where he was raised. It makes me think of Richard Russo, but a little closer to home.
So if you missed it in 2003, get out your afghan and settle in.
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wednesday february 07
I did a booklist of some of my favorite coming of age novels in 2003. Ardashir Vakil’s Beach Boy was on it. If you didn’t pick it up then, try it now! The cover is one of the most apt illustrations I’ve ever seen on a book—against a bright saffron-colored background, a boy takes an adventurous leap. The cover perfectly captures the novel and its depiction of the busy, risky, hopeful spirit of a child’s interior life.
The novel is set in 1970s Bombay. Cyrus Readymoney is a quiet, anxious boy with an insatiable curiosity to understand the world he’s growing up in. His parents’ difficult marriage, the mysteries of sex, his friends’ strangely different lives, and the endless fascinations of his beach neighborhood and bustling city—all of these interesting subjects churn constantly through his mind.
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wednesday january 31
For a first novel, this little book made it big—the author of Fields of Glory, Jean Rouaud, went from selling newspapers to being the 1990 winner of the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.
I read the book in its English translation by Ralph Manheim in 1992, and it’s one of the books that have stayed with me over many years. It’s tiny (only about 150 pages) and gently effortless to read, but it’s indelible.
The unnamed narrator, one of the grandchildren of a family in a little Loire Valley town pays tribute to his eccentric elders—his grandparents and his Great-Aunt Marie—whose lives were long ago altered by the Great War.
At first, the humorous stories of their oddities charm and amuse. There’s Aunt Marie’s card catalog of saints and their specialized responsibilities, Grandmother’s martyrdom to Grandfather’s notoriously dangerous driving, and so on. But gradually the stories become more poignant.
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wednesday january 24
I picked up Michael Perry's Population, 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time and Truck: A Love Story because I saw a good review of the second volume and couldn't resist its title.
Perry grew up in New Auburn (“Nobbern”), Wisconsin, a tiny rural town that the interstate bypassed in 1974. It still has some agriculture, “a gas station, two cafes, a couple of bars,” and an almost moribund plastics factory.
After a decade away from town, earning a nursing degree, traveling, and establishing a career as a writer, Perry has come back. He bought a house on Main Street and joined the local volunteer fire department.
He doesn’t exactly fit right in. (He believes that he is the only local firefighter ever to miss a meeting for a poetry reading.) But his love of the landscape and his admiration for those 484 other citizens—hard-working, stoic, stubborn, and colorful folks—gradually draw him back into the life of his hometown.
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tuesday january 16
Roddy Doyle has a new book out, Paula Spencer. It’s the sequel to The Woman Who Walked into Doors, his 1996 character study of a working-class Dublin woman beset by alcoholism and abuse. Paula is now sober and managing an ordinary, workaday life, though she's walking on eggshells with her children, who can't quite afford to trust her yet.
It's a lovely book, an intimate character study with a richly original voice. It's getting the same critical acclaim as its predecessor did.
But I have to confess a preference for Doyle's more comic works. My favorite Doyle characters of all are the Rabbitte family, who were introduced in his debut and showed up in two more novels, now collectively known as the Barrytown Trilogy.
I pulled The Commitments off the shelf to review in 1989, a skinny, paperback U.S. edition of a first novel by an unknown Irish writer. I was giggling from the first page, where three loutish, untalented Dublin youths decide that their fledgling rock band needs some help and recruit their more musically knowledgeable friend, Jimmy Rabbitte, to manage it.
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tuesday january 09
Okay, you survived the holidays and life is starting to return to normal. (Right?) So as the evenings close in and the weather gets chilly (right??), this is the perfect time to curl up with a good book.
Or an interesting new magazine, a movie, or a CD. Teen titles, too, and some great children's books. There's so much wonderful stuff out there, it can be hard to know where to start.
Well, you know us--we'll always have some suggestions. If you'd like a few unusual ideas, take a look at the Librarians' Choice list for 2006.
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wednesday january 03
It used to be that you could hardly get a novel published in the crime and mystery genre unless you were willing to commit to a series, but lately, long-established mystery authors are going the other way, hitting the blockbuster charts with stand-alone suspense titles (think Harlan Coben, for example).
Greg Rucka, the author of the Atticus Kodiak mysteries and, more recently, of several superhero graphic novels and a superspy thriller series, did a (yes) super stand-alone suspenser a few years back. I wish he’d do another.
That one was A Fistful of Rain. Its heroine was no Wonder Woman, but she was a knockout of a character.
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wednesday december 27
Small people caught up in large events can be great characters for a novel. I think this is the fourth or fifth World War II novel I’ve posted about--not a theme I expected to see running through my blog entries, but there’s something about that combination of intimate, personal stories and the inexorable sweep of historic events that makes for great reading. So here’s another novel I can’t resist telling you about.
Melvyn Bragg’s
The Soldier’s Return is actually about the aftermath of the war, as you may guess from the title. It’s a quiet but heartbreaking novel about a soldier’s difficulty in readjusting to life back home in a northern English town.
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wednesday december 20
You might (well, you might!) remember my enthusings about Headlong, Michael Frayn’s bravura art history thriller about a long-lost Breugel painting. I called that and A. S. Byatt’s Possession, a novel about a long-secret romance between two Victorian writers, my top two literary puzzle novels of all time.
Well, here’s another novel for fans of that genre. This one’s about a long-lost manuscript that may be the work of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of dashing Romantic poet Lord Byron—or may be the work of Byron himself.
Like Headlong and Possession, it’s a sophisticated puzzle that unwraps itself, layer by layer, like an onion. And like those novels, it’s a work of extraordinary scholarship, dazzling literary technique, and absorbing suspense.
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wednesday december 13
Remember Frank Hurley’s spectacular photographs from the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic, where the utter clarity of the light on the ice around the captive ship makes every detail seem truer than life?
I always think of those photos when I reread Beryl Bainbridge’s novel The Birthday Boys, about another Antarctic voyage, Scott’s ill-fated 1910-12 race to the South Pole. The crisp perfection of Bainbridge’s writing and her sharp, utterly clear-eyed attitude toward her characters and their venture seem to match perfectly the crystalline quality of those photos.
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wednesday december 06
Those of you who read the blog regularly know that Mary is our queen of cookbook posts. But I’m going to borrow her crown briefly to post about Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook, Baking: From My Home to Yours. It deserves a royal fanfare.
Greenspan was the co-author of the award-winning Baking with Julia, has written several other cookbooks, and is a “special correspondent” for Bon Appetit magazine (how’s that for a job?), though she says she got her start as a cook by burning down her parents’ kitchen at the age of thirteen.
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wednesday november 29
One of my favorite parts of my job is talking to people about what they’re reading. Watching people light up when they tell me about something really, really good, and listening to their voices become urgent when they tell me “you’ve just got to try this”—I find that absolutely irresistible.
And of course, if it’s something I’ve read, we get to do that “isn’t he an amazing writer” and “wasn’t it wonderful when” and even “ooh, if you liked that, you have to read.”
I love writing for this blog, because of course I get to do the “you’ve just got to.” (You can probably tell from some of my much-too-long entries how enthused I can get.)
But it’s not one-way. It just occurred to me that everything I have out on my card right now and everything I currently have on hold was recommended to me personally by a library user or another librarian.
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wednesday november 22
I was reading Publisher’s Weekly’s list of their top 100 books of the year yesterday, and I was surprised and delighted to find C. J. Cherryh’s Pretender on the list. (We won’t go into how surprised I am to find that it’s November already, and best-of-the-year lists are coming out.)
Surprised because Pretender is the eighth volume in a complicated, densely sociological science fiction series. It’s hard to imagine what kind of book would be more difficult to persuade someone to try than a book that can only be read after going back and reading seven other books, all in a genre that tends not to be wildly popular anyway.
Delighted because I love this series. Because I think Cherryh is one of the best writers of science fiction today. Because Cherryh uses the conventions of speculative fiction to tackle big, thoughtful questions about humanity and civilization. And because she writes the coolest aliens around.
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wednesday november 15
A friend of mine just attended her 25th college reunion and discovered that the old who’s-dating-whom fascination hadn’t entirely died down after two and a half decades.
Well, it’s almost three centuries since Louis XIV of France died, and the love life of the most famous monarch of his age still fascinates.
Antonia Fraser, acclaimed biographer of many royals (including
Marie Antoinette—her book was the basis for the recent Sofia Coppola
movie) has written a wonderfully detailed social
history of the period focusing on the lives of the women Louis XIV loved. But it’s more than sex and scandal—politics and piety play a large part in the story. So, of course, in the age of the supreme cult of personality, does the personality of Louis himself, a tirelessly courteous and gallant but selfish man who adored women.
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wednesday november 08
Now that Prince is calling himself Prince again, maybe it’s time to revisit this fantasy set in the 1980s music scene of Minneapolis.
Eddi McCandry is a rocker chick in a struggling band when she is unwillingly recruited as a pawn in a faerie war. A handsome phouka (who is sometimes dog, sometimes “human”) explains that she has been magically bound to appear on the battlefield on May Eve, as human blood is necessary to make the ritual combat real. In the meantime, the phouka will be her bodyguard, because the dark side of the faerie court will be after her.
Since Eddi hates being told what to do, how will she cope with her unwanted guard dog, either in his alarming animal form or in his alarmingly sexy human one? And how will she keep body and soul together till May Eve, since her band has broken up?
By starting a new band, of course, with some very unusual musicians. And getting ready for the ultimate battle of the bands.
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thursday november 02
Elmer Kelton has won prize after prize from Western writers’ associations and regional literature competitions. Fans of Westerns will recognize his name, but readers of all kinds of historical fiction should give his work a try.
His marvelous historical novels of the American West are written with deliberate simplicity, but there’s a lot of art in that unadorned, pared-down prose. The novels give a vivid picture of life on both sides of the frontier between Native American culture and the westward settlement push.
Slaughter follows a ragtag group of whites as they scratch a dwindling living hunting the last of the buffalo south through Texas. They know their way of life is dying out with the herds. A disbelieving and finally desperate clan of Commanches watches them arrive—the destruction of the buffalo means the wholesale destruction of the Commanche way of life, too. Tragedy is inevitable.
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sunday october 29
It’s the perfect time of year to read Roger Zelazny’s delightfully clever spoof of supernatural fantasy, A Night in the Lonesome October.
A group of animal “familiars” led by our narrator, Snuff the Watchdog, are helping their masters (including a knife-wielding Jack, a Count, and the Good Doctor and his Experimental Man) prepare for a rare Victorian-era conjunction of Halloween and the full moon.
It seems that such conjunctions are the only times when a Gate can be opened for the return of the old gods, and magical combatants must gather to prevent its opening.
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monday october 23
There are some books I return to over and over. Kate Wilhelm’s Welcome Chaos is one of them—I reread it this weekend, and it pulled me in again, though it’s hard to define why it’s so appealing to me.
It’s a hard book to blog, too, since the plot involves a secret. Do I tell you the secret to convince you to pick up the book? The book jacket does, though the author doesn’t for several chapters.
Let me start by saying that the novel was written when the major threat to world survival was the superpowers’ arms race. That makes it seem almost innocent, dated by our knowledge of all the other dangers that threaten our peace and our planet.
But in ways that makes it even more powerful, as it’s a thoughtful novel about civilized people deciding how far to go, balancing the lives of millions to save the world.
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wednesday october 18
Sandy posted a couple of weeks ago about some of the books she was looking forward to this fall. Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn was one of them. I don’t know where Sandy was on the holds list compared to me, but I just took the novel home last night and read it in one big, delicious gulp.
Atkinson’s last novel, Case Histories, introduced private detective Jackson Brodie, who was investigating three cold cases. It was a mystery, but not exactly—a lovely and melancholy look at the indelible effects of violence on anyone whose life it has touched, including the detective.
This one looks even more like a mystery, but somehow it’s “not exactly,” too. Rather than leave you haunted by sorrow, though, this one will leave you smiling at its perfect unexpectedness—what is this author doing, and how is she managing to make it so wonderfully different?
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friday october 13
Girl with a Pearl Earring helped make historical fiction featuring ordinary women a hot publishing trend in the past few years. And with the recent reconsideration of Marie Antoinette’s reputation, there seem to be a lot of French Revolution novels lately.
How about a novel featuring ordinary women in revolutionary France? The Rose Grower, by Michelle de Kretser, is a surprisingly moving book that will appeal to fans of both light and serious historical fiction.
In a rural province, three sisters of good but not aristocratic family sympathetically follow the news of political and philosophical unrest in Paris. It’s all rather distant, though—their own lives and budding romances are of far more real importance.
Until, slowly, revolution reaches their comfortable corner of the country.
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sunday october 08
It’s a typical weekend of mayhem at the Hotel California for assistant manager Am Caulfield: a bra theft, a Bob Johnson Society convention (every single member checking in is named Bob Johnson), a chef who serves roadkill to an eminent food critic, and, oh yes, an apparent suicide and a double murder.
Since Am has just been appointed acting security chief, too, all of this falls straight into his lap. With the help of his new intern, Sharon Baker, Am copes. But his troubles aren’t over—he’s promoted to general manager just in time for his hotel’s takeover by a Japanese conglomerate.
The Hotel Detective was the 1994 debut for an unfortunately short-lived series by veteran mystery writer Alan Russell. Russell has a field day revealing the amusing and horrific details of hotel management (the dust jacket says he was a hotel manager himself), and the mystery plot is clever, too. If you like humorous mysteries, go back and find this one. Just don’t plan any hotel stays soon afterwards.
tuesday october 03
Phyllis Gotlieb dazzles with her sheer imagination in world-building in her 1998 science fiction novel Flesh and Gold. ”What if?” is the basic question behind science fiction, and a writer who can imagine an “if” that seems truly different from the here and now yet that still seems vividly lifelike is not to be missed.
In a far-future universe richly populated by a dozen or so alien races and several varieties of humans, we follow the adventures of a small band of characters, the chief of whom is Skerow. Skerow is an interplanetary circuit judge from Khagodi. She is a ponderously slow but deeply honorable being. (One human friend thinks of Skerow’s race as “streamlined baby allosaurs.”) Skerow is shocked and disillusioned to discover that a fellow judge she has traveled with for decades has been taking bribes.
It’s just the first of several shocks this being of great integrity suffers.
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thursday september 28
Sometimes it’s hard to plunge in and start reading a prolific author. You feel as though you’ll never catch up. So if the thought of tackling James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux mysteries is a little intimidating, or if you’d like a change of pace from the steamy, haunted Louisiana delta setting of that famous series, try The Lost Get-Back Boogie, a stand-alone suspense novel Burke published in 1986. You’ll get the gorgeously lyrical writing, the gritty realism, and the inescapable violence, all set against a big Montana landscape.
Iry Paret is out on parole after serving two years for manslaughter (a barroom fight that got out of hand) and is finding it impossible to settle down quietly in his home parish. With his guitar, his pickup, and an open case of beer, he takes off for Montana, where a former fellow prisoner, Buddy Riordan, has offered him a job on a ranch.
But trouble follows Iry there, too.
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saturday september 23
George P. Pelecanos is a writer who makes me think of Walter Mosley for the amazing vividness of his writing. You can feel the grit under the soles of your shoes as you walk down these fictional mean streets, and the dialogue is so pitch perfect you can just hear it sing off the page. People who like noir crime fiction really shouldn’t miss Pelecanos’ work.
His books are set in Washington, DC, in the Greek-American and African-American communities there. The same characters show up in many of the novels, so it can be hard to find a place to start reading. Try his new novel, The Night Gardener, or if one book is not enough (and it won't be!), start with one of his recent series, beginning with Right as Rain.
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monday september 18
I found Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs more than ten years ago, when it first came out. Yesterday I found a scrap of paper with a quote from it stuck to my refrigerator door (which I clearly don’t clean often enough), and it reminded me how much I adored this little volume.
Editors Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard claim that the collection came about after a drunken campfire verse-making session, when their fishing buddy, Bob Shacochis, composed this one-line poem, “Wind,” in the voice of his Irish setter, Frank:
Leaves—I thought they were birds.
It inspired them to solicit poems from famous writers, all the poems written as though from the dogs’ point of view.
The result is irresistible, a charming, surprisingly varied collection of poems in all genres, on all kinds of doggish subjects.
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wednesday september 13
For a crisp, fast-moving mystery with appealing characters and snappy dialogue, you can’t beat Don Winslow’s 1991 debut, A Cool Breeze on the Underground. It got an Edgar nomination for best first crime novel.
Neal Carey, an investigator for a very discreet New England firm called Friends of the Family, was brought into the business at age eleven, when he tried to pick the pocket of New York-Irish p.i. Joe Graham. Graham took Neal under his wing, trained him in investigative techniques, and arranged for the firm to get him an expensive education. Now Neal just wants to finish his degree in English lit (specializing in Smollett), but the firm has a job for him. The daughter of Vice-Presidential hopeful John Chase is missing. Not that Chase really cares, but he needs her for the photo ops.
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friday september 08
Some scientists have the gift of writing so clearly that it’s like being taken backstage by a magician and shown all the tricks—oh, that’s how it’s done. I heard Daniel J. Levitin on the Diane Rehm Show a few weeks ago and was impressed by how well he described his new book, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, and when I picked up a copy, I was delighted to find that he writes just as lucidly and humorously as he talks.
Levitin is a cognitive neuroscientist (“the field that is the intersection of psychology and neurology”) and musician who studies how and why the human brain makes and appreciates music.
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Lucia St. Clair Robson has written several historical novels set in frontier America. They’re immensely readable, with down-to-earth characters, engaging adventure plots, and plenty of appeal for fans of both historical fiction and romance.
Her 1991 novel The Tokaido Road is a frontier romance of a different kind, set on the high roads of eighteenth-century Japan. Unlike some romance novelists, who use exotic settings as so much scenery, Robson manages to make her love story suit its unfamiliar time and place.
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sunday september 03
Every now and then, a science fiction novel gets the attention of people who don’t read science fiction and gives them a chance to discover just how original and thought-provoking the genre can be. (Which is a little annoying for the people who
do read sf, who get that “What am I,
chopped liver?” moment.)
I was emailing the other day with a genre fan about sf as sociological satire. We both loved Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount, for example, and think it works brilliantly as a Swiftian parable of social intolerance, even for readers who don’t care that it’s a “first contact” novel.
First contact and its subgenre alien invasion are actually great choices for non-genre readers interested in social commentary. (Hard to engineer a meeting between humans and aliens without giving thought to what humanity means.)
Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite first contact stories, and it fits our “Rediscoveries” category twice over, since most genre fans missed it, too—God’s Fires, by Patricia Anthony.
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tuesday august 29
The Great World is a war novel without battle scenes and a POW novel with only a few chapters set in a prison, but quietly and obliquely it conveys the devastation of war through the story of two men drawn into reluctant lifelong friendship by their shared experiences in Malayan and Thai POW camps during World War II.
Digger Keen, a quiet, steady man with an eidetic memory, lives in the house he grew up in in a backwater Australian town. Apart from the war, he has hardly ever left, and for twenty-six years he has kept in his memory the roll call of his fellow soldiers and their fates that he memorized during his years in the prison camp.
Visiting him now and then (more frequently as the years pass) is Vic Curran, who had a hard-luck childhood but has become wealthy in the years since the war. He fastened onto Digger’s close group of buddies in the service and ended up in the prison camp with him.
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thursday august 24
There’s something irresistible about Joanna Trollope’s novels.
Part of it is just the inexpressible pleasure of fiction on a small, domestic scale. No sweeping epics here, just Jane Austen’s classic “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” or the urban equivalent.
Part of it is just that most of her characters are so nice, and Trollope herself is so clearly fond of them.
Her typical plot involves a comfortable family of pleasant, well-intentioned people who are nudged out of their tidy routines by small events (knocking an elderly spinster off a bicycle in The Men and the Boys) or large (the death of a family member in Next of Kin).
After a period of dismay at discovering that their happiness is shallower than they had suspected, they learn to readjust and settle down into new relationships with each other. Then all the deserving characters get happy endings.
But even the cozy certainty of a happy ending isn't the only reason her books are so addictive. There’s something else.
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saturday august 19
I have to blog this 1991 novel by David Noonan, even though I don’t golf, because it has an irresisitble line in it:
“One of the appeals of golf is that you can do all the things you would normally do in a bar while engaging in an actual sport—you can eat, drink, talk, and smoke cigarettes.”
The hero of Memoirs of a Caddy, seventeen-year-old Jim Mooney, is pretty irresistible, too. This is his coming of age story. It’s the summer of 1968, and Jim is spending it caddying at the local country club, playing cards, thinking about girls, and wasting time with his big brother, Matt. Matt has ditched college and is waiting to be drafted to Vietnam. That’s not Matt’s only self-destructive act. But there’s still time for summer’s immortal pleasures, including a perfect vacation hanging out together at the beach, before Matt is shipped out.
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monday august 14
I found a copy of Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasy novel Tigana in the Friends of the Library bookstore the other day. I haven’t read it in years, but it’s on my to-be-read pile again. Those of you who waited so impatiently for George R. R. Martin’s long-delayed Song of Ice and Fire sequel, A Feast for Crows, which finally came out last year, should add it to your pile, too. It’s another splendid (fat!) work of complex fantasy.
Kay’s novels aren’t exactly alternate histories, but they’re set in cultures evocative of historic ones we’re familiar with. There’s one set in a culture much like Moorish Spain, another like the chivalric France of the troubadours, a series set in a Byzantine empire, and so on. Drawing on these cultures to create new fantasy worlds, Kay writes rich, satisfying fantasies.
Tigana has a setting much like Renaissance Italy, where dozens of rival city-states war on a peninsula, fatally leaving the door open to foreign invaders.
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wednesday august 09
I started reading Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the British Navy of the Napoleonic era after Richard Snow called them “the best historical novels ever written” on the cover of the New York Times Book Review in 1991. I thought, sure, sea stories, who cares? But my interest was piqued, and I gave them a try.
Millions of other readers have made the same decision, and many of us are now happy fanatics.
If you saw the Russell Crowe movie and didn’t understand the fuss, or picked up a volume and were swamped by the seafaring jargon, try again. Not so much, maybe, if you’re looking for fast-paced adventure, though there are heart-stopping scenes of battle and peril at sea. But if you’re a fan of historical fiction and enjoy authors who effortlessly slip you into the life in another century, definitely. I’ve never read another author who has so perfectly mastered the language, ideas, and everyday details of another period. O'Brian has been compared to Jane Austen on the high seas.
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friday august 04
Fans of Sarah Bird’s very funny proto-chick-lit novels The Boyfriend School and The Mommy Club and of her coming-of-age story The Yokota Officers Club may be surprised by her new novel, The Flamenco Academy. It’s also a romance and a coming-of-age story but on a much grander scale, incorporating the history of the Gypsies in Spain and the whirlwind passions of flamenco dancing.
Rae is an outsider and math geek at her Albuquerque high school. At home she’s struggling with her father’s terminal illness and her mother’s emotional instability. So when Didi “Dirty Deeds” Steinberg, the wildest girl in school, notices her, Rae never looks back. The two become inseparable friends.
Reluctantly accompanying Didi to a motel room band party one night, Rae meets a gorgeous flamenco guitarist. She doesn’t even learn his name, but their one magical evening together imprints her forever. Though she’s a self-conscious, white-blonde, half-Hungarian Texan, she decides to learn flamenco to make herself over into the kind of woman her Gypsy mystery man can love.
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sunday july 30
If you’re lucky enough to be on summer break, spend a few hours with Michael Malone’s inspired satire of academia and the literary scene, Foolscap. If you’re not, pick it up on your lunch hour, and it will have you smiling even at work.
Theo Ryan, the son of New York show biz parents, left his colorful backstage childhood behind to settle quietly as a drama professor at a backwater North Carolina university. Though he does have a play tucked away in a drawer (a drama about Sir Walter Raleigh, which a workshop director once cruelly panned), the most colorful thing in Theo’s life now is his friendship with Ford Rexford, a leading playwright and famous drunk, whose biography Theo is writing.
Ford pushes Theo to escape his safe little life, and Theo decides to go for it: he auditions for an amateur production of Guys and Dolls, gives in to a dizzying crush on a university preacher named Maude Fletcher, and even shows Ford his play.
Naturally, disaster follows.
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tuesday july 25
Okay, this really has nothing to do with The Da Vinci Code except that it involves (round-about-ly) a museum employee and an art history puzzle. But not mentioning TDVC up front seemed like ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
I recently recommended a book to a friend of mine, a Taft Museum docent. "Recommended" is puttting it mildly--I pressed it on her and insisted she take it home. Fortunately she loved it, couldn't put it down. So I thought I'd see whether I can persuade any of you to take it home, too. It's one of my favorite novels, certainly one of my top two literary-puzzle-suspense-novels of all time. (The other one is A. S. Byatt's Possession.) It's Michael Frayn's Headlong, a dazzling art history thriller about a lost Bruegel painting. In addition to its truly nerve-wracking puzzle plot, it's a brilliant example of first-person narration. And it's positively stuffed with fascinating art history that passed even my friend's high standards. Academic research has never been so exciting.
Really.
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tuesday july 18
Maureen Millea Smith comes to Cincinnati Sunday, July 30, to read and sign her first novel, When Charlotte Comes Home. Maureen was a Cincinnatian for many years, a colleague of ours in the Fiction & Young Adults Department and at the Deer Park Branch, so her visit feels like a homecoming, too.
Her novel is a coming of age story set in Omaha during the 1960s—an era of station wagons, Saturday cocktail parties, Jello salads, girdles and linen dresses, and the gentlemanly obligation to have a clean handkerchief.
It’s narrated by Fred Holly, the oldest child of loving but undemonstrative parents. From an early age, Fred wants something beyond the quiet, steady life of his hometown—a beauty and grace that he glimpses at the art museum and in his friendship with a new neighbor, James. But raised in a time when sex education means discreet “pamphlets left on bed pillows,” Fred hardly recognizes that this friendship means more to him than his distant crushes on lovely girls. And art can’t offer him sufficient solace when tragedy strikes his family.
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saturday july 15
Okay, I need to pay more attention. I just discovered that the library now owns Fortunes of War on DVD.
So?
So! I saw this on a thirteen-inch black and white TV in 1988, and I’ve wanted to see it again ever since. I've been watching Masterpiece Theatre since the days of The Six Wives of Henry VIII (yes, I am very, very old), and of all of the wonderful adaptations I’ve ever seen, it's right up there with A Town Like Alice and (insert your own favorite here). For almost twenty years it wasn’t available for love or money. And now here it is, right here, finally published, and on the shelves at the library.
The question is, if you haven't already, should you watch first or read first?
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monday july 10
British mystery writer John Harvey’s new novel, Darkness & Light, is the third in his Frank Elder series. Those of us who were big fans of his Charlie Resnick series have never quite forgiven him for putting that series to rest, but the new one is turning out to be dynamite, too—psychologically and emotionally resonant mysteries featuring a melancholy hero in the classic genre tradition.
Frank Elder is a retired British cop, living on the remote Cornish coast. He’s haunted by his failed marriage and by a case that damaged his family terribly. (Go back and read Flesh and Blood for that story.) Now, once again, he is being pulled out of his self-imposed exile to investigate a case. This time it’s his ex-wife who is asking him. Her friend’s sister has disappeared.
Wary at taking back up his tangled relationship with his ex, wary about falling into dangerous old habits of riding to the rescue, Elder nevertheless heads for town.
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wednesday july 05
Too hot even for chilly reads featuring frosty adventures in cold climes? Try a different approach. Here's a little British satire as deliciously cool as a teaspoonful of sorbet.
But not cold-hearted at all. Human Voices is Penelope Fitzgerald's valentine to the men and women of the BBC radio service during World War II. She worked there herself as a junior programming assistant. The novel positively brims with sardonic fondness for the eccentric characters who labored to broadcast to the world during the war’s darkest days.
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friday june 30
I recently recommended Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field to someone who had just watched the new screen version of Pride and Prejudice for the ninth time. But you don't have to be a fanatic to enjoy Melissa Nathan's 2001 tale of a newspaper columnist and an actor brought together by a stage production of that classic novel.
Trendy columnist Jazz Field is just enough of a celebrity to be asked, along with her actress sister, George, to audition for a charity fundraising production of P&P being directed by Harry Noble, beloved heir of Britain’s most famous family of actors. When she overhears him call her “the ugly sister,” she’s furious enough to ace the audition.
Of course, anyone who knows P&P knows what happens next.
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sunday june 25
With the World Series of Poker about to begin, pick up G. W. Hawkes’ engaging wild card of a novel about a family of card sharks and the son who wants out of the business, Gambler’s Rose.
Charlie Halloran is the youngest in a long line of gamblers and cheats. His father, Music, trained him to the peak of perfection in card counting and the practical psychology of gambling. But Charlie doesn’t like the calculating person he has become, and falling in love with a mathematician has given him reason to change his life. Can he really walk away from such a perfectly honed skill, though, or change the way his mind has been trained from infancy? As Music sets up a crucial poker game, Charlie has to decide whether he’s in or not.
This odd, fascinating little novel is both suspenseful and philosophical. The tension isn’t so much in the card games but in Charlie’s struggles over his decision, in the complex relationship between him and his father, and in the really big stakes—true love—he’s playing for. It’s a winner.
thursday june 22
If you’ve seen Casablanca more times than you can count, try Alan Furst’s stylish novel of Paris under the Occupation, The World at Night. It’s the love story of a man and his city.
Jean Casson is a film producer whose beloved Paris has been invaded. At first, this means putting up with small deprivations and indignities—working with a German production company, accepting a curtailed social life. But as the noose tightens, Casson is approached by British intelligence agents and then by the suspicious Germans. His job makes him a perfect tool for either espionage service. While Paris tries to pretend that everything is normal, Casson feels his pleasant life slipping irretrievably away.
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thursday june 15
That description is from the dust jacket of Zev Chafet’s 1991 debut novel, and it’s a perfect tease for this spoof on The Godfather and all its heirs. Tony Soprano might not be amused, but his fans will find Inherit the Mob an appealing beach read while Tony’s on hiatus.
Journalist William Gordon is the nephew of famed New York Jewish gangster Max Grossman. Gordon never had anything to do with his uncle’s business (not realizing Max fed him many of his Pulitzer-winning stories), so he’s rather startled when he inherits Max’s half-billion-dollar partnership with Don Luigi Spadafore. Gordon’s inclination is to refuse, but his best friend is thrilled at the chance to play-act as Gordon’s honest-to-godfather consigliere. Of course, they’re soon in over their heads. It takes an outrageous plot and some retired members of Uncle Max’s old Jewish gang to rescue them from certain death.
Fast, funny, and mischievously satiric, this is a send-up bound to raise smiles from anyone familiar with traditional mob fiction or movies.
tuesday june 13
The winner of the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is The Master, by Colm Toibin.
And we nominated it!
Libraries around the world are invited to submit up to three titles to be considered for this award, which is the biggest-money literary prize (100,000 euro) given to honor a single work of fiction. And out of the 132 nominees sent in from 43 countries, the book that our library nominated (well, our library and 16 others worldwide) was the winner.
Toibin's superb character study of the classic novelist Henry James got this comment from the judges:
"In The Master, Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly alive and vibrant in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. It is a powerful account of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart."
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saturday june 10
In 1997, Charles Frazier published his debut, Cold Mountain, a Civil War historical novel. It inspired a movie, hundreds of book club discussions, and thousands of devoted fans. The same year, Howard Bahr published his debut, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War. It didn't.
Which is a pity, because it's also a lyrical and heartrending story of love and war. Cold Mountain has the sweeping scope of an epic journey, as its wounded hero struggles to return to his Southern home and the woman he loves. The Black Flower focuses on one short moment of the war--it follows weary young Confederate soldier Bushrod Carter through a single, horrendous battle (the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864) and to a makeshift field hospital afterwards, where a young woman named Anna struggles to save him and scores of his comrades. The brief, elegiac contact between them stands in delicate counterpoise to all the carnage the two have seen.
Civil War buffs, romantics at heart, and readers of literary fiction shouldn't miss this fine short novel. Personally, I found it more moving than its much more famous brother-in-arms--it's a lovely and powerful read.
monday june 05
The current tv-movie-of-the-week hysteria about bird flu made me think about a book called Eyewitness to History, which I read several years ago. It's a collection of I-was-there accounts about all kinds of historical events, including several epidemics. I thought I was remembering one about the Black Death, but it turns out it was a description of plague in ancient Greece that was sticking in my mind. It was written by the historian Thucydides, who survived the disease himself. (More from him below.)
Browse around in this book and you'll find something that will stick in your mind, too. The editor, John Carey, has collected dozens of eyewitness accounts about all kinds of events. Memories of famous catastrophies (like the sinking of the Titanic), meetings with memorable people (how about dinner with Atilla the Hun?), and man-on-the-street reports of major historical events (an anonymous German private's account of the D-Day assault) are captured in vivid excerpts. The book is long (706 pages), and it's a little heavy on British historical events, but it's easy to dip into randomly.
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Unfortunately: The sexy man Nicola meets at her lunchtime café is a serial killer. Fortunately: She chickens out of making a date with him. Unfortunately: This frees up the afternoon for her to be abducted by a pair of teenagers who want her ATM card. Fortunately: The teens were hired by Nicola’s ex, Scooter, and Nicola can handle Scooter with both hands tied behind her back. Unfortunately: Scooter needs the money to pay off a loan shark. Fortunately: The loan shark is pretty sexy, too. Unfortunately: The serial killer is pretty persistent....
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