The After Wife
Gigi Levangie Grazer, 2012
298 pp.
September, 2012
There's obviously nothing funny about death, especially one unexpected, a life cut suddenly and cruelly short.
Yet, as in all her books, Gigi Levangie Grazer manages to rouse us to bursts of laughter and stifled guffaws. Even in grief, Grazer has created a heroine-narrator who speaks with a dark but very funny, sardonic voice.
The Annotated Alice
Lewis Carroll, 1865; Martin Gardner, 1960
384 pp.
February 2007
Not just for kids. Alice has been relegated to the nursery long enough; let's bring her back into adult company.
For starters, Carroll’s tale is a very funny piece of work. Its cryptic, sophisticated humor—based on logic, math, and wordplay—flies over the heads of most children…adults, too, for that matter.
August Heat
Andrea Camilleri, 2006 (trans., 2009)
272 pp.
August 2011
It's August, it's Sicily, and it's hot—and in the course of this novel, Inspector Salvo Montalbano takes 24 showers, baths, and dips in the sea. Sometimes it's his body, but just as often it's his fervid mind that needs cooling off.
Montalbano has a murder on his hands, and he's also trying to stave off a growing attraction to a woman young enough be be his daughter. Enough to make any man over-heat.
Away
Amy Bloom, 2008
256 pp.
January 2009
It may be the sumptuous cover that makes this book hard to resist, but the inside is delectable, too. Away is the story of Lillian Leyb, a young Russian widow and immigrant, who takes us on a whirlwind cross-country journey. In the process, Lillian discovers America and her place in its vast landscape.
It's the 1920's, and Lillian arrives in New York City from Russia, where a violent tragedy has left her bereft of family and home.
The Batboy
Mike Lupica, 2010
256 pp.
February, 2012
Brian Dudley needs his dad; Brian's idol—famous hitter Hank Bishop—needs his inner child, the kid Hank used to be, the one who once loved baseball. That's the premise of this delightful tale about a boy, a man, and their love of the game.
Fourteen-year-old Brian gets his dream summer job as a batboy for the Detroit Tigers. He's nuts about the game and thinks, hopes, prays that the sport will somehow bring him closer to his father, a washed-up major leaguer who's left home for good.
Before We Met
Lucie Whitehouse, 2014
288 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
February 2014
In the vein of Gone Girl and Before I Go to Sleep, Whitehouse's book dissects a seemingly happy marriage with dire results. In fact, the question all three books pose is whether we can truly know another being—even one we wake up to each morning.
When husband Mark misses his plane back to London and doesn't phone in, Hannah begins to worry. Her concern is heightened when Mark's assistant, and his business partner, both tell her they were under the impression that Mark had taken her, Hannah, to Rome for the weekend. Rome? For the weekend? It's news to Hannah.
Blink
Malcolm Gladwell, 2005
265 pp.
July 2008
We're smarter than we know, according to this engaging book. In his second non-fiction book, Gladwell (The Tipping Point) writes about the part of our brains that lets us know things without knowing how we know.
It turns out our intuitive hunches—or rapid cognition—can be more dependable than the high-powered reasoning part of our brains.
The Book Thief
Marcus Zusak, 2005
552 pp.
June 2008
Hard to believe, but Random House classified this as a juvenile work—and librarians dutifully shelved it in Young Adult sections. But now they're now moving it over into Adult Fiction—as so many of the 30-and-counting-crowd have come love it!
The Book Thief is the story of a young girl living with a foster family, from 1941-44, in Molching, Germany, a village outside Munich and home to the Dachau concentration camp.
Bridget Jones's Diary
Helen Fielding, 1998
271 pp.
August 2007
Quintessential "chick-lit," Bridget Jones is a romp of a read, a modern send-up of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Yet when it comes to her main character, Helen Fielding departs from her literary model—Bridget is one of literature's silliest, most hapless heroines. Elizabeth Bennett, she's not.
Aside from Bridget's self-deprecating voice, her fruitless attempts at self-improvement, her friends, her mother, her job, her boss...the great fun of this book is to find its parallel points with Austen's P & P.
Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn
Margaret Campbell Barnes, 1949
382 pp.
September 2010
What a feast of Anne Boleyn works the last decade has offered—starting with Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl in 2001 and ending with Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower in December 2010. Type "Anne Boleyn books" into Amazon and see how many pop up on the screen. Our appetite for the doomed queen is insatiable.
Brief Gaudy Hour was there before any of them—in 1949. It's had a resurgence in popularity as of late, along with a nifty new cover. We should all look so good at 61.
Can't Wait to Get to Heaven
Fannie Flagg, 2006
375 pp.
October 2007
You can't help but love this book. It's warm, funny, and at times a real belly-guffaw. While not a "social novel" in the true literary sense, it's close enough for our "Lighter Touch" novel.
Flagg returns her readers to Elmwood Springs, a small tightly-knit community in Missouri, whose residents fret and scramble and cogitate when one of their own lies near death...or is dead... or hangs somewhere in between.
Chosen by a Horse
Susan Richards, 2006
248 pp.
March 2008
My sister Janet, a sucker for horses, handed me this book. Neither of us could resist the beautiful face on the cover. It wouldn't matter if the writing inside were drivel. But it's not. Inside is a lovely story about redemption for both horse and human. Grab a tissue.
Richards, an experienced horsewoman, rescues a half-starved race horse. At first sight of the mare, she's overwhelmed: "I'd never had a horse this sick."
City of Tranquil Light
Bo Caldwell, 2010
304 pp.
July 2011
"When you leave a place you love, you leave a piece of your heart." That Chinese proverb from the book captures how I felt when closing its covers—I'd left a piece of my heart in its pages.
It sounds so cheesy having said that—yet no one was more surprised than I by how this book yanked at my sometimes jaded heart-strings.
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute
to His White Mother
James McBride 1996
362 pp.
November 2007
For years James McBride was puzzled, even slightly repulsed, by his mother. She was strange.
The mother of 12 African-American children, she rode a bicycle, spoke Yiddish and was, as she put it, "light skinned." She evaded any question about her background with "God made me." She was, in fact, far stranger than McBride suspected.
Coral Glynn
Peter Cameron, 2012
224 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
October, 2012
The set-up seems straight out of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. A shy, untested young woman, lands herself in a musty English manor house complete with a handsome but brooding owner and a spiteful housekeeper.
Yet Peter Cameron is after something more than a gothic mystery tale—his mystery has to do with the complex workings of the soul. In spare, elegant language, Cameron seems to ask how we know ourselves, if we can, and how we love one another, if we do.
The Cure for Modern Life
Lisa Tucker, 2008
369 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lunduist
July 2009
What was it Good Housekeeping had to say about this novel? Oh, yes—an "emotionally satisfying page-turner": a nicely cliched phrase which pretty much sums up The Cure. But I like this book—a light, breezy read with some good heft to it (okay, more cliche).
Matthew and Amelia, once lovers, are now rivals. The two battle over corporate ethics—Matthew as a top-level pharmaceutical exec and Amelia as an independent medical ethicist.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922
64 pp.
December 2010
This short story reverses time's arrow. In turn, hilarious and sad, it takes aim at aristocatic pretensions, one of Fitzgerald's favorite targets. It's a story with bite. (The Brad Pitt movie with all its earnestness? Not even close. Film and story have little in common.)
The story opens as a young society couple anticipates the birth of their first child. Arriving at the hospital, however, Mr. Button is met with an "appalling apparition"—no gurgling infant but a bearded creature crammed into his crib. There he sits, demanding food, clothing, rocking chair and cane. Roger's Button's newborn is a grown man of seventy.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon, 2003
240 pp.
April 2007
What's the world like in the mind of an autistic child? That's the question Mark Haddon explores in this funny, immensely readable book about an autistic English boy.
On page 1 Christopher Boone (15) finds his neighbor’s dog stabbed with a garden fork Over the next 119 pages, he attempts to solve the mystery of its murder. On page 120, he finds the answer; 101 pages later, the book ends. There are 45 drawings, 17 charts and graphs, 12 equations, 16 lists, and 1 photo. And that’s not counting the 3-3/4 page appendix. It took me 2:57:45 hours to finish the book.
Read more: Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Review)
Daisy Miller
Henry James, 1878
80 pp.
September 2009
A novella and possibly the most accessible of James's works, Daisy Miller brought the author instant fame...along with a bit of controversy. There was the charge that his heroine was "an outrage on American girlhood."
Daisy epitomizes the James heroine—a fresh young American woman on European soil who, to her own detriment, defies strict social conventions. She belongs to the class of wealthy Americans who, having lived so long in Europe, are "Europeanized." They no longer hold to democratic ideals, eschewing an open, egalitarian society in favor of a rigidly hierarchical one. Their code insists on knowing one's place and behaving accordingly.
Death Comes to Pemberley
P.D. James, 2011
304 pp.
March, 2012
In her newest work, P.D. James, the great doyenne of murder mysteries, plies her talents in the service of Jane Austen. The result is a combined period novel, romance, crime novel, and court room drama.
The novel, which takes place six years into the Bennet-Darcy marriage, opens with a summary of events from Pride and Prejudice. In reconstructing those events, James chooses a wry perspective—that of the gossip-prone neighbors, who feel certain Elizabeth had her cap set for Darcy all along, especially once she'd seen the sumptuous grounds of Pemberley.
The Death of Bees*
Lisa O'Donnell, 2012
320 pp.
January, 2013
Celebtated in Britain and now garnering stunning reviews in the U.S., The Death of Bees is a short read that packs a big wallop. But while the story is powerful and characters lovable, do take note: it might be a bit much for some. Grim...or grimly comic...or comically grim, The Death of Bees is not for everyone.
The novel, situtated in Glasgow, Scotland, is told through alternating voices: two sisters and their neighbor, Lennie. The girls, 12 and 15, are on their own, their parents "missing." Yet readers know from the get-go exactly where they are. And so do the girls.
Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage
Molly Wizenberg, 2014
256 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
September 2014
Molly Wizenberg is an accomplished woman: a successful food blogger and published book author. Yet here she is at one in the morning sobbing into salad greens and mopping the floor. She's exhausted beyond measure.
Her problem is that she's co-owner of a restaurant—one she doesn't like and doesn't want. The other problem is that the success of the restaurant is intimately bound up with the success of her marriage—the co-owner being her husband. This is Molly's memoir, and it's delightful.
Dewey: The Small-town Cat Who Touched the World
Vicki Myron with Bret Witter, 2008
271 pp.
March 2009
Maybe it's the face on the cover that's made so many fall in love with this book, but it could easily be the story, too. How is it not possible not to fall in love with a tiny, defenseless creature dropped down a library book drop in one of the coldest nights of the year?
Like most pets, Dewey makes a difference in the lives of his many owners— library staff and patrons alike—and eventually becoming so famous that he's featured in print and broadcast media around the world. People drive miles across the U.S. for a chance to meet him. Reading his story, it's easy to understand why.
Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement
Rodney Rothman, 2005
256 pp.
October 2006
Funnyman Rothman has written a funny book. And like all good joke stories, this one contains more than a kernel of social truth.
Rothman, a former joke writer for both Saturday Night Live and David Letterman, is 28 and burned-out. So what else is there to do but head to a Florida retirement community?
Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert, 2006
338 pp.
June 2007
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a broken heart must be in want of a meal. —June Austin
Elizabeth Gilbert takes that famous maxim to extraordinary lengths in her smart, delightful book and heads to Italy, where she eats four-months worth of pasta, gelato, calamari, stewed rabbit, pickled hyacinth bulbs, and the best pizza in the world. In the process she puts on 15 pounds, which should endear to pretty much everyone in the over-30 crowd.
Etta and Otto and Russell and James
Emma Hooper, 2015
320 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
March, 2015
Funny, touching, and romantic are what come to mind when describing Emma Hooper's debut novel. Hooper has given us a story grounded in realism and a fable tinged with whimsey—and she skillfully blends the two to create a love story.
The story opens one morning when Otto finds a note from Etta on the kitchen table telling him not to worry but that she (at 83) has decided to walk across Canada to the sea. She's never seen it before, and it's something she must do. Thus begins a journey of self-discovery, three in fact: for Etta, Otto, and Russell, friend and neighbor. Oh, and there's James, Etta's traveling companion—a talking, singing coyote.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Anne Fadiman, 1998
162 pp.
May 2009
So much good stuff packed into such a small package—a book the size a large index card and a mere half-inch thick.
Anne Fadiman, is a true bibliophile. While most of say we love books, Fadiman really loves them. Perhaps better known for The Spirit Catches You, You Fall Down (1997), Fadiman here takes a lighter approach and, in 18 short essays, talks about how books, their contents and phsycial selves, have shaped her life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby Girls
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920-22
300 pp.
August, 2013
Published in The Saturday Evening Post from 1920-22, these eight stories by Fitzgerald have been collected into a single new volume. An added treat are the original illustrations from The Post that accompany each story—they're wonderful.
Written with Fitzgerald's understated wit and irony, the stories, like his novels, revolve around America's elite. At country clubs, in spacious homes and yachts, handsome young women and Ivy-Leagued young men pursue one another with desperate intent. It's a marriage market to make Jane Austen blush.
Fathermucker
Greg Olear, 2011
320 pp.
November 2011
Olear's book is hilarious—starting with the title on the front cover: I can't rememeber laughing so often, one paragraph to the next, as I did reading Fathermucker.
The book, however, manages to be funny and poignant at the same time—as well as being a spot-on social satire.
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green, 2012
336 pp.
May, 2012
This is a Young Adult book which, like The Book Thief before it, has migrated over to the adult market. Although it's a teenage romance, it offers such a beautiful rendering of teens-in-trouble that adults have found it riveting.
In this book, "teens-in-trouble" has a different meaning than it ususally does. Hazel, the 16-year-old narrator, drags a portable oxygen machine behind her wherever she goes. Augustus, her boyfriend, a former basketball player, wears a prosthetic leg, and their friend, Issac, misses an eye. This is the grim reality for three teens battling cancer.
Garden Spells
Sarah Addison Allen, 2007
304 pp.
February 2008
This is a sweet book—pretty thin, even predictable. But if you're worn down by tackling dense, darker works, this may be the tonic you need.
Garden Spells offers an easy introduction to magical realism. Claire Waverly has a secret garden in which she grows flowers and herbs for her catering business. Of course, like all best kept secrets, everyone in town knows about the garden—it's legendary—though few have ever stepped foot inside.
Gilead
Marilyn Robinson, 2004
247 pp.
October 2008
A treasure of a book. While based upon Biblical scripture, it's illuminating for any faith. It is about the requirement of living up to the best parts of ourselves—and about the blessing and awe and mystery of all existence. It's a lot packed into a fairly small book.
The Reverend John Ames, 76 when the book opens, takes it upon himself to write a series of letters in the hope that when death over takes him—sooner, he believes, rather than later—his very young son will have a personal record of his father and the faith that has informed his life and work.
The Global War on Morris
Steve Israel, 2014
304 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
January, 2015
Who knew U.S. Congressmen could be so funny? On purpose. They're certainly funny when they issue policy pronouncements or cringe-worthy apologies—except those aren't meant to make us laugh.
But Rep. Steve Israel of Long Island has written a hilarious satire that gets us laughing from page one—intentionally. His hero Morris Feldstein is a happless Walter Mitty type, who's spent his whole life playing it safe—in his career, marriage, everything—because he has a severe allergy to trouble.
So there you have the trope behind this parody of the War on Terror. Who else but a schlemeil like Morris could get caught up in the grand sweep of paranoia following 9/11?
Good Grief
Lolly Winston, 2004
342 pp.
April 2009
Why would I place the story of a young woman struggling to cope with her husband's death under "A Lighter Touch?" Because even while tracing the stages of grief, this book does so with sweetness and humor.
Funny, self-deprecating, and sly, Sophie Stanton makes us laugh as she drags herself out of the depths and begins to rebuild her life. Here she is attending a group counseling session for grieving survivors:
Half Broke Horses
Jeannette Walls, 2009
288 pp.
February 2010
You can't help but read Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle and not wonder "where on earth did her mother come from?" (Not earth maybe, but...where?) Walls began this book, her second, writing about her mother but ended up focusing on her mother's mother instead.
A most happy decision as it turns out. Lily Casey Smith, reared in early 20th-century Texas, is an American original—smart, feisty and undeterred by setbacks that would unhinge the best of us.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
R.K. Rowling, 1997
309 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
January, 2014
Poor little Harry. He sleeps in a closet beneath the stairs, he's bullied by his cousin, despied by his aunt and uncle, and the most memorable gift the world ever saw fit to bestow upon him was a pair of old socks and a wooden hanger. But his world is about to change.
Harry, it turns out, is legendary, so famous—in a different plane of existence—that mere mention of his name elicits oohs and awe. Poor Harry, indeed! Yet until the strike of midnight on the eve of his 11th birthday, the little fellow had not a clue.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Jamie Ford
290 pp.
August 2009
Up to the early years of World War II, Seattle, Washington, had two distinct Asian-American communities—Japanese and Chinese. And ne'er the twain shall meet; except in this novel they do.
Henry Lee, when we first meet him in 1986, is a forlorn character—a lonely middle aged Chinese-American recently widowed. When an old hotel unearths a stash of Japanese-American belongings, stowed away since the war, Henry is sure that some part of his past is to be found there.
The Jane Austen Book Club
Karen Joy Fowler
288 pp.
May 2008
Change of plans. I'd actually been working on a different theme for this month, one more serious and...um, profound. But then I finally got around to reading Fowler's book (finished it an hour ago) and decided I really wanted to talk about it.
One of the primary motifs in The Jane Austen Book Club is happiness—and it came to me that happiness, as an ideal, is profound in its own way.
Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, 2012
336 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
October, 2013
This may be the ideal primer for those too young to have lived through the JFK assassination or fallen under the spell of the Kennedy aura. The fact that our country remains fascinated—50 years later—with the man and his legacy is fascinating in and of itself.
Still more fascinating is that a commentator with Bill O'Reilly's conservative stripes would write such a glowing account of Kennedy, a Democrat—whom he admits he finds, well...fascinating.
The Language of Flowers
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
336 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
January 2012
We first meet Victoria Jones as she wakes up on her 18th birthday to find a row of matches at the bottom of her bed set ablaze. If we're thinking something's not normal, we'd be right.
Nothing has been normal in Victoria's life: an abandoned newborn passed from foster parent to foster parent, she finally landed in a home for emotionally troubled girls. The world has been a hostile place, and on this day Victoria is to be released into its unwelcoming arms. Today she's 18 and on her own.
Last Night at the Lobster
Stewart O'Nan, 2007
146 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
October 2010
Nothing happens in this book, absolutely nothing—yet it's impossible to put down. I can't figure out how Stewart O'Nan pulls it off, but he surely does.
We follow Manny DeLeon through one entire day as manager of a down-at-the-heels Red Lobster. The place hasn't met its numbers lately, and Manny's corporate bosses have decided to pull the plug. Tonight's the last night. That's the basic plot—but it's a gorgeous read! A hymn to a good and decent man.
LIE
Caroline Bock, 2011
224 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
December, 2011
A double meaning lies at the heart of this book's title—"lie" as falsehood and "LIE" as the Long Island Expressway, a vast stretch of highway running the length of New York's Long Island.
In Caroline Bock's fictional world, LIE is the fault line, dividing Anglo culture from Hispanic—and truth from lie. The story hinges on which side of the LIE you're on.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson, 2006
288 pp.
November 2008
It's Bill Bryson, so you know it's funny. And it is—wonderfully. But it's also a gorgeous evocation of the 1950's, those halcyon years that followed the depression and war, when prosperity was spreading among a burgeoning middle class. For many life was sweet.
It was a life in which adults waxed poetically about new refrigerators, nary a tear for the old icebox; in which kids devised their own play, outdoors; and when people, even youngsters, could walk to town.
The Magician's Elephant
Kate DiCamillo, 2009
208 pp.
March 2010
If you don't fall in love with this little book, I'll be shocked. Written for chldren, it's a book for all ages—a lyrical fable about the possibility for goodness in a dark world. It is wonderful, charming and thoroughly engaging, no matter what age.
A magician performing his magic tricks conjures up an elephant, which crashes through the roof of the theater and lands in lap of a noblewoman. A disaster. Yet only a little earlier, a young boy had received a cryptic message that an elephant would lead him to his lost sister.
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman, 2012 (Engl., 2014)
352 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
August 2014
Ove is a 59-year-old misanthrope. He's ornery, overbearing, and hard to like. But we keep reading because Fredrik Bachman keeps us laughing—and because there's a bit of truth in Ove's rants...and a bit of each of us in his self-righteousness.
But Ove is done with life—all he wants to do is end his part in it. How hard can this be? Very hard, apparently, especially if you're beset with neighbors who interrupt you at the most inopportune moments, like when you're trying to hang yourself.
Marley and Me
John Grogan, 2005
305 pp.
January 2007
My friend Nan called to say she was giving everyone in her family a copy of this book—high praise, indeed, because she isn’t exactly a dog lover. In fact, she doesn't like people who are.
So obviously I was intrigued, all the more so because Nan has unerring literary taste, championing books long before critics get around to them. So maybe she was on to something.
Maybe This Time
Jennifer Crusie, 2010
352 pp.
May 2011
Jennifer Crusie has a wide following for her breezy, humorous take on the romance novel—and her latest book is no exception.
In Maybe This Time, she uses Henry James's eerie gothic tale, The Turn of the Screw (see below), as her point of departure. What she ends up with is a fun modern ghost story—with a screw-ball cast of characters and two endearing children.
The Motion of the Ocean
Janna Cawrse Esarey, 2009
336 pp.
December 2009
She calls him an a**hole in the very 1st sentence: he's the skipper of the boat...and also her husband. Yet by the 3rd sentence, you're feeling the initial pangs of love (this is a guy who cooks; need I say more?); by the 3rd chapter, you're completely hooked. Husband-skipper Graeme is a champ and a heart throb.
But this is Janna's story—and so, you wonder, what's wrong with her? That's the real subject of this charming, humorous travel memoir.
The Mountaintop School for Dogs And Other Second Chances
Ellen Cooney, 2014
304 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
October, 2014
It's been done before—so many times, in fact, that we know the outcome of this book from the get-go. But it doesn't matter because of the pure pleasure derived from Ellen Cooney's charming story of dogs and people—a tale in which healing one leads to healing the other.
The action takes place in a single locale: an isolated mountaintop refuge, known as the Sanctuary, which takes in dogs rescued from inhumane conditions. Traumatized, unfit for adoption, and at the tail end of their journey toward euthanasia, the dogs are given a second chance for rehabilitation—and life.
Ms. Hempel Chronicles
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 2008
208 pp.
October 2009
Poor Ms. Hempel. She doesn't think much of her skill as a teacher...nor does she think much of her job. But we readers know differently.
The tip-off is that Ms. Hempel loves her students—seeing them, deep in their core, as things of beauty. To her enduring credit, she manages to coax that beauty, as well as their sheer originality, out from under the protective shells of their middle-school selves.