Mythology
Edith Hamilton, 1942
496 pp.
August 2008
Even when I was a kid (couple of years ago), Hamilton and her book were so beloved that everyone referred to it as "Edith Hamilton's Mythology."
So. What's not to love about mythology? Deities and mortals loving and torment-ing one another; heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses surpassing the limits of human strentgh and beauty but caught in the trap of human passion.
The Next Best Thing
Jennifer Weiner, 2012
400 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
August, 2012
Author Jennifer Weiner is a 21st-century Jane Austen, who uses her sharp eye and sharper wit to skewer modern-day convention. In this book Weiner turns her sights on Hollywood...and conjures up a delicious satire.
Ruthie Saunders, Weiner's smart, funny heroine, was raised watching The Golden Girls—where "the skies are always sunny...not everyone is beautiful...and love sustains you." So what's a good girl to do but live life as a TV sitcom? Or better yet, write one.
Pavlov's Cats
Randy Minnich, 2005
84 pp.
December 2006
Know why cats don't get presents on their birthday? Answer—they already own everything.
Any cat owner gets the joke because it's really about us—our powerlessness in the face of a nine-pound creature. Randy Minnich explores that helplessness. His book is a delightful read for any human addicted to Felis silvestris catus.
Plainsong
Kent Haruf
320 pp.
December 2007
The title of this book is beautifully apt for a story set on the great plains: musically, plainsong is an unadorned melodic line. Haruf's novel, then, is a plainsong—in terms of his taut, straight-forward prose; his unadorned but compelling characters; and the austerity of his setting.
Plainsong is also a hymn of praise. And Haruf's story becomes a paean to the power of place and to the capacity of individuals to transcend loneliness and despair, coming together in community.
The Professor and the Madman
Simon Winchester, 1998
288 pp.
February 2011
You would hardly expect a book about a dictionary to be interesting. Yet when Simon Winchester's name is on the cover, you would expect a great read—and you'd be right.
Winchester recounts the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)—an undertaking that took 70 years with legions of volunteers, who combed through 1000s of books and submitted 2,000,000 quotes. Some poor soul had to oversee it all, and Winchester tells his story.
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
Elinor Lipman, 2003
304 pp.
May 2010
Lipman had me at the first sentence. Her writing is so polished, dialogue so hilarious, sentences crisp and pointed that I was hooked from the beginning.
Even author Richard Russo says (a bit enviously, I think) that Elinor Lipman makes "everything look easy, even to other writers who know better." That's high praise.
Remarkable Creatures
Tracy Chevalier, 2010
pp. 320
November 2010
By now, Tracy Chevalier has established her bona fides as one of the doyennes of historical fiction. She's widely praised for her skill in capturing the characters and nuanced customs of whatever era she writes about.
In Remarkable Creatures, Chevalier turns her eye to the tremulous babysteps of paleontology, the study of prehistoric life. This is the early 1800's, pre-Darwin, before the concept of extinction. What were these strange fossils...and where are the living creatures now? If they no longer exist...does that mean that God, who created them, decided to rid the world of them? Were they errors in His judgment? Such an idea was blasphemous.
A River Runs Through It
Norman Maclean, 1976
217 pp.
May 2007
On its surface, this beautiful memoir is about the intricacies of fly fishing and the two Montana brothers who fish the big western rivers.
Fishing devotees will revel in descriptions of the rhythm, angles, whip and whistle of the perfect cast. We even get a bit of fish psychology: a trout knows it's being tricked if the fly isn't set perfectly on the water.
The Rosie Project
Graeme Simsion, 2013
304 pp.
November, 2013
Feelings are a serious disruption to Don Tillman's orderly world. He listens to Bach, not for its beauty but for the pattern of its notes. He runs his life based on strict logic, he times his weekly schedule down to the minute, and he has zero luck with women. Small wonder.
A 39-year-old professor of genetics, Don is an intellectual savant and social misfit. It's obvious to us that he has Asperger's though it's a fact that clearly escapes him. He's just...unusual, is what Don thinks, and his disastrous history with women notwithstanding, Don is out to get a wife.
Rules of Civility
Amor Towles, 2011
352 pp.
September 2011
Amor Towles has given us a smart, sophisticated coming-of-age story—told from the vantage point of a middle-aged woman looking back, to the late 1930s, at a much younger version of herself.
Katey, our narrator, is one of three young adults starting out in Manhattan, the other two Eve and Tinker. The three form a love triangle with Tinker at the apex. He's a young man possessed of all the accouterments of wealth—a prince: charming, poised, and good looking. He's of the class that stands apart, "exhibiting a poise secured by the alchemy of wealth and station."
Sag Harbor
Colson Whitehead, 2009
288 pp.
January 2010
At 15 Benji Cooper is a nerd—someone forgot to leave him the instruction manual on cool. He fumbles the latest handshakes, wears braces and a "f**ked up" haircut, loves Dungeon and Dragons and Easy Listen' music. Worse, he's never kissed a girl and can't get anyone to call him "Ben."
Benji is an African-American who attends an all-white private school in Manhattan, but he spends his summers in the affluent black neighborhood of Sag Harbor, right around the corner (well hidden, of course) from the uppity-upscale white Hamptonites.
The Samurai's Garden
Gail Tsukiyama, 1994
224 pp.
November 2006
I worked up quite an appetite while reading this charming book—there's a fair amount of cooking and eating going on, and it made me hanker for some Japanese food.
There are also intriguing descriptions of Japanese decor: the exquisite airiness of shoji (paper walls) and the beauty of human artistry imposed on nature. This last has to do with the garden in the book's title.
Seating Arrangements
Maggie Shipstead, 2012
320 pp.
May, 2013
How someone as young as Maggie Shipstead has managed such sure-footed prose, mature insights, and sardonic humor is beyond me. For a writer in her then-late-20s, her debut novel Seating Arrangements is a remarkable feat. It would be so for a writer at any age.
The story opens as Winn Van Meter rises before dawn to head up to the family summer home on the Island of Waskeke. His eldest daughter is to be married there in three days, and the wedding party and families are already gathering.
The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
336 pp.
March 2007
A wonderfully appealing coming-of-age story, The Secret Life of Bees is narrated by 14-year-old Lily Owens. Lily is the daughter of a South Carolina peach farmer, a spiteful, angry man, who blames her for her mother's death 10 years prior.
And so Lily runs away. Accompanied by her beloved African-American nanny, Rosaleen, she makes her way across the state, ending up in Turbon, South Carolina.
Skinny Dip
Carl Hiaasen, 2004
355 pp.
September 2008
Joke: guy dumps his wife overboard. She hits the water and wonders, "We've been married only two years...what did I do to deserve this?" Struggling for life, she runs down a list of possible offenses, including overcooked chicken, dozing during hockey games and—this is good—joining a weekly book club!
Shouldn't be, but this is funny stuff, and that's Carl Hiaasen for you.
Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line
Michael Gibney, 2014
210 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
September, 2014
It's enough to make you weep, reading (reading, merely reading!) about what it takes to serve 300 people in an upscale New York restaurant. Why would anyone subject himself to such abuse—the mental and physical strain—night after night?
Michael Gibney's wonderful behind-the-scenes account is a revelation: chefs and cooks aren't like you and me. Their stamina and mental acuity is not the stuff of ordinary mortals; it's superhero stuff—Supermen (and the occasional woman) in chef whites.
One for the Money - Finger Lickin' Fifteen
Janet Evanovich, 1996-2009
November 2009
Stephanie Plum is hilarious. Or maybe it's Evanovich who's funny—I'm not sure. Stephanie Plum is so real it's hard to believe she's merely a character in a series.
If you haven't read Janet Evanovich's mysteries, you're in for a treat. Though it's not necessary, you might as well start at the beginning—with One for the Money...or Two for the Dough...or Three to Get Deadly...and so on.
The Syringa Tree
Pamela Gien, 2006
254 pp.
December 2008
Sometimes you fall in love when you least expect it—which is what happened to me on reading the very first pages of this wonderful book.
Imaginative, independent Elizabeth grows up in a white South African family during the final 25 years of apartheid. Only six, she is doted on by loving parents and by a houseful of black servants—especially her nanny Salamina, with whom she's deeply bonded. Through Lizzy's young eyes, we come to see the brutality of the country's racist system.
Tender at the Bone
Ruth Reichel, 1998
282 pp.
February 2009
The career of Ruth Reichl, one of the country's top food critics and the editor-in-chief of Gourmetmagazine, was hardly a given. Her mother's idea of culinary elegance was laying out a buffet of mold-encrusted food or leftovers from Horn & Hardart's automat cafeteria in New York City!
In fact, according to her account, Ruth might have followed the career path of a public health inspector. By 9 years of age she was warning guests away from her mother's toxic offerings, particularly worried about "the big eaters" and her favorite people as they neared the buffet, "willing them away from the casserole."
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston, 1937
219 pp.
Alice Walker (The Color Purple) was responsible for kindling our current interest in this lovely but once neglected work. Their Eyes was a favorite of hers, now a favorite of many, and "short-listed" as a favorite of book clubseverywhere.
From the opening lines we know this story is of a dream not to be deferred*—not, that is, for Janie Mae Crawford, the novel's heroine:
This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! in America's Gilded Capital
Mark Liebovich, 2013
400 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
September, 2013
Mark Liebovich's take on the nation's capital generates so many "suspicions confirmed" head-nods, you'll be popping Advil to ease the neck pain. According to This Town, Washington really is that bad—as bad we thought, even worse.
The opening pages take us to Tim Russert's funeral, a laugh-out-loud look at the preening, posturing D.C. in-crowd. That first chapter alone is worth the price of admission.
The Three Weissmanns of Westport
Cathleen Schine, 2010
292 pp.
January 2011
In this delicious modern send-up of Sense and Sensibility, Cathleen Schine takes Jane Austen to heart. Not content to simply clone the plot, Schine, like her famous forerunner, turns a mordant eye on a self-regarding, self-absorbed society. The result is a sharp, funny, yet poignant story.
The novel opens in a posh West Side Manhattan apartment, where Joe Weissmann announces to Betty, wife of 40 years, that he's filing for divorce ... due to "irreconcilable differences." Betty's response? What do "irreconcilable differences" have to do with divorce? (Isn't that lovely?!)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith, 1943
512 pp.
January 2008
It's been a year since my friend Nan suggested Marley and Me.
This time she mentioned that she'd just given A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to her youngest daughter. Her older girls, now fully grown, oohed and aahed, recalling it as one of their all-time favorites. Really, I teared up.
That tender display of nostalgia got me to thinking about the book, a beloved classic....
Twilight
Stephanie Meyer, 2005
498 pp.
October, 2011
There's not too much more to say about this book (first in the Twilight series) that hasn't already been said. But maybe I can wring out a few more words.
Actually, what was surprising about Twilight...was how appealing I found it. Like the Harry Potter series, I'd stayed away because of its fantasy genre and its young audience. But then I heard NPR reviewer, Maureen Corrigan, who had similar reservations yet came away charmed by her reading experience. Corrigan is someone to listen to, so I listened and read Twilight.
A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson, 1999
274 pp.
July 2007
Think of your favorite buddy movie, combine it with City Slickers, and you’ve got the idea behind Bryson’s book.
Two urban hetero’s, both out of shape and on the pudgy side (one woefully so), tackle the hardships of the Appalachian Trail. That’s the set-up for what follows, and much of it is very, very funny.
The War Against Miss Winter
Kathryn Miller Haines, 2007
317 pp.
September 2007
Rosie Winter is a master of the cool quip and cocky comeback—trademarks of the "hard-boiled" detective genre of the 1920's and '30's. Conjure up an image of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, correct for gender by tossing in Rosalind Russell from His Girl Friday, and you've got Rosie.
She's the smart and smart-mouthed heroine of this clever new crime story set in New York against the backdrop of World War II. In fact, war and violence are played out everywhere in this story: on the world stage, the New York stage, and in Rosie's life.
When You Reach Me
Rebecca Stead, 2009
208 pp.
April 2010
Here's another young adult novel that makes the leap to over to adult fiction. (See The Book Thief and The Magician's Elephant.) Rebecca Stead has taken a realistic story of school-age friendships, woven it into a mystery, and wrapped it around fantasy. It's a delightful tale for any age.
Precocious young Miranda (are child heroines ever not precocious?) lives with her single mother in Manhattan. Her favorite book, which she reads obsessively is Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. It is L'Engle's subject of time travel that informs this story. Even Miranda's knot-tying hobby echoes the twisting and warping of time itself.
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress
Ariel Lawhon, 2014
308 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
June 2014
It's a fair bet we won't get a lot of character depth when a single paragraph extols a woman's fine-boned hand, her tangle of pale curls, and tanned shoulders. The same is true with silly descriptions of eyes...cold, flashing, flinty, or otherwise.
But a bit of clunky writing is easy to overlook in this delicious tale of lust and corruption from the 1930s. Ariel Lawhon has dusted off a piece of real history, reimagining an unsolved crime that had once grabbed headlines across the country. Her novel approaches the story from the point of view of the three women involved.
Wildfire
Mary Pauline Lowry, 2014
288 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
December, 2014
For me, the draw to this novel was that the author herself had once been a "hotshot," the elite branch of forestfire fighters. These are tough Navy SEAL types, often helicoptered in, who dig ditches at the edge of an oncoming blaze. It's extreme and dangerous work.
What would attract a woman to the hotshots? It's unclear what enticed our author, but her fictional stand-in Julie explains her own reasons: "After my parents died, I started to set things on fire." When her pyromania gets snuffed out by a stern grandmother, she turns to bulimia. So fighting wildfires seems a perfect antidote to Julie's self-destructive urges.
With or Without You
Domenica Ruta, 2013
224 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
April 2013
I loved her straight off—Domenica Ruta's mother—though I knew I shouldn't. She's irresponsible, drug-addled, narcissistic, mercurial, and destructive, not just self-destructive but destructive toward her daughter.
Yet the portrait drawn of Kathi Ruta in this extraordinary memoir is endearing, often hilarious...as well as infuriating. It was too hard not to fall for such a woman.
The Wives of Los Alamos: A Novel
TaraShea Nesbit, 2014
240 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
May, 2014
In luminous, at times poetic prose, TaraShea Nesbit has produced a small gem of a book as she imagines life for the women at famed Los Alamos. The women lived there, in the desert, from 1943 to the end of World War II while their physicists husbands built the first atomic bomb.
Smart, well educated, often professionals in their own right, the women are confined to ramshackle houses, raising children and complaining about dust and muddy water. They resent the secrecy which keeps them in ignorance of what their husbands are working on.