This is the second book I’ve read in the Benjamin Black crime series featuring pathologist Dr. Quirke. Black is the pen name of the award-winning Irish writer John Banville. The series is set in Dublin in the 1950s. As it was in A Death in Summer, the story is horribly unpleasant, and Quirke’s behavior is awfully irresponsible and self-destructive. Having just completed a long stint...
It was Reading Matters that took me to this book. The author is the much admired Irish writer John Banville, writing mysteries under the pen name Benjamin Black. I have read one of John Banville’s books. The mystery solving characters of his books are a medical pathologist named Dr. Quirke and a policeman Detective Inspector Hackett. In this one Dr. Quirke begins an affair with the wife of...
After I read James Woods’ review, I knew I wanted to read this book. Then in Wikipedia I learned that Muammar Quaddafi had overturned the government of Libya in 1969 and was both an authoritarian dictator and responsible for improving the status of women there significantly. It’s useful to read James Woods’ New Yorker review to learn about the author. The narrator Khaled is the...
It was Dorothy’s recommendation that took me to this unusual little book. Asya and her husband Manu are immigrants from different countries who met in college and live in an unnamed big city. Asya describes their lives over the course of several months as Manu goes off to his job every day and Asya goes to the park to make a documentary. They are in that time of life depicted by the TV show...
When I read a Sally Rooney novel, I am happy to spend time in her world, but at the end, I’m quite happy to return to my own. The characters in each of her books are in very different situations, but her focus is always a close examination of interpersonal relations. In this one the age of the main characters presents issues. Brothers Peter, 32, a successful barrister, and Ivan, 22, a chess...
I was happy to see Ron Charles’ enthusiasm for Louise Erdrich’s latest book and it turns out that I share it. This one begins in 2008 in North Dakota’s Red River Valley where the economy centers on sugar beets and gives brief updates to the present time. The last book I read of hers, The Beet Queen, written in 1986, begins in 1932, and has a character Wallace who introduces...
It was great to listen to this narrative about researching family history, written by someone who has written several other books. She had heard family talk about the four sisters who were cousins of her grandmother; their names were Selma, Malvina, Marcella, and Ruth. Three of them and their older brother were born around the turn of the century in Romania while Ruth was born in the US. The...
In 1995 Bill Bryson wrote Notes from a Small Island about his wander through the UK. I believe I read it, though I don’t remember it. This was written 20 years later, describing visits throughout the island with a big dollop of grumpiness on display. The word “stupid” makes too many appearances in this text. My favorite book of his, In a Sunburned Country, is quite funny, and is...
This is my fourth Louise Erdrich book. Her first book was written in 1982; this one in 1986. The action occurs mostly in a small town in North Dakota beginning in 1932 where Mary, an eleven-year-old child, is deposited from the box car she and her fourteen-year-old brother were riding after their mother abandoned them. Karl jumped back in the boxcar after leaving Mary there. Their Aunt Fritzie...
This is the fourth in the Jackson Brodie series by the British author Kate Atkinson that I have read, along with some of her other books. In writing about her first book centering the private detective Jackson Brodie, I wrote, “Along with the idiosyncratic characters are the truly evil ones and enough unpleasantness to make me uneasy. I considered just skipping to the end, but the plot was...