I have previously read two books by the Irish writer David Park and think frequently of one of them, Travelling in a Strange Land. Though I don’t remember where I read about this one, I knew it was about an American CIA operative in Vietnam at the very end of the war and some consequent events 40 years later. Mike describes himself as a “prairie boy” whose family was mainstream...
Ah yes, another delightful book by the author of The President’s Hat, Vintage 1954, and The Red Notebook. This one connects the historical figure, Guillaume le Gentil, Louis XV’s astronomer, to a fictional Parisian real estate agent in 2012. Before I began the book, I read Wikipedia’s entry about the astronomer and wonder if it is a spoiler to tell the true story of his life. If...
Reading this book made me feel as though I were experiencing the fog of war, or perhaps the fog of an aging brain. That was especially the case when the focus was on the character who barely survived malaria, so I like to think that feeling was the result of skillful writing. This is my fifth Gail Jones book. Though the setting of the book was Salonika (now Thessaloniki) during World War I in a...
I listened to this one after I recommended a friend read Clare Pooley’s Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting and discovered this one was available through our library. It’s been a fine audiobook for me. An elderly eccentric artist in London named Julian writes about himself in a notebook and leaves it in a cafe, inviting others to write about themselves and to get to know their...
This is my fourth Graham Greene book; I am enthusiastic about two and not-so-much about two. This falls into the not-so-much category. It was written in 1955 and set at the end of the era of French colonial control of Vietnam as told by a cynical British reporter. Thomas Fowler has lived in Saigon for some years, happy to be away from his wife in Britain who refuses him a divorce. He lives with...
I became a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri in 2008 when I read Unaccustomed Earth and Interpreter of Maladies. Sometime later she learned Italian and has translated at least one book from Italian to English and writes in Italian which was the case for this book of short stories. I believe my reservations about Ties, the book she translated, were not the result of shortcomings of the translation. I always...
This year I read 47 books; six were non-fiction and more than half (26) were audiobooks. Of the “print” books, most were on kindle, which is much easier for me to read than paper books. Three of these books had the pandemic as an important backdrop and each of them spoke of it in ways that I connected to. A good year of reading. Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman. I have listened to...
Jane Gardem turns up on my radar now and again for her trilogy that begins with Old Filth. “Filth” is the acronym for Failed in London, Try Hong Kong and the trilogy is a much respected work with the ending of the British Empire as the backdrop. One day I will read it, but at the moment, I am not up for reading about colonial privilege. This coming-of-age novel is set in 1946 in...
Once again James McBride has brought me a lot of joy and continued to win my admiration for his work. This one is set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania and begins in 1972 when a skeleton was discovered in a well. Before much investigation begins, Hurricane Agnes hits and the skeleton and any other evidence is washed to the sea. The author turns then to Chicken Hill in Pottstown in the 1920s and 1930s...
I have read almost all of Nina Stibbe’s books. This one is non-fiction, like her first, Love, Nina, about moving to London to be a nanny for the two sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers, founder and former editor of The London Review of Books, and Stephen Frears, filmmaker (My Beautiful Laundrette and Philomena). That book is a compilation of her letters to her sister Vic; this one is in the form of a...