This summer I asked Mariflo if Another Brooklyn is as good as it sounds and she said “it is that good.” And, oh boy, she is right. The narrator August tells the story of her early childhood in Tennessee and being taken with her younger brother to Brooklyn by their father. During their early years they spent their time looking at Brooklyn of the 1970s through the window while their...
Once again it was Tony's Book World that moved me to listen to this book by his review of Rose Tremain's most recent book The Gustav Sonata. I was in the market for an audiobook and after reading the comments on his review, settled on this one. The varying opinions about Rose Tremain's books by three of my most revered bloggers (ANZ LitLovers, Reading Matters Blog, and Tony) was...
I read this book in 2007 and wrote only two sentences in my blog about it at the time. I have now gone back to it, partly because once I read Lila, I realized how little I retained. The scope of the story is ambitious: John Ames is 76 in the mid 1950s. He brings to life his grandfather, a firebrand who was a founder of their aboliitionist town in Iowa. In the mid-1850s Iowans...
Peter Ho Davies writes four takes on the experience of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the US. First comes the horrific stories of Chinese people driven to journey to the Golden Mountain (the US) to escape their unspeakable lives in China. Much was familiar from previous reading I have done: daughters being sold into prostitution, the humiliation of men operating laundries...
Having loved Rules of Civility, I was excited at the prospect of another Amor Towles book. While this one provided many hours of happy listening, it suffers in comparison to his first book. It is the story of an aristocrat confined for life by the Bolsheviks in the Metropol, the finest hotel in Moscow, beginning in the 1922. Count Rostov is erudite, a perfect gentleman, and a kind person, that...
Mr. Booklog and I listened to this audiobook on our trip to Iowa and back to Virginia a week later. Because it is an amazing story recounted flawlessly, we drove happily along the tiresome interstates. In 1974 the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst (best known to the world through the fictional Citizen Kane) was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley and held in a closet by...
Thanks to Tony's Book World I listened to this novel and so again am impressed by Tony's ability to find and write about wonderful books. Though I saw and loved the movie Last Orders, I was unaware of the author Graham Swift though he won the 1996 Booker Prize for that book. This novella was published just this spring. Swift also wrote Waterland. Mothering Sunday was...
This will be one of the top ten books for me for 2016 for sure. I was impressed by the author's work The Jane Austen Book Club in 2009 and was excited to hear that Jen and Brooke would have lunch with her before the Luther College convocation. And so I was motivated to listen to this one. What a pleasure it was all the way through. As the NYT review says, it would be preferable to review it...
Claire Hoffman grew up in Fairfield, Iowa, not on a farm, but in the Transcendental Meditation world created by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the defunct Parsons College campus. Maharishi is credited with bringing meditation to the attention of the West, jump-started by the interest of the Beatles. Their time visiting him in India was limited, apparently by Maharishi's untoward interest in Mia...
What a pleasure to listen to Edith Wharton spin the tale of Undine Sprague, a more ambitious woman you will never read about. She is blind to the needs of others when those needs conflict with her desires of the moment. Those desires always involve money and any practical considerations of where it comes from are of no concern to Undine. Though she has set-backs and must spend months...