This book is a book about the friendship of four Black women whose long-time connections endured their times of living on opposite coasts and their very different economic situations. I don’t have much hope that I can write about it in a way that does it justice, but I will write to remember moments that moved me. Desiree and her sister Danielle were raised by their grandfather, Desiree...
I particularly liked Pip Williams’ first book, The Dictionary of Lost Words, a successful combination of a fictional story with the backdrop of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. It has some historical figures and is set late in the 19th century through the early 20th. This one is a fictional story set during World War I, with a focus on twin sisters, Peggy and Maude, who work...
The recommendation to read a book by Wright Morris came from Laura. He was born the day after my mother, on January 6, 1910 and lived ten years longer than she did. I hadn’t heard of him, although he was a prolific writer and won two National Book Awards. Several of his books are available on Kindle which tells you modern readers are still interested. This book is set in Nebraska where he...
For a variety of reasons as I read this book, I often felt off center or confused by it. One aspect was quite clear and repeated in a variety of ways. The central theme of how badly one person in a relationship might be treated was illustrated in two examples. The first was Ruth’s art teacher from college days. Moser says that he’d forgiven his mother for the cruelty he experienced at...
The inspiration for this fictional book is a woman named Margaret Fishback, who was the highest-paid female advertising copywriter during the 1930s based on her work for R.H. Macy’s. She was a published poet and a feminist. The author learned of her from Angela McClendon Ossar, her high school friend who became the archivist for Fishback’s papers when they were donated to the...
I have now finished a book that will be on my “favorites for the year” list and to my surprise it is a book of short stories. I will begin with a quote from Kim’s Reading Matters that convinced me to read it. I found what she said to be exactly what I loved about it: It’s a deliciously entertaining book and reading one or two 10-page stories in bed every night proved a...
Having appreciated Intimacies by this author, I was eager to read this new one, published in April. And I loved it. First, because it threw me off balance and then with a closer look, it was the artistry that pleased me. It’s appropriately set in the world of theatre as it examines how we live our lives as the roles we inhabit, sometimes for our whole lives, sometimes for shorter periods...
It was Tony’s enthusiasm for it that encouraged me to read this book by an author I haven’t read in decades. And I’m so glad I did as it grew on me as I read. I kept wondering why I found such a low key book so engaging. We learn at the outset the narrator is a prep school administrator with limited skill in social interactions, according to the headmistress. Gail works hard to...
This is my second book by Claire Messud and it is chock full of bits I want to remember. Essentially it is a fictionalized multi-generational family history, made more interesting by the world events that moved family members around the globe. First we have Gaston and his wife Lucienne, French people who lived in Algeria (pieds-noirs) who were displaced in 1940 by the war, Gaston to Salonica...
My initial reaction before I began reading this was concern about reading a book about writing a book, especially one that bills itself as a black comedy. Some of the cheap shots did make me uncomfortable. Ultimately it’s much more complicated than that, taking comedic aim at the publishing world, academia, the television industry, while exploring aspects of dealing with racial identity...