This was the perfect book for me to read at this time. I noticed it when it came out in 2024 and was a “best book” in The Washington Post that year. It tells the gripping story of Lila, a 29-year-old book editor living in Brooklyn. She had lived with her divorced mother in Kolkata until she was 16 when her father came from the US and took her there to live. She loved her life as an...
George Saunders is a brilliant writer. Lincoln in the Bardo and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain are wildly different from each other but both are tours de force. This new novel is a tough one and my expectations were lowered by Dwight Garner’s take in the NYT. Saunders very effectively used Bardo dwellers, those who have died, but are not settled into their final rest in Lincoln in the Bardo...
Another book by the amazing James McBride (my fourth). I had intended to choose a more light-hearted book, but I found myself reading a war story with lots of death and betrayal. But it was a James McBride book, so it had kindness and yes, a miracle too. His Acknowledgements tell us that when he was nine McBride heard stories from his stepfather and his brothers about their times during World War...
Having loved Sandwich by this author, I was eager to read this. While this one had more distressing matters at its core, it was an appealing read. The narrator is Rocky writing about herself, her husband, her two grown children, and her 90-something father who lives with her. For me the wreck referred in the title was painful because it was a car-train wreck that ended the life of a contemporary...
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...