Sue in Sweden mentioned hearing Linn Ullmann speak in a library and recommended her books. Three sisters — three mothers, same father — came together each summer with their father and his wife on an island called Hammarso off the east coast of Sweden. These gatherings came to an end after a tragic event caused by teenage cruelty that occurred when the youngest sister was 5 years old...
I was moved to read this after seeing KevinfromCanada‘s post after his third reading of this prize winning book of fiction (it won the Pulitzer and the Canadian Governor-General’s Award and was short-listed for the Booker in 1993). It is the story of a 20th century woman, born in 1905 who died in the 1990s. Though Daisy’s life was that of an ordinary woman, it had its...
Sometime before 2006 I read Plainsong by Kent Haruf and loved it. (I know it was before 2006 because I read it in the pre-blog life.) My very vague memory is that it was one of those books that you fall into, that slows down your breathing and overtakes your monkey brain. And I remember the old, lovable twin-like farmer brothers who took in the pregnant teenager. So I fully expected...
Set in Montreal at the end of World War II, this book paints a picture of love and support within a Jewish family coping with loss. The story is a complicated one and begins with the wedding of a bride who had just arrived from the horrors of World War II with a brief stopover in Palestine. She is an imposter in that she took the identity card of a dead woman in order to get out of Europe. Her...
This is the second book I've read this month told by a now-grown narrator about an event that occurred in his teenage years. Though I like the device and found both books to be excellent, I'm ready for a change: my next book will not involve teenage boys drinking beer. Both books are set in the upper midwest, one in Minnesota, this one on a reservation in North Dakota in 1988. The...
Having loved Montana, 1948 so much last year, I decided to start the year with another Larry Watson book. This one is on Tony's top ten list for 2012. It is set in the southern region of Minnesota, not far from where I am visiting at the moment, in the senior year of high school for the narrator Matthew in 1963, the very year I graduated. Matthew attached himself to the...
The main character in the police procedurals I have enjoyed in the past typically have certain characteristics: a tendency to drink too much, problems being a good husband, competence (unlike his fellow policemen), and the need to lose a bit of weight. Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist specializing in bones who teaches at a university in Norfolk on the eastern coast of...
What a strange idea to recount Mary's take on the life and death of her son Jesus. She tells the story as an old woman near death, wishing to tell the truth, struggling against her "minders" who want to shape the story. In Toibin's telling she is skeptical of his ideas and wholly dismissive of those who see him as the son of God: "He was indeed the Son of...
The enthusiasm of KevinfromCanada and Reading Matters led me to The Light of Amsterdam. The three stories we hear are about individuals from Belfast who independently go to Amsterdam for a weekend and intersect very little. Karen is a single mother in her early 40s whose defining moment was her abandonment when she was pregnant by her boyfriend. She devoted her life to filling her...
Stephen Newman grew up in Los Angeles, son of a Polish immigrant father and Cuban immigrant mother. His father worked in a fur storage operation and an important moment in Stephen's life is his father's whack, administered as Stephen was dancing around in Marilyn Monroe's mink stole, a story referred to more than once by the adult Stephen. We hear nothing of his college years...