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 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...
Thanks to Dorothy for loaning me this 1997 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I was not conscious of either the book or author. We meet Martin as a young teenager working in his father’s cigar store in late 19th century New York. He is a bright fellow, focused on attracting customers, and begins by making a connection with a nearby hotel where at age 14 he begins work as a bellboy...
After a long spell of sickness left me with no bandwidth for reading, I read this one first. What a fortuitous choice! This is definitely one for the list of favorites for the year. The book opens with the narrator telling the story of being recruited to help with auditions for her small town’s production of Our Town when she was in high school. Her observation of the many auditions left...
I came to this book by way of a tweet someone posted asking for poetic, beautiful slim novels. Those lists are a treat and I plan to go back to this one for more suggestions. I confess I am certain I failed to catch the nuances of what the author wanted to tell us about these characters. Nevertheless, it was a lovely and fun trip. The book opens with the news that Nellie left Frank, taking their...
I have read books written in the voice of teenage boys (with lots of beer involved), but I don’t recall one in the voice of a 10-year old boy. This is set in late 1960s Ireland in a working class neighborhood that is being built up with new housing which means there are drain pipes to crawl through, and that fields available for soccer that are getting smaller. The author won the Booker...
Dorothy mentioned this book of short stories written by her daughter’s fellow student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I find it difficult to write about short stories to balance what I want to remember and what will reflect the collection. The characters are Chinese people in a variety of geographic locations—from Houston to Xi’an, to New York. Some have lived in the U.S. for...
I was loaned this book by Will who said there are references to Buddhism in it. I have since learned that Quan Barry is a poet and novelist and teaches at the University of Wisconsin. She was born in Vietnam and grew up in the US. Set in Mongolia in the present, the story is told by Chuluun, a young Buddhist monk who, with his twin brother Mun, entered the monastery when they were eight years old...
It was Dorothy’s mention of this book that drew me to it. The characters are familiar: Hera tells the story of the struggles Penelope had while Odysseus was making his 10-year-long trek back from the Trojan War. As if holding off the suitors who wanted to occupy his throne weren’t enough, Penelope had to cope with Elektra and Orestes showing up looking for their mother Clytemnestra...
I don’t remember where I read about this novella, but it filled the goal set for this New Directions series: “the pleasure of reading a great book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” Well, perhaps not “great” and for me it’s one that “could” be read in an afternoon. The seventeen-year old Marguerite schools us in what she learned from her Maman...