It has taken me weeks to listen to this 66-hour audiobook and it’s been a grueling, but fascinating undertaking. This three-volume work about Robert Moses, written in the 1970s, is about an extremely unusual figure, a man who for nearly 40 years was a powerful figure in New York City and State politics who was never elected to any office. It is about how he amassed power, what he did with...
I read this NYT best seller because it was mentioned by a young woman I follow on Twitter who had been a reporter for our newspaper. Though I don’t know her, I empathize with all the former reporters and mourn their loss. And I enjoy seeing her excitement about Mizzou sports. All this to say this is not my usual source for books to read. It has been, nevertheless, the perfect book for the...
In the series called “Writers on Writers” Australian Geraldine Brooks wrote about Tim Winton; a writer I greatly admire wrote about one of my very favorites. What a treat. To prepare for the memorable trip we made to Australia in 2009 I read some of the books on Reading Matters’ list of 10 of her favorite novels from Australia. I recall vividly how much I loved the ones I read...
First, the numbers: this is my seventh Elizabeth Strout book and my fourth pandemic book (Intimations by Zadie Smith, Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich). In March of 2020 Lucy Barton, the subject of four of Strout’s books, is told by her ex-husband William to pack to leave New York City in a few days’ time. She agreed, assuming she would...
It was a tweet by Nancy Pearl that drew my attention to this 1973 novel. For me it was an entertaining cowboy story set in Russia with all the stock characters, including a large herd of cattle. It is told from the point of view of a young cowboy, Levi, named for the jeans. The story begins as the cowboys and their herd arrive in Vladivostok on their way to deliver the herd to a town hundreds of...
In the pre-blog days I read and loved Evidence of Things Unseen by Wiggins, a book set in East Tennessee. I think it’s worthy of a second reading, but meanwhile I read her 2022 book. It took me a long time to take in this 544-page book with its layers of stories and many important characters. It was breathtaking. First we meet Rocky whose father had been a robber baron, leaving Rocky and...
I had read this book in a different century, but was moved to listen to it again because of a chat with friends about politics in Israel. Recently Netanyahu put together a coalition to regain power by including an ultra orthodox party that is truly radical. The Shas and the Haredi parties demand increased funding for their schools with no oversight that would insure that math, sciences, and...
Having loved Urrea’s book The House of the Broken Angels, I was moved to listen to this audiobook, a good choice. It is the tale of three girls recently graduated from high school in a small town in Sinaloa, who along with their gay friend Tacho, decide to travel north to the United States to recruit seven men to to return to Mexico to repopulate their town and save it from threatening...
I have listened to some of Laura Lippman’s series of detective stories set in Baltimore featuring Tess Monaghan, but do not write about them here. This book is set in Baltimore and though it has some features of that detective series, its strength comes from other sources. The protagonist is Madeline Schwartz, a super efficient late-thirties Jewish matron in the mid-sixties. She tells us of...
I loved Ruth Ozeki’s previous book, A Tale for the Time Being for several reasons, one of which was that it had ideas “complicated enough to make my head hurt.” Thinking about this one is best approached by talking about its various elements. But first, the framing story: in an unnamed city in the U.S. Annabelle married the beloved Kenji Oh, a Korean-Japanese musician. When...