In July I read two books by Alice McDermott and now with this audiobook perhaps this little Alice McDermott festival will end for a time. After all, this is the sixth of her books I’ve read. I think this is my favorite, though I sure did love Someone. I knew I needed to read this one after learning that three people I know had read it. This story comes in the form of letters, the main one...
What a pleasure was this 25-hour audiobook about Franklin. Recently when I watched a series with Michael Douglas playing Franklin about his time in Paris, I realized how little I knew about Franklin. And while I hope I will not be quizzed on facts about Franklin’s life, I have loved being impressed with the accomplishments of that amazing man. For example, though higher education was not...
I came across this Australian book on Reading Matters, one of my favorite sources for Australian literature. The author lives in Western Australia, in Perth, and is a journalist who has written two non-fiction books, as well as two novels. Nessa tells us her story: she spends lots of time and money covering the scars on her face each morning but we don’t learn what happened until well into...
Thanks to a recommendation by Laura, I listened to this audiobook and learned about work done by American women to help the French in a rural area in the north of France as World War I was coming to an end. Anne Tracy Morgan, daughter of J.P., funded the work to provide basic needs to the populace around Blérancourt, which is not far from the border with Belgium. The novel comes in two stories...
Fredericka Mandelbaum arrived in the US in 1850 from Germany. She and her husband had been peddlers there and continued that work in New York. She became a fence and before long was very successful, ultimately becoming a true organized crime boss. Millions of dollars in jewels, gold, cash, and silk material passed through her shop. Her success came from her meticulous work in choosing and...
Besides being an award-winning author, Alice McDermott has been active in teaching creative writing in many settings. This book is subtitled “Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction.” Though I don’t aspire to write, as a reader, I have appreciated authors’ reflections on what makes fiction work. I loved George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, a 400-page...
As I was reading a book by Alice McDermott about writing fiction, it occurred to me that it was time for me to read her book that won the National Book Award. And how glad I am that I did. There is nothing like that feeling of falling into a masterpiece of writing from the first moment. SPOILER ALERT! I cannot write about this book without giving a revelatory summary first. In my defense when you...
This is a pleasing, fun book that has an interesting history. According to the NYT, sales of it began to pick up well after it was published in May 2022. For the Christmas season buying of 2023 more people were asking for “the book with the octopus.” It seems that enthusiastic word-of-mouth and bookseller recommendations changed the trajectory of the sales. The characters include an...
This is the second in the Australian series “Writers on Writers” that I have read. The first was about Tim Winton; this one is about Kim Scott, another favorite of mine. I did not recognize the name Tony Birch, though it turns out I read an essay of his in Anita Heiss’s collection Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. In 2018 Kim Scott’s book That Deadman Dance was one of my...
One of Michael Lewis’s early books is Moneyball, about efforts to find more accurate ways to predict how well an individual baseball player or baseball team will perform. The subject of this book is the work of two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, that was the background of those efforts to make more accurate judgments and to improve decision-making. The two...