This year I read 47 books; six were non-fiction and more than half (26) were audiobooks. Of the “print” books, most were on kindle, which is much easier for me to read than paper books. Three of these books had the pandemic as an important backdrop and each of them spoke of it in ways that I connected to. A good year of reading. Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman. I have listened to...
Jane Gardem turns up on my radar now and again for her trilogy that begins with Old Filth. “Filth” is the acronym for Failed in London, Try Hong Kong and the trilogy is a much respected work with the ending of the British Empire as the backdrop. One day I will read it, but at the moment, I am not up for reading about colonial privilege. This coming-of-age novel is set in 1946 in...
Once again James McBride has brought me a lot of joy and continued to win my admiration for his work. This one is set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania and begins in 1972 when a skeleton was discovered in a well. Before much investigation begins, Hurricane Agnes hits and the skeleton and any other evidence is washed to the sea. The author turns then to Chicken Hill in Pottstown in the 1920s and 1930s...
I have read almost all of Nina Stibbe’s books. This one is non-fiction, like her first, Love, Nina, about moving to London to be a nanny for the two sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers, founder and former editor of The London Review of Books, and Stephen Frears, filmmaker (My Beautiful Laundrette and Philomena). That book is a compilation of her letters to her sister Vic; this one is in the form of a...
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...
I listened to Zadie Smith read her fictional work about squabbles and disagreements in the Nineteenth Century literary world among authors William Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, George Cruikshank, and William Makepeace Thackery. The work also turns to the true story of a man who claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a baronetcy. Sir Roger was lost at sea in 1854; his mother posted ads in...
It was Ron Charles’ review in The Washington Post that induced me to read this 645-page book, and it was the memory of his enthusiasm that kept me at it when I nearly gave it up after two grim sections, one featuring a teenage girl and the other her pre-teen brother. Then came a section describing a horror that was averted by the entrance of a woman speaking about black dogs barking outside...
It’s a little hard to imagine, but this is a novel in verse written by a married couple that is part Melville biography and pandemic memoir, with doses of Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, “The Biographer” (of Melville) and others obsessed with him thrown in. Oh yes, and Hawthorne who was a friend of Melville’s. The narrator is working on a biography of Melville as her...
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...
Few books I read are what I think of as “historical novels,” that is, novels whose placement in the past is a key element of the work. The books I’ve read by Paulette Jiles do fall into that category; the three I’ve read do not let you forget they are set in Texas in the period shortly after the Civil War. I have admired and enjoyed the three, including this one. The main...