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...
This is the second of Laura Lippman’s books I’ve written about, and like Lady in the Lake it has many of the characteristics of the Tess Monaghan detective series I’ve listened to, as well as qualities that set it apart. Tess even makes an appearance in this one, but finds the location so creepy she won’t take the job. The main character is a successful author who has...
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...
This is my third novel by Urrea and it has opened a new dimension of this author for me. One of his previous books, The House of Broken Angels, was an affectionate portrait of an extended Mexican-American family in San Diego; I’ve read that one of the angels was based on Urrea himself. This book centers on the experience of a woman who grew up in the New York area and dispensed coffee and...
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...
The subtitle, The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them gets all the elements of the book into the title, though perhaps the declaration is a tiny bit overdrawn. I suspect my questions are unanswerable: what caused this fever to take hold so strongly in disparate parts of the U.S. in the mid-1920s? Is this going to continue to happen? Egan centers the...
Now I’ve read four books by Jennifer Johnston and continue to be impressed by her work. This one was shortlisted for the Booker prize. She is not a well-known writer outside Ireland and without Reading Matters I would not have known about her. In the first book I read by her, The Gingerbread Woman, the main character declares to a visitor that there will be no talk of “the...
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...
I listened to this book having recently read Künstlers in Paradise that I liked so much. This one was about an interesting family dynamic. I will be restrained about plot revelations because those revelations were my favorite part of the book. Fin was so-named because after his birth, his father wandered into a theatre showing a French film that was just ending. He was clear that this son would...
Lynne Olson has found another brave and impressive woman to write about. I was enthusiastic about Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, about a resistance warrior in World War II, as well as Citizens of London. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, born in 1913, became an Egyptologist for the Louvre in the mid-1930s. She was a rare, perhaps unique, female figure in digs and was unusual in making good...