When Reading Matters listed the finalists in the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award, this book went on my list to read and it moved to the top of the list when it won the award. It tells the story of three hard-living housemates in Belfast just as they are turning thirty. It manages to be both funny and sad, as the women choose drug and alcohol-filled nights and messy love affairs over...
After I read Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness, I learned from Cathy that she had read the author’s first novel and was enthusiastic. Thanks, Cathy, I am so happy to have read this. At the outset I wondered how a novel set in 2008 in Detroit, a city that had been in economic decline beginning in the 1950s could possibly bring me joy. The focus is the Turner family whose life on Yarrow...
It was a review in the NYT of a recent book by this author that took me to this one. I hadn’t heard of this author before and know little about her, but I did read that her mother is Korean and that her French father left Korea before she was born. This book is a novella set in South Korea very near the border with North Korea in a beach town that is almost empty in the winter. The unnamed...
It’s hard to believe Elizabeth Strout is still writing books that capture us and take us into a world she has created. And this one is a world we haven’t been to before: no one in Olive Kitteridge’s orbit appears in this book. Olive herself made a very brief appearance when Artie, the main character, recalled reading a book about a grumpy old woman from Maine named Olive...
It was in Reading Matters’ post listing the finalists for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award that drew my attention to this book. The story is set in a small Donegal fishing village and begins with the recovery of a baby who came floating in from the sea in a barrel in 1973. The baby was quickly taken in with the minimum of legal formality by a man named Ambrose (my father’s...
The enterprise the title of this book refers to is the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 launched by Thomas Jefferson looking for a waterway passage to the northwest coast. Well, that didn’t work out, but they did make it to the West Coast, a miraculous feat, given the challenges of the terrain. Jefferson wanted reports of the plants and animals they encountered and Lewis was...
In 1994 when she was seven years old, the author arrived in this country with her mother to join her father who had arrived two years earlier. They knew no English and their visitor visas would soon expire. This book describes the horror of the five years they spent in New York City, barely surviving until her mother took the initiative to get them to Canada where they could receive the support...
This short audiobook grew out of a multi-part podcast by Freakonomics Radio Podcast host, Stephen Dubner. He became enamored of The Messiah by George Frideric Handel at the time of the pandemic. He put the podcasts together with additional material for this audiobook. My own connection to The Messiah occurred when I was very young. Music was important for all my family members, in particular...
I began listening to this book of Zadie Smith’s essays in January, but gave it up when I was worried there was too much about Trump in it. I picked it up again in late April just when my anxiety over Mr. Booklog’s move to an assisted living facility was at its height. It turns out that her voice, whatever was on her mind, was preferable to what was rattling around in my head. Now Mr...
This was the perfect book for me to read at this time. I noticed it when it came out in 2024 and was a “best book” in The Washington Post that year. It tells the gripping story of Lila, a 29-year-old book editor living in Brooklyn. She had lived with her divorced mother in Kolkata until she was 16 when her father came from the US and took her there to live. She loved her life as an...