This is one for the list of favorites this year. The story unfolds in two voices, Leah and Jean, her stepmother. Jean was married to Leah’s father for nine years, until Leah turned ten. This is the story of the complicated Jean, told from her viewpoint and from what the grown Leah remembered of Jean and what she observed when they saw each other one more time. It begins with Leah recounting...
Having read Anne Youngson’s book Meet Me at the Museum, I looked to this one for a kindly, gently-told tale. And it filled that bill admirably. As in the case with the Museum book, the characters are mature (not elderly) adults who make a change in their lives or have an unexpected change come their way. In this case a 50-something woman who has worked successfully in the corporate world...
I hesitated to read this, wondering if it would be too grim. Now I am grateful to have overcome that worry as it was so full of life, so complex, and so unexpected in many ways. It is set in Northern Ireland just outside Belfast in 1975, during the Troubles. This is the story of Cushla, who is Catholic and teaches in a school with both Catholic and Protestant children. Her brother runs the family...
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...