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...
It was Kim’s recommendation in Reading Matters that took me to this book set in the mid-1980s in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia north of Perth. The town of Geraldton that is mentioned in Tim Winton’s great work Cloudstreet is nearby. The narrator is Rowen, the younger son of wheat farmer Bryce and his wife Justine. Rowen left the farm as soon as he could and as the story begins...
The Australian writer of this book describes a carefully planned trip a woman takes with her mother in Japan. It is narrated by the daughter who tells in precise terms what she planned for the trip and how it unfolds. The mother grew up in Hong Kong and while Australia is never mentioned by name, that is where the mother raised the narrator and her sister. The father is not mentioned and in fact...
I have listened to this one-hour audiobook three times now and have grown to love it more each time. It is a sad story with warm loving characters. I will begin with a SPOILER ALERT; after all, I am writing to revisit what I loved about the book and it’s hard to go far without revelations in this case. It is written from the point of view of a child and begins with her being driven to stay...
It was my enjoyment of Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that took me to this 2014 book of hers which has been made into a movie. It’s a little tough to imagine that a cranky literary snob who owns a failing bookstore could be made a sympathetic character. Throw in the tragic death of his wife, the theft of a rare book, and an abandoned baby on his doorstep, and things can...