My library copy of this 200-page book is bristling with post-it notes as there's so much I want to remember about it. I've meant to read something by Jan Morris for a long time, in particular her book about Venice, written in 1960. I don't remember what I saw that made me light on this one, but I'm so glad I did. Jan Morris was first in Trieste as a soldier in 1946...
American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag. The NYT review makes it sound irresistible. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild. A Berkeley sociologist spent 5 years listening to people in Louisiana talk about their views. Vox interview here. Mr. Monkey by Francine Prose Floating Gardens by Emma Ashmere. Reviewed by ANZ LitLovers. Miss...
Commonwealth begins with a christening party crashed by a man who brought a large bottle of gin because he didn't have a present. This momentous party ended marriages and a priest's career. In the next chapter the father of the christened baby is being attended as he has chemo by Franny, the woman that baby became. The lives of the four children of the gin-bearing man (Bert Cousins)...
Having loved Rules of Civility, I was excited at the prospect of another Amor Towles book. While this one provided many hours of happy listening, it suffers in comparison to his first book. It is the story of an aristocrat confined for life by the Bolsheviks in the Metropol, the finest hotel in Moscow, beginning in the 1922. Count Rostov is erudite, a perfect gentleman, and a kind person, that...
Maggie O’Farrell’s book was so intense and had so many unforgettable moments that I had to take little breaks to recover. The story is told from multiple points of view so that various characters have their moment to present themselves (or be presented). The chapters may be long or short and the time varies from the mid-80s to 2016, but I didn’t have a problem adding up all the...
Mr. Booklog and I listened to this audiobook on our trip to Iowa and back to Virginia a week later. Because it is an amazing story recounted flawlessly, we drove happily along the tiresome interstates. In 1974 the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst (best known to the world through the fictional Citizen Kane) was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley and held in a closet by...
Having read a fair amount of Australian literature, I assume I know the language and understand many esoteric references. This 1991 book reminded me that I have much to learn. Though I missed much, still, it was well worth the effort. The author died this year, though she was only 51. She wrote three novels and four collections of short stories, and was well respected. I recall reading about her...
Thanks to Tony's Book World I listened to this novel and so again am impressed by Tony's ability to find and write about wonderful books. Though I saw and loved the movie Last Orders, I was unaware of the author Graham Swift though he won the 1996 Booker Prize for that book. This novella was published just this spring. Swift also wrote Waterland. Mothering Sunday was...
This will be one of the top ten books for me for 2016 for sure. I was impressed by the author's work The Jane Austen Book Club in 2009 and was excited to hear that Jen and Brooke would have lunch with her before the Luther College convocation. And so I was motivated to listen to this one. What a pleasure it was all the way through. As the NYT review says, it would be preferable to review it...
Claire Hoffman grew up in Fairfield, Iowa, not on a farm, but in the Transcendental Meditation world created by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the defunct Parsons College campus. Maharishi is credited with bringing meditation to the attention of the West, jump-started by the interest of the Beatles. Their time visiting him in India was limited, apparently by Maharishi's untoward interest in Mia...