It's hard to imagine that a polio convalescent home for children in Western Australia was really named The Golden Age, but in fact it did exist from 1949 to 1959. Otherwise, the author says, this is a work of fiction. The grim factor of this book is high at the outset. A Hungarian family with one son escaped the Holocaust while their relatives perished; they hoped to emigrate to a location...
What a pleasure to listen to Edith Wharton spin the tale of Undine Sprague, a more ambitious woman you will never read about. She is blind to the needs of others when those needs conflict with her desires of the moment. Those desires always involve money and any practical considerations of where it comes from are of no concern to Undine. Though she has set-backs and must spend months...
I do not remember where I saw a reference to this 2009 book and I don’t know the Irish author, but her work is amazing on several counts. First the perfect descriptions, like this one of early summer on a London street in the 1930s: Bella moved to the front window. Down on the street early summer was showing: more people than usual, walking at a more leisurely pace, in paler clothes made of...
I’m sad to say this is another fine book that I’m confident that no one I know will read. I bought it through Amazon because the author recently won the Stella Prize ($50,000 prize open to Australian women writers) for another of her books. This 2004 book struck me as being a good way to begin to read her work and that turned out to be a fortuitous decision. This was a terrific book...
Once again Nina Stibbe has made me a happy listener. This is her third book, this one about Lizzie, now 15, getting a job working in a nursing home in the 1970s. (She was 10 when she tried to find a husband for her mother in Man at the Helm.) She applied for the job in order to be able to buy her preferred kind of shampoo and in her interview convinced the woman who hired her (always called...
It is fitting to begin with a picture of my beautiful iPod, a birthday present years ago from my children which made me one of the cool people at the gym. It was my first Apple product and I loved it dearly. Reading this book prompted me to find it, though I haven't used it in years and it's been replaced by iPhones. t am trying not to use all my superlatives at the outset of this book...
Often a non-fiction audiobook doesn't work well when the factual material requires slow reading and some repetition. In this case the material is presented through lively stories, most often about individual people. Their experiences illuminate the dizzying changes that have come to China. The author began reporting on China for the Chicago Tribune in 2005, and from 2008 to 2013 wrote...
Having loved a previous book of short stories by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, I read this one. I found the previous collection to be fantastical, like Kafka, but more whimsical and occasionally quite sweet. While also fantastical, this one is darker in tone and more disturbing. In the title story the bus driver's ideology motivates him not to open the door to bus riders who arrive...
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Jefferson-Madison has it. Gilliam Mears, The Mint Lawn. Review by Reading Matters, available at Alderman. Careful, He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliott. Australian novel from 1963, made into a movie, available at Alderman. The Pages by Murray Bail, Tony's review. Available at Clemons. The Warmth of Other Suns by Elizabeth Wilkerson. Pam from the pool...
My friend Molly recommended a book by Alice Hoffman she was reading and as a result I read this one, based on NYT reviews and a quick look in the library at several choices. Though I've read some books characterized by magical realism (Murray Bail's Eucalyptus comes to mind), this one leans heavily toward the magical rather than the realism side. Hoffman is a good storyteller and...