It was Ron Charles’ writing about Zadie Smith’s play based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales that moved me to read this. It was bold of me to take this on; I have a high school level memory of The Canterbury Tales (It’s not in modern English, it was written by Chaucer, it’s racy). But I love Zadie Smith and that turns out to be reason...
This silly little book was published in 1940 and is told in the voice of Norman Huntley, a young man who plays the organ in the cathedral town of Cornford. When it begins Norman and his friend were traveling in Ireland and to amuse themselves while chatting with the sexton of an old church, invent an old woman named Miss Hargreaves. A letter is written, one thing leads to another, and Bob’s...
What a wonderful book this is. I loved it and when I finished it, I listened to a randomly chosen part again. Julian, a young man who lives in Brooklyn, has hit some bumps in the road and his parents won’t subsidize him so he can continue to study Kurosawa’s body of work. His best option was to help with care for Maime, his 90-something grandmother in Santa Monica who had broken her...
I knew this book was about an unnamed narrator who agreed to be with a friend who had come to the end of an unsuccessful cancer treatment and had pills to end her life. So I was prepared for a difficult book, but the first chapter that describes a talk the narrator heard by a professor that let me know that was not the hard part of the book for me. His message was about climate change and after...
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...