This Australian best seller is told in the first person by a 40 year old academic whose location on the Asperger's Symdrome scale is immediately apparent to everyone but him. He is governed by logic which suggests to him that an unvarying meal schedule is the most efficient, that his clothes should be chosen for practical reasons only, and individuals he encounters should be described by an...
Amélie Nothomb has written several short autobiographical novels; this one won the Grand Prix de la Académie Française. She was born in Japan as her father was a Belgian diplomat. After attending the University of Brussels, she became a translator for a large firm in Japan. Fear and Trembling is about a translator named Amélie with a year-long contract with a large company in Japan where she...
Jane Franklin Mecom was the beloved younger sister of Benjamin Franklin with whom she had a lively correspondence. She married badly and spent her young years caring for her many children and coping with the repossession of household goods to cover her husband’s debts. The Book of Ages is Jane’s small crudely made book that records the births and so sadly often, the deaths of her children...
I was moved to read this by ANZ LitLovers' enthusiasm for it. She describes the plot which involves a fussy academic on his own while his younger obstetrician wife is away for a year as "delicious." It's hard to identify with these characters at the outset as their quirkiness defines them. By fussy I mean having three notebooks to record observations of his body: one for the...
This is my second book by this author; I read The Other Side of You in 2007 so my memory of it is a bit vague. It was engaging but I wrote about some reservations relating to gender matters. I was moved to read this one by Annabel's House of Books' awarding it the book with the Best Sense of Place for 2013. Having loved the town of Chartres as well as the cathedral when we...
Having now read the third book in the Ruth Galloway series, I can say Elly Griffiths has created a pleasing setting and appealing characters. Ruth is a forensic archaeologist who teaches at a university on the Norfolk coast in England who is called in to help the police when bones are found. Nelson, the detective she has worked with is tall, gruff, good at his job and happily married. In the...
Reading this book recommended by Reading Matters was a very fun meander through the life of a Melbourne literary journalist as illustrated by the books on her shelves. She was born in the mid-50s to Polish parents who were fortunate to survive the Holocaust and landed in Australia after the war. Her mother read widely and encouraged Ramona to do so as well, including buying the Kama Sutra for her...
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. Audiobook. The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers. Public library. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. Audiobook. Mr. Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo. Paperback available through Amazon. Not libraries, not iTunes. The Sugar Mother by Elizabeth Jolley. Review by ANZ LitLovers makes it sound great. UVa library, kindle. The Man who Loved Children by Christina...
One of my favorite books of 2013 was Christopher Tilghman’s The Right-Hand Shore. Published some years after Mason’s Retreat, it was a prequel to Mason’s Retreat. A main character of these two books is the Retreat, the decaying plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that was originally a land grant to the first Mason, a Catholic who fled England in the 1650s. We encounter...
Another year of wonderful books, requiring some painful choices to create this list. It's noteworthy that of the eleven books, four are Australian, the same number as last year. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. The author, a young man from Washington, DC, has written a complex and emotionally satisfying book set in Chechnya. The story occurs in 2004, but...