Out Stealing Horses moves between several connected stories: a man in his late-60s moves to the wild countryside in Norway and takes us back to a momentous summer when he was 15 and his father took him from Oslo to spend the summer in the countryside in 1948. There the 15 year old Trond hears of his father’s activity in the Resistance during the war in that same area 4...
Audiobook. Such a beautiful, gentle book. The characters in these stories may have a hard life or in some way be foolish or ridiculous, but they or their circumstances are moderated. I love the description of the young family visiting India from America who are thoughtless and childlike, but also display kindness and a true, if fleeting interest in others. My favorite...
Through the experiences of four individuals, this book recounts the horrors of the siege of Sarajevo. Really, it’s three individuals, and the cellist who plays Albinoni’s Adagio every day on the spot outside his window where a mortar killed 22 people standing in line to buy bread. The beautiful and brave action of the cellist which denies the dehumanizing effect of the seige moves...
This biography of Denys Finch Hatton is a thorough, even handed look at an amazing character. Finch Hatton is best known as the love of Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) who wrote Out of Africa. He was played in the movie of that title by Robert Redford. He was from an aristocratic family — the uncle known as the “gambling earl” lost the family fortune and worried that the...
Audiobook. Esme is a 60-year resident of an asylum in Edinburgh who is turned out when the asylum closes; the administrators contact the only remaining family member, a 30ish woman named Iris, who did not know of Esme’s existence. The initial horror we learn is that Esme is the sane one; at 16 she was “spirited” and unfortunately that was sometimes enough to...
Audiobook. What an amazing character Joseph Needham was. He was born in 1900, became a scientist, and lived at Cambridge. He married another scientist and while they were devoted partners their whole lives, he was so enamored of women, a single partner was not enough. He fell in love with a Chinese woman who was studying there and he took up the Chinese language. As the title has it, he fell...
The narrator of this book by odd circumstances lands in Cairo at the time of the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference. Agnes is an unassuming 40ish woman from Cleveland who finds herself alone in the world, with some money, as a result of the influenza epidemic of 1918. After a makeover by a kindly and stylish woman named Mildred in a downtown department store, our Agnes is dressed for...
A book about the transformative nature of books is, of course, irresistible. At an unspecified time in an unknown place, that is to say, "once upon a time," a man began to teach a group of children by reading Great Expectations by Dickens to them a chapter a day. The island where this story occurs is at war; the whites left the island when the mine was no longer...
Audiobook. The setting is a small, wasting town in upstate New York, where people find themselves out of work and sometimes sick from the chemicals that once were a part of their employment. This one focuses on two generations of the Lynch family. First, Big Lou Lynch, so good-hearted and unable to see how things are, that I was as exasperated as his waspish wife, Tessa...
I knew I would love the book written by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of March. This is the fictionalized story of an actual artifact, the Sarajevo Haggadah (Jewish religious text that instructs on the Passover Seder), that was unusual in that it is illustrated, was created in medieval Spain, and has survived. It is known that it was saved from destruction twice in recent years; in 1940 a...