Run by Ann Patchett: Mary Susan is enthusiastic. Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney, a Jane Kingston suggestion. Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee Cheating at Canasta, William Trevor Captain Pantoja and the Special Service by Mario Vargas Llosa, very funny, according to Kit. Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo Dancing to "Almendra" by Mayra Montero. Fact/fiction story...
Audiobook. The eruption of Sadr City in 2004 occurred within days of the arrival of a new brigade that expected to be on a peacekeeping mission. The transfer of power had not officially occurred, and some key officers hardly knew the geography of the city when thousands of militia, clearly with the help of the citizens of Sadr City, ambushed a convoy that was on a shit-removal detail in the...
This recommendation by Mary Susan was published in 1995. It is the story of a 30ish book conservator who goes to Florence to help with the recovery after the flood in 1966. She is an enormously appealing character — how does he do that? — that the reader is pleased to be around. The background of the art, books and buildings in jeopardy enriches the story. It...
Audiobook. This was an ideal audiobook in all aspects except one. I discovered one day in a bookstore that there are lots of pictures inthe book taken by Paul Child. What an appealing woman she was, unpretentious, plain-spoken, and enthusiastic. And, like Gertrude Bell’s biography, this book is based on contemporaneous letters, making her memories 50 years later of particular meals and...
In the late 1980s, a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn bought the shut-down meat packing plant in this small town in northeastern Iowa (about 20 miles from Decorah, where Jen and Brooke live). One of his sons, Sholom Rubashkin, came to run the slaughterhouse to create kosher meats. The story of this “Clash of Cultures in Heartland America,” as the subtitle puts it, is told by a secular...
This is a great story about an amazing character. Born in the 1860s in Yorkshire to a wealthy family, she was ambitious, brilliant and fearless from the beginning. At the turn of the century she made her first trek in the desert; these treks alternated for some years with mountain climbing expeditions in the Alps. She climbed up some faces of peaks that had never been climbed and was renowned...
Audiobook. A pleasantly long one. The far upper reaches of black society, in particular its branch in academia, is the community this complicated murder mystery takes place in. The story involves a complex, but improbable moral quandry. And I’m afraid by the end, I couldn’t be sure I remembered all the important facts. I enjoyed the memories of the...
Other worldly is the term that comes to mind to describe Ondaatje’s characters in Divisadero. The first family we encounter consists of the father, his daughter Anna whose mother died in childbirth, another baby girl (Claire) taken home from the hospital along with his daughter because her mother also died in childbirth, and a boy, Coop, taken in because his parents were...
Peter Ho Davies is Welsh and Chinese, and teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan. That the topic of national identity is central to the book is perhaps not surprising. It is set in a small village near the coast of Wales during World War II. The hatred of the Welsh for the English and the English feeling of superiority, the longing of Esther, the Welsh girl, to...
This is the very heart-warming story of a mountain climber who made it nearly to the top of K-2 and in an abrupt turn, became obsessed with building schools in the region, told by a journalist who by his own account lost his ability to tell the story objectively and instead writes to support the mission. A recommendation from Annette when she heard about the Rory Stewart book, The Places in...