Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes, recommended by Mary Susan.
Out of Egypt: a Memoir by Andre Aciman. His other book was so good.
August 5, 2007
More Books to Read
05August
July 22, 2007
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
22July
Audiobook. Knowing the plot of this book made me dither a long time before downloading it. The plot: a beautiful woman of 29 with little money but ambition to remain in the best circles of the idle rich has a long and painful downfall from her position. Distractions of momentary fun cause her to repeatedly blow her opportunities to marry into security. Through...
July 22, 2007
The Monk Downstairs by Tim Farrington
A pleasant and fast read. A man leaves the monastery after 20 years and arrives in San Francisco with badly out of date clothes, little idea of the world for all those years, and a gym bag of belongings. He takes the downstairs room in a little house owned by a struggling divorced woman with a daughter and you can guess what happens. There are nice moments of humor and drama...
July 7, 2007
Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster
07July
Paul Auster successfully creates the Kafka world of paranoia where everyone is in on the new deal except you. The book recounts a day in the life of the incarcerated main character, called Mr. Blank because he can’t remember his name or much about himself. He looks at pictures of people from his past that he cannot quite remember and is cared for and visited by these same people...
June 30, 2007
Call me by your name by Andre Aciman
30June
The narrator of this coming of age novel is a 17 year old very accomplished young man who finds he is attracted to men as well as women. He struggles with all the universal feelings about the object of his affections, a young academic staying with the narrator’s family for six weeks in their home on the Riviera. Those feelings, the intense longing, fear of rejection, the countless ups and...
June 19, 2007
State of Denial by Bob Woodward
19June
The phrase “wallowing in Watergate” came to mind — Bob Woodward at it again! I haven’t read anything by him in the interim. This was a strong indictment of bureaucracy, and perhaps most of all, of Rumsfeld, who seems driven by his desire to control everything and dismiss anything he could not take credit for. Woodward recounts many moments of bureaucratic infighting;...
June 9, 2007
Books to Read
09June
An Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollen
The Places In Between by Rory Stewart. Travel literature about a trip to Afghanistan in 2002.
June 9, 2007
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Audiobook read by the author. You really get to know Liz, as she calls herself, very well in this book. And what an interesting person she is — incredibly outgoing and appealing, very well-informed, an intrepid soul. This book is the story of a year in which Liz went to Rome, then India, then a small village in Bali to recover from four years of misery. The misery...
June 4, 2007
Books to Read
04June
Three books were given rave reviews in the Post on Sunday:Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadera, Marianne Wiggins’s The Shadow Catcher.Along the lines of Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics is a book by Robert Frank, The Economic Naturalist. It’s best feature, according to the reviewer, is the questions it poses, for example, Why do keypad buttons...
June 3, 2007
The Double Bind by Chris Bohgalian
03June
I do hate being surprised at the end of a book. It’s not that I mind plot twists, but I do mind being misled. And there’s no question about it, we were misled. The story of Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom was incorporated into this book; it was great to read a book with their story as a major part of it. I enjoyed getting to know them in a new light, written into a story by someone who...