Krasner (1908-1984) was born to Russian immigrants in then-rural Brooklyn. Her scholarly father sold fish from a cart to support the family. Brother Irving introduced her to literature. The young Lee (born Lena) embraced Jewish ritual but bristled at the separation of men and women at temple. A favorite childhood teacher was one who let boys and girls play together at recess. All her life, Krasner upended the status quo for women.

Krasner was educated in New York City public schools, eventually attending Washington Irving, a vocational high school for girls, and Cooper Union. A child of poverty, she always worked: as an illustrator, a fashion model, a WPA muralist.

Influenced by Mondrian, Matisse and husband Jackson Pollock, Krasner is one of the Abstract Expressionists who lived and worked in New York during the mid-20th century. Her canvases are dramatic — sometimes frightening — and often colorful. A photograph of Krasner in her studio looks as though she’s attacking the canvas. She also cut up old work and repurposed pieces as collage.

An early love affair with a fellow student was ended by his parents because of her modest birth. His departure left Krasner terribly alone in New York during World War II, when most men were called upon to serve. Her independence as a young woman was remarkable for that time.

Painter Jackson Pollock was in New York, barred from military service because of alcoholism and mental issues. He and Krasner met at a group show and married three years later. Krasner championed his work; she recognized his greatness early on.Theirs was a love between equals, but his alcoholism strained the marriage and their friendships.

After his death, Krasner’s work grew in scale and complexity.

Krasner, on the inevitability of her career: “‘I had to’ is the only way I can put it…Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking — do I want to live? My answer is yes — and I paint.”

Since then I’ve read other Ondaatje novels (“Anil’s Ghost,” “Divisadero”) but none gripped me like “The English Patient.” (I loved the movie, too.)

“The Cat’s Table” is Ondaatje’s latest book. It’s worth a read. The author has said it’s not a memoir, but it reads like one. Michael, an 11 year old boy, boards the ocean liner “Oronsay” for the three week journey from Ceylon to London, where he’ll join his mother. The year is 1954. The ship has seven levels, 600 passengers, a jail for its sole prisoner, pools, a kennel and endless ways for a boy and his two-same age mates to get into trouble, daily.

The book’s title comes from the insignificant table Michael and his friends are assigned for dinner, the “cat’s table.”

Michael and his friends take early morning swims in the forbidden First Class pool, spy on the manacled prisoner, smuggle a dog aboard. During a storm the boys lash themselves to lifeboats, enraging the ship’s captain.

The boy is a wide-eyed guide: “All of us were longing for the sight of land, and as morning broke we lined up along the bow to watch the ancient city approach, mirage-like out of the arc of dusty hills. Aden…was mentioned in the Old Testament. It was where Cain and Abel were buried…it had cisterns built out of volcanic rock, a falcon market, an oasis quarter, an aquarium, a section of town given over to sail makers…It would be our last footstep in the East.”

Mostly, though, Michael and his friends find themselves enchanted by their fellow passengers: Michael’s beautiful teenage cousin Emily, the very proper family friend Flavia Prin, the delightful spinster Miss Lasqueti, who lounges on deck chairs reading detective novels, throwing a book overboard if it fails to please. Scholars, entertainers, the keeper of the kennels. Also, a mute girl whose father is the imprisoned passenger; their deadly escape punctuates the journey.

Woven into the story is the adult Michael finding again his boyhood shipmates in London, his romance and marriage to one of their sisters, reuniting with Emily again at the far side of Canada.

This is not a straightforward story, but it pleases. I was especially moved — to tears! — by the boy Michael’s reunion with his long-lost mother.

I read newspapers, magazines, works of nonfiction, but my true love is fiction. In these three novels, the characters and situations were so alive to me I didn’t want their stories to end: Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” Chad Harbaugh’s “The Art of Fielding,” and Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot.”

Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park” was another favorite. Enchanted, I am reading slowly Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cat’s Table.”

A play, a retrospective and a biography brought me the lives of three artists and their creative process. Each left me astonished. There was Mark Rothko in John Logan’s “Red” at the Goodman Theatre, the Willem de Kooning retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (through January 9), Patricia Alber’s biography “Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter.”

Art and books combine in the work of two friends, both photographers.

Haunting me are the lush, eery photographs of American children, teens, couples and families in Lydia Panas’ first monograph, “The Mark of Abel.” www.lydiapanas.com/book. Chester Alamo’s “The Globe” captures the beauty, color and passion of fans at a Chicago bar that offers live telecasts of European soccer. www.amazon.com/Globe-Chester-Alamo-Costello/dp/0615339417/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

I continue to be awed by my sons’ achievements in photography http://www.masondent.com/ and sports journalism http://supercursed.blogspot.com/, by my niece’s comic art and humor. http://comics.lucyknisley.com/2011/10/scaredcited-page-2/

Memorable movies this year include the smart, sexy remake of “Jane Eyre,” the plotless but mesmerizing “Tree of Life,” the hilariously foul “Bridesmaids. The one film I many never get out of my head: Pedro Almodovar’s “The Skin I Live In.” Beautiful, bizarre, shocking.

One stage play held me in its grip: “The God of Carnage,” 70 minutes of ensemble acting at its best, at the Goodman Theatre. I admired “An Iliad” at Court Theatre (through December 14) even though we had terrible seats.

I am always thinking about my next meal, so it’s worth remembering some of the places that nourished me.

In Montreal (L’Entrecote St. Jean) and New York (Le Relais de Venise) I savored prix-fixe steak-only dinners that transported me to Paris.

In Chicago this year I’ve been dazzled by the farm-to-table offerings at Nightwood, Perennial Virant, and Blackbird. The fish tacos at GT Fish & Oyster. Anything at The Purple Pig. The limited but daring menu at Morso; also, its fabulous Wolfsbane cocktail. The seasonal tartines at Floriole, the frisee salad at Gemini Bistro, the exquisite service at Pelago. The ultra-thin pizza at Three Aces and a cocktail so beautiful I had to photograph it.

Finally, a welcome addition to my Lincoln Park neighborhood: City Grounds coffee bar, a clean well lighted place.

Thanks for reading. Best wishes for the New Year.

Migration figures in both works. In “Freedom,” Patty leaves the East Coast for a kinder, gentler life in the Midwest. In “Warmth…” six million African Americans abandon the Jim Crow South. These wrenching departures — leaving one’s home and family, forever, for the unknown — is the only solution for desperate situations. Patty leaves a household indifferent to her athletic achievements and hostile to her reported date rape. Wilkerson’s subjects leave home to be freed from a caste system that kept them segregated and disenfranchised.

I finished reading Russell Banks’ “Lost Memory of Skin,” the same evening I heard Franzen and Wilkerson discuss migration and freedom.

Which left me thinking: what about those who can’t leave, who are stuck in an intolerable situation, even if it’s of their own creation?

That’s the starting point for Banks’ novel about a convicted sex offender in contemporary Miami. The Kid, as he’s known, wears a monitoring device on his ankle. He can’t live or visit any place within 2,500 feet of an area frequented by children. He’s an adult, but not much older than the teenage girl he arranged to meet, via the Internet, for sex. The Kid lives under a causeway within a tent city peopled by fellow sex offenders. None of them can leave the county — they’re monitored, too — but they can’t live easily within it, either.

After a publicized police raid of the encampment, a Professor from a nearby university persuades the Kid to be part of his study of sex offenders and homelessness.

The Kid is a fully realized character: we learn of his unfortunate past, his hopes and fears for the future, his everyday disappointments. We understand his few relationships. Hooked on porn as a preteen, the Kid is backwards and withdrawn. Even in the camaraderie of an Army platoon, the Kid is alone. Poorly educated, a social misfit: who’s to blame?

The Professor is the first person to point the Kid to a better life. Theirs is an unlikely but endearing relationship.

As the Kid’s confidence grows, the Professor’s life spins out of control, quite spectacularly.

There is comfort in this book’s end: the Kid is in the same place physically but in a better place mentally and emotionally. He accepts that he’ll never understand the Professor’s life, or motives. (Neither will I.) He’s still stuck wearing that ankle monitor for the next nine years.

This was not my favorite Banks’ book — those would be “Continental Drift” and “The Darling’ — but it’s certainly worth the read. A porn-addled sex offender worth rooting for: that’s no small feat.

Banks is one of our greatest living writers.

My North Avenue beach is banked by man-made dunes. Get yourself beyond those and the beach offers a wide swath of sand pebbled with crushed shells. Also washed-up wood slabs from wave-smashed piers, a dead fish or two, emptied booze bottles.

Our boat-shaped boat house is closed. Nets strung for beach volleyball leagues have been taken down, rentable beach chairs and umbrellas packed away.

What a place to walk! Before me is the city’s cutout skyline, fronted by the seemingly infinite lake. There’s so few people on the paths and the beach on a weekday morning it feels eerily post-apocalyptic. There is the city; where are its people?

The lakefront’s beautiful desolation this morning reminded me of a section of Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms: If I Forget Thee Jerusalem.” Faulkner describes the Midwest’s off-season gift of warmth as “the long sigh toward autumn and the cold.” His doomed lovers overstay the season in their Lake Michigan beachfront shack, and nearly freeze, almost starve.

Dan Chaon’s masterful “Await Your Reply,” gives us a Northwestern University college student presumed dead in Lake Michigan’s frigid waters. We stand over his shoulder as he reads the news story of his probable suicide. Gulp.

In Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” the eponymous narrator spends his Chicago off-hours drinking excessively, bedding beautiful young women whose names he checks scraps of paper to remember. “In the first flush of the morning sun, the city lay spread out to my left, more like a dream than I had ever imagined it….the city gave everything…and I bawled like a goddam madman to be so lucky…”

In the enchanting “The Art of Fielding,” Chad Harbach compares a scholar’s love for literature with Lake Michigan. “Walking along its shore called forth some of the same deep feelings that his reading of Melville did, and that reading explained and deepened his love of the water, which deepened his love of the books.” Unexpectedly, and memorably, the lake becomes this man’s final resting place.

In Patricia Albers’ rich portrait of the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, the biographer says Mitchell painted the lake her whole career. “She watched rain clobber the lake, ice lock it up, thunderheads billow above…it shimmered, turquoise and sapphire like a tropical lagoon, or pulsed with dark ochre along its edges…”

“‘The Lake is with me today,’” Joan would say, years after leaving Chicago. “‘The memory of a feeling. And when I feel that thing, I want to paint it.’”

For more Chicago in literature: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/448.html

Welcome to the world of Hanna. Madeleine has everything a young woman could want: she’s an English major with an Ivy League degree, wealth, athleticism, and beauty. What she doesn’t have is a near future: she’s been rejected by every graduate program she applied to and the brilliant boy she planned to live with after graduation has dumped her.

Madeleine loves Leonard. Mitchell loves Madeleine. On graduation day, Leonard is in a Providence psych ward.

This book is the journey these three take, together and alone, the year after they leave Brown. Their story is comic, sad, moving, sexy, bawdy, porny (yes, there’s a difference,) surprising and sometimes very frightening.

After graduation, Mitchell heads home to Detroit to save and earn money, driving a cab and busing tables at a Greek restaurant, all the while pining for Madeleine. Why is she with Leonard? Why isn’t Mitchell good enough? Then again, what if he attained his desire? Would he grow bored of her? A child of Greek immigrants, Mitchell tussles with his working-class parents over his professional future and a planned trip. Europe, yes. India?

Meanwhile, Leonard receives a research fellowship on Cape Cod, where he’ll study yeast. (Trust me, his field of study matters.) Madeleine tends to Leonard there, fights politely with her family, focuses her ambition (she’ll be a Victorianist!) and re-applies to graduate schools. Theirs is a sweet but rocky romance, infused with intelligence and wit.

It’s a loaded year for these three: religious experience, world travel, mental illness, scientific discovery, familial and marital duty. Don’t worry! This is a funny, smart read filled with riffs on, say, a girl’s beautiful ass, or the conundrum of deconstructing love while in love.

Like its title, the story’s narrative engine is fueled by an old-fashioned plot. Will Madeleine marry Leonard? Will Mitchell fight for her? Will Leonard survive? Missed aerograms, busy telephone lines, this is Jane Austen on fast forward.

I couldn’t put it down.

Newly published, Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding” could only take place in America. Baseball, a small town, a private college and its students, a Great Lake, Melviille. I’d add anorexia, depression and the ugly side of ambition, but those conditions are universal.

Westish College catcher Mike Schwartz comes upon a promising shortstop playing summer Legion ball. The scrawny but graceful shortstop is Henry Skrimshander, and this book is the story of Henry’s change from a sweet, wide-eyed, hard working college player and major league prospect to a mean-spirited guy who steals girlfriends, takes himself out of games, and cuts himself off from family, friends and teammates.

The agent of change is a wildly thrown baseball. On the verge of breaking a record for errorless games, Henry blows a throw to first base; the errant ball beans his roommate, Owen Dunne, who’d been reading a book in the team’s dugout.

Literature, it turns out, can be very dangerous.

From the accident the story spools out in surprising ways. The college president falls in love with a student. Mike Schwartz, this book’s gem of a human being, pursues the president’s troubled daughter. Henry spirals downward in a remarkably unpleasant fashion.

This is a book about literature, baseball, growing up and growing old, taking chances, failing, and winning. Its appeal is wide.

I found myself awed by the author’s ease with words and graceful storytelling, with his descriptions of the Midwest’s odd beauty. This is a comedy, but it’s not a happy read: like Franzen’s novels, these characters and their journeys left me unsettled.

Read Walt Whitman’s “Mannahatta” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice,” a short wallop of a story about an immigrant Jewish girl’s role in her school’s Christmas play.

I pulled from the shelf Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything,” a rollicking novel of 1950’s career girls in New York. Tenderly, I opened my dog-eared copy of “Netherland,” Joseph O’Neill’s layered tale of friendship and cricket in New York. Even though it strained credulity, I’ve been thinking about Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close.” I had to skip chunks of the overwrought “Let the Great World Spin,” but certain characters and locations in Colum McCann’s sprawler will live with me forever. I grieve for the New York lovers haunted by the Holocaust in I.B. Singer’s “Enemies, a Love Story.”

When I hold Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” in my hands I am transported back to the Fifth Avenue mansions that housed my school and where I, fittingly, lost myself in Lily Bart’s inexorable decline. If you’ve never read Edmund Wilson’s “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” do: you’ll discover New York in the 1930s, and the reason this novella was banned for obscenity.

New York is the sole possibility in Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids.” In Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park,” New York is the redeemer. Eerily, E.B.White’s “This is New York” (1948) predicts the ease with which this urban wonderland could be destroyed.

Reading New York is reading life: John Cheever’s stories still shock, Richard Price’s thick novels could, and should, go on and on. Forever I can be wooed by the New York poetry of Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes and Frank O’Hara: “…oh god it’s wonderful/to get out of bed/and drink too much coffee/and smoke too many cigarettes/and love you so much.”

“Rules of Civility,” by Amor Towles. A slight but nicely written coming-of-age story set in 1938 New York. Katey Kontent (I’m not kidding) is an orphan. She lives at a boarding house and works as a secretary. Glamorous Eve Ross befriends her. When the two girls meet the cute, rich Tinker Grey all three lives change forever. Scenes of 1930s New York and its wealthy playgrounds are beautifully described; reading this, you are there. My gripe: this story lacks drama. It’s “The Devil Wears Prada” without Meryl Streep. It’s “The Great Gatsby” without a love story.

“Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey. Drama, and then some! Kesey’s 1964 epic is 715 pages of American literature at its best, and most heightened. Think Whitman, Ginsberg, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Jim Harrison telling this story, of a town, a business, an industry, a strike and the undoing of an American family. It’s so rich I had to put it down for a day. Will they get the logs down river in time? Will Lee seduce his brother’s wife? I was often surprised and tremendously moved by this magnificently told story. And, its ending is perfect.

“Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter,” by Tom Franklin. A great title (it’s how children in Mississippi are taught to spell their state) for a ho-hum story. A teenage girls goes missing from a small town. A middle-age man whose date disappeared years earlier is the suspect. But someone has shot him; until he comes to, we can’t know. Where do we go from here? Backwards, to the man’s childhood and troubled friendship with a black boy who is now the town’s constable. Also the more recent past, when this tremendously lonely man is befriended by a sociopath. A noisy, predictable read.

Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992) was born to great wealth in Chicago. Her mother was a poet, her father a dermatologist. The younger of two girls, they’d wanted a boy.

What they got was a synesthete with a photographic memory who would stop at nothing to finish paintings for a show, get a man, nab an apartment. That said, Albers does a fine job showing the gentler side, documenting Mitchell’s grace in opening her home and studio to young artists. Mitchell could be very, very kind and very, very cruel, often in the same evening.

Mitchell is classified as an abstract expressionist, the post World War II art made in New York. But her move to France in the 1960s put her just up the road from Monet’s Giverney home, and her later works carry the unmistakeable deep blues of the French artists (Monet, Matisse) she followed.

Painting, color, memory transferred to the canvas, the physicality of her work: that’s the thread of this book. But the noise and brilliance of this read is in the life told. The extravagant childhood in Chicago’s Gold Coast, her bedroom view of Lake Michigan, her education at the exclusive Francis W. Parker school, the troubled relationships with family, friends, lovers.

Married briefly to a high school sweetheart (the publisher Barney Rosset, Jr.), Mitchell flaunted her sexuality by sleeping with any one she chose. In the 1950s Mitchell lived the bohemian life on St. Mark’s Place and summered in the Hamptons with fellow painters. In Paris she took up with Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, insisting he divorce his Catholic wife. For 20 years, she and Riopelle shared a home and studios in France, with beloved dogs and his visiting daughters. It couldn’t last: abortions, jealousy, booze set them in an endless battle. “At first shocking and disturbing, their fights quickly felt boring and sad.”

Is it possible to love the life story of someone you don’t especially like? I did. Mitchell held her own in an art world dominated by men. She loved wildly. (Samuel Beckett, among others, gave her up.) Most impressive to me was Mitchell’s march to the grave: she never stopped working. “Frail, arthritic, semi-ambulatory, farsighted, dying of cancer,” she continued to paint huge canvases, make prints and work in pastels until her last days.