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With the year coming to a close it’s a good time to reflect on the offerings that enriched my days and nights. 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 [...]
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Unexpected book grief. Ian McEwan’s “Solar” is that rare thing: a wickedly funny satire about science featuring a wholly unlikeable main character. I loved every page of it. When we first meet Michael Beard he’s 53 and fat, a Nobel-prize winning physicist riding the high-fee, high-calorie lecture circuit. His (fifth!) marriage is in shambles and [...]
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Ah, the year’s first thunk: David Grossman’s “To the End of the Land.” So lauded, so bloated. To invest in ($26.95) and lug around (576 pages) one would expect, and should receive, a Franzen. In its simplest form, this is the story of an Israeli woman who gathers up her son’s father and takes him [...]
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More book grief! Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park” grabbed me from its first sentence. “For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things.” He is Miles Heller, an Ivy League drop-out working foreclosures in Florida, inspecting abandoned homes for banks. He finds himself cataloguing, via photographs, the things people have left behind: [...]
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Finishing her umpteenth young-adult novel set during World War II, my ten-year old daughter pranced around the kitchen: “I llllllove the Holocaust.” I choked on my coffee. “You mean, the literature of the Holocaust. Hitler, the Nazis. The ultimate bad guys.” Alex agreed, then told me all about a Danish girl sent by her grandmother [...]
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Should you trust the narrator? Depends on the book. Two I read this summer set me up to believe that its main character, and narrator, was seeking to repair a significant love (a wife, a daughter). Each starts with a similar premise — I need to get her back — then widens in the telling, [...]
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When I first read E. M. Forster’s “Where Angels Fear to Tread” I thought it a twisted comedy. (It is.) I read it again years later and found it sad — still a comedy, but threaded with tragedy. Loss, loss and more loss, complicated by squashed emotions and cultural misunderstanding. Why do we reread? I [...]
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I recently finished an exasperating read: an unhappy couple can’t bring themselves to divorce. If they part during the spring, it will color every spring. If they tell her father…if they tell their son…. The book is “Some Prefer Nettles”, by Junichiro Tanizaki, Vintage International, $13.95, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. I loved it. The [...]
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My daughter accuses me of doing nothing at our summer house in Quebec. Ha! I practice yoga after breakfast, kayak late morning and swim fast to the island and back (about a mile) late afternoon. In between: I read. I read small books and big books, fiction and nonfiction, old books and those newly published. [...]
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