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Books: Start and Stop Reading

Wow. How many doorstoppers in a row?

First, Peter Orner’s “Love and Shame and Love.” A great title! His story is multigenerational but so choppily told I lost interest in every character.

Next, Anna Solomon’s “The Little Bride.” Another great title, well reviewed. I put it down two-thirds of the way through. If you put a young mail-order bride in a home with an old husband and young adults sons, something — O’Neill anyone? — should happen.

I couldn’t get through even the first (confusing) chapter of Lauren Grodstein’s “A Friend of the Family.”

I thought I was much farther into Edie Meidav’s “Lola, California: A Novel” before I quit. Again, a wonderful premise that stalls: a charismatic father on Death Row, dying from cancer. Nearby, at a nudist retreat, his estranged daughter, one of his followers and her best friend from high school. This set up goes on and on and on.

One book I liked a lot: Philip Larkin’s “Jill.” Set during World War II, a working-class scholar rooms with an aristocratic hellion at Oxford University. To make his roomate jealous, the scholar imagines a girl named Jill. Then Jill appears! It’s an odd story, a delicious read.

I did all this stop and start reading during recent travels to Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Van Gogh Close Up” runs through May 6. See it. Some of these works are in the U.S. for the first time. Also in Philadelphia, Parc Restaurant & Bistro is as good as any in Paris and opens out to beautiful Rittenhouse Square.

Because I grew up on Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, I’m a tough critic. What a delight, then, to be completely charmed by the Broadway musical “Once.”  An at-the-bar dinner followed, at Bond 45, an Italian steakhouse in Times Square. Another New York highlight: an evening stroll on the High Line and a bistro meal at Pastis, on Ninth Avenue.

In Washington we lucked into a guided tour of the U.S. Capitol, thanks to Senator Dick Durbin. The American plants and flowers woven into the interior architecture, and its dome — George Washington lounging with thirteen maidens — were highlights for me. Also Doug Aitken’s SONG 1, cinema and music that envelopes the Hirshhorn Museum, from sunset to midnight, through May 16.

Also in the blog

Art: Caravaggio, on loan

Blockbuster shows of museum art enthrall — and exhaust. Yes, it’s astonishing to see the treasures of Tutankhamun, the Picasso retrospective, Matisse beside Picasso, Calder’s circus. But there’s a deep pleasure in being drawn to a museum to see a single work, on loan, set among its peers. There you’ll find no headsets, no clots

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Books: Mother’s Day

When I finish a book that I’ve loved reading, my first thought is: Will Mom? My mother, like my son Evan, consumes books as though they are air, necessary for survival. She is always in a book, or five if none of them are pleasing. Unlike me, she’ll read an unlikeable book to its end.

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Dining: Bar Lunch

I settled in for a bar lunch the other day at Joe’s, an elegant seafood and steak house off Michigan Avenue with my friend and colleague Barbara. I’d been to Joe’s (60 E. Grand St.) several times, for review or to meet with editors. It’s pricey, but the seafood — especially their signature stone crab

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