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In the months after summer’s heat, Chicago’s crisp sunny days pull me, and my dog, to the beach. There’s no one there! 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,

When we first meet Madeleine Hanna she’s hungover and heartsick. It’s 1982, graduation day at Brown University, and Madeleine’s parents are at her apartment house front door, buzzing. Old Money, they’ll breakfast with Madeleine instead of taking her for a graduation dinner so they won’t have to spend two nights paying for a hotel. Welcome

I love uniquely American novels. Yates’ “Revolutionary Road,” Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion,” Franzen’s “Freedom.”  Firmly grounded in time and place, its characters define the time as they’re shaped by the place. Newly published, Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding” could only take place in America. Baseball, a small town, a private college and its

Can art be a salve? In these days of collective mourning, I find myself reaching for the literature of New York. The poetry and stories and novels of a city that offers, above all else, possibility. Read Walt Whitman’s “Mannahatta” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice,” a short wallop of a story

I read year round but summer is when I give myself huge chunks of time on a dock or a beach or by the pool to do what I love most: lose myself in a story. Some people think “summer reads” should be light and fun, like the season. My favorite summer reads are dense,

This life story is a smart, sexy, full-bodied read. We get it all: from Mitchell’s Midwestern ancestors to her early success in New York’s art world to her deathbed in Paris. Drinker, lover, painter, traveler. Rude, crude, mean. What a life! Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992) was born to great wealth in Chicago. Her mother

A line stretches from a closed kiosk day after day for a year. Place numbers are assigned. Family members take turns waiting, sometimes paying each other for their time. What’s for sale? What could be worth losing your job, your savings, your marriage, your family? Concert tickets. Once issued, what will you do with the

I’m one of the few readers on earth who didn’t finish Erik Larson’s 2004 mega-hit, “Devil in the White City.” I had researched and written about the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago — the White City — so those chapters bored me. The serial killer chapters scared me. I couldn’t read it! Now Larson has

After a particularly brutal winter and a long, cold spring we here in Chicago are desperate for sun and warmth. People stand at street corners or outside office buildings, faces lifted to the sun. Not waiting for the Rapture. Or sneaking a smoke. They’re jones-ing for a hit of sunshine. So it’s understandable that we

I was so taken in by the beginning of David Bezmozgis’ “The Free World,” I missed my “el” stop. Later the same day I stood on another “el” platform, gobbling up this story of immigration, and nearly missed my train home. There it stood, doors open. When had it pulled into the station? How is

I began this blog with a post about the companionship a book provides. Tucked inside a handbag, a suitcase, a backpack, it’s there for us. That’s how I felt about Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a thick paperback I picked up, half-price, at a college bookstore. (The book I’d brought for the trip,

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

It’s no fun throwing daggers at a flawed book but I spent $22 and a few days of my vacation making my way through Darin Strauss’s slender memoir, Half a Life. A better title would be: Half a Memoir. At 18, in the last days of high school’s senior year, Strauss drives his buddies to

I confess: I loved Borders. I spent many hours and countless dollars there. Not the store on North Avenue so much, but the one on Michigan Avenue. HIgh ceilings, four full floors of pricey real estate, a cafe with a spectacular view of the avenue, deep collections of poetry, travel, photography and fiction (who cares

Do you like television’s “Mad Men?” I sure do. Imagine my delight, then, to fall into Rona Jaffe’s first novel, “The Best of Everything” (1958). Set in the early Fifties, the story follows a handful of working girls at a Manhattan publishing house. Leisurely told, Jaffe (1931-2005) has a light touch with heavy themes. I

When was the last time you stumbled on, or into, a great restaurant? It’s the foodie’s curse to know about every new place to try, and why. That’s what put four of us in a far north Chicago neighborhood, hoping to score platters of mussels, venison ribs and craft beers at Hop Leaf (5148 N

I read and loved Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong” when it was released in 2000. Beautiful, spare, moving, grounded in time and place. About a pregnant teenager taken in by two old men, brothers, both bachelors. I weep just remembering their story; how they save her and how, in turn, she saves them. The other day I

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

Then a poet rocker, Patti Smith gave a reading at the small Catholic girls school I went to in Manhattan in the late 1970s. Most of us knew of her from our own late nights downtown, at CBGB’s or Irving Place or St. Mark’s Church. Getting her in the door and up into our auditorium

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: