Every Living Thing is a wonderful account of two men in a competition of their own making to name every living creature on earth. They were nearly exactly contemporaries, being born only months apart—Carl Linnaeus, born May 1707, while Buffon was born in September...
I credit Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series with engendering my son’s love of reading. We read that series aloud to each other, every word, all 407,960 of them. I loved them as much as he did. He’s grown up now, but I have a youngster who loves fantasy in the house...
Daughters of Warsaw is a dual point-of-view historical fiction novel, split between the present time in Seattle and World War II Warsaw. Lizzie in the Pacific Northwest has suffered a series of miscarriages and is wallowing in self-pity and grief when she discovers...
I’ve read most of Joe Clifford’s works and found A Moth to Flame to be his best so far. He tells the story of two sisters: Jess, the elder, who had been found dead at the bottom of a ravine twenty-five years earlier, and Lydia, the younger, now an investigator for the...
The Zanzibar Chest was absolutely fascinating. It’s terrific reading, so good it was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. It is far more than a mere memoir or travelogue. Hartley was born in Kenya and still resides there, so he writes about events on the...
Return to Lerici is the second of a so-far two book series, continuing the story of the Greene sisters begun in The Invisibles. Half-sisters Elinor and Saffron are bound by a father who abandoned them as he pursued a near-infinite series of infidelities. After being...
During the recent upsurge in hostilities between Israel and Palestine, I stumbled across Mornings in Jenin by the American-Palestinian author, Susan Abulhawa. After reading its heart-wrenching words and being moved to tears many times, I placed it on my keep-forever...
I got this book thinking it was an art heist story, one of my favorite genres. I enjoyed it, although I didn’t expect the fantasy aspect. Dani Poissant, a superb artist, manipulated into becoming an art forger and accomplice to her mother, Maria, a world-famous art...
Crazy for Trying is a bit of a genre-bending novel: coming of age meets women’s fiction meets feminism meets western romance. I enjoyed it very much. Tulsa Bitters leaves San Francisco after the death of Andrea Firestein, Tulsa’s 1970s lesbian-feminist-activist...
I’ve read several of Paul Theroux’s nonfiction books (having just finished The Last Train to Zone Verde), primarily travelogues with deep insights into his various journeys, but this is my first foray into his fiction. I am delighted that he carries through with his...
Having been interested in Gandhi and India since my twenties and having read a good deal about him, I was eager to read Becoming Gandhi. The author and I are roughly the same age, being in our twenties during the 1970s and seem to have similar thoughts regarding the...
The Fetishist is the story of three people: a young punk rocker named Kyoko; Daniel, a now-middle-aged violinist who finally reconciles with his past; and Alma, a superb cellist, the love of Daniel’s life, who feels she was never truly loved as a young woman. Kyoko’s...
The Bullet Swallower is described as a magical realism western with prose in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, and Gabriel García Márquez. Though the breadth of those comparisons seems unfathomable, The Bullet Swallower is a unique novel, a truly quirky...
Diva can no means be considered a biography of the fabulous opera soprano, Maria Callas, as it covers primarily the brief period of time in which she is involved with Aristotle Onassis, then the richest man in the world with only an occasional flashback to her...
Somehow I seem to be reading a lot of books set in the American or Canadian West which truly resonate with me: the works of Richard Wagamese, Peter Heller, and now Kent Haruf's trilogy: Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction. Plain song, for which Haruf’s Plainsong book...
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