Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
I immediately fell in love with this book’s language as well as its terms for defining of personal worlds. Jonathan travels to Ukraine to search for a woman in a photograph who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is assisted by an unlikely team of guides: Sasha, his translator who is in love with America, Sasha’s blind grandfather who is also the driver, and Sammy Davis Junior Junior, a dog that is too affectionate. As their story moves forward, a second story unfolds in the past: that of Trachimbrod, the town Jonathan’s grandfather was from. Both stories are gripping, poignant, and hilarious. Personal history is intertwined with political history, and as the characters in the various periods of history find out, a world can be as isolated as a balloon and as personal as a thought, and they end and begin in the blink of an eye.
Names Above Houses - Oliver de la Paz
The story told through these poems is of Fidelito, a boy who longs to fly. This, of course, can mean many things. Fidelito clings to his family as they relocate to America, and the Filipino myths of his childhood shape his understanding of this new place. The family’s uprooting results in their being taken out of context and their previous life sometimes manifests itself physically. Fidelito’s desire to fly can be seen as wanting not to be connected to any place, to be self-contained.
The Orchard – Brigit Pegeen Kelly
This book is a search for meaning in a desolate landscape, a garden that has been left untended for a very long time. The garden is a metaphor for the mind, even for existence itself, and this collection brims with the simultaneous beauty and horror that accompany the very visceral details of living. There is a weight to these poems that comes from their use both of existing myths and the creation of new ones. A startling, haunting read.
Dear Ghosts - Tess Gallagher
With the assured conviction of one channeling messages from the divine, Tess Gallagher shows how powerful language can be as she describes the “run-down subject” of missing loves and the edges of history that burn the walls of living houses. Her words are those of a mystic, and her telling of life and lives that have slipped away is so engaging and razor-sharp in its observations that the reader’s imagination will be unwinding for weeks to come.
Lunar Park – Bret Easton Ellis
This book blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, as this “novel” has Bret Easton Ellis for its main character. The story is an alternate universe for Ellis, the suburban life with wife and kids he could have had if he had been a different person. However, drug abuse, break-ins, murder and the malevolent supernatural creep into this seemingly perfect existence, including a demonic toy that Bret buys for his stepdaughter. Frightening until the end, where the story takes on a larger significance, Lunar Park will keep you up all night.
Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion
Maria is a woman who has based her life on following what gleams, what catches her eye— and this has left her in want of something of substance, something worth having. Los Angeles is a town full of sexual malaise, as is the movie business. Maria lives her life from man to man, and realizes too late, that there is nothing behind the shimmering façade of a business that is as cold and cruel as the people who run it. This book is about choices;in a life with too much to choose from, stasis is Maria’s answer.
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
Holly Golightly is that person who whooshes in, upsets everything, and leaves in the same breath. She is a weather pattern rather than a person. This is her story, as told to the person who felt closest to her for a brief period in her life. This novella acts as a diagram for human interaction while still managing to describe things in assaulting elegance and beauty. The shorter stories are equally well phrased, and often the point is made that the smallest glances or changes from routine are the end result of much backstory.
Stiff - Mary Roach
Mary Roach has researched, visited and chronicled cadavers donated to science in the various situations where they might end up. Forensic research in decompo- sition, human crash-test dummies, the healing powers of mellified man— nothing is too gruesome a topic. This reportage is useful for its confronting of death as well as its light-hearted spirit. In talking about the dignity of various ways of disposing of a body— including human composting— the author reminds us of nature and how humanity is unified in its reverence for, and discomfort with, death.
Last Exit to Brooklyn - Hubert Selby, Jr.
This book describes in graphic detail the lives that fill the streets of Brooklyn in the 1950’s. Raw with violence, sex, and drug abuse, these characters show the reader what becomes of people when they are left to themselves with no social mobility. The poor with no way to improve their situation turn on each other, and themselves. Morality is ignored when it is of no consequence. This book starts out with a gripping momentum and holds onto it as it unfolds like a detailed, thought-by-thought account of a fight, or a night of drinking.
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
This is hands-down one of the most moving novels I have read. Housekeeping details the upbringing of Lucille, a gregarious girl who needs the company of many, and Ruth, a bookish girl who prefers the company of her family. The description of this small town and the adjacent lake and how they tend to fill up the lives of their inhabitants is sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, but always cathartic. To read
this book is to consider what makes a home, and what makes a life.
Such an authentic teen voice, filled with longing, self-consciousness, bravado, and humor. Just shy of his 16th birthday and just beginning to pull his life together, Sam learns that he’s going to be a father. A passionate skateboarder, he turns as always to his Tony Hawk poster, which talks to him, for advice in grappling with the demands of his new life. This is one of the best young adult novels I’ve ever read.
Book of a Thousand Days - Shannon Hale
Medieval Mongolia may strike you as an odd setting for a book that will capture teens’ imaginations and hearts, but this book is a real hit. Dashti, the narrator, must act with ingenuity, compassion, and bravery to save herself and the Lady she serves. This engrossing retelling of a little-known Grimm’s tale has it all – adventure, disguise, suspense, and romance!
The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx - Groucho Marx
Hallelujah! I’m thrilled that this long-unavailable book has been reissued! For years – decades, really – this was my favorite book to give to anyone convalescing, depressed, or just out of sorts. Groucho was one of the great wits of the 20th century, and these letters, which cover a wide range of topics, could make a block of granite laugh.
The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million - Daniel Mendelsohn
It’s a mystery and a family saga and a Holocaust story. It’s one of the most extraordinary and powerful books I’ve ever read. From childhood, Mendelsohn knew only two things about his great uncle: that he resembles him so strikingly his elderly relatives cry when they see him, and that the uncle, his wife, and their four daughters were “killed by the Nazis.” He makes it his mission to learn both how they died and how they lived. The process takes him to Ukraine, Australia, Israel, Sweden, and Denmark, and you’ll feel compelled to stay with him every step of the way.
Starting Out Sideways - Mary E. Mitchell
Starting Out Sideways gives us characters who aren’t just three dimensional; by the book’s end we’ve added them to our circle of close friends and eccentric family members. Roseanne Plow, who works with developmentally disabled adults, must juggle her job, her Donna-Reed-as-drill-sergeant mother, and her grief at being dumped by her putz (her mother’s term) of a husband, all while coming to terms with a newly revealed family secret that profoundly challenges her sense of self. Both moving and funny, it’s a great choice for book groups – there’s much to digest and discuss.
Let Me Finish - Roger Angell
Angell is such a fine writer; he makes any subject fascinating. In these autobiographical essays, the subject – Angell’s life – is fascinating in and of itself. The essays touch on his many decades and extraordinary colleagues at The New Yorker magazine, his World War II experience, his amazing parents (including his stepfather, E.B. White), the roots of his love of baseball, even an ode to the martini. This book is a wonderful extended visit with one of the best writers of his generation.
Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite – June Casagrande
I was initially intrigued by Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Alas, when I started to read it I found it didactic, prissy, and impractical – after all, it’s British; they punctuate differently. But I love language and, though I should probably be embarrassed to confess it, I’m eager to read a great book about grammar and punctuation. So much the better if it’s laugh-out-loud funny, which Grammar Snobs. . . most definitely is.
The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly – Mark Harris
I’m going out on a limb here, but I think these two books are quite possibly the best baseball fiction ever written (Apologies to Ring Lardner.) They’re both written in the first person by Henry Wiggen, a pitcher for the New York Mammoths. With warmth and humor, they explore coming of age, finding one’s place in the world, and the passionate love of baseball. Read them in the above order.
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Set in England, this splendidly written novel focuses on class, maturity, and secrets. McEwan takes a sort of Roshomon approach, looking at a very specific moment from different points of view and at different points in time before, during, and after World War II. I was drawn into the book slowly, but once there I was riveted.
Understood Betsy - Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Although written in 1917, this book speaks powerfully and delightfully to today’s kids. Elizabeth Ann lives in a city with two elderly relatives who smother and indulge her. When one of them becomes ill, she’s sent to live in rural Vermont, where she’s called Betsy, given chores, and expected to stand on her own two feet. How she learns to do so makes a great story.
84, Charing Cross Road - Helene Hanf
In 1949, Helene Hanff, a New York City writer with eccentric literary taste, spotted a London bookseller’s ad in a magazine. She tentatively ordered some books, and thus began a marvelous 20-year, trans-Atlantic correspondence. This charming, moving collection of letters is an absolute must-read for anyone who loves books and/or England.
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen -Julie Powell
Love to cook? Eat? Read? Laugh? A yes to any of those questions means read this book. On her 29th birthday, Julie Powell decided her life needed a new focus. She chose to cook her way through Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking – all 524 recipes – by her 30th birthday. How she managed to do it without losing her job, her husband, or her sense of humor makes one hugely entertaining story.
My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell
When Durrell was 10, his deliciously eccentric mother moved him and his three siblings from damp, chilly England to the Greek island of Corfu. A budding naturalist, he writes with contagious passion about Corfu’s flora and fauna. And he writes with warmth and great humor about the adventures of his highly idiosyncratic family – which includes his big brother Lawrence, author of the (to me, pompous and overwritten) Alexandria Quartet. I’ve reread My Family and Other Animals with delight every few years since I was 15.
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith – Anne Lamott
Okay, first you really should read Lamott’s earlier book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. She’s the only writer I’ve read who can address issues of faith in a way people of all faiths – or no faith at all – can respond to. She’s not the least bit preachy or gooey. Her essays are insightful, poignant, startling, and laugh-out-loud funny by turns. She’ll become your new best friend. And then you’ll just have to read Plan B, so you can spend more wonderful time with her.
The Dogs of Babel – Carolyn Parkhurst (Back Bay Press)
It’s a weird topic, I know: a widowed husband takes a sabbatical from his college career so that he can devote all his attention to the task of making his dog speak. Why? Because the dog may hold the answers to his wife’s death. The way Parkhurst blends and contrasts not only the grieving process but love from beast and man is mesmerizing, heartbreaking and thrilling.
Trespass – Valerie Martin (Nan A. Talese)
Without having children, it hard for me to fully internalize the terror of this book; but, believe me when I say that Martin’s illumination of the tense alienation a mother receives after she voices a (justified) dislike for her future daughter-in-law is chilling. This book not only screamed to not be put down, it was so real that I started worrying about children I don’t even have yet!
Last Town on Earth – Thomas Mullen (Random House)
Inspired by tales of towns that had quarantined themselves during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, Mullen weaves together the effects of a cataclysmic event that results from Commonwealth, a small town in Washington, barring its door to strangers. If you are looking for some historical fiction to curl up with and remind you all the good and bad pieces of humanity, I recommend this book.
No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy (Vintage Books)
There may be words out there to explain the depth, scope and glory of this book, but if they’re out there, they aren’t in our language. McCarthy’s grace with character development is unparalleled; and, the way this modern Western stretches itself out to reveal the effects of our choices is majestic.
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami (Vintage Books)
In this chillingly mournful book, Murakami peels back the prosperous façade of Hajime’s life to show how the memories of a person once loved can lay in wait, biding their time to reveal all the secrets that burden them. This is a subtle book, but the melancholy romance of it will linger with you, giving you pause to remember the past loves in your own life.
Born on a Blue Day – Daniel Tammet (Free Press)
If there is an autistic memoir out there, I’ve either read it or it’s on my list to be read. I have a zealousness to read more and more about it. That said, if you want to go inside the mind of an autistic individual and attempt to see the world through his/her eyes, this is the one I most recommend. Tammet’s descriptions are not only well written, they are fleshed out and visually stunning.
The Witch’s Trinity – Erika Mailman (Crown Pub.)
Mailman writes of the witch trials in northern Germany in the 1500s and the terror of living in a time when condemnation needed only a finger to point at a target. This book was so hauntingly well written and captivating that I literally felt it in my stomach for days after finishing it. This is the kind of book where people will be talking to you and you don’t hear them because you are so utterly hypnotized by the page before you.
The Meaning of Tingo – Adam Jacot De Boinod
Finding himself fascinated with the words in other languages that are either hard to translate or very culture specific, De Boinod spent a few years researching these word gems and gathered them into a delightfully organized book. I know, I know, it sounds boring, but I swear it is hilarious. Where else will you learn that Albanians have 27 different words to describe mustaches, that the Finnish language is home to the longest palindromes, or learn the illustrious meaning of tingo? (Its translation: to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them.)
The Handmaid's Tale & Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
In these books, Atwood gives us a terrifying glimpse at humanity’s future if we remain set on our path to control man and nature. Handmaid portends what could come if we finally snap the thin line between church and state, resulting in a republic of Christian fundamentalists who rule with horrific moral justice and strip women of all rights. Oryx and Crake deals with our incessant zeal to bridle nature through bioengineering and organ harvesting. Through amazingly gripping prose and plot flow, Atwood shows the reader how small steps can lead to an end result that is apocalyptic at best.
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster – Svetlana Alexievich
This -- as I am sure you can imagine -- is not the feel-good book of the year.You shouldn't read it for stories of kindness from nature or man, but rather man's folly to man and science. We should learn from this and fear its repeat. What went on in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster is abominable: government corruption, split families, manipulation of the lower classes and horrendous side effects to the fall-out. But, there are people who want their stories told: people who were silenced, people that never left the sides of the dying loved ones, people that stayed and remain there to this day.
A Long Way from Chicago - Richard Peck
In the summer of 1929, Joe and Mary Alice are forced by the difficult times of the great depression to spend their summer vacation in rural Illinois with their grandmother who is almost a complete stranger to them, and slightly "rough around the edges." The summer ahead seems like it will be a disaster, but the outcome may surprise you.
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Post War France, 1920's. The lives and adventures of several American expatriates are documented and the "lost generation" life style is epitomized. Jake Barnes, forever
impacted by an injury received during the Great War, must continue his life knowing that because of his wounds, he will never be able to marry the girl he loves. Drinking, bullfighting, lovers’ triangles and Hemingway's first great success are what comprise this excellent novel.
The hilarious tale of a boy's summer spent on a farm with his mischievous and one-of-a-kind cousin Harris. From an unstable home, the narrator has spent his childhood spending time with different relatives. The prospect of moving from the Philippines to a farm seems horrible, but the narrator is in for the time of his life.
Loving Frank - Nancy Horan
One hundred years ago this was the "scandal of the season." Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect had left his wife and family and took off for Europe with the wife of one of his clients. She was Mamah Cheney, a truly remarkable woman and an early feminist who is seldom mentioned in books about Wright's life. An insight into the early life of a complex genius who I remember as a very old man.
Later, at the Bar - Rebecca Barry
There's a fictional bar in upstate NY that, with a little imagination, could be here. The regulars are an assorted lot that you can't help liking, hard drinking scoundrels that they are. A good summer read.
Luncheon of the Boating Party - Susan Vreeland
Imagine yourself in Paris in 1881 at the height of Impressionism. Auguste Renoir has asked you to pose along with 13 other of his bohemian friends for what will become one of his most famous paintings, "Luncheon of the Boating Party". What fun! This book takes you back into an era of hedonism and a wonderful world of art.
My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell
As a 10 year old, the zoologist, Gerald Durrell spent a year on the island of Corfu. His eccentric English family-his brother was Lawrence Durrell of "Alexandria Quartet" fame- couldn't take another dreary English winter and headed south. A book to read on a dark winter' s day in Oswego. Images of Corfu with a hot sun, exotic flowers and the "critters" the budding zoologist loved to collect.
The Blue Pages-A Directory of Companies Rated by Their Politics and Practices (Polipoint Press)
Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, this is a handy little book to take along when you go shopping – for anything! Each listing of 4,000 different companies has a paragraph describing political contributions, business practices, non-discrimination policies, etc. Some companies contribute heavily to a political party while others are more equitable. Interesting to see how your hard-earned cash is being spent by someone else.
Underground London/Travels Beneath the City Streets - Stephen Smith
The city of London has many wonderful attractions but beneath the pavement lurks a fascinating buried world of catacombs, underground rivers, plague pits and a medieval abbey whose remains lie buried under a large supermarket. Layers of history under a modern-day city – there’s more there than meets the eye.
The Story of Chicago May - Nuala O'Faolain
In 1890 a beautiful nineteen year old ran away from her farm home in County Longford, Ireland and headed for the United States. May Duignan became a prostitute, a bank robber and accomplice of some of the most notorious crooks of the 19th century. An entertaining story of a woman who lived life exactly as she wanted.
Dear John – Nicholas Sparks
John Tyree’s day-to-day schedule follows a routine of working out, training, and more working out, a routine common to most army men. John’s so-called “routine life” is suddenly changed on his first military leave. Savannah Curtis, a woman with whom he has spent a mere few days seems to be a woman that John cannot shake from his mind. Both realize they have fallen in love; neither expected the events of September 11th to unfold. John is faced with a huge decision, reenlist or Savannah?
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Little Prince shows the reality of the fact that once you lose your imagination, you are no longer a child. One of the most important lessons the Little Prince learns throughout his travels is that his love for an ordinary rose means more to him than anything else. He soon finds himself forced to decide to follow his heart or to continue his travels. This is a great read for adults who need a shock of reality that it’s the little things that count and for teenagers who still have their imaginations.
Forever in Blue – Ann Brashares
In the final novel of the Traveling Pants series, the Septembers find themselves going their own ways. This summer, the girls learn that: it’s better to be safe than sorry, love the one who loves you not the one who happens to be available, relationships have bumps but everything will work out, and stand up for yourself. Tibby, Bee, Lena, and Carmen use the pants as their way to keep their “sisterhood” alive even when they cannot be together.
Without You - Anthony Rapp (Simon & Schuster)
If you love Rent, the musical which is now a major motion picture, Without You will bring light to many unanswered questions and interesting highlights of the production. Anthony Rapp, the original Mark, shows how practices, rehearsals, tryouts, opening night, and finally the way that Rent helped him to overcome many obstacles throughout his life. This is an inspiring novel for singers who are looking to become the next stars of Broadway and for ALL Rent lovers.
Nobody Does It Better - Cecily von Ziegesar (Little, Brown)
While the anticipation of acceptance letters from colleges is at its peak, the seniors of Constance Billiard become enthralled with their annual "senior skip day.” Blair Warendorf and Nate Archibald, the so-called "perfect couple" become a non-existent couple when Blair catches Nate cheating on her with none other than Blair's drop-dead gorgeous best friend, Serena. In this quick, run read, Ziegesar shows the ups and downs of high school life.