Fathermucker
Greg Olear, 2011
320 pp.
November 2011
Olear's book is hilarious—starting with the title on the front cover: I can't rememeber laughing so often, one paragraph to the next, as I did reading Fathermucker.
The book, however, manages to be funny and poignant at the same time—as well as being a spot-on social satire.
Twilight
Stephanie Meyer, 2005
498 pp.
October, 2011
There's not too much more to say about this book (first in the Twilight series) that hasn't already been said. But maybe I can wring out a few more words.
Actually, what was surprising about Twilight...was how appealing I found it. Like the Harry Potter series, I'd stayed away because of its fantasy genre and its young audience. But then I heard NPR reviewer, Maureen Corrigan, who had similar reservations yet came away charmed by her reading experience. Corrigan is someone to listen to, so I listened and read Twilight.
Rules of Civility
Amor Towles, 2011
352 pp.
September 2011
Amor Towles has given us a smart, sophisticated coming-of-age story—told from the vantage point of a middle-aged woman looking back, to the late 1930s, at a much younger version of herself.
Katey, our narrator, is one of three young adults starting out in Manhattan, the other two Eve and Tinker. The three form a love triangle with Tinker at the apex. He's a young man possessed of all the accouterments of wealth—a prince: charming, poised, and good looking. He's of the class that stands apart, "exhibiting a poise secured by the alchemy of wealth and station."
August Heat
Andrea Camilleri, 2006 (trans., 2009)
272 pp.
August 2011
It's August, it's Sicily, and it's hot—and in the course of this novel, Inspector Salvo Montalbano takes 24 showers, baths, and dips in the sea. Sometimes it's his body, but just as often it's his fervid mind that needs cooling off.
Montalbano has a murder on his hands, and he's also trying to stave off a growing attraction to a woman young enough be be his daughter. Enough to make any man over-heat.
City of Tranquil Light
Bo Caldwell, 2010
304 pp.
July 2011
"When you leave a place you love, you leave a piece of your heart." That Chinese proverb from the book captures how I felt when closing its covers—I'd left a piece of my heart in its pages.
It sounds so cheesy having said that—yet no one was more surprised than I by how this book yanked at my sometimes jaded heart-strings.