Maybe This Time
Jennifer Crusie, 2010
352 pp.
May 2011
Jennifer Crusie has a wide following for her breezy, humorous take on the romance novel—and her latest book is no exception.
In Maybe This Time, she uses Henry James's eerie gothic tale, The Turn of the Screw (see below), as her point of departure. What she ends up with is a fun modern ghost story—with a screw-ball cast of characters and two endearing children.
The Professor and the Madman
Simon Winchester, 1998
288 pp.
February 2011
You would hardly expect a book about a dictionary to be interesting. Yet when Simon Winchester's name is on the cover, you would expect a great read—and you'd be right.
Winchester recounts the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)—an undertaking that took 70 years with legions of volunteers, who combed through 1000s of books and submitted 2,000,000 quotes. Some poor soul had to oversee it all, and Winchester tells his story.
The Three Weissmanns of Westport
Cathleen Schine, 2010
292 pp.
January 2011
In this delicious modern send-up of Sense and Sensibility, Cathleen Schine takes Jane Austen to heart. Not content to simply clone the plot, Schine, like her famous forerunner, turns a mordant eye on a self-regarding, self-absorbed society. The result is a sharp, funny, yet poignant story.
The novel opens in a posh West Side Manhattan apartment, where Joe Weissmann announces to Betty, wife of 40 years, that he's filing for divorce ... due to "irreconcilable differences." Betty's response? What do "irreconcilable differences" have to do with divorce? (Isn't that lovely?!)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922
64 pp.
December 2010
This short story reverses time's arrow. In turn, hilarious and sad, it takes aim at aristocatic pretensions, one of Fitzgerald's favorite targets. It's a story with bite. (The Brad Pitt movie with all its earnestness? Not even close. Film and story have little in common.)
The story opens as a young society couple anticipates the birth of their first child. Arriving at the hospital, however, Mr. Button is met with an "appalling apparition"—no gurgling infant but a bearded creature crammed into his crib. There he sits, demanding food, clothing, rocking chair and cane. Roger's Button's newborn is a grown man of seventy.
Remarkable Creatures
Tracy Chevalier, 2010
pp. 320
November 2010
By now, Tracy Chevalier has established her bona fides as one of the doyennes of historical fiction. She's widely praised for her skill in capturing the characters and nuanced customs of whatever era she writes about.
In Remarkable Creatures, Chevalier turns her eye to the tremulous babysteps of paleontology, the study of prehistoric life. This is the early 1800's, pre-Darwin, before the concept of extinction. What were these strange fossils...and where are the living creatures now? If they no longer exist...does that mean that God, who created them, decided to rid the world of them? Were they errors in His judgment? Such an idea was blasphemous.