The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna tells the life story of a teenager to young man who makes his own way in the world between Mexico and the United States, thanks to a Mexican mother whose main purpose is to find a husband and a distracted, remote, and often inept American father. Along the way he works for Diego [...]

Invisible by Paul Auster

Invisible is the perfectly constructed, tortuously complicated story of a psychopath and an incestuous brother (two different characters), mixed in with a number of airhead women who tolerate their ways. And it left me completely and absolutely cold. It turns out that I have great difficulty finding anything likable or even interesting in psychopaths or [...]

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

Note to self: avoid books that include a reading group guide. Who writes these guides anyway? They are so simplistic and patronizing. The real problem is not the guide, naturally, but the likely pairing of said guide with fairly insipid novels,  The Wednesday Sisters being the second encounter for me in a few days (Bed [...]

Homer and Langley by E.L Doctorow

Homer & Langley tells the fictional story of two real brothers who died in a Fifth Avenue mansion filled with treasures and detritus after a lifetime of collecting, much of which spent cut off from the world, having dismissed the staff and rarely venturing out. One brother is blind and the other is nominally the [...]

Thinks by David Lodge

Thinks tells one story from two perspectives, that of a department chairman at the (fictional) university of Gloucester and of a female visiting professor, newly widowed. Their very different reactions to the same events are often amusing and the story that appears to be a simple affair at first turns out to be pleasantly tortuous [...]

Books of the Month – October 2009

I found these two books to be close to perfect:
A Gate at the Stairs – a wonderfully well-told, intricate story of a college student with personal, job, and family traumas but grace throughout
Brown Round – the biography of a food critic with weight issues, a great family, and a sweet perspective on life
And two more, [...]

The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith

The Lost Art of Gratitude is the last installment in the Isabel Dalhousie series, reviewed here in the past. There’s a significant dearth of any significant mystery in this one, but the usual complement of charming toddler, perfect husband-to-be, and nefarious plotter. I found Isabel to philosophize a tad too systematically so I hope the [...]

Bed and Breakfast by Lois Battle

The owner of the Bed & Breakfast of the story is the mother of three grown daughters who gathers all three for what she hopes to be a peaceful, perhaps joyful Christmas celebration. Alas, all three daughters misbehave in predictable and unpredictable patterns and the hoped-for celebration is a disaster, but over the [...]

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

A Gate at the Stairs is the story of a college student who finds a nanny job that turns into a family therapy position, as I suppose is often the case with nannies, while her younger brother is struggling with high school and with life and her boyfriend turns out to be, perhaps, a terrorist. [...]

The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi

The Wish Maker tells the story of three generations of a Pakistani family, culminating in the grandson going off to Harvard (like the narrator) and focusing on his mother and his mother’s much younger female cousin on the background of Pakistan’s complicated politics of the 1990s. This could be a triumph, like A Golden Age, [...]