September, 2017 Book List

Another month, another book list. So many books, so little time. However having too many books on our book list is never a bad thing, sort of like a buffet can never have too many offerings. Amazon, this month, listed all the new fall books with publication dates, so some of the titles on the Amazon list are not yet available. Just a reminder that books make great gifts.

Aug. 11

A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

A Doll for the Throwing by Mary Jo Bang (book length sequence of prose poems)

The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes (A Stewart Hoag Mystery) by David Handler

Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen

Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption by Benjamin Rachlin

The House of Government: A Saga of Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine

Fog by Miguel de Unamuno, trans. from the Spanish by Elena Barcia

Aug 18^th

Stay With Me: A Novel by Ayobami Adebayo

Shooting Ghosts: A US Marine, a Combat Photographer, and their Journey Back from War by Thomas J. Brennan and Finbarr O’Reilly (NF)

Eastman Was Here: A Novel by Alex Gilvary

Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard (1^st of a projected quartet of autobiographical volumes) (NF) *

Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty

Unraveling Oliver by Liz Nugent

The Room of White Fire: A Novel by T. Jefferson Parker

Aug. 25

The New Voices of Fantasy, edited by Peter S Beagle (NF)

Snap Judgement: a Sam Brinkman Legal Thriller by Marcia Clark

The Burning Girl: A Novel by Claire Messud

Sundays in August by Patrick Modiano, trans. from the French by Damion Searls

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, edited by Jeronimo Pizzero, trans. from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

The Big Indie Books of Fall 2017

See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

The Stone Building and Other Places by Asli Erdogan

The People are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage by Jared Yates Sexton (NF)*

Mean by Myriam Grerba

A Year in the Wilderness: Bearing Witness in the Boundary Waters by Amy and Dave Freeman (NF)

The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits by Tiya Miles

Gilded Suffragist by Johanna Neuman (NF)

Democracy and its Crisis by A.C. Grayling (NF) *

Marita: The Spy Who loved Castro by Marita Lorenz (NF)

Solar Bones: A Novel by Mike McCormack

The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco

They Can’t Kill us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib (Essays)

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (NF)

Sept. 1

Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream by Sasha Abramsky (NF)*

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova (NF)

A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carré (George Smiley)

The World of Tomorrow: A Novel by Brendan Mathews

Black Rock White City by A.S. Patric

The Golden House by Salmon Rushdie *

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman

Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward

Sept. 8^th

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

The Devouring: A Billy Boyle World War II Mystery by James R. Benn

Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime by Ben Blum

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz

Warcross by Marie Lu

Voice in the Dark by Ulli Lust and Marcel Beyer, trans. from the German by Nika Knight

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Katalin Street by Magda Szabó, trans. from the Hungarian by Len Rix

Aug. 11

Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta

The Chalk Artist by Allegra Goodman

Moving Days by Joshua Cohen

Broken River by Robert Lennon

South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby

Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory

Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy

A House Among the Trees by Julia Grass

Bed-Stuy Is Burning by Brian Platzer

Crime Fiction

The Secrets She Keeps by Michael Robotham

Fierce Kingdom by Gin Philips

Arrowood by Mick Finlay

Need You Dead by Peter James

Nonfiction

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green *

The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein

Aug. 18^th

Nonfiction

Freud by Frederick Crews

The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich

The Once and Future Liberal by Mark Lilla

To Siri with Love by Judith Newman

Life in Code by Ellen Ullman

Surfing with Sartre: Does Riding a Wave Help Solve Existential Mysteries? by Aaron James

Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean (econ. James McGill Buchanan)

Wrestling with His Angel by Sidney Blumenthal (2^nd volume of Lincoln biography)

North Korea

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley Martin

The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot

Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies by Victor Cha and David Kang

Fiction

The Destroyers by Christopher Bollen

The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

The Little French Bistro by Nina George

A French Wedding by Hannah Tunnicliffe

Impossible Views of the World by Lucy Ives

Crime Fiction

Y is for Yesterday by Sue Grafton

The Driver by Hart Hanson

The Rat Catcher’s Olympics by Colin Cotterill

Crime Scene by Jonathan Kellerman and his son Jason Kellerman

Aug. 25^th

A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert

The Locals by Jonathan Dee

See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

Motherest by Kristen Iskendrian

Nonfiction

Wild Things by Bruce Handy

Into the Grey Zone by Adrian Owen

No Apparent Distress by Rachel Pearson

Chester B. Himes by Lawrence P. Jackson

You Can Do Anything by George Anders

A Practical Education by Randall Stross

Campus Confidential by Jacques Berlinerblau

The New Education by Cathy N. Davidson

Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu

Sept. 1

Nonfiction

Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen

Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas by Donna M. Lucey

‘Good Booty’: The Sexual Power of Music by Ann Powers

‘Warner Bros’: A History of the Studio and the Family by David Thomson’s

“I’ll Have What She’s Having” by Erin Carlson (Nora Ephron)

Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Autobiography by Walt Whitman

Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound Mind and a Beautiful Body by Walt Whitman

Fiction

The Woman Who Had Two Navels by Nick Joaquin

Tales of the Tropical Gothic by Nick Joaquin

Crime Novels

Glass Houses by Louise Penny

Séance Infernale by Jonathan Skariton

The Doll Funeral by Kate Hamer

Killer Harvest by Paul Cleave

When the English Fall by David Williams

Grace by Paul Lynch

Out in the Open by Jesus Carrasco

Made for Love by Alissa Nutting

Pages for You by Sylvia Browning

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Final Demand by Deborah Moggach

My Sister’s Bones by Nuala Ellwood

You’ll Never Know Dear by Hallie Ephron

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

Sept. 8^th

Nonfiction

Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen

Collecting the World by James Delbourgo

Black Detroit by Herb Boyd

Gorbachev by William Taubman

Enraged by Emily Katz Anhalt

A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell

Beautiful Bodies by Kimberly Rae Miller

David Litt, an Obama Speech-writer Who Wants No Credit by David Litt

Fiction

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hayes

The Party by Elizabeth Day

A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Careers for Women by Joanna Scott

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

Dirt Road by James Kelman

The Followers by Rebecca Wait

Best Fall Books (Some of these books can only be pre-ordered. They are not yet available from the publisher.)

A Legacy of Spies: A Novel by John Le Carré

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

Hardcore Twenty Four by Janet Evanovich

A Column of Fire by Ken Follett

The Rooster Bar by John Grisham

Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Unqualified by Chris Pratt

My Absolute Darling: A Novel by Gabriel Tallent

Origin by Dan Brown

The Girls Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: A Lisbeth Salander Novel by David Lagercrantz

To Be Where You Are (A Mitford Novel) by Jan Karon

Two Kinds of Truth (A Harry Bosch Novel) by Michael Connelly

The Sun and Her Powers by Rupi Kaur

The Midnight Line: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child

Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward

End Game (Will Robie Series) by David Baldacci

Don’t Let Go by Harlan Coben

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Artemis: A Novel by Andy Weir

Sourdough: A Novel by Robin Sloan

The Rules of Magic: A Novel by Alice Hoffman

Winter Solstice by Elin Hilderbrand

It Devours: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror (John Dies at the End) by David Wong

Without Merit: A Novel by Colleen Hoover

Paris in the Present Tense: A Novel by Mark Helprin

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Future Home of the Living God: A Novel by Louise Erdrich

The Twelve Mile Straight: A Novel by Eleanor Henderson

Autonomous: A Novel by Annalee Newitz

The Quantum Spy: A Thriller by David Ignatius

Snap Judgment by Marcia Clark

Fever by Deon Meyer and K.L. Seefers

Five Carat Soul by James Mc Bride

Hanna Who Fell From the Sky: A Novel by Christopher Meades

Nonfiction

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Braving the Wilderness by Brene Brown

The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance by Tom Brady

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur

Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team by Simon Sinek and David Mead

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Watersi

Grant by Ron Chernow

It Takes Two: Our Story by Jonathan Scott and Drew Scott

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Unstoppable: My Life So Far by Maria Sharpova

Sisters First: Stories from Our Wild and Wonderful Life by Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush

Waiting for the Punch: Words to Live By from WTF Podcast

Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake by Kathryn Miles

David Bowie: A Life by Dylan Jones

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella and Greg Shaw

My Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History by Josh Dean

T is for Transformation: Unleash the 7 Superpowers to Help You Dig Deeper, Feel Stronger, and Live Your Best Life by Shaun T

Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz Chast*

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith and Zack Weinersmith*

Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life by Robert Dallek

Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone by Richard Lloyd Parry

What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism by Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner

Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A by Danielle S. Allen

Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan

Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime by Ben Blum

Blood Lines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty by Melissa del Bosque

WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us

The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe

Chuck D Presents This Day in Rap and Hip Hop History by Chuck D and foreword by Shepard Fairey

The Bloody Patriots: How I Took Down an Anti-government Militia with Beer, Bounty Hunting and Badassery by Bill Fulton and Jeanne Devon

The Art of Stopping Time: Practical Mindfulness for Busy People by Pedram Shojai

We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations that Matter by Celeste Headlee

Lou Reed: A Life by Anthony DeCurtis

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy

Member of My Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness that Ended the Sixties by Dianne Lake and Deborah Herman

Inside Camp David: The Private World of the Presidential Retreat by Michael Giorgione

Real American: A Memoir by Julie Lythcott-Haims

The Ghosts of Langley: Into the CIA’s Heart of Darkness by John Prados

A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa by Alexis Okeowo

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions by Muhammed Yunus

The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown

Supernormal: The Untold Story of Adversity and Resilience by Meg Jay

The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America by Rebecca Fraser

American Radical: Inside the World of an Undercover Muslim FBI Agent by Tamer Elnoury with Kevin Maurer

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google by Scott Galloway

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to see my published books and my book reviews

Evicted by Matthew Desmond – Book

Matthew Desmond’s book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City summarizes the lengthy and intimate researches of this sociologist with a MacArthur Genius Grant who has done his due diligence. His interest is in analyzing and discovering ways for breaking up stubborn, seemingly impossible-to-resolve problems that make life a misery for poor folks, especially black poor folks, and single mothers who are at the absolute bottom of the economic heap.

Mr. Desmond, a young man, still in college, moves into two different poor neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Since he is white he perhaps would have been distrusted in a minority neighborhood so he started out in a trailer park at the edge of the city with a more mixed-race population. This allowed him to make some connections, see some possible housing issues and eventually he was able to enter the predominately black North Side as a resident. He roomed with a black policeman called Officer Woo (a childhood nickname).

Obviously poverty and all of the things attendant on it, such as lack of education or training, being limited to low paying jobs, being hungry and having to spend too much time finding food for your family, not having an appropriate job wardrobe are all factors that contribute to keeping poor people from rising.

But Matthew Desmond decided to focus on the issue of housing and he exposes an angle on urban poverty that we have not yet explored in enough detail. He looks specifically at the part evictions play in squelching opportunity. He looks at a cycle that allows ever higher rents that do not decrease for low value properties. He looks at the gap between incomes and rents. He introduces us to the people he met who let him have access to their personal finances. I will issue a warning to you that they still haunt him even as he moves on to pursue his own life, and they will stay with you also.

Anecdotal studies are difficult because of the fact that the researcher is present and interacting. This can change the data in ways that are quite subtle, and perhaps not so subtle, sort of the way in which a rock bends the current in a stream. Desmond tried to keep his presence somewhat personal even as he also stuck to his position as a writer and a recorder of the lives of the people he met. He calls his report, his book, an ethnography, which seems accurate enough.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey has a book club every summer. He chooses a title and everyone who signs up for the book club reads the same book. There is a discussion session at a certain date. This is the book for summer, 2017. You could probably still sign up.

I’m not going to summarize Desmond’s findings or his suggestions for fixing this seeming unresolvable dilemma of inner cities which seem to act like traps, robbing Americans of the comforts we expect life in America to offer. These observations are the entire content of his book. However, I will say, “Good choice, Cory Booker!”

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy – Book

In her most recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy talks about modern India (which is not as modern as you would like it to be). Two women are the focus of her story, Anjum and Tilottama. However, this is really a story of human rights and human intolerance and finding happiness when and where you can.

Anjum is born a boy. However upon closer examination he has the organs of both of the sexes – a hermaphrodite. His mother is able to keep this biological state a secret until puberty. At puberty the boy, Aftab, realizes she is not a boy. Are such things accepted in India? Yes and no. Anjum would never find a life in “normal” India society but one day she follows a transgender shopper from the market and she learns that there is a separate society of transgender Indian people, that the name for some transgender persons, including Anjum, is “hijra,” and in her neighborhood the hijra live in a house called the Khwabgah.

Within this group she is able to have a circumscribed but full social life. She adopts a homeless child and becomes her rather jealous mother. Although she must face a life separate from her parents and siblings, she is protected by superstition and left to her own devices. Fortunately, although feelings about Muslims are running high (as they do periodically in India), and although Hindus are attacking and slaughtering Muslims with little provocation, it is bad luck to kill hijra. This does not prevent Anjum from experiencing something so horrifying that it turns her life upside down.

Tilottama is a young woman with considerable charm despite her dark “café au lait, except very little lait” skin, which is not considered desirable. In fact she is desirable enough to attract three men (and more) who are in school with her. Naga, Musa, and “Garson Hobart” meet Tilo when practicing to stage a play (which never opens). These four are caught up in the off again – on again brutal war for control of Kashmir, a province coveted by India proper, Pakistan and China. Kashmiris want only to be a free and independent nation. Musa becomes a Kashmiri spy and a fighter for the independence movement. Tilo loves Musa who she can connect with only in the moments he snatches away from the movement.

The lives of our two main characters, Anjum and Tilo, become intertwined over, of all things, a homeless child.

Now it may seem as if I am telling the whole novel and that this will make it unnecessary to read this book. But that is not so. Arundhati is a prize-winning author and not by mistake. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a 400+ page book. It is detailed without being dry; it is instructive without being pedantic, and long without seeming long. This book cannot be summarized. It must be experienced.

Arundhati Roy never sugarcoats political flaws of corruption and religious intolerance in India, corruption that possibly tops the corruption we lament in our own government. She also explores the courage of people who lead authentic lives.

If you enjoy travelling to another culture without leaving your comfort zone and you want to avoid the touristy spots and get some in-depth exposure to the true spirit of a nation, Arundhati Roy is your ticket. You will gain exposure to an internal turmoil that inspires people, frightens people, and generates great courage and great grief. Don’t be a chicken. What you learn makes the journey worthwhile.

I’ll end with Roy’s beginning quote, “I mean, it’s all a matter of your heart…” –Nâzim Hikmet

July 2017 Book List

Publisher’s Weekly

June 2

Confessions by Augustine (newly translated by Sarah Ruden)

Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd (NF)

Felix Y_z by Lisa Bunker (YA)

Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? by Heath Fogg Davis (NF)

The People We Hate at the Wedding by Grant Ginder (F)

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Kennedy and the King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights by Steven Levingston (NF)

A Fugitive in Walden Woods by Norman Lock (F)

Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou (translated from the French by Helen Stevenson) (F)

How to Be a Muslim: An American Story by Haroon Moghul (NF)

This Impossible Light by Lily Myers (F in poetry)

We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria by Wendy Pearlman (NF)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhoti Roy (F)

The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny by Michael Wallis (NF)

June 16

The Girl in Between by Sarah Carroll (F)

The Boy Who Loved Too Much: A True Story of Pathological Friendliness by Jennifer Latson (NF)

Into the Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death by Adrian Owen (NF)

Flesh, and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma (NF)

Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby

The Force by Don Winslow Morrow (F)

June 30

American, English, Italian, Chocolate: Small Subjects of Great Importance by Rick Bailey (NF)

The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins (F)

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan by Elaine M Hayes(NF)

Trophy: A Novel by Steffen Jacobsen (F)

Who is Rich? By Matthew Klam (F)

The Disappearances by Emily Bain Murphy (F, YA)

All We Shall Know? A Novel by Donal Ryan (F)

A Stone of Hope: A Memoir by Jim St. Germain

Words on Bathroom Walls: A Novel by Julia Walton (F, YA)

July 7

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera by Adam Begley (NF)

Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg (NF)

Alone by Christophe Chabouté (visually stunning) (F)

Death on Delos by Gary Corby (F)

Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 AD to the First Crusade by Anthony Keldellis (NF)

Dirt Road by James Kelman (F)

Hum If You Don’t Know the Words by Bianca Marais (F)

The Art of Starving by Sam J Miller (F, YA)

My Heart Hemmed In by Marie N Diaye (translated from the French by Jordan Stump) (F)

Conversations with Friends: A Novel by Sally Rooney

So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens (NF)

The End by Fernanda Torres (F)

July 14

The Late Show by Michael Connelly (F)

No Good Deed by Kara Connolly (F, YA)

The Epiphany Machine by David Burr Gerrard

Ants Among the Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla (NF)

Soul Cage by Giles Murray (F)

The Library of Fates by Adit Khorana (F, YA)

Like a Fading Shadow by Antonio Mũnoz Molina (translated from the Spanish by Camilo A Ramirez) (F)

Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin (Short Stories)

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (NF)

July 21

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich (translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsby) (NF)

Refugee by Alan Gratz (F)

Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed (F)

The Way We Die Now: The View from Medicine’s Front Line by Seamus O’Mahony (NF)

Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips (F)

Amazon

Literature and Fiction

Spoonbenders: A Novel by Daryl Gregory

Goodbye Vitamin: A Novel by Rachel Khong

The Outer Cape: A Novel by Patrick Dacey

Tornado Weather: A Novel by Deborah E. Kennedy

AFTERLIFE by Marcus Sakey

Before Everything by Victoria Redel

The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo by Ian Stansel

Rufuge: A Novel by Dina Nayeri

Quiet Until the Thaw: A Novel by Alexandra Fuller

Who is Rich? A Novel by Matthew Klam

Camino Island by John Grisham

Mysteries and Thrillers

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Fierce Kingdom: A Novel by Gin Phillips

The Lying Game: A Novel by Ruth Ware

The Dead Comedians: A Murder Mystery by Fred Van Lente

Zero Sum (A John Rain Novel) by Barry Eisler

House of Spies: A Novel (Gabriel Allon) by Daniel Silva

Every Last Lie by Mary Kupica (A gripping novel of psychological suspense)

AFTERLIFE by Marcus Sakey

Biographies and Memoirs

Sting-Ray Afternoons: A Memoir by Steve Rushin

Chester H. Himes: A Biography by Lawrence P. Jackson

Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship by Michelle Kuo

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughn by Elaine M Hayes

To the New Owners: A Martha’s Vineyard Memoir by Madeleine Blais

Giant of the Senate by Al Franken

Nonfiction

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Ben Mezrich

Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem by Bill Nye

Science Fiction and Fantasy

When the English Fall: A Novel by David Williams

New York Times

June 18

Everything under Heaven: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power by Howard French (NF)

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap? By Graham Allison (NF)

Be Like the Fox by Erica Benner (Machiavelli) (NF)

Goethe: Life as Work of Art by Rudiger Sofranski (NF)

Raven Rock by Garrett M Groff (History of the Cold War) (NF)

I Was Told to Come Alone by Souad Mekhennet (NF)

A Little More Human by Fiona Maazel (F)

Camino Island by John Grisham (F)

You Belong to Me by Colin Harrison (F)

Ginny Moon by Benjamin Ludwig (F)

According to a Source by Abby Stein (F)

Among the Lesser Gods by Margo Catts (F)

The Invisible Mile by David Coventry (F)

June 25

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Lev Grossman (NF)

A Fine Mess by T R Reid (NF)

Lincoln and the Abolitionists by Fred Kaplan (NF)

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein (NF)

The Seeds of Life by Edward Dolnick (NF)

The Boy Who Loved Too Much by Jennifer Latson (NF)

Murder in Matera by Helen Stapinski (NF)

Awkward by Ty Tashiro (NF)

If I Understood You, Would I Have this Look on my Face? By Alan Alda (NF)

Best New Crime (4 titles)

Wolf on a String by Benjamin Black (F)

The Force by Don Winslow (F)

The Templars Last Secret by Martin Walker (F)

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan (F)

Fly Me by Daniel Riley (F)

Some Rise by Sin by Philip Caputo (F)

A Good Country by Laleh Khadivi (F)

July 2

Kennedy and King by Steven Levingston (NF)

The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida (NF)

An English Governess in the Great War by Mary Thorp (NF)

Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor’s Search for the Perfect Match by Vanessa Grubbs (NF)

Healing Children: A Surgeon’s Stories from the Frontiers of Pediatric Medicine by Kurt Newman (NF)

Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby (NF)

Sometimes Amazing Things Happen: Heartbreak and Hope on the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Ward by Elizabeth Ford (NF)

Fiction

Modern Gods by Nick Laird

Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan

Little Sister by Barbara Gowdy

Compass by Mathias Énard

July 9

Fiction

Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne

Saints for All Occasions by Courtney Sullivan

The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates by Jacob Bacharach

Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

The Zoo by Isobel Charman (NF)

The Chickenshit Club by Jesse Eisinger (NF)

Hue 1968 by Mark Bowden (NF)

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M Sapolsky (NF)

The Hue and Cry at Our House by Benjamin Taylor (NF)

The Best Land Under Heaven by Michael Wallis (NF)

Love, Africa by Jeffrey Gettleman (NF)

Return to Glory by Matthew DeBord (NF)

July 16

Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North by Robert Fergusson (NF)

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley (NF)

Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom by Deborah Yaffe (NF)

The Making of Jane Austen by Devoney Looser (NF)

The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theater and Why She Works in Hollywood by Paula Byrne (NF)

Jane Austen: The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly (NF)

The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison (F)

The Half Wives by Stacia Pelletier (F)

The Underground River by Martha Conway (F)

July 23

The Home that was Our Country by Alia Malek (NF)

We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled by Wendy Pearlman (NF)

Hunger by Roxane Gay (NF)

The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea by Bill Emmott (NF)

One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality by Jeremy Waldron

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls

The Islamic Enlightenment by Christopher de Ballaigue (NF)

Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals by Jeremy McCarter (NF)

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughn by Elaine M Hayes (NF)

The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (NF)

Fiction

There Your Heart Lies by Mary Gordon

The Changeling by Victor LaValle

4 new mysteries

The Smack by Richard Lange

The Fallen by Ace Atkins

City of Masks by S D Sykes

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

Black Moses by Alain Mobanckou

Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexander Fuller

Check out my book reviews and my published books at

http://notabene718.com/

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya – Book

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communal Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and translated by Anna Summers in 2017 caught my attention because I had read, not long ago, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which was also set in post-revolutionary Russia in the Metropol Hotel, located in the heart of Moscow. While I enjoyed the novel by Towles, I felt that the life Alexander, once a member of the aristocracy, lived in the Metropol Hotel might be a somewhat romanticized version of the fate a person would normally have suffered as an enemy of the people during those early days of the Communist (Bolshevik)Revolution. The new leaders were purging the nation of old bourgeois influences and the privileged classes. Petrushevskaya’s story is quite different from Alexander’s and conforms more nearly to my understanding of the complicated and unpredictable suspicions that often led to the arrests of Russians in the wake of the revolution.

Anna Summers offers a preface which provides some background. She begins by describing a May 9^th parade that took place in every town and village since the end of WWII with rows of ragged and neglected veterans marching proudly, and then she has us picture the day of May 9^th in 2015 (Petrushevskaya originally published her book in Russia in 2006) when there were no WWII vets left to parade through the towns and villages; there were only pictures carried by their grandchildren. She tells us, “Except sometimes the facts of a family’s connection with the war weren’t suited for proud retelling and were therefore often concealed from the little ones who would then be forced to hem and haw and finally come up with some lie. Sometimes our grandparents didn’t just die gruesomely, buried alive in a tank, like mine or return disfigured or even return at all. Sometimes they were arrested and sent to the Gulag…” (Her father and her grandfather were killed in a mass execution in the late 1930’s, even though her relations were prominent Bolsheviks elevated by the October Revolution, so she had no war stories to tell and this was a problem.) “The shared experiences of their childhoods – evacuation, hunger – were heightened in her case by the unbearable – and unshareable – extreme because of the social stigma that branded her an ‘enemy of the people’”

Ludmilla’s childhood with her aunt and her grandmother was hungrier and dirtier than that of most children because of the classification and execution of her grandfather and her father. The female survivors were ostracized and interned in a prison without walls. Ludmilla’s story may begin when she was born in the Metropol Hotel but her life is lived far from Moscow for the most part. Whatever Russia was like after the Revolution for those who found favor with the Communists, Ludmilla’s memoir of her childhood years shows what life was like for everyone in a family once a progenitor became an enemy of the people, even though the reasons were often obscure, petty, or even imagined.

Soon this famous Russian writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, will join the ranks of those no longer living veterans of WWII. Thankfully she got to publish this memoir of her early hardscrabble existence and outcast state. We should not ever forget that the Russian Revolution was often an ideological quagmire with many victims, both guilty and innocent. Sounds grim, but is very readable.

Flâneuse by Laura Elkin – Book

Laura Elkin’s book Flâneuse is not the first book about women who are the counterparts of the more usual male figure, the flâneur, A few other books with this title predate hers. Her book has a subtitle: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London and reads very much like a doctoral dissertation, although the language is not quite as academic, and the book tends to offer a warmer reading experience than the expected dry fare of the dissertation. The flâneur she tells us is “one who walks aimlessly…A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention.

Flâneuse is the feminine form and denotes “an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. But each flâneuse discussed in any detail by Elkin is not truly idle. These women were writers, photographers, artists. Until recently it was difficult for a woman to be a flâneuse. Writer Janet Wolff did not give credence to the flâneuse as “such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century.” Other writers agree. But Elkin reminds us that the rise of the department store in the 1850’s and 60’s “did much to normalize the appearance of women in public.”

Laura Elkin was born on Long Island where no one walked anywhere. Her father was an architect who designed some of the corporate headquarters as companies left the city and moved into newly designed corporate parks. But Elkin discovered that she belonged in cities when she moved into New York City to attend college. “To sit in a restaurant on Broadway with the world walking by and the cars and the taxis and the noise was like finally being let in to the centre of the universe, after peering in at it for so long.”

The book is dense with detailed examples of women writers, artists, journalists, and more who felt most at home in cities and used the intimate details of city life gained through wandering and observation to enlighten us all. Elkin gives us a taste of London, following in Virginia Woolf’s footsteps; a soupçon of Venice, New York, and Tokyo (where wandering alone around the city is basically impossible even in daylight); but mainly of Paris which ended up being her home.

Artists she expands on in some detail, both about their lives and their work include Jean Rhys (allied with Ford Maddox Ford), George Sand (who dressed as a boy/man to roam the city freely), Virginia Woolf, Martha Gellhorn (wife of Ernest Hemingway and war journalist and more), and Agnès Varda, in French films.

Elkin’s sums things up in this way, “You don’t need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you’re a woman. Just walk out your front door.” Reading this tome is a bit like being a literary flâneuse without having to leave your armchair – lots of great little tidbits.

Edgar and Lucy by Peter Lodato – Book

Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato is a story of mental illness so severe that even love and medication cannot prevail. It is a story of grief that makes a person forget all the rules that humans should heed. And it is story of parenting both neglectful and obsessed; the story of a boy so small and pale he seems to have been born an albino child; a child so dependent on his grandmother, Florence, that when she dies he is too bereft to heed the protective advice routinely offered to children.- “never speak to strangers.”

Lodato’s novel is well-written, but I was torn. The plot itself is not quite as formulaic as it might seem. This kept me reading. And clearly we cannot spend too much time thinking about the issues that arise from mental illness and our less-than-successful treatments and enabling behaviors. The rights of an individual to freedom are set against the chaos that comes with untreated serious mental illness, a set of circumstances which offers the mentally ill both a sort of dignity and the potential to destroy the balance of more than one life. Lodato makes us hope that we come up with better answers in the future. This issue that continues to challenge us all is a frustrating, but is also a rewarding thread in this book.

What I found hardest to take was the bad parenting the reader encounters in this story. Sadly, it is a fact that bad parenting is a common topic in modern literature. What happens to children when parenting is absent or inappropriate is heartbreaking and, although it probably reflects accurately on what is really the case (and not only in these times), I wish I could believe that exposure leads to improvement and that we get parenting right in the majority of families, however unorthodox the family might be. However, I have sincere doubts that such optimism is valid.

There are plot twists in Lodato’s novel that I cannot discuss. The author uses internal cues to make us think that things will come out one way, while the outcomes are actually less predictable. This should be a good thing but ends up being a bit creepy in ways I cannot specify as I don’t want to interfere with letting readers judge this aspect of the novel as they read. It bothered me; it might not bother another reader. I am concluding with a belief that those who read Edgar and Lucy by Peter Lodato will find in this novel an almost constant stream of personal emotional reactions. While it is a good read; it does not make it onto my list of favorites.

The Baroque Cycle, A Trilogy by Neal Stephenson – Book

I chose the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson because I wanted a long book to read and because this author has written other books that I enjoyed. Perhaps if I knew this trilogy of books ran to 2700+ pages I might have had second thoughts but my Kindle doesn’t deal with page numbers. I like to think that I would have read these novels anyway. It certainly was not a sprint: it was a journey – a journey in time, a mental journey, and involving lots of journeying by the books’ characters. Stephenson takes us to the 17^th and early 18^th century. This time period represents a transitional age in that the way men lived upon the earth was changing, in much the same ways that we are in a transitional age now.

Quicksilver introduces us to the Alchemists, who wished to find a way to turn base metal into gold. Quicksilver is mercury, which fascinated Alchemists with its unusual behaviors as a metal that is liquid at room temperature and a metal that beads and rolls around as if it were solid. It was felt that quicksilver, so often found near gold deposits, was somehow transformed into gold by some kind of mysterious natural process. The Alchemists were almost done with their investigations, having failed so often in their endeavors. But the experimentations they had conducted gave them a great scientific curiosity about everything in the world around them, both nonliving and living. Out of the Alchemists came a group known as Natural Philosophers and we had the very beginning of Physics.

These were the days of Isaac Newton in England and Hooke in England and Huygens, a Dutchman, and Gottfried Leibnitz, a German. These men explored the insides of living things, they looked at everything under lenses that improved in quality as the trilogy progressed. They created “the algebra” and they began to see that all things were made of smaller things (atoms to Newton, monads to Leibnitz). Newton and Leibnitz both claimed to have come up with “the algebra” which made these two great men opponents and caused educated folks to divide into two camps depending on which great man they backed.

Stephenson gives us a fictional character to serve as a go-between for these great gentlemen who did not always agree with each other. Daniel Waterhouse is the character who speaks to all of the principals. He also avoids much of the Catholic – Protestant divide of the times by coming from a family that is neither. His father is persecuted for his beliefs, but Daniel is not. Daniel serves as our man in London and in Massachusetts where he is trying to set up the Massachusetts’ Institute of Technological Arts. (He is not the founder of MIT.)

The other two books in this trilogy – which jumps around in time and place – although not quite as neatly and tidily organized as I am making them sound, are called The Confusion and The System of the World. They take us out of London with a vagabond. On the “Continent”, we follow two very unusual fictional characters. We follow Eliza, the stunning and extremely intelligent ex-Turkish slave, captured by a French aristocrat with her mom and sold into slavery in Turkey. And we have Jack Shaftoe, a poor Englishman, also extremely intelligent, who becomes the King of the Vagabonds. Eliza and Jack fall in love when he rescues her from the Turks but their paths diverge. Eliza becomes wealthy by learning to invest in the Dutch “stock market” of the day. Dutch economics are superior to other nations earlier due to the trade of the Dutch East India Company. Eliza becomes a member of the court of Louis XIV and becomes a familiar figure at Versailles. Jack gets captured and becomes a slave rower on a ship bound for Africa. But he is too brilliant to stay down for long. Jack makes a plan, makes some friends and ends up taking us to visit all the world that was known at that time.

Jack’s plan involves stealing gold as part of a plan of retribution against the Frenchman who enslaved Eliza. He does not realize that this is known as the Solomonic Gold because it is bound to mercury. The nature of this particular gold had everyone chasing Jack and his men all over Christendom and beyond and puts his life in mortal jeopardy more times than you will want to count. The Alchemists and the Natural Philosophers are thrown into a total tizzy over this gold and several of our favorite characters barely escape with their lives and only manage it through the rather extreme machinations of Daniel Waterhouse and those he ropes into assisting him. Thus ends the age of Alchemy.

What follows are the beginnings of the Industrial Age. Here as magical science wraps up and practical science begins, just here when someone invents the “Engine that Uses Fire to Pump Water” and a contest offers a prize to anyone who can come up with a way to determine “the longitude” when on a sea voyage, things are as chaotic as they are here at the end of the Industrial Age in our real world.

The Baroque Cycle is a tale that will either entertain you over many a rainy and sunny day or will cause you to completely lose your patience and perhaps throw it at a wall. (Don’t throw your Kindle). Although I sometimes felt a bit crazed when I read for half a day and only progressed through 2% of the book, I never really wanted to stop reading it and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it’s not an experience I can recommend to anyone. You know if you are a reader who will love this or yawn over this. As for me I will eventually download another Stephenson tome and while away some more idle hours by allowing my mind to be taken somewhere/time else. (It is also a love story of sorts.)

“At some point, says Neal Stephenson by way of Daniel Waterhouse, the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have been wrought into it…Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But – and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there’s a longboat waiting to take him away – he has to admit that having some kind of System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.

May 2017 Book List

The interesting trend I see in this new crop of books on my May 2017 Book List which covers (compiled from PW, Amazon, NYT) mid-March until the end of April is that I see more nonfiction titles than fiction titles. I wonder if all the difficulty we are experiencing in our politics separating real news from fake news, and fact from propaganda or outright lies is fueling a desire to read books that attempt to be based in fact. Another trend also relates to politics because, while our country is responding to the “America First” message and turning its back on globalism, writing is becoming more global than ever before as the nationalities of the published authors show. One constant: so many great books, so little time. I am reading from older lists right now and will not catch up to this list for some time. When I do catch up the novel American War by Omar El Akkad seems like it might suit my politics, sci-fi, apocalyptic tastes. What titles appeal to you?

Publishers Weekly

April 3, 2017

Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing the Revolution by Peter Andreas (NF)

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year by Peter Brooks (NF)

What Flaubert had just written: Sentimental Education (F)

Marlena by Julie Buntin (F)

The Happy End/All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre (Sounds like a can’t miss Poetry book)

Fever of the Blood by Oscar de Muriel (Mys.)

American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad

Somebody with a little Hammer by Mary Gaitskill

Prussian Blue: A Bernie Guthrie Novel by Philip Kerr

The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty by Jonathan Morduch and Rachael Schneider (NF)

The Draw: A Memoir by Lee Siegel

God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America by Louis S. Warren (NF)

Foxlowe: A Novel by Eleanor Wasserberg

April 10, 2017

Long Black Veil: A Novel by Jennifer Finney Boylon (Thriller)

The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science by Marcus du Saufoy (NF)

Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip Fibura (NF)

Cruel is the Night by Karo Hämäläinen (F)

Beck by Mal Peet with Meg Rosoff (F)

At the Lightning Field by Laura Raicovich (Essays)

An American Sickness: How Health Care Became Big Business and How You can Take it Back by Elizabeth Rosenthal (NF)

Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro (Memoir)

Darwin’s First Theory: Exploring Darwin’s Quest for a Theory of Earth by Rob Wesson (NF

April 17

The Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam (F)

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. (NF)

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (True Crime)

Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Helligman (NF)

The Sun King’s Conspiracy by Yves Jégo and Denis Lépée (Thriller)

Bang by Barry Lyga (F)

Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes by Ann Elizabeth Moore (Essays)

Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg

April 24

North of Happy by Adi Alsaid (F)

The Whole Together Thing by Ann Brashares (F)

Good Friday on the Rez by David Hugh Bunnell (NF)

The Last Neanderthal by Clair Cameron (NF)

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (Memoir)

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (F)

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (F) (post-apocalyptic journey)

May 1

Salt Houses by Hala Alyan (F)

Season of Crimson Blossoms by Akubakar Adam Ibrahim (F)

The Leavers: A Novel by Lisa Ko (F)

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of this Will Matter by Scaachi Koul (Essays)

The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis (Autobiographical novel)

Ginny Moon: A Novel by Benjamin Ludwig (F)

The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution by Mike Rapport (NF)

A Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (NF)

Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky (NF)

Beyond the Bright Sea by Lauren Wolk (F)

Amazon

Literature and Fiction

The Stars Are Fire: A Novel by Anita Shreve

If We Were Villains: A Novel by M L Rio

The Woman in the Castle: A Novel by Jessica Shattuck

My Cat Yugoslavia: A Novel by Pajtim Statovci, David Hackston

Spoils by Brian Van Reet

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley: A Novel by Hannah Tinti

The Half Wives by Stacia Pellietier

What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nineka Arimah

The Practice House by Laura Mitchell

What to Do About the Solomons by Bethany Ball

Marlena by Julie Buntin

All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan, Jessica Cohen

American War by Omar El Akkad

Bear Town by Fredrik Backman

The Last Days of Café Leila by Donia Bijan

Mysteries and Thrillers

Rag Doll by Daniel Cole

Change Agent by Daniel Suarez

Earthly Remains: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery by Donna Leon

The Fix by David Baldacci (Amos Decker Series)

One Perfect Lie by Lisa Scottoline

The Devil’s Country by Harry Hunsicker

If We Were Villains by M L Rio

A Criminal Defense by William L Myers Jr.

Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr

The Lost Order by Steve Berry

Biographies and Memoirs

When You Find Out the World is Against You by Kelly Oxford

Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce Wars by Daniel J Sharstein

The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince by Mayte Garcia

Richard Nixon: The Life by John Farrell

Sam Shepard: A Life by John J Winters

The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn

Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman

Nevertheless: A Memoir by Alec Baldwin

The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History by Stephan Talty

Arnie: The Life of Arnold Palmer by Tom Callahan

New York Times

March 26

The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution by Ganesh Sitaraman (NF)

The One-Cent Magenta by James Barron (NF)

Quicksand by Malen Perrson Giolito (Thriller)

Ties by Domenico Starnone (F)

Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar (F)

Ill Will by Dan Chaon (F)

The Barrowfields by Philip Lewis (F)

Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato (F)

Irish Fiction

Himself by Jess Kidd

Eggshells by Cartriona Lally

Slipping by John Toomey

March 31

The Evangelicals by Francis FitzGerald (NF)

A Novel of the Century by David Bellow (Les Miserables) (NF)

The Price of Illusion by Joan Juliet Buck (NF)

Blitzed by Norman Ohler (NF)

Sex and the Constitution by Geoffrey R Stone (NF)

Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu (NF)

The Unmade Bed by Stepah Marche (NF)

Down City by Leah Carroll (NF)

Reagan Rising by Craig Shirley (NF)

Jerzy by Jerome Charyn (F)

The Idiot by Elif Batuman (F)

Crime Fiction

Earthy Remains by Donna Leon

The Loving Husband by Christobel Kent

Prussions Blue by Philip Kerr

White Tears by Hari Kunzru (F)

Shot Blue by Jesse Ruddock (F)

April 7

An American Sickness by Elizabeth Rosenthal (NF)

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy (NF)

Ice Ghosts by Paul Watson (NF)

By More than Providence by Michael J Green (NF)

No One Cares About Crazy People by Ron Powers

Unwanted Advances by Laura Kipnis (NF)

The Campus Rape Frenzy by K C Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr (NF)

The Spider Network by David Enrich (NF)

My Darling Detective by Howard Norman (F)

No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts (F)

Our Short History by Lauren Grodstein (NF)

April 14

Nonfiction

Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr

A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes

South and West by Joan Didion

Letterman by Jason Zinoman

Who Lost Russia? By Peter Conradi

Never Out of Season by Robert Dunn

Martin Luther by Lyndal Roper

The First Love Story (Minus the Sin and Sexism) by Bruce Feiler

The Chessboard and the Web by Ann-Marie Slaughter

Fiction

The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World by Brian Boyle

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti

Sympathy by Olivia Sudijic

The Dhow House by Jean McNeil

What to Do About the Solomons by Bethany Bell

Crime Fiction

Fallout by Sara Paretsky

The Burial Hour by Jeffrey Deaver

The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda

A Fever of the Blood by Oscar de Muriel

April 21

Nonfiction

Hamlet Globe to Globe by Dominic Dromgoole

You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser

The Knowledge of Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernback

What We Can Learn from Falstaff by Harold Bloom

A Rabble of Dead Money by Charles R Morris

Portraits of Courage by George W Bush

The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel

Madness Rules the Hour by Paul Starobin

Fiction

My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci

American War by Omar El Akkad

Marlena by Julie Buntin

One of the Boys by Daniel Magarielm

Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

April 28

Fiction

The Book of Joan by Lidia Yaknavitch

Underground Fugue by Margot Singer

Nonfiction

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

Tell Me How it Ends by Valeria Luiselli

The Givers by David Callahan

The Golden Passport by Duff McDonald

Phenomena by Annie Jacobsen

Mercies in Disguise by Gina Kolata

The Family Gene by Joselin Linder

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Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood – Book

“Brush up on your Shakespeare”. Hogarth Press has commissioned modern authors to write novels based on Shakespeare’s plays. Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood is the famous Canadian author’s offering in this series. Her novel is based on The Tempest, a Shakespeare play that I have never read. I have no real excuse except that I just never got around to it. Now I’m glad that I didn’t. I think Atwood’s book would provide schools with a great precursor to this rather complicated play, although it is probably just as helpful if read after-the-fact. Felix Phillips is the Artistic Director at the Makeshiweg Festival and he gives new scope to Shakespeare by staging productions that are quite edgy and sometimes a bit over-the-edge. He has an assistant who he has perhaps given too much responsibility for all the nuts and bolts jobs that keep theater festivals afloat. Just as Felix is getting his new cloak (pieced together from stuffed animals) ready so that he can become Prospero, Tony breaks the news that Felix’s contract is not being renewed.

As it turns out the contract now belongs to Tony. Felix has lost so much. He lost his wife of one year when she died in childbirth, then he lost his daughter, Miranda (strange coincidence, Miranda is the main female character in The Tempest) to meningitis when she was three. This second huge loss happened very recently. Now he has lost the career he loves. He is old. He married late. He is fifty and is not likely to find another meaty job in theater especially after being let go. He is mourning and he is angry. He wants revenge and he is willing to wait until his main chance arrives to get it.

He goes to ground in a very bare sort of cottage built into the side of a hill with only an iron stove for heat and no indoor plumbing, but an outhouse. He spends nine years in self-imposed exile with only the ghost of his daughter to keep him company. He uses an alias. He is now known as Mr. Duke. In his new persona he takes a job as a teacher of literature at the Fletcher County Correctional Institute where he teaches, you guessed it, Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, he works with minimum security prisoners and he has them act out the plays, records the productions, and then plays them for the entire prison population on closed-circuit television. His course is in great demand.

Finally he gets to put on the play he never got to direct. He gets to put on The Tempest and if you never understood this play you will by the time the inmates and Mr. Duke are done with you. This is a very enjoyable way to learn about or refresh your memory about a Shakespeare play that has a rather complicated plot and lots of deep things to say about humans and the human condition. And it is the perfect vehicle for Felix’s revenge, as if the universe delivered this moment to him because he deserved it. The parallels make the novel fun for those who enjoy symbolism, metaphor, etc.

Hogarth, as I said, has given very famous authors each a play that mates well with the kind of fiction they write. If you go to Google and type Hogarth Shakespeare Series in the search window it will take you to a list of who has been assigned to which play. Some of the books in the series have been written and some are not out yet. Great idea. I hope to eventually read them all. Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood was an excellent place to start.