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!”
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
Confessions by Augustine (newly translated by Sarah Ruden)
Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd (NF)
Felix Yz 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 Livesof 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
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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 9th 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 9th 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.
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 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.
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 17th and early 18th 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.
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
Editors Picks, Best of the Month
Bear Town: A Novel by Fredrik Backman
American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (NF)
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley: A Novel by Hannah Tinti
The Woman in the Castle: A Novel by Jessica Shattuck
Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg, Adam M Grant PhD (NF)
Void Star: A Novel by Zachary Mason
The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the People’s Temple by Jeff Guinn (NF)
Nevertheless: A Memoir by Alec Baldwin (Memoir)
Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr (A Bernie Gunther Novel)
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
“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.
It’s Spring (sort of) and this is the season when lots of new books appear on the market so I present to you my March 2017 Book List. Although you will find lots of repetition on these lists each source also offers some unique titles. If you just want a good story, nothing too esoteric, go the Amazon section of the list. If you have global tastes Publisher’s Weekly should satisfy, and if you like to get your book advice from the New York Times then that source is also represented in this list. For the truly compulsive, go for all three.
Nonfiction titles, for some reason, are getting longer and longer so they are, generally, easy to spot. If you are a true reader you probably wish to devour each new book and all of the older ones too. If you were to have a fantasy room it would probably have a comfy chair surrounded by piles of classic and newly-minted books. But if you set out to read each book that was published from February through Mid-March this year you would have to read a little bit over 6.5 titles per day. So don’t be discouraged if you are unable to meet your admittedly unrealistic book reading goals. You have a lot of company.
Publisher’s Weekly
Feb. 6th
Civil Wars: A History of Ideas by David Armitage (NF)
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression by Daphne Merkin (NF)
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen (NF)
Schadenfreude, a Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For by Rebecca Schumen (Memoir)
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag trans. from the Kannada by Srinath Perur
Make Yourself Happy by Elini Sikelianos (NF)
Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular by Derek Thompson (NF)
The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease by Meredith Wadman (NF)
Feb. 13th
The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble
In Full Velvet by Jenny Johnson
We are Okay by Nina LaCour
Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma by Larry Millett
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker
The Last Night at Tremore Beach by Mikei Santiago
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt
The Undesired by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith (NF)
The American Street by Ibi Zoboi
Feb. 20th
Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach
American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution by A. Roger Ekirch (NF)
Spook Street: A Novel by Mick Herron
Running: A Novel by Cara Hoffman
Rusty Puppy: A Novel by Joe Lansdale
Optimists Die First by Susin Nielsen
The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test and the Power of Seeing by Damion Searls (NF)
Encircling by Carl Frode Tiller trans. from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland
Feb 27th
The Accusation by Bandi trans. from the Korean by Deborah Smith (Short Stories that offer glimpses of North Korea)
The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon (Bio)
Alpine Apprentice: A Memoir by Sarah Gorham
Walking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen trans. from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston
Daughter of the Pirate King: A Novel by Tricia Levenseller
The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria by Alia Malek
The Gene Machine: How Genetic Techniques are Changing the Way We Have Kids – and the Kids We Have by Bonnie Rochman (NF)
The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World by Anne Marie Slaughter (NF)
Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson by Christina Snyder.
The Hate U Give: A Novel by Angie Thomas
Please Bury Me In This by Allison Benis White (Collection of suicide stories)
Velocity by Chris Wooding (YA Apocalyptic novel)
Camanchaca by Diego Zúniga trans. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
March 6th
Taduno’s Song: A Novel by Odale Alogiun
The Price of Illusion: A Memoir by Joan Juliet Buck
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (Memoir)
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
Ill Will by Dan Chaon
Lenin’s Roller Coaster by Daniel Downing
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Rabbit Cake by Annie Hornett
Inferno: A Doctor’s Ebola Story by Steven Hatch (NF)
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
No Friends But the Mountains: Dispatches from the World’s Violent Highlands by Judith Matioff (NF)
The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico
Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World by Benjamin Reiss (NF)
The Photo Ark: One Man’s Quest to Document the World’s Animals by Joel Sartore
Goodbye Days: A Novel by Jeff Zentner (YA)
March 13th
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
A Psalm for Lost Girls by Katie Bayeri
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis
In Between Days by Teva Harrison (Memoir, Cancer battle)
Mikhail and Margarita by Julie Lekstrom Himes
The Wanderers by Meg Howrey
Himself by Jess Kidd Atria
White Tears by Hari Kunzru
The Family Gene by Joselin Linder (NF)
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper
March 20th
Mississippi Blood by Greg Iles
Lola: A Novel by Melissa Scrivner
Girl in Disguise by Greer Macallister
Find Me by J S Monro
Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching from Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem by George Prochnik (NF)
City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic and the First Police Chief of Paris by Holly Tucker (NF)
The Exploded View by Ivan Vladislavic (F)
The New York Times Book Review
Feb. 3rd
Too Close to Happy by Daphne Merkin (Memoir, Depression)
The New Brooklyn by Kay Hymowitz (NF)
Disaster Falls by Stéphane Gerson (NF)
The Weapon Wizards by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot (NF)
Upwardly Minded: The Reconstruction Rise of a Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor (NF)
Fiction
A Great Place to Have a War by Joshua Kurlantzick (NF)
The Men in My Life by Patricia Bosworth (NF)
The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld
Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson
Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Best and Latest in Crime Fiction
Rather Be Devil by Ian Rankin
Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough
What You Break by Reed Farrel Coleman
The Lost Woman by Sara Blædel trans. from Danish by Mark Kline
Books Recommended this Week
Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes by Michael Sims (NF)
A House Full of Females: Plural Marriages and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (NF)
Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World by Robert D. Kaplan (NF)
The Crossing by Andrew Miller (F)
The Patriots by Sana Krasikov (F)
Once We Were Sisters: A Memoir by Sheila Kohler
Feb. 12th
Fiction
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Night of Fire by Colin Thubron
The Evening Road by Haird Hunt
On Turpentine Lane by Elinor Lipman
Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson
This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel
Nonfiction
Why Time Flies by Alan Burdick
Six Encounters with Lincoln by Elizabeth Brown Pryor
(Middle East)
The Attack by Loic Daewillier
The Arab of the Future 2 by Riad Sattouf
Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden
The Girl from the Metropol Hotel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B Tyson
Generation Revolution by Rachel Aspden
The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Lévy
Black Edge by Sheelah Kolhatkar
Feb. 19th
Fiction
The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Dibble
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates
The Dance of Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
Autumn by Ali Smith
Fiction in Translation
Dance on the Volcano by Marie Vieux Chauvet
The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen
The Ninety-Ninth Floor by Jan Fawaz Elhassan
The Great and the Good by Michel Déon
Nonfiction
Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li
Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra
Two about Silicon Valley
Valley of the Gods by Alexander Wolfe
The Kingdom of Happiness by Aimee Groth
At Utmost: A Devotional Memoir by Macy Halford
Cannibalism by Bill Schutt
Best and Latest Crime Fiction
Rush of Blood by Mark Billingham
Racing the Devil by Charles Todd
Snowblind by Ragnar Janasson
Walk Away by Sam Hawken
Amiable with Big Teeth by Claude McKay (lost Harlem novel)
Feb. 26th
Fiction
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
The School Days of Jesus by J M Coetze
The One Inside by Sam Shepard
A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline
Journeyman by Marc Bojanowski
Nonfiction
Caught in the Revolution by Helen Rappaport
Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet
How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell
All the Lives I Want by Alana Massey
Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine
When Police Kill by Frank Zimring
Unwarranted by Barry Friedman
Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
March 3rd
Fiction
A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman
The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky
The World to Come by Jim Shepard
Argentine Fiction
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarae
Nonfiction
We’ll Always Have Casablanca by Noah Isenberg
High Noon by Glenn Frankel
Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin
Pontius Pilate: Deciphering a Memory by Aldo Schiavone
Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall
Food Fights and Culture Wars by Tom Nealon
Reality is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli
The Islamic Jesus by Mustafa Akyol
Robert Lowell – Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison
The Nature Fix by Florence Williams
Stalin and the Scientists by Simon Ings
Best and Latest Crime Fiction
What You Don’t Know by Jo Ann Chaney
I See You by Clare Macintosh
The Dime by Betty (Riz) Rhyzyk
Twelve Angry Librarians by Miranda James
March 12th
Fiction
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Before the War by Fay Weldon
Everything Belongs to Us by Yoojin Grace Wuertz
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Nonfiction
Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
Can’t Just Stop by Sharon Bagley
Convergence by Peter Watson
Divided We Stand by Marjorie J Spruill
The Brain Defense by Kevin Davis
The Gestapo by Frank McDonough
Abandon Me by Melissa Febo
Amazon
Best Books of March
Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
White Tears: A Novel by Hari Kunzru
The Night Ocean: A Novel by Paul La Farge
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter (NF)
Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, School, or, How to Become an Expert at Just About Anything by Ulrich Boser
All Grown Up: A Novel by Jami Attenberg
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper (NF)
The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir by Ariel Levy
Literature and Fiction
The Book of Polly by Kathy Hepinstall
Our Short History: A Novel by Lauren Grodstein
The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel
White Tears by Hari Kunzru
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
The One-Eyed Man by Jr. Ron Currie
Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett
Edgar and Lacy by Victor Lodato
Celine by Peter Heller
Eggshells by Caitriona Lally
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
Bright Air Black by David Vann
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
Mysteries and Thrillers
The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Lyndsay Faye
Mississippi Blood by Greg Iles
The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel
Never Let You Go by Chevy Stevens
Celine by Peter Heller
Ill Will by Dan Chaon
Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito
The Twelve Lies of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
Murder on the Serpentine by Anne Perry
Biographies and Memoirs
Dueling with Kings: High Stakes, Killer Sharks, and the Get Rich Promise of Daily Fantasy Sports by Daniel Barbarisi
The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir by Ariel Levy
The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown by Catherine Burns
Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Earnest Hemingway by Nicholas E. Reynolds
The Price of Illusion: A Memoir by Joan Juliet Buck
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion
Grace Notes: My Recollections by Katey Segal
Being Elvis: A Lonely Life by Ray Connolly
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last Three Hermits by Michael Finkel
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 