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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine, September/October 2011 issue

CarrieK — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:33:24 +0000

Recent additions to my TBR list, thanks to the September/October issue of Bookmarks Magazine, blurbs courtesy of GoodReads:

There But For The by Ali Smith: At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles’s story is told from the points of view of four of them: Anna, a woman in her forties; Mark, a man in his sixties; May, a woman in her eighties; and a ten-year-old named Brooke. The thing is, none of these people knows Miles more than slightly. How much is it possible for us to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, fleeting moments we share every day with one another?

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood: In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination is Margaret Atwood’s account of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as science fiction. This relationship has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she explored the Victorian ancestors of the form, and continuing with her work as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures of 2010—“Flying Rabbits,” which begins with Atwood’s early rabbit superhero creations and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; “Burning Bushes,” which follows her into Victorian other-lands and beyond; and “Dire Cartographies,” which investigates utopias and dystopias. In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood’s key reviews and musings about the form, including her elucidation of the differences (as she sees them) between “science fiction” proper and “speculative fiction,” as well as “sword and sorcery/fantasy” and “slipstream fiction.” For all readers who have loved The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood — not to mention Atwood’s 100,000-plus Twitter followers — In Other Worlds is a must.

The Coffee Trader by David Liss: Amsterdam, 1659—a mysterious world of trade populated by schemers and rogues, where deception rules the day.

On the world’s first commodities exchange, fortunes are won and lost in an instant. Miguel Lienzo, a sharp-witted trader in the city’s close-knit community of Portuguese Jews, knows this only too well. Once among the city’s most envied merchants, Miguel has lost everything in a sudden shift in the sugar markets. Now, impoverished and humiliated, living on the charity of his petty younger brother, Miguel must find a way to restore his wealth and reputation.

Miguel enters into a partnership with a seductive Dutchwoman who offers him one last chance at success—a daring plot to corner the market of an astonishing new commodity called “coffee.” To succeed, Miguel must risk everything he values and test the limits of his commercial guile, facing not only the chaos of the markets and the greed of his competitors, but also a powerful enemy who will stop at nothing to see him ruined. Miguel will learn that among Amsterdam’s ruthless businessmen, betrayal lurks everywhere, and even friends hide secret agendas.

With humor, imagination, and mystery, David Liss depicts a world of subterfuge, danger, and repressed longing, where religious and cultural traditions clash with the demands of a new and exciting way of doing business. Readers of historical suspense and lovers of coffee (even decaf) will be up all night with this beguiling novel.

Time and Again by Jack Finney: First published in 1970, this highly original cult classic tells the story of Simon Morley, a young Manhattan illustrator who is selected by a secret government agency–presumably to test Einstein’s theory that the past actually co-exists with the present–and finds himself suddenly transported back to the New York of the 1880s. Written with style and elegance, this bold, visionary novel provides “Mind-boggling, imagination-stretching, exciting, romantic entertainment.”– San Francisco Examiner.

The Girl in the Blue Beret by Bobbie Ann Mason: Inspired by the wartime experiences of her late father-in-law, award-winning author Bobbie Ann Mason has written an unforgettable novel about an American World War II pilot shot down in Occupied Europe.

When Marshall Stone returns to his crash site decades later, he finds himself drawn back in time to the brave people who helped him escape from the Nazis. He especially recalls one intrepid girl guide who risked her life to help him—the girl in the blue beret.

At twenty-three, Marshall Stone was a U.S. flyboy stationed in England. Headstrong and cocksure, he had nine exhilarating bombing raids under his belt when enemy fighters forced his B-17 to crash-land in a Belgian field near the border of France. The memories of what happened next—the frantic moments right after the fiery crash, the guilt of leaving his wounded crewmates and fleeing into the woods to escape German troops, the terror of being alone in a foreign country—all come rushing back when Marshall sets foot on that Belgian field again.

Marshall was saved only by the kindness of ordinary citizens who, as part of the Resistance, moved downed Allied airmen through clandestine, often outrageous routes (over the Pyrenees to Spain) to get them back to their bases in England. Even though Marshall shared a close bond with several of the Resistance members who risked their lives for him, after the war he did not look back. But now he wants to find them again—to thank them and renew their ties. Most of all, Marshall wants to find the courageous woman who guided him through Paris. She was a mere teenager at the time, one link in the underground line to freedom.

Marshall’s search becomes a wrenching odyssey of discovery that threatens to break his heart—and also sets him on a new course for the rest of his life. In his journey, he finds astonishing revelations about the people he knew during the war—none more electrifying and inspiring than the story of the girl in the blue beret.

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante: Is the perfect murder the one you can’t forget or the one you can’t remember?

Dr. Jennifer White, a brilliant former surgeon in the early grips of Alzheimer’s, is suspected of murdering her best friend, Amanda. Amanda’s body was found brutally disfigured — with four of her fingers cut off in a precise, surgical manner. As the police pursue their investigation and Jennifer searches her own mind for fractured clues to Amanda’s death, a portrait emerges of a complex relationship between two uncompromising, unsentimental women, lifelong friends who were at times each other’s most formidable adversaries.

The Enemy by Charlie Higson: They’ll chase you. They’ll rip you open. They’ll feed on you…When the sickness came, every parent, policeman, politician – every adult – fell ill. The lucky ones died. The others are crazed, confused and hungry. Only children under fourteen remain, and they’re fighting to survive. Now there are rumours of a safe place to hide. And so a gang of children begin their quest across London, where all through the city – down alleyways, in deserted houses, underground – the grown-ups lie in wait. But can they make it there – alive?

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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine, July/August 2011 issue

CarrieK — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:14:20 +0000

Recent additions to my TBR list, thanks to the July/August issue of Bookmarks Magazine, blurbs courtesy of GoodReads:

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta: What if the Rapture happened and you got left behind? Or what if it wasn’t the Rapture at all, but something murkier, a burst of mysterious, apparently random disappearances that shattered the world in a single moment, dividing history into Before and After, leaving no one unscathed? How would you rebuild your life in the wake of such a devastating event?

This is the question confronting the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, a formerly comfortable suburban community that lost over a hundred people in the Sudden Departure. Kevin Garvey, the new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized neighbors, even as his own family falls apart. His wife, Laurie, has left him to enlist in the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence but haunt the streets of town as “living reminders” of God’s judgment. His son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet by the name of Holy Wayne. Only his teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she’s definitely not the sweet A student she used to be.

Through the prism of a single family, Perrotta illuminates a familiar America made strange by grief and apocalyptic anxiety. The Leftovers is a powerful and deeply moving book about people struggling to hold onto a belief in their own futures.

Doors Open by Ian Rankin: For the right man, all doors are open…Mike Mackenzie is a self-made man with too much time on his hands and a bit of the devil in his soul. He is looking for something to liven up the days and perhaps give new meaning to his existence. A chance encounter at an art auction offers him the opportunity to do just that as he settles on a plot to commit a ‘perfect crime’. He intends to rip-off one of the most high-profile targets in the capital – the National Gallery of Scotland. So, together with two close friends from the art world, he devises a plan to a lift some of the most valuable artwork around. But of course, the real trick is to rob the place for all its worth whilst persuading the world that no crime was ever committed. But soon after he enters the dark waters of the criminal underworld he realises that it’s very easy to drown…

The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick: As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger’s Spell is the true story of three men and an extraordinary deception: the revered artist Johannes Vermeer; the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him years later; and the con man’s mark, Hermann Goering, the fanatical art collector and one of Nazi Germany’s most reviled leaders.

Staircase of a Thousand Steps by Masha Hamilton: Set in Transjordan just before the 1967 war with Israel, Staircase of a Thousand Steps is a “remarkably well-written…thoroughly absorbing novel” (Arizona Daily Sun) that takes us to a place where memory whispers like fear, where visions of a long-ago forbidden love affair haunt a precocious young girl — and where the flare of old rivalries can be as sudden as searing as the desert wind.

The Great Night by Chris Adrian: On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court. On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues will threaten the lives of immortals and mortals alike.

Selected by The New Yorker as one the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, heartbreaking, and humorous novel—a story that charts the borders between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality and immortality.

Bent Road by Lori Roy: For twenty years, Celia Scott has watched her husband, Arthur, hide from the secrets surrounding his sister Eve’s death. As a young man, Arthur fled his small Kansas hometown, moved to Detroit, married Celia, and never looked back. But when the 1967 riots frighten him even more than his past, he convinces Celia to pack up their family and return to the road he grew up on, Bent Road, and that same small town where Eve mysteriously died.

While Arthur and their oldest daughter slip easily into rural life, Celia and the two younger children struggle to fit in. Daniel, the only son, is counting on Kansas to make a man of him since Detroit damn sure didn’t. Eve-ee, the youngest and small for her age, hopes that in Kansas she will finally grow. Celia grapples with loneliness and the brutality of life and death on a farm. And then a local girl disappears, catapulting the family headlong into a dead man’s curve…

Blink & Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones: Boy, did Blink get off on the wrong floor. All he wanted was to steal some breakfast for his empty belly, but instead he stumbled upon a fake kidnapping and a cell phone dropped by an “abducted” CEO, giving Blink a link to his perfect blonde daughter. Now Blink is on the run, but it’s OK as long as he’s smart enough to stay in the game and keep Captain Panic locked in his hold. Enter a girl named Caution. As in “Caution: Toxic.” As in “Caution: Watch Your Step.” She’s also on the run, from a skeezy drug-dealer boyfriend and from a nightmare in her past that won’t let her go. When she spies Blink at the train station, Caution can see he’s an easy mark. But there’s something about this naïve, skinny street punk, whom she only wanted to rob, that tugs at her heart, a heart she thought deserved not to feel. Charged with suspense and intrigue, this taut novel trails two deeply compelling characters as they forge a blackmail scheme that is foolhardy at best, disastrous at worst – along with a fated, tender partnership that will offer them each a rare chance for redemption.

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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine, May/June 2011 issue

CarrieK — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 07:23:24 +0000

Recent additions to my TBR list, thanks to the May/June issue of Bookmarks Magazine, blurbs courtesy of GoodReads:

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages by Katie Roiphe: Katie Roiphe’s stimulating work has made her one of the most talked about cultural critics of her generation. Now this bracing young writer delves deeply into one of the most layered of subjects: marriage. Drawn in part from the private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals of the British literary community from 1910 to the Second World War, here are seven “marriages à la mode”—each rising to the challenge of intimate relations in more or less creative ways. Jane Wells, the wife of H.G., remained his rock, despite his decade-long relationship with Rebecca West (among others). Katherine Mansfield had an irresponsible, childlike romance with her husband, John Middleton Murry, that collapsed under the strain of real-life problems. Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin spent years in a “semidetached” marriage (he in America, she in England). Vanessa Bell maintained a complicated harmony with the painter Duncan Grant, whom she loved, and her husband, Clive. And her sister Virginia Woolf, herself no stranger to marital particularities, sustained a brilliant running commentary on the most intimate details of those around her.

Every chapter revolves around a crisis that occurred in each of these marriages—as serious as life-threatening illness or as seemingly innocuous as a slightly tipsy dinner table conversation—and how it was resolved…or not resolved. In these portraits, Roiphe brilliantly evokes what are, as she says, “the fluctuations and shifts in attraction, the mysteries of lasting affection, the endurance and changes in love, and the role of friendship in marriage.” The deeper mysteries at stake in all relationships.

Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides: This haunting, moving and highly evocative account of one of the most dramatic aspects of the War in the Pacific powerfully redefines our understanding of the nature of heroes, heroism, and sacrifice, while it eloquently explores the triumph of the human spirit.

Hampton Sides, a gifted writer, masterfully interweaves a complex tapestry of three stories. The first recounts Japan’s initial military triumphs throughout Asia and the South Pacific and the subsequent emergency evacuation of Allied troops from Bataan in 1942. The second describes the horror faced by those who were captured, as they struggled to stay alive in the POW camp at Cabanatuan as survivors of the hideous Bataan Death March. The third story re-creates the daring liberation of the 513 British and American soldiers who clung to life in the infamous camp at the jungle’s edge. This January 1945 rescue mission was led by the U.S. Army’s Sixth Ranger Battalion, which grappled with a retreating Japanese Army that possessed a vast superiority in numbers.

Richly detailed and deeply evocative, Ghost Soldiers stands as a meaningful testimonial to those who served and those who were sacrificed, as well as a stark reminder that even in the darkest hours, humanity can exhibit one of its greatest skills: the ability to persevere against all odds.

Prague by Arthur Phillips: A novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune. They harbor the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague have it better, but still they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making.

Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry: When she witnesses a small child tumbling from a ferry into Lake Champlain, Troy Chance dives in without thinking. Harrowing moments later, she bobs to the surface, pulling a terrified little boy with her. As the ferry disappears into the distance, she begins a bone-chilling swim nearly a mile to shore with a tiny passenger on her back. Surprisingly, he speaks only French. He’ll acknowledge that his name is Paul; otherwise, he’s resolutely mute. Troy assumes that Paul’s frantic parents will be in touch with the police or the press. But what follows is a shocking and deafening silence. And Troy, a freelance writer, finds herself as fiercely determined to protect Paul as she is to find out what happened to him. What she uncovers will take her into a world of wealth and privilege and heedless self-indulgence—a world in which the murder of a child is not unthinkable. She’ll need skill and courage to survive and protect her charge and herself.

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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine: March/April 2011 Issue

CarrieK — Thu, 05 May 2011 07:41:08 +0000

Recent additions to my TBR list, thanks to the latest issue of Bookmarks Magazine, blurbs courtesy of GoodReads:

Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool: Abilene Tucker feels abandoned. Her father has put her on a train, sending her off to live with an old friend for the summer while he works a railroad job. Armed only with a few possessions and her list of universals, Abilene jumps off the train in Manifest, Kansas, aiming to learn about the boy her father once was.

Having heard stories about Manifest, Abilene is disappointed to find that it’s just a dried-up, worn-out old town. But her disappointment quickly turns to excitement when she discovers a hidden cigar box full of mementos, including some old letters that mention a spy known as the Rattler. These mysterious letters send Abilene and her new friends, Lettie and Ruthanne, on an honest-to-goodness spy hunt, even though they are warned to “Leave Well Enough Alone.”

Abilene throws all caution aside when she heads down the mysterious Path to Perdition to pay a debt to the reclusive Miss Sadie, a diviner who only tells stories from the past. It seems that Manifest’s history is full of colorful and shadowy characters—and long-held secrets. The more Abilene hears, the more determined she is to learn just what role her father played in that history. And as Manifest’s secrets are laid bare one by one, Abilene begins to weave her own story into the fabric of the town.

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes: One of the classics about book collecting, A Gentle Madness begins with the great library of Alexandria and extends through the massive thefts (not to sell, but to keep) of “book bandit” Stephen Blumberg. Basbanes definitely captures the “passion to possess books.”

The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay: In this charming novel about the eccentricities and passions of booksellers and collectors, a captivating young Australian woman takes a job at a vast, chaotic emporium of used and rare books in New York City and finds herself caught up in the search for a lost Melville manuscript.

Eighteen years old and completely alone, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city she’s read so much about. She begins her memorable search for independence with appealing enthusiasm, and the moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff owner, Mr. Pike, gives her a job sorting through huge piles of books and helping the rest of the staff—a group as odd and idiosyncratic as the characters in a Dickens novel. There’s Pearl, the loving, motherly transsexual who runs the cash register; Oscar, who organizes the nonfiction section and shares his extensive, eclectic knowledge with Rosemary, but furiously rejects her attempts at a more personal relationship; and Arthur Pick, who supervises the art section and demonstrates a particular interest in photography books featuring naked men.

The store manager, Walter Geist, is an albino, a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade. When Walter’s eyesight begins to fail, Rosemary becomes his assistant. And so it is Rosemary who first reads the letter from someone seeking to “place” a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. Mentioned in Melville’s personal correspondence but neverpublished, the work is of inestimable value, and proof of its existence brings the simmering ambitions and rivalries of the Arcade staff to a boiling point.

Including actual correspondence by Melville, The Secret of Lost Things is at once a literary adventure that captures the excitement of discovering a long-lost manuscript by a towering American writer and an evocative portrait of life in a surprisingly colorful bookstore.

Compass Rose by John Casey: Rose is spunky with an inborn talent for theatrics, but being slightly overweight and unpopular at the fancy new school where she’s a scholarship student is bad enough. It doesn’t help that her single mother is at war with her; her fisherman father lives practically next door with his own wife and kids; and the whole of their insular, gossipy community knows she’s an illegitimate child. On the other hand, maybe it isn’t so bad being related to half the town and unofficially adopted by everyone.

John Casey’s magnificent new novel follows Rose and the complex constellation of family, friends, and foes that circle around her as the years go by, working their slow but irreversible changes on one another and on the rugged, magical landscape they inhabit, with its salt marshes, its creeks and rivers, and the ever-present ocean, whose rhythms and moods shape and reshape the lives of the men and women of Rhode Island.

Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon: Fay Weldon in top gear: a wickedly sharp, history-bending, cosmos-colliding novel that tells the story of Frances, Fay’s never-born younger sister. Its 2013 and eighty-year-old Frances (part-time copywriter, has-been writer, one-time national treasure) is sitting on the stairs of Number 3, Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, listening to the debt collectors pounding on her front door. From this house she’s witnessed five decades of world history – the fall of communism, the death of capitalism – and now, with the bailiffs, world history has finally reached her doorstep. While she waits for the bailiffs to give up and leave, Frances writes (not that she has an agent any more, or that her books are still published, or even that there are any publishers left). She writes about the boyfriends she borrowed and the husband she stole from Fay, about her daughters and their children. She writes about the Shock, the Crunch, the Squeeze, the Recovery, the Fall, the Crisis and the Bite, about NUG the National Unity Government, about ration books, powercuts, National Meat Loaf (suitable for vegetarians) and the new Neighbourhood Watch. She writes about family secrets…The problem is that fact and fiction are blurring in Frances’ mind. Is it her writer’s imagination, or is it just old age, or plain paranoia? Are her grandchildren really plotting a terrorist coup upstairs? Are faceless assassins trying to kill her younger daughter? Should she worry that her son in law is an incipient megalomaniac being groomed for NUG’s highest office? What on earth can NUG have against vegetarians? And just what makes National Meat Loaf so tasty?

Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan: Lightborn, better known as ‘shine’, is a mind-altering technology that has revolutionised the modern world. It is the ultimate in education, self-improvement and entertainment – beamed directly into the brain of anyone who can meet the asking price.

But in the city of Los Sombres, renegade shine has attacked the adult population, resulting in social chaos and widespread insanity in everyone past the age of puberty. The only solution has been to turn off the Field and isolate the city.

Trapped within the quarantine perimeter, fourteen-year-old Xavier just wants to find the drug that can keep his own physical maturity at bay until the army shuts down the shine. That’s how he meets Roksana, mysteriously impervious to shine and devoted to helping the stricken.

As the military invades street by street, Xavier and Roksana discover that there could be hope for Los Sombres – but only if Xavier will allow a lightborn cure to enter his mind.

What he doesn’t know is that the shine in question has a mind of its own ..

And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding: On June 14, 1940, German tanks rolled into a silent and deserted Paris. Eight days later, a humbled France accepted defeat along with foreign occupation. The only consolation was that, while the swastika now flew over Paris, the City of Light was undamaged. Soon, a peculiar kind of normality returned as theaters, opera houses, movie theaters and nightclubs reopened for business. This suited both conquerors and vanquished: the Germans wanted Parisians to be distracted, while the French could show that, culturally at least, they had not been defeated. Over the next four years, the artistic life of Paris flourished with as much verve as in peacetime. Only a handful of writers and intellectuals asked if this was an appropriate response to the horrors of a world war.

Alan Riding introduces us to a panoply of writers, painters, composers, actors and dancers who kept working throughout the occupation. Maurice Chevalier and Édith Piaf sang before French and German audiences. Pablo Picasso, whose art was officially banned, continued to paint in his Left Bank apartment. More than two hundred new French films were made, including Marcel Carné’s classic, Les Enfants du paradis. Thousands of books were published by authors as different as the virulent anti-Semite Céline and the anti-Nazis Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Meanwhile, as Jewish performers and creators were being forced to flee or, as was Irène Némirovsky, deported to death camps, a small number of artists and intellectuals joined the resistance.

Throughout this penetrating and unsettling account, Riding keeps alive the quandaries facing many of these artists. Were they “saving” French culture by working? Were they betraying France if they performed before German soldiers or made movies with Nazi approval? Was it the intellectual’s duty to take up arms against the occupier? Then, after Paris was liberated, what was deserving punishment for artists who had committed “intelligence with the enemy”?

By throwing light on this critical moment of twentieth-century European cultural history, And the Show Went On focuses anew on whether artists and writers have a special duty to show moral leadership in moments of national trauma.
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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine: Jan/Feb 2011 Issue

CarrieK — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:03:05 +0000

Recent additions to my TBR list, thanks to the latest issue of Bookmarks Magazine, blurbs courtesy of GoodReads:

Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland: Against the unforgettable backdrop of New York near the turn of the twentieth century, from the Gilded Age world of formal balls and opera to the immigrant poverty of the Lower East Side, bestselling author Susan Vreeland again breathes life into a work of art in this extraordinary novel, which brings a woman once lost in the shadows into vivid color.

It’s 1893, and at the Chicago World’s Fair, Louis Comfort Tiffany makes his debut with a luminous exhibition of innovative stained-glass windows, which he hopes will honor his family business and earn him a place on the international artistic stage. But behind the scenes in his New York studio is the freethinking Clara Driscoll, head of his women’s division. Publicly unrecognized by Tiffany, Clara conceives of and designs nearly all of the iconic leaded-glass lamps for which he is long remembered.

Clara struggles with her desire for artistic recognition and the seemingly insurmountable challenges that she faces as a professional woman, which ultimately force her to protest against the company she has worked so hard to cultivate. She also yearns for love and companionship, and is devoted in different ways to five men, including Tiffany, who enforces to a strict policy: he does not hire married women, and any who do marry while under his employ must resign immediately. Eventually, like many women, Clara must decide what makes her happiest—the professional world of her hands or the personal world of her heart.

Among Others by Jo Walton: Startling, unusual, and yet irresistably readable, Among Others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and SF, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment.

Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom and promise in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled—and her twin sister dead.

Fleeing to her father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England–a place all but devoid of true magic. There, outcast and alone, she tempted fate by doing magic herself, in an attempt to find a circle of like-minded friends. But her magic also drew the attention of her mother, bringing about a reckoning that could no longer be put off…

Combining elements of autobiography with flights of imagination in the manner of novels like Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, this is potentially a breakout book for an author whose genius has already been hailed by peers like Kelly Link, Sarah Weinman, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Home Fires by Gene Wolfe: Gene Wolfe takes us to a future North America at once familiar and utterly strange. A young man and woman, Skip and Chelle, fall in love in college and marry, but she is enlisted in the military, there is a war on, and she must serve her tour of duty before they can settle down. But the military is fighting a war with aliens in distant solar systems, and her months in the service will be years in relative time on Earth. Chelle returns to recuperate from severe injuries, after months of service, still a young woman but not necessarily the same person—while Skip is in his forties and a wealthy businessman, but eager for her return.

Still in love (somewhat to his surprise and delight), they go on a Caribbean cruise to resume their marriage. Their vacation rapidly becomes a complex series of challenges, not the least of which are spies, aliens, and battles with pirates who capture the ship for ransom. There is no writer in SF like Gene Wolfe and no SF novel like Home Fires.

Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony by Lee G. Miller: “November 1587. A report reaches London that Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition, which left England months before to land the first English settlers in America, has foundered. On Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, a tragedy is unfolding. Something has gone very wrong, and the colony – 115 men, women, and children – is in trouble. But there will be no rescue. Before help can reach them, all will vanish with barely a trace.” “The Lost Colony is America’s oldest unsolved mystery. For four hundred years, the question of what became of the doomed settlers has remained unanswered. Where did they go? What really happened? And yet, as compelling as this riddle is, Roanoke holds a further surprise, for it comprises not one mystery but two – not only what happened to the colonists but why? Why were they marooned on Roanoke Island when their true destination was elsewhere?” “In this work of historical detection, Lee Miller goes back to the original evidence and offers a fresh solution to the enduring riddle. She establishes beyond doubt that the tragedy of the Lost Colony did not begin on the shores of Roanoke but within the inner circle of Queen Elizabeth’s government. Powerful men had reason to want Raleigh’s mission to fail.”

And a few more:

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
Bound by Antonya Nelson

Have you read any of these?

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 24 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine: Nov/Dec 2010 Issue

CarrieK — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 07:01:37 +0000

Here are the titles from the latest Bookmarks Magazine that made it onto my to-read list:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss: A man is found wandering the desert outside Las Vegas. The cards in his wallet identify him as Samson Greene, a Columbia University English professor last seen leaving campus eight days ago. Thirty-six years old, with a wife, Anna, and a dog, Frank. But Samson doesn’t even recognize his own name, and by the time Anna has made her away across the country to pick him up, doctors have discovered a cherry-sized tumor in his brain; its removal eradicates the last twenty-four years of Samson’s memories.

Samson and Anna return to New York together, where Samson struggles to connect with the woman he knows he is supposed to love, with his career, with his home, with his “life.” He remembers his mother, his childhood in California, the basic shape and processes of the world, but everything else remains blank. In the meantime, Anna sees the same husband she has always seen, but every day has to steel herself against the notion that the man she loves is the Samson who remembers the last quarter century, the Samson who has been shaped by the history of their lives together.

Into these daily lives fraught with a peculiarly intimate tension comes a charismatic scientist who invites Samson to take part in a groundbreaking, experimental project involving the transfer of memories from one mind to another–all it requires is a trip back to the Nevada desert. It doesn’t take much to lure Samson away from his profound loneliness in the City–where he is stuck between missing the past life that surrounds him and yearning to enjoy the fresh start he’s been given–though Anna is never far from his thoughts as he embarks on the adventure that could mean the end of the old Samson Greene.

In Samson, Nicole Krauss creates an ordinary man who his facing a searingly new world with gritty poignancy and purely instinctual empathy. Reminiscent of early DeLillo, but with the emotional sensitivity of a budding Cheever, Krauss’s sharp, intelligent storytelling effortlessly peels away the layers of quotidian circumstances to reveal the subtle joys and woes of simple survival.

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong: Linda Hammerick has a special yet burdensome gift–she experiences words as tastes. Linda’s boyfriends’ names, for example, remind her of orange sherbet and parsnips; her own name is mint-flavored. Depending on the speaker, listening, for Linda, can be delicious or distasteful. In the first part of the book, Linda interacts with her family: she dances with her eccentric uncle Baby Harper, whose sing-song voice limits her “tasting his words”; she faced off with her acerbic grandmother, Iris; deals with her adored father, Thomas, and her unsympathetic mother, Deanne, whose infatuation with a neighborhood boy leaves Linda vulnerable to his predatory advances. Woven into Linda’s story is the history of her home state, North Carolina–slaveholding days, the first airplane flight, and local Indian lore. But when a sudden tragedy brings Linda back home from New York City, she finds answers to a life that has been made up of half-finished sentences, as the secret of her origins and the clandestine histories of those around her are revealed one by one. Truong’s mesmerizing prose beautifully captures Linda’s taste-saturated world, and her portrait of a broken family’s secretive pockets and genuine moments of connection is affecting.

What is Left the Daughter by Howard Norman: On a stormy Nova Scotia night in 1967, the loner Wyatt Hillyer has come to terms with his life’s choices and self-imposed separation from his daughter Marlais. Realizing that one of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is an honest picture of himself, Wyatt has decided to write his memoirs in the form of a letter on the occasion of Marlais’ twenty-first birthday. With great clarity and economy he slowly discloses the events of his parents’ scandalous deaths in 1941, his teenage years living with his aunt and uncle, the joys of fatherhood, and what led to his abandoning his only daughter and her mother. Returning to Canada’s Maritime provinces in his latest novel, What Is Left the Daughter, acclaimed author Howard Norman has created an unpredictable and absorbing story of an imperfect and tragic life at a turning point. This short and potent novel will leave readers replaying events and reconsidering Wyatt and the other unique characters long after reading the final pages.

Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell: In Let’s Take the Long Walk Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell has written a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life, and her extraordinary friendship with the author of Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp—fellow writers, AA members, dog lovers, and observers of life.

In her younger years, Caldwell defined herself by rebellion and independence, a passion for books, and an aversion to intimacy and a distrust of others. Then while living in Cambridge in her early 40s, “an age when the view from the hill can be clear and poignant both,” Caldwell adopts a rambunctious puppy named Clementine. On one of their bucolic walks, she meets Caroline and her dog, Lucille, and both women’s lives change forever.

Though they are more different than alike, these two fiercely private, independent women quickly relax into a friendship more profound than either of them expected, a friendship that will thrive on their shared secrets, including parallel struggles with alcoholism and loneliness. They grow increasingly inseparable until, in 2003, Caroline is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. Caldwell writes: “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”

In her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion and grief in this wise and affecting account about losing her best friend. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is also a celebration of life and all the little moments worth cherishing—and affirms why Gail Caldwell is rightly praised as one of our bravest and most honest literary voices.

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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine: Sept/Oct 2010 Issue

CarrieK — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 07:01:30 +0000

Here are the books I found drool-worthy in the latest issue of Bookmarks Magazine:

The World to Come by Dara Horn: Inspired by the true story of a Chagall painting that was stolen from the Jewish Museum in New York in 2001 (and that later turned up), The World to Come weaves together stories about Stalinist Russia and Yiddish literature. It is at once a mystery, Jewish history and folklore, biography, philosophical treatise, love story, and fantastical adventure.

The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman: In the near future, 10-year-old Honor and her parents, lured by an evil Corporation, are relocated to Island 365 from a North America flooded by climate change. In their new home, they are expected to conform to a seemingly benevolent yet dictatorial Earth Mother. When Honor’s parents revolt and her mother is turned into a government flunkey, it falls to their daughter to save them.

Intuition by Allegra Goodman: At the Philpott Institute, a small cancer research lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, postdoc researcher Cliff makes an amazing breakthrough: he discovers that the R-7 virus has reversed cancer growth in mice. Or so he thinks. When oncologist Sandy Glass sidesteps protocol and publishes Cliff’s preliminary results despite the warning of Philpott’s codirector, the stakes become high. Robin, Cliff’s ex-girlfriend and colleague, attempts to disprove Cliff’s results, while Cliff cries innocent. Soon, unwanted controversy for the grants-driven lab threatens its very existence.

Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth: Is it any surprise that among the various shady characters recruited by the CIA and other agencies over the years one might find a vampire? Certainly not – in today’s publishing world. Nathaniel Cade, Secret Service agent, has previously been pardoned for his supernatural crimes by President Andrew Johnson. This patriotic creature of the night is sworn by – you guessed it – a blood oath to forever protect the American commanders in chief and generally defend the United States from supernatural dangers ordinary humans can’t handle. Whether they’re the very real threats behind 1950s horror movies or zombies under the control of Al-Qaeda-like Jihadists, Cade is on the case.

Other finds:

First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis

How Did You Get This Number?: Essays by Sloane Crosley

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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine, July/August 2010 issue

CarrieK — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:00:12 +0000

There is absolutely no way I will ever read all of the books on my to-read list, and yet, I keep adding titles. I add one or two books from reviews on other blogs each week, and then, every other month, I get my Bookmarks Magazine, and add a dozen or so. Here are the latest:

The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce: Sam and his friends are like any gang of normal young boys. Roaming wild around the outskirts of their car-factory town. Daring adults to challenge their freedom. Until the day Sam wakes to find the Tooth Fairy sitting on the edge of his bed. Not the benign figure of childhood myth, but an enigmatic presence that both torments and seduces him, changing his life forever.

Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon: In 1964, 12-year-old Cory Mackenson lives with his parents in Zephyr, Alabama. It is a sleepy, comfortable town. Cory is helping with his father’s milk route one morning when a car plunges into the lake before their eyes. His father dives in after the car and finds a dead man handcuffed to the steering wheel. Their world no longer seems so innocent: a vicious killer hides among apparently friendly neighbors. Other, equally unsettling transmogrifications occur: a friend’s father becomes a shambling bully under the influence of moonshine, decent men metamorphose into Klan bigots, “responsible” adults flee when faced with danger for the first time. With the aid of unexpected allies, Cory faces hair-raising dangers as he seeks to find the secret of the dead man in the lake.

Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman: The year is 1878. Paris is the centre of the art world, and in the heart of its thriving, vibrant community live two sisters, Mary and Lydia Cassatt. One is at the peak of her career, as the other one reaches her moment of greatest frailty. Lydia Cassatt is dying of Bright’s disease. Conscious of her approaching death, she contemplates the narrowing of her world with courage, openness and dignity. But for Mary, an independent, ambitious painter, life is unimaginable without her beloved sister. Torn apart by the idea of losing Lydia, Mary embarks on a series of five paintings. And as the emotional tension between the sisters rises, they become unable to avoid inevitable questions about love and passion, about live and death…Lyrical and tender, “Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper” is a profoundly moving, unsentimental and hugely life-affirming story of the immortality, which both love and art can bestow.

Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman: Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem: Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems-there’s a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is a brave new world where evolved animals are members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage.

Metcalf has been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent doctor. Perhaps he’s falling a little in love with her at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor’s Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of a bar called the Fickle Muse.

Mixing elements of sci-fi, noir, and mystery, this clever first novel from the author of Motherless Brooklyn is a wry, funny, and satiric look at all that the future may hold.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Feed by Mira Grant
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2010. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine, May/June 2010 issue

CarrieK — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:39:28 +0000

Once again, the latest issue of Bookmarks has been very hazardous to my to-read list. I am going to have to become immortal to be able to read all of the books on that list! Maybe if I stopped adding titles right this minute, I might be able to finish before I die – but we all know that’s not gonna happen. Here are the titles that caught my attention this this time around.

Kraken by China Mieville: In a London filled with magic and sorcery, a rare squid specimen disappears – it’s an embryonic god with huge potential, don’t you know – so beware the sect of squid worshipers or the Londonmancers who can see the future in the city’s entrails.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine: In Schine’s latest endeavor, Jane Austen’s beloved classic Sense and Sensibility undergoes a modern day makeover. Wealthy businessman Joseph Weissmann decides to divorce his sweet wife Betty (a.k.a. Mrs. Dashwood), citing irreconcilable differences (i.e., a younger woman enters the picture). He is 78, she is 75, and their marriage has lasted almost 50 years. Betty suffers further insult when she is turned out of their elegant upper West Side home and forced to relocate to a small cottage in Westport. Along with her daughters, the sensible Annie and the high-strung Miranda, Betty must learn to forge new relationships and adjust to a world of vastly reduced circumstances.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow: In the 1980s, 11-year-old Rachel Morse is sent to live with her paternal grandmother in Portland. Raised mostly overseas by her Danish mother and African American father, she is the only survivor from a mysterious tragedy that resulted in the death of her mother and younger siblings. Rachel doesn’t quite fit into her grandmother’s predominantly black neighborhood: her light brown skin, striking blue eyes, and bookish ways instantly brand her an outsider. As she learns to adjust to her new surroundings and navigate the perils of adolescence, she must also come to terms with her family’s sad, complex history.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman: In these engaging and quirky essays, Batuman chronicles her academic misadventures in the field of Russian literature. A conference on Isaac Babel that she helps organize at Stanford University goes hilariously awry in “Babel in California.” In “Who Killed Tolstoy?” she concocts a theory that Tolstoy was murdered in order to secure the grant funds necessary to attend a conference at his estate. She explores Dostoevsky’s enigmatic masterpiece in the title essay. Using Russian novelists and their works as a springboard in her quest for meaning, Batuman observes: “Tatyana and Onegin, Anna and Vronsky, Ivan and Vera: at every step, the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love [appear] bound up with Russian.”

And a couple more:

~ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
~ The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum

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Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine, March/April 2010 issue

CarrieK — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:05:25 +0000

Once again, the latest issue of Bookmarks Magazine has me adding titles to my to-read list. Here are the titles that peaked my interest this time:

The Art Student’s War by Brad Leithauser: It’s 1943 in Detroit, and World War II is firmly under way. The thriving city is busy turning out an astonishing number of guns, tankers, and airplanes in support of the war effort. Bianca “Bea” Paradiso, an 18-year-old art student, does her part by volunteering to sketch wounded soldiers at a local hospital. As Bea struggles with her attraction to one of the injured men, she must also confront a once-stable home life that threatens to implode. In The Art Student’s War, Leithauser explores World War II’s effect on one family and portrays a uniquely American city during its glory days.

True Confections by Katharine Weber: In the 1970s, WASPy teenager Alice Tatnall accidentally sets fire to a friend’s house and is branded “Arson Girl.” The label causes her to be rejected, first by her humiliated parents and then by a college admissions department. Alice finds solace and surprising enjoyment working in a New Haven, Connecticut candy factory called Zip’s. Founded in 1924 by the Jewish Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky, Zip’s is famous for it’s “Dat’s Tasty!” company slogan and its assortment of chocolate-covered (and racially suspect) Little Sammies. When Alice marries the Zip’s candy heir, she finds herself immersed in a whole new, and not so sweet, way of life.

Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction by Amy Bloom: In these twelve stories, divided into two sets of four linked stories and four standalone stories, families, friends, and unlikely lovers discover the many ways that love can upend our lives. The first series of stories charts the relationship of William and Clare, two longtime, middle-aged friends who suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves passionately attracted to one another despite being married to other people. The second series follows Juli and her stepson Lionel, who, after the death of Lionel’s jazz musician father, express their mutual grief in a way that will haunt them both for the rest of their lives. Each story is a small tribute to human nature at its best and worst.

Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James: We “turn for relief, entertainment and mild intellectual challenge to these unpretentious celebrations of reason and order in our increasingly complex and disorderly world,” P.D. James writes of the importance of the detective novel. The author’s overview on the genre was written at the request of Oxford’s Bodleian Library as a primer for interested readers. James was happy to oblige, drawing on an insider’s perspective to offer her thoughts on the writers and the social contexts that spawned – and perpetuated – the (primarily British) detective novel. James pays homage to such stalwarts as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie, as well as some writers new to the scene who will surely push detective fiction across cultural and geographical boundaries to even greater heights.

The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee: In Lee’s fourth novel, an 11-year-old refugee during the Korean War is separated from her siblings and brought to an orphanage by an American soldier. She slowly recovers with the help of a minister’s wife, who is herself suffering from having witnessed her parents’ murder at the hands of Japanese soldiers in 1934.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2010. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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