Having been so enthralled by MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Yiyun Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, then her novel, The Vagrants, I admit I held off on this, her latest collection, for over a year. I seem to have difficulty immediately reading the newest book of...
No one has such an unpredictable, quirky, downright wacky imagination as Haruki Murakami. And even though your brain knows he's created an impossible universe, everything on the page seems so convincing, you'll go along for the ride – any ride with Murakami at the helm. Even almost...
All is definitely not fair in love and war ...
Melissa Fay Greene first arrived last spring in my mailbox via her latest book, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, and made me cry. But she also left me tickled with joyous laughter at the antics of her sprawling, multiplying, multi-ethnic family. While Biking made me...
Eight years have passed since Jeffrey Eugenides won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (as well as too many other accolades to list) for this, his second novel, and nine years since it was first published. Nine years later (pattern forming here? – his debut The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are also...
Just after finishing Divisadero, I immediately found myself missing Hope Davis' voice – she who so lullingly narrated Michael Ondaatje's dream-like bifurcated drama. So what a comforting surprise to click on Ann Patchett's Wonder and find Davis' voice gently streaming out of my headset! Serendipity indeed! As the...
Regardless of what is actually happening on the page (even brutality, sometimes tragedy), Michael Ondaatje's writing is something akin to a velvety, soothing dream. In a perfect world, reading (or better yet, listening to ...
I'm probably one of the last readers on earth to have managed to avoid this international (posthumous) publishing phenomenon. I might as well confess right now that I never finished the Harry Potter series, either (made it through the first three with gritted teeth, but...
Here are the two most important things I got out of Snow: 1. it definitely had memorable glimpses of Turkish social and cultural history that I had little to no knowledge of previously; 2. Orhan Pamuk is a clever, intelligent writer, which – given his array...
Heidi is not your average soon-to-be-13-year-old: "One thing I knew for a fact, from the time I knew anything at all, was that I didn't have a father. What I had was Mama and Bernadette, and as far as I was concerned, that was plenty."...
Within minutes of finishing Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, I felt so bereft without Alma Singer and Leo Gorsky, that I immediately clicked my iPod to The Great House. [Thank goodness the hubby keeps my gadgets well-stocked!] How pleased I was to discover that, of the sizable...
Here's how I finally came to read The History of Love ...
Clearly, Unbroken falls into the 'you can't make this stuff up'-category. Within the almost 500 pages of print (or 14 hours of listening – narrated with such dignity by award-winning actor Edward Herrman!), you'll experience just about every human emotion ...
This was my last of the Julia Glass novels, having read them out of published order. Glass' first title, Three Junes, and her latest, The Widower's Tale, undoubtedly make up the better half of her oeuvre. I See You Everywhere and Whole World land on...
No matter what you ultimately think of the story here, reading this book will no doubt elicit strong lasting emotions. As I'm convinced the less you know about Judy Blundell’s 2008 National Book Award for Young People's Literature winner, the better your own reading will be, you might...
Hattie Kong's email inbox is full of desperate pleas from various relatives to please send back her parents' bones to the family plot in Qufu, China. Because her American missionary mother and her Confucius-descended Chinese father found their final rest in Iowa, the remaining Kong...
Read this, just as soon as possible. You may not immediately recognize Dr. Paul Edward Farmer's name, but you will recognize his miraculous story. Pulitzer-winning Tracy Kidder enters the good doctor's expansive orbit long enough to produce a resonating portrait of a phenomenal human being whose life purpose is to...
Truth: if not for Sunil Malhotra, I would never have finished Abraham Verghese's bestselling first novel, Cutting for Stone. Immediately opened upon receipt more than two years ago, for some reason, my bookmark never moved beyond the first few chapters ...
Without a doubt, this is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s best work to date. While her debut, Purple Hibiscus, was engrossing, and her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, included stand-out gems, both titles pale to the exceptional Yellow Sun. Gentle, innocent Ugwu enters the home of...
Had I not been so enthralled with Room, I don't know if I would have discovered Emma Donoghue's many other titles, but I've definitely been enjoying reading newly discovered authors' works backwards. Take a look at the cover and you can probably guess what Landing is about....
