July Books

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruis Zafó  "takes us into a dark, gothic universe …and creates a breathtaking adventure of intrigue, romance, and tragedy.” Blending deft, evocative writing with a bit of magic realism, Zafón keeps the reader turning pages, but in the end, the truffles don’t make for a satisfying meal.

The Fixer by bestselling author, Joseph Finder, is a story of  a investigative reporter who loses his job, fiancée, and apartment and has to move back and renovate the home of his miserable youth. He finds millions hidden in the walls and sets out to learn the secrets of his comatose father who turns out to have  been a “fixer.”  Finder has written good books, but this isn’t one of them.  If he had taken another six months to edit and revise, this could have been much better.

A Tightly Raveled Mind  by Diane Lawson  is a book that Freud might have liked, but I didn’t.   Dr. Nora Goodman is  a sexy forty-something psychoanalyst with a  handful of one-dimensional, neurotic patients who, like their analyst,  can't seem to allow themselves happiness, love, or success. I liked the descriptions of San Antonio and some of the psychobabble as Lawson  tried to blend crime-solving and psychoanalytic understanding of unconscious mental  processes.

Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman is the disjointed story of Tooly Zylberberg and her Dickensian, peripatetic life. Covering three continents and switching back and forth  over thirty year, the novel left me more confused than the reviewer who gave it high praise. The SF Chronicle called it, “inventive… full of wonderfully quirky, deeply flawed, but lovable characters.”

*The Book Seller by Cynthia Swanson gives Kitty Miller the opportunity to experience both paths in Frost’s “Roads Not Taken.”  She has come to accept her unconventional single life and loves the little bookshop she runs with her best friend, Frieda.  Then, she starts having realistic dreams about a different life involving a great husband, beautiful children and different challenges. Reminiscent of Sliding Doors “The Bookseller is a delightful and haunting exploration of identity, love and loss. ..written with great style and compassion.”

Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo was called a “ perfectly pitched thriller" (Sunday Mirror)  Perhaps, but I found it to be a terse, dark, introspective  first person account about the work life and musings of Olav, a contract killer for a ruthless crime boss.  Beneath the murders and other failed criminal efforts, Olav has a heart of gold, if only he didn’t have a bad childhood and dyslexia.  Don’t look for a happy ending.

June Books

*The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle returns to his trademark description of  destructive misfits with individualism as a central theme. A seventy-year-old Vietnam vet  returns home after killing a Costa Rican  armed robber to find that his  schizophrenic fragile son  Adam is involved with an older woman dedicated to a right-wing anarchist group.  Adam imagines himself a modern mountain man and shoots two people, leading to a major, eerily contemporary, manhunt. My favorite Boyle book since Tortilla Curtain. 

*The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn is a political biography of the intertwined lives of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who emerged New York's Knickerbocker elite to become the most prominent American political family of the twentieth century. While building on Burns’ concept of transformational leadership, there is little new insights on leadership or history in its  almost thousand pages.  Still,  it is an interesting view of how the Roosevelt family dominated the first half of the 20^th century with more impact than the Bush’s and Clinton’s managed in more recent times.

**Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lufthansa  by Eric Larson, “ one of the modern masters of popular narrative nonfiction”--.a resourceful researcher and a subtle storyteller places the world’s fastest and most opulent passenger ship and the deadly German U-boat as protagonists in a thrilling suspense tale even if you already know the outcome.  Larson draws on telegrams, war logs, love letters, and survivor depositions to provide  intriguing details about things you didn't know you need to know...”Thrilling, dramatic and powerful."

Life After Life by Jill McCorkle explore the capacity for self-discovery at any age (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie). The residents, staff, and neighbors of a North Carolina retirement center  share their secret memories and life’s  profound discoveries in a somewhat disjointed meditation on life, death, and dying.

May Books

And Sometimes I Wonder About You  by Walter Mosley is a mediocre book by a good writer. In the 5^th Leonid McGill  novel, the short, irresistible, unstoppable, African American (he describes the skin tones of ever character in the novel) detective who  is investigating the murder of a client he initially refused to help.  “Leonid navigates difficult personal elements in his own life while uncovering dark secrets about the victim's old-money family and its missing heiress.”

The Stranger by Harlan Coben, “NYT bestselling master of suspense, delivers his most shocking thriller yet.” Adam Price learns a devastating secret about his wife, Corinne, but when he confronts her, the mirage of their  perfect life seems to disappear as if it never existed. The plot is contrived  and the book has far too many incomplete sentences, but I read this escapist novel in one day.

*The Last Bookaneer is by Matthew Pearl, “the reigning king of popular literary historical thrillers.” In the late 19^th century, two literary pirates (bookaneers) are seeking manuscripts to steal and are caught up in a colonial war in Samoa as they compete for Robert Louis Stevenson's last manuscript and try to make a fortune before a new international copyright treaty ends their  trade. Although described as “a page-turning journey to the heart of a lost era,” the storyline seems a bit stretched and slow going at points.

*The Sixth Extension: An Unnatural History by  Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of geologists, botanists, marine biologists, and others to explain the discovery and impact of  five devastating mass extinctions on Earth.  In a NYT “10 Best Books of the year, she explains, in a way that I can almost understand,  why we are in the 6^th periods of major species losses  in the history of the universe. “A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account.”

The Heart Has Its Reasons by Maria Duenas is a tale of a Madrid  professor who seemed to have it all until her husband suddenly left her. To escape, she accepts a  research grant in California involving an exiled Spanish writer who died decades ago. Trying to leave her own troubled life behind, she becomes enmeshed in some eternal issues of love, academics and middle-age.  

March-April Books

Dog on It by Spencer Quinn is narrated by intrepid canine detective Chet who accompanies his human PI partner, Bernie, on an assignment involving the disappearance of a teenage girl who ran with the wrong crowd, a case that is complicated by Bernie's dysfunctional personal life. Chet has a charming style and the book is an enjoyable dessert morsel.

*Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins centers on Rachel, who commutes to London every day, past the backyard of a couple she images having the perfect life that has escaped her. Then she sees the wife kissing another man, and the next day he wife  goes missing. The story is told from three character’s not-to-be-trusted perspectives. Rachel  mourns the loss of her former life with the help of canned gin and tonics, gets overly involved with the “missing person” investigation and closer to  understanding  who she really is…and isn’t. Janet Maslin (NYT) says this book, “has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl.” 

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up  by Marie Kondo didn’t change my life or keep my attention but had a couple of good points about neatness and deep philosophical insights about the virtues and benefits of being tidy from a bestselling, young, obsessive Japanese woman.

*Me Before You by Jo Jo  Moyes is classic “chick lit” about  an ordinary girl  who has never traveled beyond her tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for a wealthy acerbic, moody, bossy quadriplegic who doesn’t want to adjust to the limitations of his current life. “Clark” takes on  the challenge of helping him see the opportunities in his life—and he opens new opportunities for her.  Not a traditional love story with a conventional ending, but a story that was enjoyable and hard to put down.

*The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands by Eric Topol tries to explain how new technology--from the smartphones to artificial intelligence will to democratize  and improve the practice of medicine.  Topol provides an obituary for the paternalistic medical regime in which "the doctor knows best"  as mobile phones, apps, and attachments will literally put the lab, primary care and some of the ICU in our pockets. The vision is inspirational, and the research exhaustive (exhausting, too) but the writing lacks the engaging quality of his previous best-seller, The Creative Destructive of Medicine.

A Bad Character  by Deepti Kapor was, for me a bad book with great reviews. It  explores an  intense, short-term relationship that the  young  narrator begins  with the title's  "bad character." Her lover introduces Idha to a slice of Delhi life spiked with cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and passionate sex. This slice is juxtaposed to the mundane, even sedate existence she leads with her guardian, who intends to marry her  to any more eligible suitor. “the novel is at its most impressive in its impressionistic evocation of a dazzling, dangerous cityscape.”

**The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a National Book Award finalist and winner of several other prizes.  A hauntingly beautiful book about a blind French girl and a brilliant German orphan whose paths intersect  in occupied France as both try to find themselves and survive the devastation of World War II.  You long for a happier ending than there’s any reason to expect, yet it is “Stupendous…A beautiful, daring, heartbreaking, oddly joyous novel.”

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly follows the story of Los Angeles Police Department detective Harry Bosch as he and a new partner, Lucia Soto, investigate the death of a mariachi musician shot some ten years previously and a 1993 fire that left several children dead. They find that the musician’s murder case is entangled with local and state electoral politics and the latter is connected to a famous 1997 North Hollywood shootout. This is classic Connelly with good character development, dialogue, police procedure and politics—perhaps not his best but still fun to read.

**Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande's is a “masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession's mishandling of both.” With rapidly aging populations in the developed world, doctors and their patients should see the role of medicine as enabling well-being rather than extending life as long as possible. Gawande provides plenty of important facts, but never loses his warm, caring style. “In his compassionate, learned way, Gawande shows all of us…how mortality must be faced with both heart and mind.”

Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst, the reputed master of the “historic spy novel”  has Cristian Ferrar as a Spanish lawyer living in Paris helping anti-Franco forces smuggle arms into his homeland. Working with an enigmatic man of Slavic descent; Ferrar goes on a quest which will take him from libertine nightclubs in Paris to volatile bars by the docks in Gdansk while working in a brief romance with an aristocratic spy and a chance to reclaim a lost love in New York as the war threatens to engulf France.

Insatiable Appetites by Stuart Woods opens with studly Stone  Barrington awaiting the results of the presidential election with candidate Kate Rule Lee and her husband, the sitting POTUS. The plot involves a typical mix of Stone’s devising clever solutions for complex problems of his rich and famous clients, bedding  a couple of gorgeous  younger women, eating at some fabulous restaurants and drinking lots of Knob Creek bourbon.  Formulaic and tacky, yet  a pleasant quick escapist read.  

February Books

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny has recently retired Quebec Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, seeking balm in the picturesque town of Three Pines. His neighbor Clara Morrow’s artist husband has failed show up as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. She wants Gamache to help find him, so a trusty band of friends set out to solve the mystery. The writing starts out almost lyrically, but gets a bit bogged down in the middle.  The NYT  found “ elements of the police procedural with a deep-delving psychology,…a sorrowful sense of the precarious nature of human goodness, and the persistence of its opposite, even in rural Edens.” Maybe, but maybe it tries a little too hard.

**Prague Summer by Jeffrey Condran is an insightful, beautifully written story of a happily-married State Department employee and her rare-books-dealer husband  who enjoy a good life in Prague.  Their routine is thrown into chaos by the arrival of an old friend whose  own husband has been mysteriously imprisoned.  She hides a sinister agenda that is gradually revealed in a tantalizing and ingeniously constructed study of relationships and human character. “"Like the city itself, Prague Summer is romantic and mysterious, with a refined literary bent.”

*City of Thieves by David Benioff is based on his grandfather's stories about surviving WWII in Russia. Alone in Leningrad during the siege, 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper's corpse. To avoid execution, he and his cocky side-kick are given the challenge of finding  a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. The touching Quixotic buddy story blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age tail,  an oddly touching quest with  humor blended with the grisly absurdities of war.

*Children Act by Ian McEwen probes the dread beneath the surface of most post-middle-age lives in his best book since Atonement. Through the perspective of Fiona Maye,  a leading High Court judge who is renowned for her intelligence, exactitude, and sensitivity, McEwen examines legal, medical and religious issues,  while exploring  the human experiences of  anger, sorrow, shame, impulse, regret and yearning. He rejects religious dogma that lacks compassion, but also questions secular morality as well. “Few will deny McEwan his place among the best of Britain’s living novelists."

The Hundred Year House by Rebecca “Makkai  is a “ twisty, maximalist story with…a natural ear for satire”. Partially  screwball comedy, intellectual sex farce, historical drama and fashioned ghost story told backwards in time and with an impressive array of colorful, yet forgettable, characters. The Hundred-Year House  unfolds the secrets of an old-money family and their turn-of-the-century estate and sometime artist colony .. “ feels like the precocious love child of John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire and a rousing game of Clue.”