The best memoir I have ever read is Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1997. When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, […]
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The Night Watchman
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich “Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children. She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even […]
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October Reads: a Little Bit of Everything
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich “Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children. She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering […]
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Love in Colonial Punjab
What remained was a feeling of quiet rapture, of dawn colours slowly involving themselves with the day, a champagne brightness starting to warm my skin and the waving acres of corn and wheat, the soft green hills that followed no pattern, a distant stone hut that held the horizon and a long tapered track driving on until I couldn’t even imagine that I could see it. The orange sun broke upwards and placed, and they did seem placed, great beams of light across all that waiting land. For the first time in my life I had a sense of the world turning. All these years later and I can still […]
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Disappointing Themes in Great Circle
A couple days ago I started reading Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. At 600+ pages it is a literary behemoth, but based on the synopsis, I was eager to dive in. One of the early chapters is about a transgender Native American in the 1800s. Warning bells went off in my head. When one of the main characters has sex with her brother, I knew it was time to be done. Many fellow reviewers put this book in the DNF pile, too, so it was the right decision for me. According to them, Great Circle includes incest, rape, abortion, and gender and sexual fluidity. I’m no puritan, but that’s more […]
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Cloud Cuckoo Land – A Triumph!
Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen […]
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18 Books Later, Mitch Rapp is Still a Badass
I love escaping into a good spy thriller, and #18 in the Mitch Rapp series transported me to the Middle East, Mexico, and Washington DC to watch the world’s most deadly good guy lick terrorists, drug cartels, and corrupt politicians. Lethal Agent (a brilliant double entendre) has pulse-pounding action, and a delightfully intertwined plot and I cheered on a brutal killer as he thwarted evildoers. If you enjoy audio books, narrator George Guidall is one of the best in the business. 4 stars.
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Amy’s September Reads and Reviews
There’s not much I enjoy more than curling up with a book on a crisp autumn evening. I have a feeling some of you agree. When I write these posts, I intentionally include reviews of books I loved and others I didn’t. Why? Because we all like different things. Being a writer and editor makes me a tough critic, but I do my best to include both pros and cons on each book. Maybe you’ll find the perfect read in this month’s group. A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner “The person who completes your life is not so much the person who shares all the years of your existence, […]
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August Books
Last month’s catch was a light one, and you know what? That’s cool! I spent loads of time with my grandkids and worked on two client books. Then I got Covid. Other than cooking, there’s little I enjoy more than reading, but Covid put the kibosh on that. For nearly three weeks, all I did was sleep, and although I’m behind schedule, I still have some great book recommendations for you. Here you go! The Noticer by Andy Andrews “You see, with a degree of intelligence and a hint of wisdom, most people can tell the difference between good and bad. However, it takes a truly wise person to discern […]
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Sparks Like Stars – a novel set in Kabul
The current situation in Afghanistan is madness. The horrors being experienced by citizens and foreigners are unimaginable as thousands run for their lives. Sadly, the land that is now Afghanistan has a long history of domination by foreign conquerors and strife among internally warring factions, from Genghis Khan to ISIS. In March, I read an astonishing novel by Nadia Hashimi set in Kabul during the 1978 communist coup. It has eerie similarities to what is taking place today. Hashimi was born and raised in New York and New Jersey, but both her parents were born in Afghanistan and left in the early 1970s before the Soviet invasion. She writes with […]
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