"All That Follows" by Jim Crace

Lennie Less is a saxophonist, a well-known jazz musician in the U.K. with lots of fans and lots of credits, who is apparently afraid of everything. Jim Crace presents this quirky, bumpy portrait as its hero lives through the very eventful week in which he turns 50. The narrative contains a highly individual, detailed, and sometimes trying progress to a nevertheless rewarding denouement. The player in question is almost no player at all. He shies from everything. He has taken a sabbatical as our...

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"Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie

My first foray into things Rushdie, and I came away excessively diverted. This is an Arabian Nights-type tale, with magic, enchanted emperors, and an exotic locale. We have an Italian nobleman, Il Machio (who, I figured out embarrassingly late, is Niccolo Machiavelli), who travels to the Mughal Empire (in present-day India and Pakistan) and claims he is the Emperor's uncle. There turns out to be some possible justification for this improbable claim, and Il Machio enjoys favor in the court for...

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"The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard

In this exceptional story, Shirley Hazzard gives us the eternal story of Aldred and Helen, thrown together in the chaotic and threatening aftermath of the Second World War. He's a major in the British Army who re-upped at war's end to study the effects of war on old cultures. She is the daughter of horrid and ambitious parents and has a terminally ill brother to whom she is devoted. She's loyal, erudite, fifteen years Aldred's junior, and falls unalterably in love with him. War's fortunes and the...

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“Pere Goriot” by Honoré de Balzac

This classic piece was my introduction to Balzac. This canny Frenchman is a close and knowing observer of human nature. The hopes, desperation, greed, and cynicism so rampant every day in our world, are fully on display here. The tale is told through the viewpoint of Rastignac, a 21-year-old law student and newcomer to Paris. Rastignac's ambitions are the common ones, to be rich, fashionable, and carefree, and to take a mistress. These ambitions shift over the course of the story. He becomes enamored...

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"A Woman in Jerusalem" by A.B. Yehoshua

"A Woman in Jerusalem" begins with the discovery by a baking tycoon that a former employee has died and her corpse has languished in the morgue for a week. Worse, a second-rate journalist eager for a wider readership has picked up and sensationalized the story to make the baking company look bad. The acting and somewhat reluctant HR director has a fairly cyincal view of the company owner's motivation when he is assigned a damage-control function. He investigates the case, and the first thing he...

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"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Having wound up as one of Oprah's Club books (congratulations to Eugenides!), "Middlesex" has received a lot of focus and a lot of ink. Eugenides manages to give first-person flesh-and-blood life, in almost mundane language, to an individual with an extremely rare and extremely personal abnormality. This is its main accomplishment, and it's something Eugenides should be honored for (and Oprah wielding her personal weight to support it deserves honors too). The author uses particulars from his own...

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"John Henry Days" by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead follows up the brilliant "The Intuitionist" with another strong effort. This story recounts the trip an independent journalist (hack? flack?) makes to the small hill town where they will celebrate the legend of John Henry, the mythic steel-driving man who died in competition with a machine. The novel takes us through different historical stages in which the legend takes root and grows. The author also effectively lampoons present-day journalism, bringing up the ridiculous effort...

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"Shakespeare: the World as Stage" by Bill Bryson

A good basic compendium of what we know about the Bard. There isn't much, of course, but Bryson lays it all out in a straightforward and sometimes breezy way that always comes naturally to him. I found the sections on the economics of the theatre during Shakespeare's lifetime, and the regulations covering everything from sodomy to dress to how much it cost to go to a Catholic Mass, and the growth of medieval London, all to be very interesting. I wished for more in the section of words and phrases...

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"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz's first full-length fiction is a fully-realized piece, heartfelt, compassionate, and memorable. Our protaganist Oscar is a young Dominican living in New Jersey who is a "ghetto nerd": hopelessly overweight, endlessly focused on writing fantasy fiction. Unfortunately, Oscar is also completely smitten every time he sees even an average-looking woman. This is a good novel because of the author's diction: it's hip, poetic in its rhythms, and startlingly effective. It puts us directly in...

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"Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson

In "Housekeeping" Marilynne Robinson establishes herself as the very best of living American authors. This novel perches on the fraught balance between living and dead, drowning and flying, orthodox and outcast. In a lonely town in the Far West, where "the history of the world happened elsewhere," there is a house owned by Sylvie and Ruth's family. Sylvie is Ruth's aunt and is very little more than a drifter. Lucille is Ruth's younger sister and she occupies the house. This remote town sits on...

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"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Dai Sijie

How like a novel by Balzac is this little study in love, rivalry, and ego. Two unfortunate young Chinese men are sent into the mountains for "re-education" during Mao's Cultural Revolution. There they discover the tailor's daughter, a lovely young seamstress, with whom both young men become enamored. She is beautiful but untutored, but our two intrepid young men take care of that. They steal a collection of books, a wonderful group of Western masterpieces. In due course they travel to the seamstress's...

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"Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl

How does one plan a book like this? To set a murder mystery (we have no idea it's a murder mystery except for some prescient comments along the way, until well into the story) in a clever high schooler's senior year, and make her not only solve the mystery, but suffer abandonment as a result! This exceedingly clever piece contains multiple cultural references on every page, most of them actually valid. We have a startlingly erudite high school senior, who falls in with a clique of charismatic...

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"Larry's Party" by Carol Shields

In "Larry's Party," Carol Shields gives us the intimate portrait of Larry Weller, Canadian landscape architect who goes through life as through a maze. In fact, mazes are such a perfect metaphor for this poor sap's perception of life, that our cagey author makes him a lover and professional designer of them. We have chapters with particular aspects of Larry: "Larry's Love," "Larry's Work," "Larry's Folks," even "Larry's Penis," a chapter on his sexual experiences. As the book progresses, each...

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"The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought" by Marilynne Robinson

This book is next to impossible to rate: you want to alert readers to the loveliness of the prose, and I for one wanted to admire the logic and cogency of the arguments, for I love and cherish this writer. And yet ... the essays (the ones I read) are, as promised, contrarian in nature. Ms. Robinson objects to the lionization of Darwin, pointing out that he was an unabashed racist and eugenicist, and that his legacy is used as cover for callous and radically greedy economists and social scientists....

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"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell

In which world will we find ourselves on opening David Mitchell’s next book? In which universe? In “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” Mr. Mitchell transports us in classic style to late medieval Japan, to that nation’s one portal to the outside world. And he takes us, his joyous, eagerly-led readers, on a captivating journey yet again. Our eponymous clerk, Jacob de Zoet, sails from The Netherlands in 1799 to Nagasaki, or more exactly to Dejima, the one precinct where Dutch traders are allowed...

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"Lost Nation" by Jeffrey Lent

One begins to see a pattern in Jeffrey Lent. Prior to "Lost Nation," he brought out a masterpiece, "In the Fall." Each of these is an epic multi-generational drama ("Lost Nation" deals with subsequent generations only in a postlude), each concerns itself with violent men in warlike, bloody activity, and each portrays men who have eroded themselves, ruined themselves with ancient guilt. "Lost Nation" refers not only to a territory in the far north of New Hampshire which is orphaned between the...

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"Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson is an all-time classic author, and this book is rightfully held in the front rank of the Stevenson canon. It is often cited as a classic of young adult literature, and it clearly works as such, superbly so. But I would like to cite Mr. Stevenson's sophisticated and subtle portayal of his characters. The motivations are shaded, knowing, understandable, and realistic. We have the evolving, by turns treacherous and ingratiating, journey of Long John Silver. We have the captain of the vessel,...

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"Paint it Black" by Janet Fitch

"Paint it Black" is Janet Fitch's powerful and compassionate novel of two women trying to get on with their lives in the wake of young Michael Faraday's suicide. Their shared lives and the ultimate divergence of their approaches to Michael's end make up the story. Josie, the innocent from Bakersfield, is the lover Michael leaves behind, and our main protaganist. Her mix of internal dialog, recollection, and drug-addled guilt and grief make up much of the story. Ms. Fitch's handling of all this...

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"Five Skies" by Ron Carlson

Ron Carlson assembles three men in "Five Skies," each at a different, trying stage of his inner and overt journey. They all have an angry, or guilty, place they are running from, and assemble on a high cliff in Idaho to build something right. Arthur Key is a huge man, muscled, experienced, intelligent, and kindly. He is also skittish and haunted by something that happened at home in California. Darwin Gallegos is the onetime manager on the ranch where they work; his wife was recently killed when...

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"The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" by Peter Orner

"The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" is told in snippets, tiny chapters, some as short as a paragraph, that observe the lives, lusts, and shenanigans of teachers at a Catholic boys' school in the veld of Namibia. Some of the snippets provide forward momentum, as we learn of the volunteer teacher from Cincinnati, a youngish Jewish man who, along with the other male teachers, lusts after the eponymous Mavala. Young Larry Kaplanski, our Buckeye protaganist, engages in a long series of assignations...

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"Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser

Buddha teaches that the suffering we experience in life comes from desire. "Sister Carrie" expresses and reinforces this truth with such singleness of purpose that it becomes ponderous, a drag. This book holds its place in the American canon because it broke shocking new ground of realism in portraying the callous disregard with which some men treat impressionable young women. The book also casts its unblinking eye on our material culture and its concomitant status-seeking. But principally and...

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"The Echo Maker" by Richard Powers

In "The Echo Maker" Richard Powers gives us an encylopedic recap of neurological pathologies, and a fraught scientific debate about the current state of neurology. This book portrays accident victim Mark Schluter and his grappling with Capgras Syndrome, the inability to recognize one's loved ones - and the resulting assumption that persons close to you are impostors. Gerald Weber, MD, the cognitive neurologist and popular author, takes time out from his busy book-promotion tour to visit, but why?...

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"The Janissary Tree" by Jason Goodwin

In "The Janissary Tree" Jason Goodwin gives us an engaging murder mystery set in 1836 Istanbul. In the imperial capital, the sultan faces pressure from shrinking territory and waning influence, and when a young houri in his harem is murdered, he sighs and says, "Summon Yashim." Thus are we introduced to the intrepid and resourceful investigator who must solve not only the mystery of the harem murder, but also the apparent murder of four of the sultan's young officers. Are they related? We have...

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"The Blood of Flowers" by Anita Amirrezvani

"The Blood of Flowers" presents us with the story of an unnamed female narrator trying to make her way into adulthood in the Iranian capital of Isfahan in the 1620s. Our protaganist has a gift for designing and making, or "knotting" carpets, and after losing her father at fourteen, she must move from her native village to the home of her uncle in the dazzling capital. Our heroine suffers at the hands of her family, her friends, and the restrictive mores of the time. Yet she and her mother prevail,...

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"Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout

"Olive Kitteridge" consists of a series of short pieces written about the personal and internal lives of folks in a town on the coast of Maine. These glimpses show us so clearly, in language unerring and deceptively simple, folk that aspire against all hope for love, fulfillment, even survival. Sometimes the piece illuminates an episode from Olive's life, sometimes Olive plays only a cameo in this or that person's current crisis. And the crises abound in this collection. Lives and marriages and...

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