On Chesil Beach: A Novel
by Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese
Our Price: $22.00
My favorite part of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion is a passionate letter which Captain Wentworth writes to Anne Elliot. He closes it by writing, “A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never." McEwan’s lyrical novel (more of a novella, actually), is what happens when a couple fails to make that connection – when that word is unspoken, and that look meets an averted face. Set in early 1960s Britain, On Chesil Beach follows the brief but intense relationship between a young couple. It’s searing and heartbreaking and funny, as only life can be.
Home Comforts : The Art and Science of Keeping House
by Cheryl Mendelson Scribner
Our Price: $35.00
This book is the Joy of Cooking equivalent for housekeeping. But it’s more than just how to get stains out of blouses, refinish your wooden floors, and go about spring cleaning. Mendelson – more than any issue of Martha Stewart Living or Real Simple or Dwell – shows you how to turn a collection of rooms into a HOME. This book is in indispensable guide, and should be on a shelf in everyone’s home. It’s a wonderful gift for newlyweds.
Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (Twentieth Century Classics)
by Graham Greene Penguin Classics
Our Price: $14.00
The guidelines for picking books in my Spy Novel Book Club were simple. It had to be a book that nobody had yet read; it had to be exciting; and it had to transcend the boundaries of the genre. Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana exceeded all of our desires (and then some). Greene’s novel is set in pre-Castro Cuba, where James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman, is recruited by the British Secret Service. For $300 a month (used to keep his spoiled daughter in luxury) Wormold becomes M16's man in Havana. To compensate for not actually knowing anything, Wormold files bogus reports and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. However, much to his surprise (and that of his suspicious handler), Wormold’s stories start becoming alarmingly true. A can’t-put-down thriller with Graham’s trademark dry humor and characters so skillfully drawn you want to throttle them.
No question – this book is massive. It took me a month to make my way through it. But don’t let its doorstop size stop you from picking it up – you’ll be glad that the author spent 900 pages to tell this story.
Switching between the stories of a modern-day Sikh policeman in Bombay, Sartaj Singh, and the infamous Hindu gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, Chandra evokes a rich, evocative, chilling and absolutely believable world. As someone who knows little about modern India, this book was eye-opening in its details of daily life in India, as well as being a compelling mystery. I relished every moment I had it in my hands.
The Emperor's Children
by Claire Messud Random House
Our Price: $25.00
Out of all the fabulous fiction published this fall, this was the hardcover novel that I recommended most often to friends. It wasn’t just that several of Messud’s protagonists were teetering, ambitious but confused, at the edge of thirty, like many people I know. Her graceful writing, finely drawn characters, and striking descriptions of place drive, but do not overwhelm, the plot. Like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, this novel comes close to perfection, but its flaws made me love this ambitious, brilliant, thought-provoking book all the more.rn
In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot
by Graham Roumieu Manic D Press
Our Price: $12.95
If Nick Bantock was bitter, grumpy and obsessed with Bigfoot, he may have produced something like In Me Own Words. Roumieu, a self-described "author illustrator who is easily annoyed," recasts North America's favorite crypto-zoological homonid as the modern day everyman, skewering much of popular culture along the way. This slightly disturbing but highly amusing book begs to be passed on to artistic friends, younger brothers, and people who appreciate truly horrible poetry.
Reading Banville's Man Booker Prize-winning novel is a profoundly moving experience. Like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, it is a portrait of a person wrapped in sorrow, abandoned by his spouse, adrift on memory and in danger of drowning. This is a novel that cries out to be read again and again, encouraging us to delve into the complexities of the main character, but also into our own fears and desires. One of my favorite books of 2005, and one of three that I still find myself thinking about, months after I first read it.
Pitlor has written a superbly graceful book. The action takes place over a long weekend as a family--an aging mother and father, the two sons and their wives, and a daughter--gather at a summer house in Maine to celebrate the father's 75th birthday. Pitlor moves between the point of views of differing family members in a way that illuminates their interactions and makes you incredibly aware of what is said, and not said, to the people they love. It made me think about the challenges and joys of interconnectedness, and how small graces (the sound of the surf, the softness of a bed, the pressure of a loved one's hand) can help us get through the inevitable sorrows of life.
Good old-fashioned literary fun. By which I mean, a coming-of-age story concerned mainly with, as the housemaster might say. “Smut. A smear upon the spirit. Concerning things between the legs.”
Particularly pleasing to those of us who favor James Joyce’s Portraits of an Artist as a Young Man, but wish that maybe, well, a little more happened in it.
The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories
by Valerie Martin Vintage Books USA
Our Price: $13.00
I’m a sucker for short stories – when they’re done well, they can be devastating in their perfection. In the weeks since I read Martin’s collection, I’ve thought countless times about her characters, even waking once from sleep to reconsider the motivations of particularly mixed-up man. Martin’s crisp, confident writing style was what won me over originally, but the skillfully drawn characters, and the strength of their relationships (to others and to their art), keep these stories percolating in my consciousness.
How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life
by Mameve Medwed William Morrow & Company
Our Price: $24.95
A delightful love story and coming-into-oneself tale from a local author. Medwed’s Harvard- and Inman-Square dwelling “underachievers” seem like people you would actually want to know, and could, and do, in your day-to-day life. There’s even a scene in Harvard Book Store!
In accessible prose, Kramer (Listening to Prozac) writes not only about what depression is (medically), but what it is to us. Struggling against the romanticism of depression—the idea of an ennobling "heroic melancholy" suffered by artists and writers—Kramer argues for viewing depression as it really is: a disease capable of devastating life.
Like William Styron’s Darkness Visible, this book has given me a new understanding of what it means to live with depression, as well as what’s involved in living with those suffering from the disease. Kramer has written a thoughtful, responsible and potentially life-changing book.
I expected this book to be one which mostly appealed to teenage boys—indeed I picked it up because it was recommended to me by several former members of that group. But I found Mowat’s lucid and humorous writing a delight, while his account of a year spent studying wolves in the Arctic tundra made me want to go North myself. A wonderful book for teens and adults.
Introducing Buddhism
by Chris Pauling Windhorse Publications (UK)
Our Price: $8.95
A lovely and very concise introduction to Buddhism's teachings and practices. Pauling's writing is oddly soothing, almost meditative. Even if you are not seeking to follow Buddhism as a path, this book helps you consider what it means to live an ethical life, and be at peace with oneself.
Rudolf Nureyev floats through this new novel by Colum McCann. He also stomps, slides, leaps, and pins you with his gaze. The world-changing dancer is the focus of this masterful book, but is somehow unapproachable. We watch him through the eyes of the other characters – Yulia, a St. Petersburg intellectual trapped in a deadening marriage; Odile, Nureyev’s devoted chef and housekeeper; Victor, fabulously and ravenously riding the wave of New York’s gay scene in the 1970s and 80s. Even Margot Fonteyn, Nureyev’s most famous dancing partner, gives us her view of this mercurial man. But is genius unknowable? Are we really capable of understanding someone like Nureyev? Having finished the book, I feel no closer to comprehension, but I do feel different –stronger and more alive – for having considered the passion, risk, and beauty that drove this man.
Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival
by Bernd Heinrich Ecco
Our Price: $14.95
Heinrich is the best kind of nature writer. He teaches us, opening our eyes to the creatures around us and the fascinating ways in which they’ve evolved in order to survive a New England winter. But he also captures the transcendent beauty of the natural world in this longest season, the hiss of snow falling in the pine wood, the silent sweep of an owl across the field, the humid warmth of a beaver’s lodge.
How can I complain about walking to work in winter when tiny creatures like golden-crowned kinglets, frogs and voles actually survive without the benefits we take for granted (houses with heat, waterproof boots, layers of wool and fleece and gore-tex)? A perfect book for when the snow comes down.
Drawn to Nature: Through the Journals of Clare Walker Leslie
by Clare Walker Leslie Storey Publishing
Our Price: $14.00
“Nature is everywhere we are” writes Clare Walker Leslie in the introduction of this book. But how often do we take the time to see it? The author lives in our city of Cambridge, walks the same streets as us, hears the same sounds. But she often sees more, because she takes the time to pay attention. Leslie’s journal is both written, sketched and painted in a way which inspires even non-artists like myself. A wonderful book you’ll want to pick up again and again.
p.s. Have you noticed the red tails that circle above Widener Library and perch on the Holyoke Building? Look up!
Willful Creatures: Stories
by Aimee Bender Doubleday Books
Our Price: $22.95
Readers, myself included, don’t like Aimee Bender. We love her. As much as I treasure her novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own, it is her short stories that appeal most strongly to me. They’re modern parables, fairy-tales that that place in a world like and unlike our own. Otherworldly, fresh and beautiful.
Prophet of Dry Hill: Lessons from a Life in Nature
by David Gessner Beacon Press
Our Price: $19.95
Nature writer Gessner (whose book Return of the Osprey has been on my reading list for years) has penned a loving portrait of the great American nature writer John Hay, whom he befriended when Hay was in his eighties, and Gessner both mid-life and mid-career. Gessner does a wonderful job introducing us to the central themes in Hay’s work, as well as the history of American nature writing. But what I found most striking about this book was its theme of young writers seeking mentors. Gessner (and others) were mentored by Hay, while Hay himself was mentored by the poet Conrad Aiken. Rejecting the anxiety of influence, Gessner discovers himself as part of a long lineage of writers, and writes “the job of celebrating Cape Cod, or any individual place, was not any one person’s job. It was the work of generations.” Well said, well written and well done.
Everyone knows an Austen novel will end happily, but there’s joy in feeling again and again that you’re not quite sure it’ll turn out the way you want. Will Anne Elliot recapture the love of Captain Wentworth? Will Louisa’s youth and beauty steal his heart? Will Anne’s family ever appreciate her? Will the Captain come to the card party?! I know all the answers, yet, without fail, I get goosebumps at the climatic point in this novel. Wentworth is my favorite Austen love-interest, Persuasion my favorite Austen novel. Enjoy.
If you’re looking for a mystery that makes complete sense, don’t read this book. However, if you’re in the mood for wickedly drawn characters, snappy dialogue, humorously menacing thugs and tons of swell dames getting tight, this is your ticket.
ps: Don’t forget to watch the fabulous movie adaptation with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. Perfection!
