Customer Comments

Be honest. Sometimes you wish you were six, or nine, some cozy time and place in life where other people did the worrying. Okay, you worried too, but mostly not about grownup worries. Grab this volume, pull up an easy chair if they still exist,let your toes swing free and read this book. Weren't we drawn repeatedly to our Golden Books, chiefly for the illustrations? Who remembers what happened to Poky Little Puppy? But we sure remember what he looked like. This is the loveliest sort of revisit; you get to learn a bit about the illustrators, compare techniques and styles and colors, notice stuff you may not have seen when you were little. And feel like you went back home for a bit. You know. Yep, some of the tales are saccharin and the stereotypes are, well, products of their times. But if you ever brushed your fingers over a copy of a book and heard childhood calling, here's a way to enjoy it all over again. We lucky ones get to share them with grandbabies. Slow down their whirlwind world for a while. Nice journey to take, together! Nice one to take alone in the evenings, too. Great stuff, this!

I have certainly done my share of loving Ivan Doig. The Whistling Season is one of just a handful of novels that stick with me year by year, and I read hundreds of novels every year. So I was excited to find The Bartender's Tale on the "new" shelf at my local library. I've been known to be wrong, and it's hard to argue against a Kirkus review, but I'm sorry to report that I held my nose through a lot of The Bartender's Tale. There are phrases, and phrase types, that Doig uses ad nauseum. One wants to look past these, to attribute them to the particular voice of the narrator, perhaps -- but then they fall persistently out of the mouths of various characters, and there goes that excuse, and it was a weak one to begin with. Some of the prose is so muddled and plain muddy that a sentence will bear reading several times before the reader can catch the meaning. This is not, sorry to say, due to some sophisticated or elegant style or voice, but in fact the opposite. When writing is so clumsy that it calls attention to itself, it cannot be said to be elegant, can it. (That particular form of sentence, that ultimate clause with period that I just used, Doig employs so frequently, emerging from various characters and sometimes in the direct narration itself, that you can find two or more on a single page in more than one instance.) I could pay for a hard-cover edition of this novel if I had a dollar for every time a form of the word "savvy" is used as a verb. Not even kidding. Maybe it was a kind of convention of the time and place (1960 rural Montana) of the book's setting, but this amount of repetition is plain annoying -- unless it's meant to depict an annoying habit of a particular character which, in this case, it is not. Some threads are just plain lost or unfinished. When the starring pair of 12 year-olds are employed to rehearse dramatic lines with the local news editor's wife, the thread kind of peters along until it peters out, never mind that a happily-ever-after, quick-finish wrap-up in the final two pages of the novel shows that those moments became meaningful to the eventual life's work of the two kids. It ends up reading as a kind of after-thought, and it's a shame; a bit more development seemed promised and never delivered. The saving grace is that one does find it easy to care for the two young protagonists, and therefore to care about the story of their dramatic summer of '60. That's why, though I vowed again and again to put the book down and not pick it back up, I plodded through. And with the exception of a certain few passages, owing to awkward syntax all over the place and even more awkward dialogue -- not what one expects of Ivan Doig -- it WAS a plod, I'm afraid. The boy's father, the most vital character besides the kids, held so much promise of complexity that one just keeps waiting for him to flower in full, but he seldom succeeds in developing much past two dimensions. Now, again, I'm no PhD. I'm going to allow that maybe there's a secret formula or a certain form celebrated in The Bartender's Tale that just swoops over my head. I have read reviews that seem to repeat the "old-fashioned novel" notion. Well, I love a good old-fashioned novel; I repeat that I have loved Doig, and Dickens finds his way to my nightstand at least once a year, and plenty of honestly good, fully-developed novels that one might think of as pre-post-modern make their way into my mix. I anticipated this one with relish. But if a book has to stand on its own without regard for the great name behind it, well, this one is Doig's clunker, at least from where I sit. Worth reading? That's why I give it three stars rather than two; it's a compelling-enough story, with a couple of well-enough drawn characters, if "enough" is enough for you to spend four hundred pages with. Reviewers have remarked of Bartender that Doig evokes time and place with some mastery. True enough, usually; there are whiffs of it here. But mostly even the setting, right down to the magical back room where pawn is collected for a reason kept secret until the last few pages, is more cardboard than one anticipates from Doig. If one is interested in the Doig canon, it's worth a read. Particularly since someone else may disagree with me and come over here to tell me why I'm wrong. I want to be wrong.

An utterly delightful memoir with places exotic and (sort of) homespun circling around some pretty sumptuous recipes. Any traveler or child gone off to school without really wanting to will recognize how sometimes a nightmare becomes paradise and sometimes it's the other way around. Reichl unfurls the flag of how she became a very fine chef by happening into recipes out of desperation (with a mother who scrapes mold off of food, or sometimes doesn't even bother, and serves it to guests at large parties) and out of love -- for the food and for the many cooks she meets on adventures she seems to have happened into throughout her life. By necessity starting to cook by about age 7, recipes and food experimentation were never causes for anxiety for this autonomous (also by necessity) girl and young woman. They were a means to an end and then, of course, to the heart of all matters. I can't wait to try all the recipes. Well, almost all: I'm taking a pass on the ham-style corned beef (from mold-mother's recipes), and maybe on that dish that combines chicken and a lot of sugar, and but who knows? Reading about Reichl's adventures makes me want to try just about anything! Reichl tells us in an afterword that the recipes dotted throughout the book like butter on top of a good custard take the place of photographs, which come at the end of the book. I almost missed a good opportunity by bypassing the recipes, the faster to consume the story; but when I chanced to stop and look one over, I realized my mistake: Anyone who likes to cook will easily slide a little deeper into the person whose recipe appears on the page and it is worth the effort. There is something visceral that you take away from such an offering that cannot be conveyed in any photograph. Apple dumplings with hard sauce follows a story about an adopted grandma and her Barbadian cook who have a secret; fried chicken illuminates a section about the woman in the Village (what do you mean, What village? It was the '60s!) Reichl met in an integrated bar -- one of two in the college town of Ann Arbor; and on and on through school in Montreal and a cheap trip to the Middle East ... Such characters, and such colorful verbal drawings of them, like a piquant side dish, chapter after chapter. Memoir can be such a yawner, but not when it's Ruth Reichl telling the tale!

Atwood's prose in this writer's writer book is easy, that is to say, friendly. Cozy, even. But to breeze over the chapters, culled from a series of lectures Atwood gave at Cambridge, is to miss some delicious morsels that taste as universal and esoteric at the same moment as Atwood's fiction does. An intriguing catalog in the introduction tells us that writers -- ones we would know, it is hinted -- say that they write "... To set down the past before it is forgotten. To excavate the past *because* it has been forgotten ... To thumb my nose at death ... To attract the love of a beautiful woman ..." and so on, for two and a half pages. Do two souls inhabit the writer? Are we jekyll and hyde? Which is the "real" writer? How have we reacted over centuries, millennia, to censorship, and where does that response land us? Are we some alien creatures, or is that impression, well, impressed upon us from without? What to do with all those ideas? What to do with all those questions about our ideas? Atwood brings her own history to the making of this book: A Canadian writer starting out when no Canadian writers existed in the main to show the way, riding the eventual tide and being uniquely Atwood. Stunning theoretical stuff, if you can imagine such a thing (remember this is "friendly" language), purposeful biographical points tucked into the warp and weft of the whole, in all, a fine read with the potential to ignite any mind already simmering.

Beautiful, mysterious tensions and collisions between earth and sea, God and the gods, innocence and knowledge, good and something other than good abound in this novel of a young Chicano in New Mexico in the days during and just after World War II. An incredibly-realized first novel, now nearly 50 years old, by the author some consider the Father of Chicano Literature. The point of view is that of a seven year-old boy entering school and the larger community from his family's life on the plains, as an old woman known to make cures in the old ways comes to live with his family and teaches him what she knows. It's a rough couple of years that passes, with the protagonist seeing more death and ugliness than perhaps a young boy ought to witness first-hand. Antonio tries to grapple with these events through the strong Catholic religion he's growing into, yet also through the paganistic sensibilities of some of his young cohorts, and eventually through the all-knowing eyes of La Curandera herself, as he comes to understand that all things are not knowable, at least not all by way of the same cosmic answers. Opened a world completely unknown to me, and yet is entirely accessible, sympathetic, relevant. If not for some very slight ragged edges, this would rate a 5 for me.

In a time when it seems all the rage to create scarcely-sympathetic characters, the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series is like breathing clean air. Plot seems to hardly matter in the series, though without one we would not be the fortunate recipients of Precious Ramotswe's gentle and traditional wisdom. In Tears of the Giraffe Mma Ramotswe solves, among others, the mystery of what happened to a young American who disappeared in Botswana years ago, and as always, the gracious repercussions of her work touch and unite numerous people. Mma Ramotswe's household increases by two, a surprise to her: one of the two is not Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, to whom she is engaged to be married. There is suspense and the habitation of a country and culture far away, there are lessons of morality that are not moralistic, there are deeply three-dimensional characters living in these pages, and humor and surprise and relief. An excellent read.

This is a story that invites, not demands, the reader's slow, thoughtful chewing. In that respect, such a novel has not appeared in years. Perhaps not since Robinson's previous, Housekeeping. If you're fairly young, you can't imagine what you'd have in common in a dying Congregationalist preacher in the mid-1950s. If you're not Christian, even more problematic, as the Rev. Ames peppers this long, dying letter to his son, still at a tender age at the writing, with Scripture. There is Robinson's gift, for this book is about all us all, after all. Much narrative, little dialogue, you flip through it and wonder how to survive it. But soon you're going back and re-reading passages you've just read, not because they've confounded you, but because of the shock or universal truth and the beauty in their conveyance. There is not a literary convention that Robinson does not employ with elan. You want to shake Ames from his apparent naivete, only to come to understand, later, that he wasn't naive at all. He lives in the delight of a home freshly (for a man of seventy-something) endowed with a young wife and a very young son. Now the doctor tells him he isn't long for the world. The conceit is that Ames will herein write to his adult son (for that's when the letter is intended for opening) the many things he feels that he, as father, should teach a son and tell him about his family history -- which includes forays by a grandfather with the raiding John Brown in Kansas -- but ought not tell so young a boy. The result is an intricate embroidering of an Iowa town (Gilead) that's been fraught with as much devastation and plain hard living and some better times and some strange and beautiful souls as any we've ever met anywhere in literature. The story arc sneaks up on you. By then you're invested in Ames and his young family. Ames, his best friend (also a minister), his namesake (the other minister's son), have some coming-to-terms to do, with themselves and with each other. And as it will do, life's circle goes on, dips, rises, ends, starts anew, and with Gilead, we also find ourselves renewed. The kind of rare, lovely artifact that changes us.

Everything about these novels sings with a lightness and yet a depth that is irresistible. No one can read one of these books and not set it down occasionally to contemplate the deceptively simple, yet profound, truths about living together on this earth, and how to do it well, revealed in Precious Ramotswe's investigations and observations, or to simply have a chuckle about the strange circumstances and new points of view (to our American ears) of those who populate these books. In this installment of the series, now-assistant-detective Mma Makutsi strikes out on her own to found a typing school for a special subset -- men -- who would never think to show up at the secretarial school, which is, after all, for women. But clever Mma Makutsi recognizes that in this age of computers, even a man must learn to type, even if he must do it clandestinely. Lucky for us, the wily assistant does not leave the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, but starts the school on her free evenings. The venture brings her a suitor but, as so often in McCall Smith's Botswana (and everywhere), things are not as they appear. Meanwhile, in her usual wise and gentle manner, Mma Precious Ramotswe continues to solve peoples' problems, care for the two foster children she has been persuaded to take into her home on Zebra Drive, and drink bush tea, wondering when Mr JLB Matekoni might set a date for their wedding. Rra Matekoni, for his part, at long last stands up to the venerable matron of the orphanage who has so handily persuaded him to take in those two orphan children, telling her that the water pump at the orphanage is finally, irrevocably, beyond repair, even HIS capable repair. And wonder of wonders, she has acceded to finding the resources for a new one. The mysteries resolved and problems solved by Mma Ramotswe are really just ways into a preachless and tender morality and a means to illustrate just how much each of us has, how many resources reside within and around us every moment of our being. In fact I have returned to this series after a month of very difficult news and knowing that hard times are ahead for myself and my family, and it has inspired and emboldened me, and kept my spirits high and right. I don't know if this is literary fluff or not, but does it matter?

One hates to dislike the hard work of an author, but I'll confess that I gave this book 100 pages -- 75 too many -- and never ever got past glaringly poor writing. The irony of this novel being about five aspiring writers who more or less make it by dint of their support of one another has been pointed out elsewhere; however, it is an adolescent fantasy and the language and structure are too often just as adolescent. Five women become friends after meeting with their children in a park near their homes and pretty much accidentally "become writers" in their, ah, spare time. I thought that at least the promised view of the tumult of the '60s through their various lenses would carry the story into some kind of depth, but no such luck. We are all too frequently told, not shown, how characters respond to, say, the first moon landing. This failing causes the story to lack any kind of passion or even much veritas. Such responses are also, too often, as cliched and common as one could possibly imagine. "So-and-so felt blah-blah because she whatever-it-was." I was moderately curious to find out at long last why Brett wears white gloves at the park, at home watching television, 24/7, it would seem. When I finally slogged onto page 80 I decided to speed-read my way through the next 20 pages trying to just discern this answer, and possibly be compelled to continue beyond page 100. No such luck. It's nice that other readers were somehow able to latch onto this story and have it mean something to them. Personally, I could never persuade myself that anyone had ever edited it. It very much reads like a draft. If literary writing and tight, economical prose written by an eye capable of seeing and expressing shared experiences through an independent lens are important to you, you will not enjoy this read. If the sentimental resounds in you and you want to relive some of the events of the 1960s through fairly stereotypical "housewife" eyes, you may enjoy it. There's not a thing wrong with that. It's just not my cup of tea.

I have not read Lahiri's short fiction that preceded this novel; it seems to have created such fire among reviewers that "The Namesake" has disappointed some of them. But not me. Three and more decades of life in the Ganguli family, newly emigrated from Calcutta in 1968, unfold and echo back on each other as the chief protagonist, son Gogol (newborn as they settle into the U.S.), grows through school and into adulthood. Lahiri's use of an "accidental" name for the child, which has come about because a piece of vital mail has not arrived from Calcutta in time, is the clever tie that binds Gogol to his roots, when it could do the opposite. As such, Lahiri explores the familiar conditions of new immigrants without resorting to cliche. The strand that the name itself -- Gogol -- weaves through the narrative informs the action at every turn, in some sections more subtly than in others. Halfway through I realized that revisiting Nikolai Gogol's short fiction, while not necessary, would serve to enhance my reading of the novel. I took quick tours through a couple of N. Gogol's stories, most notably "The Overcoat," which repeatedly comes into play in this novel, though skipping this step does no damage to the story. And indeed I am at a loss to express many direct connections, scarcely any parallels whatever, between "The Namesake" and "The Overcoat." For this I will want to revisit all of Gogol's short fiction and then again "The Namesake," for while there is the matter of a tortoise shell-like toenail in both works, a cloak ("overcoat") and a cape in each story, and a handful of other minute and odd shared details, there are these persistent, inarticulable echoes that I want to excavate. "The Namesake" is not a story with explosions and enormous climaxes; the trajectory is rather ordinary, as it should be, for this permits Lahiri to explore her characters' interiors and the way these bump up against and often repel each other. Secrets kept from one another are at once mundane and startling. Gogol hates everything about his name, until it isn't his anymore. This was very well worth reading and will be a fine re-read, something I do not do with many books, once I have studied N. Gogol a bit more and also acquaint myself in a bit more depth -- entirely unnecessary but something I want to do -- with Indian naming and family customs, illuminated enough in "The Namesake" but making this particular reader thirsty for even more.

Sorkin on a page. If you're energized, rather than enervated, by Aaron Sorkin dialogue, meet author Walter Kirn. Though he asserts there is no plot to this book, in fact there is forward momentum and then, for my money, the plot at last reveals itself on the final page, not too cute, nothing like "and then I woke up," but the reader is in for a revelation nonetheless. I have not seen the film. I think I'm glad I read the book first; from other readers' comments at other websites, I get the sense the story is turned inside-out on the screen. Some who saw the film first couldn't stand the book, likely because the book's chronology, if you can call it that, can only be flirted with on film: So much of what happens on the page here is driven internally that I can scarcely imagine how to translate it to the screen. The interior monologue and most of the dialogue click along at a clip with a wit wherein many will hear echoes of West Wing and Social Media. The challenge of keeping up with abruptly-turned verbal corners is fantastic. Ryan Bingham finds himself arcing toward his millionth air mile and that drives the story. That, and an unappeased need to understand the workings of a shadowy firm he more and more wants to work for. His resignation lies on his superior's desk back at HQ: His present job has him "outsourcing" the downsized folk in and around every city the airline with the coveted millionth mile flies. We manage to meet lovers, people who may be something like friends, family, associates. We manage to see them in their native habitats, at least as concerns Ryan Bingham. Things happen so fast it scarcely seems probable, and in lesser hands than Kirn's the story would not work. As Bingham hurtles closer by the minute to his coveted mile, he is hurtling toward a new life away from what he's up to now. You can't hate the guy; for Kirn to have set him up as loathsome would be too easy. He's detached from the awfulness of his work. Or is he? The closer we get to the final mile, to a sister's wedding, to his resignation, to his future, the more we sense that somehow nothing is quite what it seems. Kirn gets us thinking this has to do with exaggerated -- but plausible -- corporate control over everything we think and do and see. Or does he? Lately I see "utterly original" used rather loosely to describe novels and novelists. Here, it applies. I enjoyed this read as much as any I've dipped into this year and, for a book "without a plot," it sure kept me riveted to the page until the very, half-surprising end. It shouldn't have been a surprise, you say; why, of course that's what's going on, you say; and yet, Kirn has masqueraded his final act with little leads and twists that fall so neatly into place, you never knew what slapped you. A marvelous read.

What a rollick! Fine juxtaposition of modern anxieties against the values and affections of an America that may or may not have ever existed. Anyone looking to inhabit a moment of simplicity that lives in our imaginations will want to read this gem. Dena Nordstrom has driven herself all the way to the top as a morning-show anchor on major TV network. Don't ask her how she feels about things; she can't tell you. An ensemble cast of unlikely characters acts as her conscience, guide, guru, nemesis, and ultimately, family -- replete with answers to questions about herself she never thought to ask. Flagg is one a few authors who makes me laugh out loud. She manages to spring small-town characters into life without turning them into caricatures. All of her novels sigh with the clear sense that something great is lost with each step of progress -- but that if we keep ourselves authentic, we ourselves are never lost. Fannie Flagg has a way of hitting you with redemption and nostalgia and bright life and hilarity, and you never really see it coming. Even more astonishing than her sense of place and character is her deftness at weaving a tale. Just when you think she's gotten herself so tangled up that she'll never get out of it, the unlikely but perfectly plausible resolution has you saying Why, of course ... Flagg is my go-to author when I'm just too cynical to live another day. She makes me believe in the power of love and home and hearth, and by gosh, it's just as sappy as it sounds. Even Pat Conroy loves her work. "Baby Girl" makes a full circle before you even know you're going around, and makes your sides hurt while you're at it.

As advertised -- and here's what that means: This IS the "people's history". First, we get glimpses into the lives of the native peoples of our continent before Europeans arrived. That means that the impact of the arrival of the Europeans is twice as meaningful than the Euro-centric half-stories we all know. We have a look at the lives of the Africans before Europeans kidnapped them and forced them into a life -- also illustrated here as never before -- of what we now know is unspeakable suffering. And on, through the immigrants (which we mostly are, after all) and the wars and the struggles and the politics and policies that have brought us to today. Not to worry -- you probably won't hate your country when you're finished reading. Rather, you will have a deeper respect for every American (and aspiring American) and arrive at a far broader understanding of how each of us came to be a part of one United States of America. It's all about point of view, and this assortment of POVs is vastly unique among history surveys. Also eminently readable.

I have yet to read an Alexie book or short story that doesn't make me squirm, and "Indian Killer" is no exception. Nor does it fall into the "exception" column in its fearless excellence. Alexie writes mainly about North American Indians, and mainly about characters who are Spokane. But it would be wrong to simply dub him an "Indian author," because the mirror he holds up is for all of us. There are no saints among the white or the red. The occasional kind heart, the sympathetic character (whose sympathies surprise more often than not), but no saints. "Indian Killer" might be shelved as a murder mystery. But there's more mystery in what goes on in the hearts and minds of the community, and the actions those mysteries spawn, than in "whodunit." We shake our heads at the ignorant, the arrogant, and the just-plain-mean, while simultaneously recognizing ourselves in them. In this way, "Indian Killer" -- and all Alexie fiction -- is instructive. It is also tremendously rewarding.