Peachy Reads

Look at maps of pre-Napoleonic Europe and while Germany looks like a meatlover's pizza-- a fantastic creation full of bits of sausagelike city-states, pepperoni principalities, and prociutto protectorates, all on a sea of Hapsburgian mozzarella; France in comparison looks like a homogenous white pizza with not a speck of Speck, a leaf of oregano, or a drop of tomato sauce; it's one color from east to west, north to south. The Discovery of France proves that the reality behind this cartographic representation was a bit different. Even though France was technically one unified kingdom, later one republic ruled from Paris, the reality was quite different. Regional dialects made it nearly impossible for even very near-lying towns to understand each other. Mapmakers who were sent out by royal decree to chart the hinterlands were regarded with such suspicion that on occasion they were captured by village mobs and at least on one occasion executed. Areas of France were so isolated th...

Bill Bryson is definitely one of those people you’d want to be seated next to at a dinner party. His latest nonfiction book At Home: A Short History of Private Life is just chock-full of interesting anecdotes and factoids that would make you lean in closer at the dinner table and say, “do tell me more”. In fact, I dog-eared so many pages of things I found interesting or wanted to go back to that I knew I was a huge violator of library book etiquette (though I did go back and smooth out the creases before I returned it). Bryson uses the floor plan of his Norfolk house, a former vicarage or parsonage (I can’t remember which, and there is a difference which he explains) to group historic information related to each of the rooms in the house—kitchen, drawing room, dining room, attic, etc. The historical insights are thematically grouped to the rooms—somehow his digressions on a myriad of topics only remotely linked to the room in focus don’t derail his narrative. It’s all fascinating. And...

The musical Wicked has taken the world by storm. It has a clever story, is endearing, and is filled with roles rich in character. Having seen it performed on stage twice and listened to its signature tunes dozens of times, my curiosity was piqued by certain aspects of the story that I thought certainly must be better explicated in the novel—like, just what was going on with Dr. Dillamond?, what was the spark that brought Elfie and Fiyero together? and what made people call Elphaba wicked? (And yes, don't be confused, this is most definitely an adult novel. You won't want to be reading it to Little Tommy and Suzie at bedtime.) Let’s just say that the musical is very loosely based on the novel, taking a few ideas and concepts and throwing most of the story out. The reluctant friendship of Glinda and Elphaba is the most compelling element of the novel, and the creators of the musical took that nugget and out of it crafted a heartwarming story for their blockbuster Broadway hit. T...

After six-year-old Maja tragically and mysteriously disappears on a family winter hike to a nearby lighthouse, her father Anders falls into a pattern of drunken depression. Eventually returning to the island where it happened, he suddenly feels an eerie connection with his lost daughter and senses that she is not gone. Other strange and inexplicable occurrences begin to happen, villagers act as if they are possessed, houses are burnt down, and mysterious and frightening things happen after nightfall. Everything seems to be linked to an ominous presence inhabiting the sea surrounding the island, centered at the lighthouse at Gåvasten where Maja disappeared. Harbor takes place mostly on the fictional island of Domarö in the sea of Åland east of Stockholm. The story spans several generations, so the reader is offered a historical and social context for the strange happenings that have taken place and continue to take place on the island. There are some flashbacks that offer an almost nos...

My detective novel tour of Scandinavia continues to Iceland where we meet Inspector Erlendur, a gritty individual who is married to his job, doesn’t take good care of himself, frequently falls asleep and wakes in the morning in an easy chair in his living room, worries about his daughter... Sound familiar? He's really not so unlike Kurt Wallander for those who may be pining for the Swedish gumshoe after the series concluded with The Troubled Man . In Jar City an old man has his head bashed in with a large ash tray, and a mysterious note left near the body and a cryptic photo of a grave site offer clues to the mystery surrounding his death. The circumstances of his murder are rooted in events that happened forty years ago and it is ingenious how Erlendur teases out the details of the connections between people and events that gradually reveal the identity of the murderer. The key to linking perpetrator to victim is a marker of an unusual genetic disease recorded in Iceland’s geneti...

Sarah’s Key charts two parallel stories—one from Nazi-occupied Paris and the other sixty years later. The common element is an apartment on the rue de Saintonge and its horrible secret that links two families a generation apart. The story begins with events set in motion by the horrific roundup of Parisian Jews during an initiative known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, (named for the Vélodrome d’hiver) in which Jewish families were warehoused in an indoor stadium under the most inhumane conditions by the French police (not the occupying German Nazis) until they were shipped off to internment camps and, in most cases, their eventual deaths. Julia is a journalist who uncovers the details linking 1942 and 2002, a link that involves her immediate family. The tragic secrets of rue de Saintonge are gradually revealed until the end of the novel where a tidy, but nevertheless quite plausible resolution, pulls all the narrative strands together. This is a powerful book, full of emotion, full of grief. The c...

Okay, so I wanted to find out more about Aimée Leduc, the Parisian gumshoe I was introduced to in Murder in Passy , which was the eleventh in the bestselling series. I rewound to the debut novel, Murder in the Marais . The plot is an interesting (but perhaps overly complicated) tangle of events centered on the Parisian Jewish community involving several murders, two in contemporary times, others dating to World War II. There are Nazi collaborators, a secret contemporary German organization called the Werewolves, French neonazis, corrupt politicians, and more. I was a little bewildered by language issues— Cara Black liberally sprinkles her dialogue with French interjections, and it all seems a bit faux . French Neonazis spout German catchphrases in a meeting in Paris. I suppose this is possible, though I’m not sure why German would be the lingua franca of skinheads just because the Third Reich was German. (I would find it similarly remarkable that German would be used much in mee...

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

I really wanted to like this novel. I’ve been captivated by the Scandinavian thriller phenom that has put authors like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Lars Kepler on international bestseller lists and the top of public library circulation logs. Jo Nesbø is a Norwegian crime writer whose police inspector Harry Hole (last name is two syllables) is an interesting character. Jo Nesbø has now written seven novels with Harry Hole, and while I may have missed some of the background to characters and context in the series by jumping in with The Snowman , the main difficulty I had seemed to be with the English translation. When a novel “feels” like it’s been translated from a foreign language, then there’s an issue with the translation. I felt that the novel was a slow-starter, and I think much of this has to do with the rough translation. Sometimes it was fine, other times it was so clunky it felt like an unedited term paper. I tried to collect some examples of weird translator errors whic...

Snakes alive! Judging from the cover of this memoir, you might guess you were in for a book-length swampy herpetological tour… which is not actually the case. It’s mostly the story of a father-son road trip, the attempt of a grown man to peel the layers away from his aging father to see why he was so “out there,” so unconventional, such an enigma in his life growing up. His father was a naturalist of sorts, and one of his lifetime passions (it's a passion when you can barely eke a living out of it) was surveying the surviving numbers of the endangered copperbelly water snake in remote areas in southern Michigan. After living through his father's substance abuse, a messy divorce, and a childhood salvaged by the more reliable care (and income) of his teacher mother, the author approaches his father later in life to try to understand him better and repair their tattered relationship. He meets him in his former swampy stomping grounds, where he gets an idea and a reluctant apprecia...

Redmond O’Hanlon seems like a somewhat unlikely candidate for adventurer-- for fifteen years he had the rather sedentary job of book reviewer at the Times Literary Supplement and holds an advanced degree in literature (his doctoral thesis was titled 'Changing scientific concepts of nature in the English novel, 1850-1920'). His journeys into some of the remotest jungle regions on earth (Borneo, the Amazon, the Congo) might be one answer to the question, “What should I do with my English degree?” In Trouble Again is the record of a trip (with a rather spurious research goal) into the upper reaches of the Amazon, the "Again" in the title referring to his first book chronicling a similar (mis)adventure in Borneo. My interest in O'Hanlon's book was sparked after reading Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder . She listed it as one of the sources she consulted while gathering background on the Amazon, and it certainly is a rollicking good read. Redmond and a motley crew...

My daughter is reading The Catcher in the Rye in 10th grade English this year, so I thought I’d pick it up again— the years have dulled my memory, and I wanted to revisit this classic, a book which some have labeled the first ever Young Adult novel. Published in 1951, the troubled adolescent voice of Holden Caulfield still rings true all these years later. Sure, the teenage vernacular has changed and changed again in the intervening years, but Holden still has a resoundingly authentic voice that surely must be one of the secrets to the novel’s seemingly eternal relevance and longevity. In spite of his impatience and immaturity, it’s Holden’s interactions with people—Ackley, Spencer, the nuns at the lunch counter, old Sally, even Mr. Antolini, that lend his character further depth and humanity. But it is his relationship with his little sister Phoebe that is so real and so touching that I don’t think the novel would have been nearly so powerful without her. The image of her dragging a ...

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

The snail is a lowly creature, and probably one that most of us have never truly contemplated. The snail was probably a creature to which the author hadn't given much thought before a debilitating disease kept her confined to bed, practically immobile, for months and months. One day a friend put a woodland snail in a pot of violets on her nightstand. After being transported from the woods, the snail had emerged from its shell into the alien territory of my room, with no clue as to where it was or how it had arrived; the lack of vegetation and the desertlike surroundings must have seemed strange. The snail and I were both living in altered landscapes not of our choosing; I figured we shared a sense of loss and displacement. p 20 The companionship of this tiny creature is what sees her through the darkest days of her imprisonment by her horrible disease. The snail, thriving in its slow-mo existence and life of undemanding simplicity, provides interest and comfort to the author. ...

It probably goes without saying that handling books in a public library can introduce you to titles you might not otherwise come across. I tend to notice the cookbooks, especially those with mouthwatering photos of the finished recipes. Maybe it’s in the middle of the afternoon when my stomach starts to growl in anticipation of dinner when cookbooks look the most tempting. Anyway, here are a few that I’ve borrowed from the library (and then purchased when they passed the first kitchen test). Noodles Every Day: Delicious Recipes from Ramen to Rice Sticks / Corinne Trang It’s not just the Italians who can do tasty noodle dishes. In fact, there is some speculation that Marco Polo brought pasta to the Venetian Republic after one of his forays to Asia. And Asian influences form the focus of this cookbook— Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Malaysian. If you want to go beyond instant ramen with its foil flavor pack, then see if these recipes make your mouth water-- somen noodles with shrimp and...

When this book came out nearly ten years ago, it caught my eye. It's one of those books I would have read sooner if I had infinite free time, or perhaps more self-discipline (I probably could have skipped seasons 3, 4, and 5 of "Hell’s Kitchen," for example). After our brief trip to Acadia National Park this summer (and several meals of lobster quite literally “under our belts”) I decided to read this book to extend my vacation mentality. Back in Atlanta, a good five hours' drive from the salty ocean, and with temps reaching near 100 in early August, it was nice to escape with this book to the small wooded island surrounded by water that’s 55 degrees even in late summer, an island that still supports a fishing community, mostly of lobster fishermen. I’ ve been fantasizing what it might be like living in Maine year round, having unlimited access to lobster and wild blueberries, that rugged coastline with crashing waves, a profusion of wildflowers and birch forests. T...

When a Minnesota pharmacological researcher and father of three dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances at the company's research station deep in the Amazon, his colleague Dr. Marina Singh has her arm twisted by her boss (and lover) to travel to Brazil to check things out. Her journey there and her efforts to gain access to the almost-secret research compound run by the dictatorial and driven Dr. Annick Swenson prove challenging, to say the least. Eventually her efforts and patience pay off and she is allowed to enter the hidden world of the Lakashi tribe, a sort of Shangri-la where women are fertile their entire lives due to an interesting environmental phenomenon (hence the interest of the researchers). The writing is wonderful and there are some fascinating characters (with a special nod to Werner Herzog's character Fitzcarraldo who may share more with Annick Swenson than just a passion for opera), but I thought the almost sci-fi botanical curiosity that was the focus o...

Most people were introduced to the fictional Rhine River village of Burgdorf with Ursula Hegi’s critically acclaimed 1994 novel Stones from the River . The author’s latest visit to pre-World War II Burgdorf is her most recent novel Children and Fire . Thekla is offered a job teaching an all-boy class when the Jewish teacher is asked to step down. The awkwardness of the situation is compounded by the fact the Thekla was a favorite student of Fräulein Siderova. Throughout the novel the story of Thekla’s birth and upbringing is revealed in flashbacks, while the events of 1934 happen over a single day, a day that marks the one year anniversary of the burning of the Reichstag. A family secret is fully revealed by the end of the novel, a secret that puts Thekla’s future in Nazi-controlled Germany in question. The novel deftly handles issues of complicity in the Nazi regime, mutual responsibility, and human compassion. I thought the flashbacks were more compelling and were more completely dev...

The latest sensation in the seemingly unending Swedish crime-thriller juggernaut comes in the form of Lars Kepler, a pseudonym for a husband-wife writing team (the new Sjöwall and Wahlöö?). Their debut novel is called The Hypnotist , a nearly 500-page roller-coaster ride that never stops delivering the thrills. When a doctor is asked to hypnotize a crime victim to find out information about the perpetrator, his revelations cause all hell to break loose. There is violence aplenty within the pages of this book (it makes me shudder to look at the cover image) and there are a couple criminal monsters who seem to have been created in the same mold as Hannibal Lecter, so this book is definitely not for the faint of heart. In spite of some instances of unexpected switches of narrator, the story flows quite well and there is a good sense of place— most notably Stockholm around Christmas time with lots of glögg , saffron buns, and advent stars in windows. I like the character of finlandssvensk ...

Lobster is rather creepy when you think of it. Looks like a giant insect... a scorpion in fact. It just tastes so darn good that people are willing to put up with its off-putting looks, its dangerous claws (Atlantic lobsters, that is), and the struggle it takes first to cook it (if you are so daring) and then prise the meat from its shell. This book chronicles the history of lobster and how it earned a revered place on our table. Lobster are pictured in ancient Roman mosaics and seemed enjoy a place in their feasts, but like many things that the Romans promoted and perfected, lobster fell into obscurity until the 1800s. In Colonial times it was considered a poor man’s replacement for meat and saw the early coastal setters through lean times. “Coastal” is a key word here, since lobster’s popularity only really took off in modern times when refrigeration and transportation made it possible to get it to restaurant tables more than a stone’s throw from the ocean. Lobsters can live from 50...

If Garrison Keillor had grown up in Botswana instead of Minnesota, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series might be the result. The tone is not so different from his folksy homespun style about the frequent whimsy of daily life, innocent misunderstandings, human foibles, and other things of seemingly little consequence. At the same time it is these apparently inconsequential things that make up the bulk of our own daily existence and can take on huge significance and tell us a lot about human nature and ourselves. Of course, there is a detective case here—someone is grievously injuring a client’s cattle and it is Detective Ramotswe’s task to find out who the perpetrator is. The main focus of the novel, however, seems to be Mma Ramotswe's quest to reacquire her old and beloved van, her help in getting the apprentice Charlie out of a ticklish situation, and Mma Makutsi's misadventures with shoes, and her wedding to Phuti Raduphuti of course!

This is a book I had been intending to read for about ten years—and I only now got to checking it off my list. My wife had borrowed the paperback from the library and I read it after she was done. It was nice to have the shared experience of a book read in common. Hadn’t done that for a long time. One of the pleasures of more unscheduled time in the summer. Bel Canto is a wonderfully crafted story about people and relationships. It starts out like an episode from the television series 24 when terrorists storm a posh birthday party at a government mansion somewhere in an unnamed South American country. The hostages are a disparate group of international businessmen and diplomats, many of whom do not share a common language. The sole female hostage is Roxane Coss, an internationally acclaimed soprano opera singer who was the evening’s entertainment. In lieu of a common language, it is music that serves as the lingua franca (and soothes the savage beast). As the days turn into weeks and...

Jonathan Franzen seems to have a knack to chronicling America’s dysfunctional families. The Corrections was certainly memorable in that regard and in Freedom he charts the ups and downs of the decades-long relationship of Patty and Walter Berglund from St. Paul, Minnesota. The characters in Freedom offer an antidote to the St. Paul denizens of Garrison Keillor’s Minnesota ideal, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”. In Franzen’s Freedom individuals are flawed and far from perfect, and in spite of this they are very relatable and very human—they’re people you know, probably people you have Thanksgiving with (probably people you'd argue with at the Thanksgiving table). The subplot (beyond the chronicle of the Berglunds' long-suffering relationship) is a misguided attempt to purportedly create a habitat for an endangered bird, while flattening a mountaintop to do it. I thought during the course of reading this t...

Guernsey, a Channel Island located closer to France than England, was occupied by Nazis during WWII, the only English territory to suffer German occupation. The novel records the stories surrounding a somewhat quirky group of islanders who created a literary society as a pretense to give them an alibi for breaking the occupation-imposed curfew. The literary society takes on a life of its own, all the more so when a London-based journalist joins their circle, first from afar and then in person, and is smitten with island life. The book is told almost entirely through letters, a device which might seem clever at first, but is stretched thin and I thought it grew tiresome in some parts. Apparently multiple daily postal deliveries did make it possible to maintain back-and-forth communication almost as if it were as instantaneous as email, even in 1946, at least in London and larger cities. But sometimes it isn’t successful in propelling the plot forward. I can see why this novel had such ...

I really think this series finds its stride with the third installment. Family characters are developed a bit more, the reader is provided with a little more backstory, and Flavia’s impertinent investigations are reined in somewhat by the adults she is always running circles around-- which seems only credible when you’re talking about a precocious eleven-year-old. I liked the plot of Red Herring , complete with a fringe religion, a crystal-ball gazing gypsy, underground mazes, and a ne’re-do-well who is killed by a lobster pick dispatched up the nose and hung up on an oversized statue of Poseidon on the grounds of Buckshaw. If anything, the plot may be a bit too elaborate, but in the end it all seems to work, and I’m becoming ever more smitten with young Flavia. Now I'll have to find something else to read while waiting for Flavia to return.

The second installment of the Flavia de Luce franchise reintroduces the reader to what may be the most original sleuth since Precious Ramotswe . If you can swallow the premise of a precocious 11-year-old in an impossibly twee English village, racing around on her bicycle, conducting advanced chemistry experiments in her family's treasure home, and solving complex murder investigations that confound the local constabulary, well this is the series for you. That description may make it sound a bit too like Nancy Drew meets Masterpiece Theatre... but don't get me wrong, because it does work as an engaging crime novel. And it's clearly not written for an eleven-year- old reader either . There's something about the nostalgia of the Agatha Christie settings and the aura of the English idyll that makes this series irresistible , at least to non-British readers. Apparently language and cultural inconsistencies introduced by Canadian writer Alan Bradley are jarring if you grew...

The subject of this novel, the Sarajevo haggadah, is a real book, an exquisitely illuminated Passover script from the 1300s. Its survival over the centuries is a miraculous story of near-misses and incredible luck and the author uses her imagination (based on some historical facts) in an attempt to reconstruct the book's origins and history as it travels from Spain to Italy to Sarajevo, where it most recently was threatened by the antisemitic policies of the Nazi occupation in World War II and the more recent violence of the Bosnian War. Hannah Heath, a rare book conservator, gathers clues from the book itself—salt crystals, spilled wine, blood, an insect wing, a solitary white hair—then there are flashbacks explaining the origin of these artifacts and providing a backstory to this fascinating book. It’s a great historical lesson, though critics might suggest that everything fits a bit too neatly. And although there are no police chases or psychopaths, this may well be considered ...

The Julia Child portion of the film Julie & Julia was based on this book by Alex Prud’Homme (look below for the review of Julie Powell's book). It’s the story about how she followed her husband in the foreign service to France, where she discovered gastronomy and her raison d’etre . Her love of food and cooking was backed up by a meticulous and painstaking approach, every recipe she included in her groundbreaking cookbook was tested and retested, always with the American cook in mind, with American kitchens and provisions from American grocery stores. The book also chronicles her post-France years and her rise to fame as America’s original celebrity TV chef, but my interest somewhat flagged after the Childs left Marseille. The first part of the book was what was featured in the movie version as well. If you are a francophile or a gastronome, or are simply interested in reading about one of TV’s early and most colorful personalities, don’t hesitate to read My Life in France . (...

I must admit I’ve not yet seen the John Wayne version of the film True Grit (costarring the "Rhinestone Cowboy" Glen Campbell, if you can imagine that!)-- or even the new one with Jeff Bridges (though it’s in my Netflix queue), but all the Oscar buzz around the 2010 version got me interested in this little novella. I really quite enjoyed it. Originally published in 1968, the novel had the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses trilogy with the strong male characters, the untamed West, the horses, and the violence. But it was the plucky character of Mattie Ross that made this book a memorable one. There was a little Addie Pray in her, I dare say. I think I prefer the original 1968 book cover that shows Mattie prominently.

Love the title, but now having finished the book it's as if the author thought up the almost-too-clever title first and tried to put a story behind it second. There's a touch of the supernatural in this novel with Rose, the protagonist, possessing the rather extraordinary skill of divining people's emotions and psychological well-being through the food they harvest or prepare. Rose first notices her mother's emotion in her rendition of a birthday cake (hence the title of the book), and as she matures it is nearly impossible for Rose to swallow any food that has bitter emotions associated with it, and she survives adolescence by frequenting the school's snack machine with all its industrially-manufactured snacks (and no human hands involved, and thus no poisoned emotion), but what teenager doesn't survive the teen years on twinkies? Well, okay, Rose's unusual talent was an interesting plot device, but it goes to the next level or extraordinary when she become...

If you’re wondering about all the hoopla regarding graphic novels, you might want to pick up Tamara Drewe and give the genre a try. Forget about comics like Scooby Doo or superheroes like Spiderman or Batman that you might remember from your childhood. Tamara Drewe is a very adult drama (okay, it's a soap opera) loosely based on Hardy’s Far from the Maddening Crowd . It was first serialized in the British newspaper The Guardian , was then compiled into this single volume, and has now been made into a feature film with live actors. My brother-in-law recommended this title to me, and I didn’t quite know what to expect. It’s hard to imagine that a “comic strip” can be so compelling, but I think when I look back on it, I will remember it as a novel and not necessarily as a graphic novel, and certainly not as a cartoon! The graphic novel is finding a new readership. Give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Jack and his Ma live within the confines of a room 11-feet square. Their existence is quite extraordinary since this small windowless room and all its contents (Rug, Duvet, meltedy spoon, Remote, the egg snake...) is the only world Jack has ever known. Gradually the true circumstances of their confinement are revealed to the reader as Ma and Jack plan a daring escape. Their lives in the outside world present far more problems than they could have predicated and Jack somewhat disturbingly yearns for the comfort and familiarity of Room and the exclusive relationship he had with his mother. The story, told through Jack's 5-year-old voice, is thought-provoking and gripping. Of course it's fiction, but one can't help making comparisons to real-life stories such as Austrian Natascha Kampusch or another horrifying Austrian case that made headlines not so long ago . An unusual but rewarding read.