Bel Canto / Ann Patchett

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 the weeks turn into months, Stockholm syndrome transforms the initial adversarial relationship between hostage and hostage-taker into an almost friendly (at least comradely) environment, a sort of summer camp for adults—there’s chess playing and outdoor soccer games and secret language lessons in the china closet, and a little sneaking around at night.

Without giving anything away to those who haven’t read the book--I had this great visualization for the cinematic realization of the penultimate chapter—the soundtrack features a beautiful soprano operatic aria in the background as figures and objects move slow-mo through the final moments in the vice presidential mansion.

I shouldn’t have waited ten years for this book. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Put it on your reading list today.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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