Peachy Reads

This book is part of the Open Letter Initiative from the University of Rochester, an effort to translate world literature into English and expose it to a wider audience and foster a deeper appreciation for international literature. Billie is an eleven-year-old girl living at a country home for children in need. The nation is unnamed, but it seems to resemble Norway a lot.  Anyway, the time is some point in the future and there is some unexplained armed conflict consuming the nation.  Even the isolated country home at Reindeer Woods is not immune from the violence, and Billie’s life is changed forever when soldiers arrive at the home and kill all but her.  It’s not clear why she was spared. Is Billie a bit “retarded” as she herself sometimes wonders, or was her survival a fluke? Billie does seem, somewhat uncharacteristically for a child, to be a bit numb to the violence that she is confronted with when one of the soldiers continues the killing by topping off his co...

Atlanta-Fulton County Public Libraries picked this title for its one book/one community initiative.  It’s a good choice since A Lesson Before Dying is a novel full of issues and provides many points of departure for discussion.  Set in the Jim Crow South, it deals with the limitations and injustices that African Americans faced before the Civil Rights Movement.  AFPLS will sponsor some community read initiatives on this novel during the month of February.  Check out the events listing on the library homepage for more information. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and a 1997 choice for Oprah’s Book Club

Bordering the access roads that lead to the gleaming new hotels around the modern Mumbai airport, frequently out of sight behind barrier fences plastered with oversized posters advertising a lifestyle unobtainable for most Indians (adverts with the words “Beautiful Forever”), live the underlings of the commercial and entertainment capital of India.   Slumdwellers occupy land that will one day, probably without adequate advanced warning, be reclaimed by the airport authority. Crushing poverty, political corruption, police intimidation, and the challenge of everyday life make suicide by rat poison or self-immolation recurring events in this book. The main storyline centers on the conflict between two families in the slum of Annawadi.   Was the suicide of one motivated by the actions of another?   An entire family is dragged into jail and court, and regardless of their eventual guilt or innocence, their house of cards, their tenuous hold on survival, on life, collapses. ...

I remember when we lived in London, this novel was in all the bookshop windows. It had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, and may have outsold the winning title that year.  With the movie coming out in 2012, I thought it time to play a little catch-up and read this 500-page novel. It consists of six separate, but remotely interconnected stories that take place in different locations and in different times.  The opening story is set in the South Pacific in 1850 and was immediately captivating and had me pulling out atlases and googling facts to find out if they were historic, or merely fiction.  When the first story broke off in mid-sentence I cursed my Nook, thinking that it was a transcription error in the electronic copy.  No, it was just the concept of the book, the first narrative a fragment of a diary that a subsequent character reads, only later finding the remainder propping up one leg of a bed in a Belgian chateau—that’s the level that in wh...

Caren Gray is in charge of visitor services at Belle Vie, a stately antebellum plantation in Louisiana. Not only is Caren African American, but she has ancestral ties to the home, which sometimes makes things complicated—a modern Black woman promoting a romantic sugar-coated portrayal of plantation life for tourists and wedding parties has its incongruities, to say the least, which the author exploits to full effect. When an itinerant worker from the adjacent farm is found murdered on plantation land, an investigation uncovers some interesting surprises. The ending of this novel is a bit unexpected, and I found that the history of a parallel figure in Caren’s past stretched the bounds of credibility somewhat. I liked the potential of this book, but don’t think it lived up to it. It had its moments, but it didn’t quite gel for me.

A group of old men makes a small winning with the lottery and after their celebratory bender, 72-year-old Waldemar Leverkuhn ends up dead at home in his bed with twenty-eight stab wounds. The same night one of his drinking buddies disappears, and several days later the concierge’s wife from the Leverkuhns' building is reported missing.  Is someone stalking senior citizens?  Are the cases even related?  When Fru Leverkuhn confesses to the murder of her husband, it seems that the case is solved… or is it?  Truth be told, this novel didn’t really pick up until about page 200 for me, which is a shame, because the last 100 or so pages were well worth it and the plotline is really rather clever, with the reader guessing until the last page about motives and responsible parties. This was the first Håkan Nesser  novel that I’d read. I picked it up because of my fondness for Scandinavian mystery/thrillers and the fact that it had both a “ü” and an “å” on the co...

It seems more than a bit incongruous that Sweden, a neutral peace-loving nation, would be one of the world’s top weapons producers and exporters. The weapons industry is the context for this latest thriller from the Swedish couple writing under the pseudonym Lars Kepler. It’s a chase from start to finish when a contract killer is hired to hunt down peace activist Penelope Fernandez when she inadvertently finds herself in an intrigue involving government officials and illegal weapons exports to Sudan. At first she and her boyfriend are relentlessly hunted on a remote island in the Stockholm archipelago (with a very strange stop at the summer house of a faded TV personality who tries to involve them in sex games… hunh?), then the chase switches to Stockholm (with an exciting shoot-out at Östermalms market hall and the German embassy near Gärdet). The translation is a little spotty-- there were some odd lexical choices. A main theme which comes up again and again is to “reap your...

Alan Clay, a man who has made a lifetime of poor decisions, is staging a last-ditch effort to put things right. If he can win a contract to provide telecom infrastructure for King Abdullah’s Economic City in Saudi Arabia, the windfall would set his life back on track, allow him to pay off his debts, see his daughter through college, set him up for the remainder of his life. As he and his team wait days and then weeks for a chance to make a pitch to the king, they find themselves in a situation a little like Waiting for Godot , whiling away time in a desert purgatory, waiting for someone who may never come, for an opportunity which may never materialize. Alan is quick to make friends, and his interactions with driver Yousef, expat Hanne, and a local doctor provide interesting episodes in a novel that is essentially plotless (and I don’t mean that as a criticism). Saudi Arabia is a fascinating study of contrasts, which makes it an ideal setting for a world turned topsy-turvy-- the cert...

William E. Dodd was a lifelong academic who thought an ambassadorship would afford him needed time to work on his life’s ambition, writing a multi-volume history of the American South. He ended up being awarded the posting in Berlin during the years the National Socialists had gained power and Germany was hurtling towards war. He was pretty well-connected in the halls of government, but it helped that several others had refused the German ambassadorship before it was offered to him. He was probably ill-suited to the position, but did what he could to sound warning bells about the rising threat of Nazism and Germany’s renewed military escalation. Had Dodd's warnings been heeded, it may have been possible for western governments to thwart Hitler’s ambitions, but it wasn’t just Neville Chamberlain who indulged the Nazi regime, and eventually the appeasers were to regret their isolationist tendencies and kid-glove treatment of Germany in the 1930s. It seems a real worry, at least fr...

This short novel, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction, chronicles the gritty life of a motherless rural Mississippi African American family, trying to scrape by in their daily existence. The novel takes place in the days leading up to Katrina and ends with the catastrophic effects of that singular storm. There is love in the Batiste family, but it is so tempered by the hardship of their lives, that it manifests itself in small and sometimes surprising ways. Even though this was a very credible portrayal of rural Southern poverty, I felt it was a bit of a slow-starter, and the pace didn’t really pick up until well into the book. Salvage the Bones provides a good rural counterpart to the Katrina narrative  Zeitoun by David Eggers. Salvage the Bones won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction .

Amazing and seemingly perfect Amy goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary. The police quickly find evidence that suggests her husband, Nick, may be implicated in her disappearance. The story is first told in Nick’s voice and subsequent chapters suggest an alternative history made up of entries from Amy’s diary, describing a disintegrating marriage and a wife increasingly fearful of her husband. The diary makes Nick look like an unbalanced husband capable of murder until halfway through the book when the narrative does a complete turnaround and we find out that Amy may not be the victim we were led to believe after all. It’s a gripping story, one that’s not easy to put down, and has overtones of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent or the movie Fatal Attraction . Amy and Nick, two unreliable narrators, make this a guessing game until the finish, and the novel’s resolution will probably be a surprise to everyone. With the right cast, this will surely make a blockbuster mov...

This novel follows the inhabitants of one rather affluent street in London, Pepys Road, in the year 2008, a time when the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers changed the financial landscape of London and the world seemingly forever. One family on Pepys Road lives a life of conspicuous consumption and when the head of the household doesn’t get an anticipated £1 million year-end bonus at his Canary Wharf banking institution, some difficult choices have to be made. Their Hungarian nanny hooks up with the Polish laborer who works at various houses along the road, a Zimbabwen meter maid whose immigration status is in question frequents the street, and a Pakastani family runs the corner shop. Additional characters are introduced, all linked by their association to Pepys Road. It’s sort of a posh East Enders. I didn’t really want it to end, even at 500+ pages. It brought to mind Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, or certainly Zadie Smith’s White Teeth .

Marcus Samuelsson is one of those celebrity chefs you see more and more frequently on cable. His international background and cool, almost intellectual demeanor may set him apart from the others, but his Swedish background is what fascinated me. Adopted at an early age from Ethiopia, he grew up in Göteborg, Sweden, where his Swedish mormor infected him with her enthusiasm for cooking. His disciplined pursuit of a culinary dream took him to Switzerland, Austria, France, New York, (and many other destinations as he worked on a cruise ship), where he added to his lexicon of tastes and flavors that inspire his reimaginings of classics and inform his new creations. Yes, Chef shows how difficult it is to make it as a successful chef, perhaps even more so in the U.S.  in what traditionally has been a domain dominated by white males. Marcus Samuelsson proves that being a chef, even a celebrity chef, involves an extreme amount of hard work and dedication. His is a fascinating story...

The plot of Sue Grafton’s eighteenth novel in her alphabet detective series definitely is one of the stronger ones from the latest installments in the franchise. A daughter of privilege, Reba Lafferty is a recent parolee, released after spending two years in the women’s prison for embezzling from her former boss. Daughter of privilege embezzling from her boss? Something doesn’t measure up here, and it’s all the more strange when she takes up with her former boss right out of the slammer. Things get messy really fast and the action is fast-paced. Kinsey also is lucky in love, which doesn’t happen much, so it was sort of a nice change of pace. I downloaded this as an eBook and it provided a nice diversion on a recent trip I made. Reacquainting oneself with Kinsey is always feels like reconnecting with an old friend.

This fascinating novel is hard to put down, even though it’s a sort of an unclassifiable collection of stories, history, points of view, politics, with a lot of magical realism thrown in. It’s set in Yugoslavia in the first half of the 20th century and also in the new states that came out of the disintegrated former Yugoslavia. So maybe the structure of the novel reflects the complex Balkan kaleidoscope in which it is set. The writing is wonderful and the storytelling the same. An intriguing glimpse into a part of Europe that I know relatively little about. The Tiger’s Wife won the 2011 Orange Prize, and Obreht was the youngest author to have won the award. A passage on the effects of war in the former Yugoslavia: The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old county no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the whole. Previously shared things—landmarks, writers, scientists, histories—h...

Oooh, I’m glad I found this series, of which Prague Fatale is the 9th. I read a couple books by Kerr ages ago and had heard good things said of this series, so I’m glad I finally got around to picking one up. Bernie Gunther is an irreverent Prussian Polizist who is stationed in this installment in both Berlin and Prague, working closely with Reinhard Heydrich, Acting Reichs Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazi-annexed portions of Czechoslovakia. When a murder takes place at Heydrich’s estate, outside Prague, Gunther is called in to solve the mystery and the resolution is not at all what is expected. The writing is excellent, the characters multifaceted and the historical context is fascinating. I’m definitely going to come back to this series.

I don’t know what it is about apocalyptic novels that seems to fascinate me. White Horse refers to a killer disease that is wiping out 90% of the world’s population and leaving the survivors with grotesque genetic aberrations. Zoe seems to be immune and after losing her parents and sister, sets off on an international journey to find the parents of the only other person that has meant something to her. There is a somewhat annoying narrative device of alternating the time frame by prefacing the sections “Date: Now,” “Date: Then," but other than that it's pretty readable.  The first in a proposed trilogy. I see a potential movie on the horizon.

Georgia’s own Karin Slaughter published her first crime novel in 2001 and has enjoyed international success ever since, selling over 30 million copies of her books worldwide. I read one of her earlier novels, set in fictional Grant County. Fractured is set in Atlanta, more precisely Ansley Park, the upscale neighborhood that abuts Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta (and is the immediate neighborhood this library serves). Readers who are looking for local color and familiar landmarks may be disappointed, since Slaughter’s imagining of Ansley Park and Atlanta has a lot of poetic license in it (though she does mention the Varsity). The plot of Fractured involves murder, kidnapping, child predation, orphanages, private schools, illiteracy, and more. In fact, if anything, the plot is almost too intricate. If you're looking for a Southern-fried thriller with a contemporary twist, you may want to give Karin Slaughter a try.

I stumbled across this graphic novel from 2010 quite by accident-- one of those serendipitous discoveries that happen when you work in a library. The Night Bookmobile is written (and illustrated--who knew?) by Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the title, The Night Bookmobile , was rather intriguing to this librarian. It was first serialized in the UK's Guardian newspaper. Alexandra wanders the streets of Chicago in the hours before dawn after an argument with her partner. She stumbles upon a Winnebago camper parked on the roadside which she learns is the Night Bookmobile, "open dusk to dawn". Upon entering she discovers the shelves lined with every book she’s ever read in her lifetime. Her bookmobile is elusive, however, and only appears to her several times during her life. Understanding the premise of its existence and how the collection expands, she reads voraciously to fill the shelves of her own library of record with suitable t...

It was rather fascinating being a fly on the wall for a short time in the lives of the interesting (but not so remarkable) characters in Jeffrey Eugenides's latest novel, The Marriage Plot . Time-travel back to the 1980s where co-ed Madeleine is finishing up her bachelor's degree at Brown and trying to sift through the debris of her less than successful college romances. She seems to want to remain true to Leonard, but his ups and downs as a manic-depressive throw a monkey wrench into her vision of a stable life. Mitchell has had a crush on Maddy since high school, but his love remains unrequited as he continues to pine for her even after his quest for spirituality takes him to faraway India. In addition to Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell, we get to know Maddy's stalwart and nurturing (but ever so slightly interfering) parents, her flighty sister, Leonard's whacked-out family, as well as a slate of other memorable characters. Eugenides seems to be doing a Jonathan Fra...

I tracked this book down after enjoying the author’s more recent release, The Summer of the Bear . Maggie is a feisty American journalist/correspondent who is used to dodging bullets in the world’s hotspots. When she gets a rather soft assignment documenting the decay of the British landed gentry, she is out of her element and is not well-pleased, but seems surprised to find that her new subjects are bit trickier to interview than her normal revolutionaries and street protesters. Quite by accident she uncovers a skeleton in the closet of one of the more eccentric families, and decides to include it in an expose. To complicate matters there is a love affair between Maggie and Rory, the son of the landed family she is featuring in her story (the connection is not known to her-- so much for her skills as investigative reporter). This was an enjoyable read, but didn’t hold me the way The Summer of the Bear did. It seemed like it was written as a screenplay for a madcap British comedy wi...

If you want a different spin on Honest Abe, try this novel on for size. Before Abe Lincoln got to the White House he swung his ax for quite a different reason than what you might remember learning in elementary school. Apparently there was a thriving community of vampires in 1800s America, and due to a certain family tragedy Abe vowed as a young boy to do something about it. He swung that ax quite mightily, felling a goodly number of vampires before his political successes brought him to the White House. Abe’s presidency gets a new spin in this book too, what with the Civil War being recast as a conflict in which vampires figure largely in the motivations of the Southern succession, and John Wilkes Booth is revealed as—what else? -- a vampire. I liked this until about two thirds of the way through and then wearied of the premise. It’s pretty clever though, I must admit, and there’s sure to be a lot of interest in this title when the movie appears on June 22, 2012. The author boasts a...

The author, a self-described WASP and sometime (that is to say, absentee) senior editor at the Paris Review, and his Korean American family (he’s not just married to his wife, but the whole family), buy a Brooklyn convenience store and then the adventures begin. With New York’s impenetrable bureaucracy, the byzantine network of vendors and suppliers needed to stock a New York deli and keep its lottery machine humming, the cast of local characters that trudge through the door, his idiosyncratic employees, his in-laws’ history and exploits, not to mention the author’s literary adventures at the magazine-- there certainly are more than enough stories to fill this book and more. I found myself identifying with certain aspects shared in common between a public library and a convenience store—serving the public is the same wherever you work, it seems. One thing you’ll walk away with from this book is a new-found respect for shopkeepers (and maybe public servants like librarians).

I really enjoyed this book from start to finish.  I saw the film first and was interested enough in the story that I wanted to go back to the original novel.  I’m glad I did.  While the film remained largely true to the novel, it did inevitably change some details of the story, and left others out entirely.  The characters are all wonderfully developed, each unique, each believable.  They’re definitely not perfect, and their fallability may be part of why the novel is so compelling—we may see ourselves in the characters, and relate.  That’s the thing about this book, it just seems so incredibly real. Everything-- the language, the motivations of the characters, their actions.  In spite of the tragic storyline (mother in coma at death's door) there’s still a lot of joy and humor in this book, too.   The Descendants is ultimately a celebration of life, of family, of finding what matters.  A pretty amazing debut novel for Kaui ...

The grandiose avenues and squares of Paris, the impossible conceit of l’Etoile, the romantic uniformity of the golden stone facades and their wrought iron balconies—all this was imposed upon a medieval network of streets and passages. In the course of about fifteen years in the mid-1800s entire streets and neighborhoods were literally wiped off the map to make room for the new triumphant boulevards, parks, and grand public spaces. What effect did this have on the people of Paris and their neighborhoods? Tatiana de Rosnay ( Sarah’s Key ) attempts to investigate this by recreating a historic street that is scheduled to yield to Baron von Haussmann’s wrecking crews in order to make room for the new Boulevard Saint-Germain. Rose Bazelet, a widow, is the homeowner at the center of the story, a person whose life is so rooted in the neighborhood and the very house in which she lives, that she cannot consider abandoning it. Her life story is revealed chapter by chapter as the demolition team a...

A young British diplomat and his family are posted in Cold War-era Bonn when he apparently jumps to his death from the roof of the embassy. The circumstances of the death of a doting father and husband are unexplained and mysterious and there are rumors around the embassy of his being a spy. His widow and children retreat to a remote Scottish island, the family homestead, where they deal with their loss and try to come to terms with all that it means. Coincidentally, a tamed grizzly bear has escaped from its master and all the island folk are abuzz about his fate and whereabouts. Jamie, the son and youngest child, forges a special link with this bear, in a way that will certainly surprise the reader. This is a gem of a novel, one of those unexpected pleasures that surprises you with its originality, its cleverness, its tight writing. As complex as the plot is, it really works nicely—the characters are great, the story wonderful, even the magical realist subplot is a success (hint, it h...

As we near the Omega of Sue Grafton’s alphabet mystery series, the reader begins to wonder if there’s anything new under the sun in fictional Santa Teresa, California, private investigator Kinsey Millhone’s home territory, a place forever stuck in the late 1980s, a time nostalgically positioned before cell phones, GPS devices, and the internet (Kinsey still goes to her public library for vital sleuthing information, for goodness sake!). In V is for Vengeance , her beloved neighbor Henry is out of town and Kinsey herself is offstage for about half of the narrative. V focuses rather on a raft of characters linked to an organized crime family. The preamble to the story is a bit slow, and it never really connects until the end, and then in a way that isn’t too successful. V is for Vengeance is an off-day in the Kinsey Millhone franchise. We hope she gets her groove back if she’s going to make it to Z ( A is for Alibi was published in 1982). With author Sue Grafton now past 70, one wond...

Craig Taylor took years gathering interviews from all sorts of Londoners to create the impossible-- a comprehensive picture of this multifaceted metropolis provided by its inhabitants. Well, if he didn’t get every representative voice from London, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Included in this book are interviews with the voice of the London Underground (“mind the gap”), taxi drivers, tourists, a beefeater and his wife, protester, angler, rapper, paramedic, estate agent, foreign worker, bouncer, squatter, etc. Their candid commentary shows London, warts and all. Taylor goes far off the beaten tourist trails where the gritty side of London starts to show, providing a picture of London some may be unfamiliar with, but in so doing creating a book that any Londonophile needs to read.

Oversized billboards on Florida’s byways beckon tourists to Swamplandia!, an Everglades sideshow that features the Bigtree family wrestling and swimming with ‘gators (they call them Seths) in a nostalgic tourist trap that most readers will recognize. After opening with a hugely engaging first chapter that introduces the quirky members of the Bigtree Family and their unusual business, it all goes quickly to pieces—Hilola Bigtree, the show’s headliner and family matriarch, succumbs to cancer, the “chief” disappears to the mainland, and the home-schooled children are left more or less to their own devices to fend for themselves. Ossie starts dabbling in the occult and hooks up with a ghostly paramour (whose backstory is somewhat superfluously told in significant detail), Kiwi defects to the rival amusement park, and Ava hooks up with an unsavory swamp character she employs in an attempt to bring her sister back from the “other side.” This novel was noted as one of the ten best books of 20...

I just reread The Great Gatsby since my 10th grade daughter is reading it in her English class. I read it years ago, but remembered very little. It’s impressive what F. Scott packs into under 200 pages. The character development is pretty amazing and the plot rather complicated with the split love triangle. It also offers an interesting glimpse into the party atmosphere of roaring twenties New York, East versus West, old versus new, nouveau riche versus established wealth. I can see why it makes such a good choice for High School English classes. Not overly long, full of symbolism and metaphors. Not so unlike a tv drama with the carnage at the end. I’m glad I reacquainted myself with it. Maybe we’ll go to the new movie version with Leonardo di Caprio and Carey Mulligan when it comes out in December 2012.

Tina Fey didn’t really cross my radar screen until I became a fan of "30 Rock" in its first few seasons (thanks mostly to time-delayed viewings via Hulu). The quirky sitcom featured such quick, smart, off-the-wall humor that it sort of defied comparison to anything else I’d seen on network TV. Then there were Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impersonations which were inspired and still inspire laughter today. Bossypants has been in high demand in the library, and my curiosity finally got the better of me and I checked it out. Tina Fey is just one of those smart funny women that you have to admire. Her self-deprecating view of herself and her day-to-day life play in stark contrast to her confident entertainment persona and her many professional successes. The chapters describing her father and her annual Christmas visits to her Youngstown inlaws provide an interesting glimpse into her groundedness and precious ordinariness, and in other chapters she makes her “glamorous” TV lifesty...

It’s pretty damn easy to get to Hell. If you exceed 700 mutterings of the F-word, for example, you’re damned for eternity. If you honk your horn just one time over your lifetime allowance of 500, you’re damned (probably less in Switzerland). If you exceed your charitable allowance of urinating in a public swimming pool, you’re damned. Not to mention the obvious ways to get in— murder, suicide, genocide. Maddie is a thirteen-year-old girl (daughter of a Hollywood power couple that sounds an awful lot like Brangelina), who finds herself the newest resident “downunder,” and she’s not completely sure why. She decides to make the best of things though. Her backstory is revealed little by little, as she and her cohorts (who are a Hellish version of the Breakfast Club) plod their way across the Dandruff Desert and a wasteland made up of toenail clippings (just some of the topographic treats waiting for you in Hell). By the end of the story Maddie has the diabolical job of telemarketer, callin...

Peter Ackroyd wrote the ultimate Londonophile’s companion to the city with 2003’s London: The Biography , which was not a chronological history in the traditional sense but a rather fascinating thematic approach to all things London. Now he’s dug a little deeper (pun intended) and produced this volume that addresses the things that exist under London’s streets. Most people are familiar with the tube and maybe even Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms, but there's so much more to be uncovered, so to speak. Graves, wells, hidden rivers, secret tunnels and air raid shelters, layers and layers of archeology—it’s really pretty fascinating. Just to illustrate how fascinating, have a look at the following excerpt, which chronicles the historical investigations that accompanied the extension of the Jubilee tube line when it pushed across the Thames and then towards Canary Wharf: [The Jubilee Line] travelled back 5,000 years. In the depths of the new system were uncovered pieces of Neolithic potte...

I don’t know why I have such a phobia of Dickens. There’s some hidden event in my schooling that turned me against him, and I can’t for the life of me think of what it is. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, is a Dickens enthusiast, maybe even a little bit of a Dickens fanatic. It is his eternal concern that I have yet to read any Dickens novel cover-to-cover (though truth be told I have read A Christmas Carol ). So, he gifted me Great Expectations, the graphic novel . Quite nice. I really rather enjoyed it, though even in this much condensed graphic form, there was a plethora of characters that were sometimes hard to keep track of. Luckily for me there was a two page spread of dramatis personae at the front of the book that was convenient to make reference to. It’s actually a good way to ease into the novel. Maybe I’ll do that some day.

A film crew and a cast of characters from the local village are marooned at Flavia de Luce’s tired old family mansion Buckshaw near Christmastime after a blizzard cuts them off from civilization. A murder occurs (surprise, surprise) and Flavia is once again racing ahead of (and running circles around) the inspector, finding clues that he never even knew to look for. It all sounds a little like a game of Clue (Was it Mrs. Peacock in the Library with the rope?) or a plot borrowed straight from Agatha Christie's playbook, in fact one of the characters comments on this very thing, saying something like “This is like an Agatha Christie novel.” As clichéd as the plotline is, it doesn’t really have a very satisfactory resolution, and I found myself less concerned with the murder and more interested in Flavia’s attempts to capture Father Christmas and set off a secret fireworks show from the roof of the treasure home for the enjoyment and edification of the local villagers. I still find th...

The final installment of the popular Kurt Wallander detective series follows Wallander to the end of his career. As he transitions from the loss of his father, his family focus shifts to his newly-born granddaughter and a renewed relationship with his daughter Linda. Worrisome episodes of forgetfulness, however, force him to confront his own mortality, and the sudden death of his once-beloved Baiba is a sign that his remaining years are precious. The disappearance of Linda’s “in-laws” (since she isn’t married to their son, what’s the proper term?) is the case that preoccupies Wallander in The Troubled Man . Their backstory takes in the complicated history of post-war Europe's Cold War politics, a suggestion of espionage, Olof Palme, the CIA... all culminating with the rash of submarine incursions into Swedish territorial waters from the 1980s that I remember so well. I was fascinated by Wallander’s last case, but also felt that the entrance into his final life stage was very compel...

Henrietta Lacks was the name of an African-American woman who died of a virulent form of cervical cancer in Baltimore in the early 1950s. What makes her case historically remarkable is that a colony of her cancerous cells were among the first human cells to thrive and multiply outside the body in a petri dish, making them a much sought-after commodity for lab experimentation and scientific discovery. For decades the cell line known as HeLa (for the first letters of her first and last name) made a huge positive impact on the development and advancement of cellular biology. On the flip side, partly due to its remarkable longevity and tenacity, HeLa contaminated other cell lines, ultimately compromising the integrity of experiments and responsible for the loss of millions of dollars in research money. Further controversy surrounds the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks’s cell line without the informed consent of her next of kin, and much of the book chronicles the author’s attempts to win th...