Freedom / Jonathan Franzen

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 that a more apt title might have been Mistakes (and Patty does write a missive called "Mistakes Were Made"), though I suppose the freedom in the title might refer to our freedom to make mistakes, the freedom to choose the course of our lives, for good or for bad?

Anyhow, I highlighted the passage below, always on the look-out for quotes that expose the internet for its notorious unreliability and all too frequent mediocrity.

“The internet’s f__d up, isn’t it?” Jenna said…
“So f__d up, so f__d up,” he
said
…” free information’s by definition worthless.”

Guess that’s what libraries are for!

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The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

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...

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