Peachy Reads

Rachel is a troubled soul who lost her husband and her job due to her uncontrolled drinking.  Now she spends her days in a charade—travelling back and forth by rail to the city (thus the title) in the pretense of commuting to the job she no longer holds, whiling away the days in public libraries, and making frequent stops at the off-license.  From the train she spies on a Victorian terrace home in her old neighborhood that backs up to the rail line and imagines a fantasy existence for the couple living there, perhaps it’s the fantasy she never was able to experience herself.  The night that the woman from her fantasy musings disappears and later turns up murdered, is a night that Rachel was nearby on a bender.  Only nebulous memories of that evening remain, but somehow she thinks they may hold important clues to an intricate web that involves her ex-husband, his new wife, the missing woman, and a mystery man.  This is the new Gone Girl by all accounts....

Douglas is the nerdy scientist-type and displays all the stereotypes that go along with that.  Connie is a Bohemian artist-type on the rebound, and Douglas seems to be everything her last boyfriend was not.  This book charts their unlikely romance, the uneasy marriage, the dysfunctional family, and finally the inevitable but nevertheless reluctant separation.  Connie decides to inform Douglas that she’s through with their marriage just before their son is off to university and right before they’ve planned to depart en famille on a grand tour of the continent.  Against common sense, they decide to go forward with the plan, which results in predictably unpredictable consequences. I’m not sure that in real life the ill-fated grand tour would really have made it to the first hotel, but as a plot device it was pretty clever.  Perfect for the armchair traveler, there is wonderful description of some of the great art museums of Europe sandwiched in between the freque...

I may be a sucker for novels set in World War II, so I could not resist picking up All the Light We Cannot See .  It follows the fate of two children, one a blind Parisian girl named Marie Laure whose father works in a natural history museum as the keeper of the keys. The other child is Werner, a young orphan living with his sister in the Ruhrgebiet.  As the children mature and Hitler’s war machine grinds into gear, their paths eventually cross in the French town of St. Malo.  A third strand of the narrative is the legend of a storied diamond, the curse of which seems to shadow Marie Laure’s evacuation from Paris, and eventually brings her and Werner together. Far more compelling than the fate of the diamond is the fascinating story of these two war children and the history that swirls around them. This was one of those books that will probably rate as an all-time favorite of mine.  It was just so good from start to finish. Similar: Suite Francaise, Sar...

The brazen theft of a number of masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 is the factual context for this complex yet enjoyable thriller.  Claire Roth is a talented artist who has had a checkered history that has more or less blackballed her in the art world, closing doors to competitions and gallery exhibitions, and stalling her career.  She makes ends meet by recreating copies of masterpieces for an internet firm called Reproduction.com. A Faustian bargain with a Back Bay gallery owner capitalizes on Claire’s talents as a forger to copy a stolen masterpiece from the Gardner museum—her task is to recreate a Degas from one of the paintings taken in 1990—or is it even an original Degas?  Her talents as both an artist and a researcher are undisputed and when her forged copy is accepted as the recovered original, things start to get really interesting. I would never have thought that this book on art forgery would be the page-turner it w...

Who hasn’t heard the story of Marco Polo bringing pasta to Italy from China?  Well, apparently it’s a myth, thought up by a pasta company in early twentieth century America to popularize pasta in American kitchens.  If not personally delivered by Marco Polo, pasta was nonetheless likely brought to Italy by merchants on the Silk Road, an important trading route that stretched from China to the Mediterranean.  The author sets out to travel the entire length of the route from the heartland of the Chinese noodle to the Italian province where ragu is expertly paired with a noodle like tagliatelle or pappardelle (and never spaghetti!).  She investigates the noodly aspects of the current cuisine of each country she visits along the way, some of which do not seem to have maintained even a vestige of the versatile noodle.  From western China, across a couple of the former Soviet republics ending in -stan, Iran, Turkey, and finally Italy, Lin-Liu traces the hist...

A patron recommended this title to me the other day in the library and I thought it sounded really interesting.   After having gone through the agony and the ecstasy of the college admissions process last year with our one and only child, I am still tuned in to the admissions cycle and have even been lurking in online college admissions forums to shadow students who are agonizing over their choices for college and university, and ultimately the choices that the college and universities make when considering their apps.   It was just such a monumental process that it’s hard to turn it off.   Maybe this book will serve as part of my therapy. I also saw the movie based on Admission starring Tina Fey, and while it was billed as a comedy (which the book most certainly is not), it was only mildly entertaining.   The book, as frequently is the case, is not like the movie.   The author provides wonderful insight into the highly competitive admissions process a...

I wanted to return to Bruges with Inspector Pieter van In after enjoying the first installment in this Flemish detective series,  The Square of Revenge .  Bruges really is the most captivating character in this novel, providing a wonderful backdrop to the police action, its streets frosted with a magical covering of powdery snow, its gothic and neogothic towers and facades transformed into so much iced gingerbread.   The plot, however, is a bit overcomplicated-- involving murders, Nazi gold, a conspiracy involving a forged copy of Michelangelo’s Madonna, and a terrorist plot to blow up cultural monuments in Bruges in order to drive out its middle class citizens to a proposed garden suburb built on the neighboring polder... need I go on?  It really didn’t hold together and when I said that the city of Bruges is the best character in The Midas Murders , it’s because Van In is so ugly and unlikable, at least in this installment.  The series has had...