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| 2015 |
All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel by Anthony Doerr.
Scribner, 2014. 531 pages.
Set in World War II Germany
and France, revealed through deftly intertwined narratives, this beautiful book concerns itself with the internal lives of two adolescents—a
sightless French girl and a gifted German boy—as they negotiate a broken,
brutal external world. Blind since early childhood, Marie-Laure lives in
Paris with her father, master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History.
When the Nazis occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to the coastal citadel of
Saint-Malo. Werner Pfennig grows up in a German orphanage, demonstrating
precocious aptitude for radio technology. His talents earn him admission
to a blood-chilling academy for Hitler Youth, and Werner soon finds himself
journeying through the dark heart of war, eventually to Saint-Malo. As
Marie-Laure and Werner move toward inevitable meeting on the Brittany coast,
abbreviated chapters present big themes and intricate detail with prose that is
at once sweeping and tightly composed. The result is luminous historical
fiction: a convergence of
history and personal experience that lingers in our memory long after the last
page turns.
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| 2014 |
Little, Brown and Company, 2013. 771 pages.
We do the heavy lifting and carry this bildungsroman through
the Cellar Door: a big, compelling, beautiful-but-flawed novel of
formation, a coming-of-age story that ends up taking The Prize. So, gentle fans of literary criticism and esoteric terminology,
what goes on amidst those hundreds of page-after-pages? To begin, thirteen-year-old Theodore Decker survives a terrorist
bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a cataclysmic moment of
violence that kills his mother and launches Our Protagonist Narrator on a
so-tragio-it's-comedic life trajectory, an exhausting physical and
psychological journey from youth to adulthood, and for us, an exhaustive
flight of heart-and-mind-flipping fiction.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.
 |
| 2011 |
Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 273 pages.
This is really good stuff, fresh and funky and intricately constructed. We've got punk rockers and pop culture, old men and young women, the reminiscences of punk-rocker-turned-recording-industry-executive Bennie Salazar and the inscrutable comportment of lovely Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant. With willy-nilly chronology and willy-nilly characters, it has a lot to say about time, the human heart, and the importance of… the pause… in music and in life. Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?
Tinkers by Paul Harding.
 |
| 2010 |
Bellevue Literary Press, 2009. 191 pages.
As George Washington Crosby rests on his deathbed, seeking reconciliation between the waxing past and the waning present, he returns to the physical and psychological landscape of his New England youth. The old man reunites with his epileptic traveling salesman father and revisits memories of love and loss, of abandonment and redemption, of mystery and compassion. Time and memory collapse and expand, revealing a life story, simply told, that is beautiful, heartbreaking, and transcendent.
As George Washington Crosby rests on his deathbed, seeking reconciliation between the waxing past and the waning present, he returns to the physical and psychological landscape of his New England youth. The old man reunites with his epileptic traveling salesman father and revisits memories of love and loss, of abandonment and redemption, of mystery and compassion. Time and memory collapse and expand, revealing a life story, simply told, that is beautiful, heartbreaking, and transcendent.
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| 2009 |
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.
Random House, 2008. 286 pages.
It is pure pleasure to read this collection of thirteen linked short stories featuring large-boned retired schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge in pivotal, supporting, or cameo roles. Our Olive is sometimes brave, sometimes abrasive, sometimes sharp-tongued, sometimes maddening, and oftentimes vulnerable-- but always worth reading and discussing. She provides a wonderful foil for the meanderings and machinations of her small Maine town and an uncompromising lens for an exploration of the intricacies of the human heart. BJM does not stash stolen shoes in her handbag and has not defaced apparel with a black Sharpie pen... yet. But she believes that there is a little bit of Olive in all of us.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
 |
| 2001 |
Picador, 2000.
639 pages.
Kavalier and Clay is historical fiction infused with humor and pathos, a stylish bildungsroman that opens in 1939 and wraps around World War II, following the exploits of cousins, Brooklyn-born writer Sam Clay and Czech-refugee artist Joe Kavalier. As Sam and Joe breath comic-book life into anti-fascist superhero the Escapist, their ascendent employer Empire Comics prospers on a quarter of a floor in the Empire State Building, enough to exert an impressive mass-cultural influence over the vast American marketplace of children and know-nothings. In the nostalgic shadow of the formative and functional skyscraper, Chabon writes eloquently of heroes and heroines, aspiration and inspiration, capitalism and creativity, exploitation and escapism.
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.
Kavalier and Clay is historical fiction infused with humor and pathos, a stylish bildungsroman that opens in 1939 and wraps around World War II, following the exploits of cousins, Brooklyn-born writer Sam Clay and Czech-refugee artist Joe Kavalier. As Sam and Joe breath comic-book life into anti-fascist superhero the Escapist, their ascendent employer Empire Comics prospers on a quarter of a floor in the Empire State Building, enough to exert an impressive mass-cultural influence over the vast American marketplace of children and know-nothings. In the nostalgic shadow of the formative and functional skyscraper, Chabon writes eloquently of heroes and heroines, aspiration and inspiration, capitalism and creativity, exploitation and escapism.
 |
| 1992 |
Anchor Books, 2003 (1991). 384 pages.
Some have called it King Lear in a Cornfield: in truth, forsooth, this artful, agricultural re-imagining of King Lear—Shakespearean tragedy projected upon a late-twentieth-century Iowa farm family—makes us squirm. Proud, uncompromising, tyrannical patriarch Larry Cook—shades of proud, uncompromising tyrannical King Lear!—decides to divide his successful Middle American farm—shades of a mythical Middle-of-England kingdom!—between three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline—shades of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia! When Caroline-who-is-shades-of-Cordelia refuses to play along, Larry-who-is-shades-of-Lear disowns her, cuts her out of his will, and descends into madness, carrying us across a dark landscape of treacherous truth, tortured love, and twisted humanity.
 |
| 1986 |
Lonesome
Dove by Larry McMurtry.
Simon and
Schuster, 2010 (1985). 858 pages.
Our worthy winner here is the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy: a cinematic western adventure, a big-old beautiful love story, a sweeping epic of a frontier lost and found. Two former Texas Rangers, peripatetic Augustus McCrae, who believes that “a man dumb enough to bet his saddle is dumb enough to eat gourds,” and irascible Woodrow Call, who’s been told he “don’t have a human nature,” abandon their ramshackle ranch in dusty little Lonesome Dove, Texas, to lead cattle and cowboys to the promising wilds of far-away Montana.
His Family by Ernest Poole.
Macmillan, 1917. 320 pages.
Widowed for more than a decade, Big Apple businessman Roger Gale recollects his wife’s dying exhortation to remain engaged in the lives of his three inimitable daughters: Edith the Eldest, a class-conscious wife and consummate mother; Deborah the Middle, a reform-minded educator and social activist; and Laura the Youngest, a classic beauty and active socialite. As Gale awakens to late-in-life patriarchal duties and parenting skills, he hears distant, disturbing rumblings of the Great War and observes bewildering and disorienting changes in the city around him: He was thinking of the town he had known… not of old New York… He was thinking of a young New York, the mighty throbbing city to which he had come long ago as a lad…. Less conniving and contriving than Edith Wharton’s New York stories, more sentimental with softer edges, the winner of the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for the Novel is a satisfying slice of domestic fiction, a surprisingly relevant study of upper-middle class family life in early twentieth-century New York. Back in the day, reviewers suggested that His Family pictured remarkable well present-day Americans. It is significant, intellectual and stimulating—a story of today. We are a bit bewildered and disoriented: today has become yesterday, but isn’t it lovely to don our hats and sable cloaks, to pick up our walking sticks and stroll upon the sidewalks of Old-New-Old-New York?
Our worthy winner here is the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy: a cinematic western adventure, a big-old beautiful love story, a sweeping epic of a frontier lost and found. Two former Texas Rangers, peripatetic Augustus McCrae, who believes that “a man dumb enough to bet his saddle is dumb enough to eat gourds,” and irascible Woodrow Call, who’s been told he “don’t have a human nature,” abandon their ramshackle ranch in dusty little Lonesome Dove, Texas, to lead cattle and cowboys to the promising wilds of far-away Montana.
It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s
living, Augustus says. I doubt it
matters where you die, but it matters where you live. And of course, it matters what you read while
you’re doing that living. In this
regard, Summer Reader BJM and Pulitzer specialist DLC recall the proud, mangled Latin motto from Gus’s Hat Creek
Company and Livery Emporium sign: uva uvam vivendo varia fit, which translates
roughly to: grape grape variety is made by living. You get the general idea. Part flesh-and-blood romp, part
nostalgic dream, this laugh-out-loud-one-minute-break-your-heart-the-next-
story is the real deal, darlin’.
Splendid behaviour.
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner.
 |
| 1972 |
Penguin, 1992 (1971). 569 pages.
Emotionally estranged from his living family, physically removed from the contemporary world, wheelchair-bound retired historian-narrator Lyman Ward embarks on a research and ruminating project, ostensibly to chronicle the frontier experience of his grandparents and, perhaps more truthfully, to sift through some of his own life story. This is a winding, long-winded narrative, at turns wry and poignant, with a scrupulous sense of time and place. This is a geographical journey, a historical journey, a generational journey, a deeply personal journey. So much journeying! And so much for the title: a phrase descriptive of human as well as detrital rest, preface to prize-winning prose with a wandering spirit and a wonderful restive heart.
 |
| 1969 |
House Made
of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday.
Harper
Perennial, 2010 (1968). 185 pages.
First conceived as a serial poem, then as a
collection of linked short stories, and ultimately as a novel, House
Made of Dawn reflects Momaday’s Kiowa heritage, his life at Jemez Pueblo, and his experiences in the wider world.
Newly arrived home from a foreign war, young Native American Abel is tottering on shaky emotional and physical
ground: he careens between reservation life and commercial America, between traditional
culture and mainstream society. At many points in our reading, we have no idea—strike that—we have very
little idea-- what is going on. We feel as
if we are voluntarily wandering the Chihuahuan Desert after ingesting powerful
samples of first-rate psychoactive peyote, aka Cactus Pudding, Devil’s Root, White
Mule. There is Abel. There are at least two prominent white
women. There is sexual content. And violence. There is alcohol consumption. And
a dead albino. The words, alternately
transcendental, meditative, and ritualistic, have a distinctive cadence, and we
would like to say that the writing is evocative... of what, we’re not certain,
but we think that the book is very good and may be smoked for medicinal
purposes.
 |
| 1940 |
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Viking Press, 1939. 619 pages.
The dirt crust broke and the dust formed. Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air.... The dust was long in settling back again.... We follow the Joad family on their migration to California during the Great Depression, sifting Steinbeck's fine storytelling dust through our fingers, re-experiencing his formidable language, re-visiting his redolent imagery, and re-considering his powerful portrayal of hardscrabble Okies confronting ravaged Western landscapes during hard times.
The dirt crust broke and the dust formed. Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air.... The dust was long in settling back again.... We follow the Joad family on their migration to California during the Great Depression, sifting Steinbeck's fine storytelling dust through our fingers, re-experiencing his formidable language, re-visiting his redolent imagery, and re-considering his powerful portrayal of hardscrabble Okies confronting ravaged Western landscapes during hard times.
 |
| 1937 |
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
McMillan Publishing, 1936. 1037 pages.
Unbuckle the swashes and
re-lace those whalebone stays! Here’s Margaret Mitchell's 1936 romantic
classic, one-thousand-thirty-seven page-turning pages of silliness and
seriousness, of saints and sinners, of scandalous behavior and sashaying, of
swooning and simpering, of states rights and sieges, of Scalawags and
sawmills... and Scarlett, one of our all-time feistiest fiction
favorites. Perennial belle and serial bride, her fiddle-dee-dee spirit
never fails to fascinate; her untamed Irish heart captures and carries our
collective heart over the Mason-Dixon Line and sweeps us across the timeline of
quintessential American literature.
One of Ours by Willa Cather.
 |
| 1923 |
Vintage Books, 1991 (1922). 371 pages.
To the north and south, Claude could see the corn-planters, moving in straight lines over the brown acres where the earth had been harrowed so fine that it blew off in clouds of dust to the roadside. Young Nebraskan Claude Wheeler is heir apparent to a comfortable, corn-filled livelihood on his family’s prospering farm. Emotionally estranged from an insensitive father and pious mother, sadly spurned by charmingly-monikered wife Enid Royce, our restless protagonist yearns for something beyond a ready-made fortune and the perceived drudgery of farming and marriage. When America enters the Great War, Claude enlists and soldiers across a bloody French frontier as vague notions of purpose and direction coalesce into something meaningful and heroic.
 |
| 1918 |
Macmillan, 1917. 320 pages.
Widowed for more than a decade, Big Apple businessman Roger Gale recollects his wife’s dying exhortation to remain engaged in the lives of his three inimitable daughters: Edith the Eldest, a class-conscious wife and consummate mother; Deborah the Middle, a reform-minded educator and social activist; and Laura the Youngest, a classic beauty and active socialite. As Gale awakens to late-in-life patriarchal duties and parenting skills, he hears distant, disturbing rumblings of the Great War and observes bewildering and disorienting changes in the city around him: He was thinking of the town he had known… not of old New York… He was thinking of a young New York, the mighty throbbing city to which he had come long ago as a lad…. Less conniving and contriving than Edith Wharton’s New York stories, more sentimental with softer edges, the winner of the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for the Novel is a satisfying slice of domestic fiction, a surprisingly relevant study of upper-middle class family life in early twentieth-century New York. Back in the day, reviewers suggested that His Family pictured remarkable well present-day Americans. It is significant, intellectual and stimulating—a story of today. We are a bit bewildered and disoriented: today has become yesterday, but isn’t it lovely to don our hats and sable cloaks, to pick up our walking sticks and stroll upon the sidewalks of Old-New-Old-New York?
