The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl is a confection, set in the 1980’s in Paris. Stella, a 20-something copy editor in New York, leads a highly routinized life, the regularity of which is comforting to her. She is estranged from her mother, Celia, who has never expressed love of her. Nor has Celia ever told …
Category: reading list
Fanatics and vigilantes: two books with red flags
American Mother by Collum McCann is an as-told-to account by Diane Foley of the 2014 death of her son, freelance American journalist James W. Foley. McCann, the author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin, is a master storyteller, tells the first and last chapters of this riveting book in the third person, but …
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Two Creative Approaches to Fiction Writing
James by Percival Everett tells the story of Huckleberry Finn’s escape from his drunken abusive father with slave Jim in pre-Civil War Missouri. As a child, I read Huckleberry Finn as a simple adventure tale; as a college student, I came to understand it as telling account of mid- 19th century American life and culture. …
Diana Chapman Walsh: a college president we can admire
The Claims of Life by Diana Chapman Walsh is a deep and delightful memoir by the former president of Wellesley College, whom I met and with whom I briefly worked in conjunction with the 125th anniversary of the college. A child of privilege in suburban Philadelphia and an athlete, she grew up dismissing her intellectual …
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Non-fiction books taking us to places both familiar and strange
Knife by Salman Rushdie is an account of the near-fatal attack on the well-known writer in 2022 by a lone knife-wielding terrorist who hated Rushdie for his writings, having read just two pages, and could only aver that Rushdie was “disingenuous.” The assailant, whom Rushdie calls “A” (for ass) but refuses to name, somehow eluded …
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Fiction among the fragrances of spring
Want to get away from current news stories, weather warnings, and Donald Trump's hush money election fraud trial? Want to stretch out with a book amidst the fragrance of lilacs, the perfume of flowering crab trees and sweet rhododendrons, and the riotous colors of geraniums and bleeding hearts? Here are some novels to consider this …
Book Retells our Lives with Love, Loss and Hope
An Unfinished Love Affair: a Personal History of the 1960’s by historian and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin is the book I have been waiting for, and it doesn’t disappoint. It is an intimately told, stunningly impactful history of the 1960’s told through the eyes of her husband, presidential speech writer and himself a shaper of …
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More books to delight and challenge,pt. 1-fiction
The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin is a lush historical novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner, Belle of Boston, an upper class young woman who refused to limit herself to the cultural norms prescribed by the wealthy social elite of her time and who, in her struggle to assert herself, made an impact on the …
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Books: non-fiction, early spring reviews
How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney offers what could be an eye-opening look at how to talk to “the other.” It’s about much more than when every day becomes Thanksgiving Day and seemingly reasonable people turn out to be crazy Uncle Harry. McRaney shares what he has …
Books: a fictional interlude in our non-fictional life
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein is a short, dense and intense meditation on what it means to be an outsider and a survivor. The first-person narrator speaks directly to the reader spinning the tale of how, as a child, her family had taught her to subdue her own wants and silence her own voice …
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Marjorie Arons-Barron 