Summer Reading: 2017

Meet the Pratt clan. Driven men. Determined women. Through six turbulent generations, they would pursue a lost Paul Revere treasure. And turn a family secret into an obsession that could destroy them. Here is the novel that launched William Martin's astonishing literary career and became an instant bestseller. From the grit and romance of old Boston to exclusive -- and dangerous -- Back Bay today, this sweeping saga paints an unforgettable portrait of a powerful dynasty beset by the forces of history...and a heritage of greed, lust, murder and betrayal.

A deep-dive into human behavior in an epic story of science, society, sex, and survival, from T. C. Boyle, the acclaimed, bestselling, author of the PEN/ Faulkner Award–winning World’s End and The Harder They Come. It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, forty miles from Tucson, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the earth, eight scientists, four men and four women dubbed the "Terranauts," have been selected to live under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. Their sealed, three-acre compound comprises five biomes—rainforest, savanna, desert, ocean, and marsh—and enough wildlife, water, and vegetation to sustain them. As the Terranauts face increased scrutiny and a host of disasters, both natural and of their own making, their mantra: "Nothing in, nothing out," becomes a dangerously ferocious rallying cry. With characteristic humor and acerbic wit, T.C. Boyle indelibly inhabits the perspectives of the various players in this survivalist game, probing their motivations and illuminating their integrity and fragility to illustrate the inherent fallibility of human nature itself.

Behold the man: stinking, drunk, and brutal. Henry Drax is a harpooner on the Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaler bound for the rich hunting waters of the arctic circle. Also aboard for the first time is Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon with a shattered reputation, no money, and no better option than to sail as the ship's medic on this violent, filthy, and ill-fated voyage. In India, during the Siege of Delhi, Sumner thought he had experienced the depths to which man can stoop. He had hoped to find temporary respite on the Volunteer, but rest proves impossible with Drax on board. The discovery of something evil in the hold rouses Sumner to action. And as the confrontation between the two men plays out amid the freezing darkness of an arctic winter, the fateful question arises: who will survive until spring? With savage, unstoppable momentum and the blackest wit, Ian McGuire's The North Water weaves a superlative story of humanity under the most extreme conditions.

"Complex, personal, and profound ... a brash and brave piece of writing ... filled with the swords and spears that inflict the carnage of the Iliad." -The Wall Street Journal Why Homer Matters is a magical journey of discovery across wide stretches of the past, sewn together by the Iliad and the Odyssey and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer's poems-transmitted orally across the generations, shaped and reshaped in a living, self-renewing tradition-occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts." The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 BC when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.

London, 1926. American-raised Maisie Musgrave is thrilled to land a job as a secretary at the upstart British Broadcasting Corporation, whose use of radio—still new, strange, and electrifying—is captivating the nation. But when she unearths a shocking conspiracy, she and programming director Hilda Matheson join forces to make their voices heard both on and off the air…and then face the dangerous consequences of telling the truth for a living.

You've heard the names John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong. What about Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, Kathryn Peddrew, Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith, or Barbara Holley? Most Americans have no idea that from the 1940s through the 1960s, a cadre of African-American women formed part of the country’s space work force, or that this group—mathematical ground troops in the Cold War—helped provide NASA with the raw computing power it needed to dominate the heavens.

This book celebrates the 1936 U.S. men’s Olympic eight-oar rowing team—nine working class boys who stormed the rowing world, transformed the sport, and galvanized the attention of millions of Americans.
The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers from the American West, the boys took on and defeated successive echelons of privilege and power. They vanquished the sons of bankers and senators rowing for elite eastern universities. They defeated the sons of British aristocrats rowing for Oxford and Cambridge. And finally, in an extraordinary race in Berlin, they stunned the Aryan sons of the Nazi state as they rowed for gold in front of Adolf Hitler.

In post-World War II London, an emergency meeting of the Mortimer Square Garden Committee has been convened to discuss a most alarming matter: Someone has been digging in the garden and making off with buckets of dirt. Miss Angela Chesney is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street is to blame. But Angela’s sister, Olivia, isn’t so sure. Olivia has always wondered why the neighborhood children—the “sparrows” she sometimes watches from the window of her house—are kept out of the private garden. Don’t they have a right to enjoy the place, too? But neither Angela nor Olivia has any idea what sent the neighborhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends in search of good, rich earth. Still less do they imagine where their investigation of the incident will lead them—to a struggling restaurant, a bombed-out church, and at the heart of it all, a hidden garden.

Read the New York Times bestseller that has taken the world by storm! Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him “the bitter neighbor from hell.” But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time? Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations. A feel-good story in the spirit of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Fredrik Backman’s novel about the angry old man next door is a thoughtful exploration of the profound impact one life has on countless others. “If there was an award for ‘Most Charming Book of the Year,’ this first novel by a Swedish blogger-turned-overnight-sensation would win hands down” (Booklist, starred review).

A charming, warmhearted novel from the author of the New York Times bestseller A Man Called Ove. Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy—as in standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-strangers crazy. She is also Elsa’s best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal. When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure begins. Her grandmother’s instructions lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and old crones but also to the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is told with the same comic accuracy and beating heart as Fredrik Backman’s bestselling debut novel, A Man Called Ove. It is a story about life and death and one of the most important human rights: the right to be different.

Written by historian Kate Cooper, this interesting work looks at the lives of the influential women who played important roles during the first century of Christianity, including peasants, empresses, and even independent business owners, who were often ignored by recorded history.

"Based on all-new interviews and including 72 rare photos, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements is the definitive biography of one of the last great rock 'n' roll bands of the twentieth century. Written with the participation of the group's key members, including reclusive singer-songwriter Paul Westerberg, bassist Tommy Stinson, and the family of late guitarist Bob Stinson, Trouble Boys is a deeply intimate and nuanced portrait, exposing the primal factors and forces--addiction, abuse, fear--that would shape one of the most brilliant and notoriously self-destructive rock bands of all time. Based on a decade of research and reporting, hundreds of interviews (with family, friends, managers, producers, and musical colleagues), as well as full access to the Replacements' archives at Twin/Tone and Warner Bros. Records, author Bob Mehr has fashioned something far more compelling than a conventional band bio. A roaring rock 'n' roll adventure, a heartrending family drama, and a cautionary showbiz tale, Trouble Boys is a penetrating work of biography and a major addition to the rock book canon."

"In Shake It Up, Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude) and Kevin Dettmar (Is Rock Dead?) offer a hit parade of the most outspoken and distinctly personal voices from a half century of writing about rock and pop music. Here is Lester Bangs on Elvis Presley, Lenny Kaye on doo wop, Ellen Willis on Janis Joplin, Nick Tosches on Jerry Lee Lewis, Nat Hentoff and Luc Sante on Bob Dylan, Nelson George on Marvin Gaye, Eve Babitz on Jim Morrison, Greg Tate on Kanye West, Jessica Harper on emo, Elijah Wald on The Beatles, and Greil Marcus on Christian Marclay's Guitar Drag. Rock music changed America, and Shake It Upreveals that the generation of writers that grew up with it found ways to write about it that mirrored the music's freedom, homemade inventiveness, and rebellious energy. High culture, pop culture, roots culture, the politics of race and gender, philosophical speculation, poetic exploration, and just plain obsessive enthusiasm all came together in a mix that articulated what had been implicit in the music and certified that rock and roll had both an aesthetic and a social significance that demanded critical response. The scope of rock writing has continued to deepen and widen as the music itself has gone through repeated transformations in the eras of punk and hip hop. In probing the roots of America's most popular music and giving voice to its widest implications and influences, these writers created a critical canon as cutting edge as the music they were writing about."

It is Texas in the 1870’s and seventy-something Captain Jefferson Kidd agrees to transport a ten year old girl who has been recovered from the Kiowa Indians (after being held captive for four years) back to her only living relatives. The long trip from the Red River Valley to near San Antonio is a beautiful and harrowing journey during which the old man and the young girl work to understand each other (she’d forgotten most of her English) and survive the dangers of the trip across largely unpopulated country. Captain Kidd finances the trip by booking a room in the towns they pass through and charging ten cents to anyone who wants to hear him read selected news from the latest papers he can find. (He is an early model for Walter Cronkite and all the other newscasters we hear on a daily basis.) Jiles’ style is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy and the story appeals to anyone who loved Lonesome Dove. My favorite book of the year.

The dog had fallen through a hole in the net of events. We leave so many of them, lacerations of negligence, when we put together cause and effect. The essential was that the string, the weave that now supported me, should hold.” (177) This about sums it up. Well-written, this novella has a way of staying with you long after you’ve finished reading the book.

From the cover: Once an aspiring writer, Olga traded literary ambition for marriage and motherhood; when Mario dumps her after 15 years, she is utterly unprepared. Though she tells herself that she is a competent woman, nothing like the poverella (poor abandoned wife) that mothers whispered about in her childhood, Olga falls completely apart. Routine chores overwhelm her; she neglects her appearance and forgets her manners; she throws herself at the older musician downstairs; she sees the poverella's ghost. After months of self-pity, anger, doubt, fury, desperation and near madness, her acknowledgments of weaknesses in the marriage feel as earned as they are unsurprising.

Fast read, haunting. This review from the Guardian captures it well:
“This is a remarkable book, but not to be read for pleasure. Oates wishes us to reflect on the scary randomness of our fates. 'Good luck, bad luck. Hit by lightning, spared by lightning.' (Her focus on this made especially upsetting reading during the London bombings.) She is interested in the difference a day, or a single violent night, may make.”

For me, this was like a trip down memory lane. I’m curious to know how readers who haven’t grown up in Israel, much less a Kibbutz, would react to it.
Here’s what one reviewer noted:
“In her fiction debut, Ball has formulated a fast-paced, multigenerational, dysfunctional family drama that also bubbles over with humor and intrigue — essentially what you might expect (or hope for) from a tale of a kibbutz family and its scattered, colorful offspring. With beautiful language and sordid details, the narrative bounces from Israel to New York to Southern California and beyond (and back and forth), with plenty of gossip gone wrong and dark secrets in between. Early critical responses are drawing comparisons to Nathan Englander and Jennifer Egan — or as a Booklist review put it, ‘Try Eudora Welty with sex and Jews.’”
~ Victor Wishna, JTA

One of the very best Holmes hommages/pastiches that I have read. From Publishers Weekly: “Edgar-finalist Faye, whose debut, Dust and Shadow (2009), was one of the better novel-length pastiches pitting Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper, presents pitch-perfect Watsonian narration in 13 of the 15 tales in this outstanding collection; the other two are told from Holmes's perspective. The stories are divided into four chronological sections: the first predates the Holmes-Watson partnership; the second covers the period before Reichenbach; the third dates to after Holmes' resurrection; and the fourth treats the pair's later years sleuthing together. Most take Conan Doyle's tantalizing references to untold tales as their starting point, as in "Notes Regarding the Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore," which deals with a man who vanished after returning home to retrieve his umbrella. All impressively add psychological depth to the friendship, plausibly exploring personal dynamics in the wake of traumas such as the loss of Watson's wife and Holmes's apparent return from the dead … “

A charming mystery, with a book-revering academic highly sceptical of the digital age slowly coming to terms with it and solving a centuries-old riddle in the bargain. From Publishers Weekly: “Diffident Arthur Prescott, the endearing hero of this thoroughly enjoyable novel from bestseller Lovett ( The Bookman's Tale), has chosen to teach at the University of Barchester, a backwater institution, because he grew up in Barchester (yes, Anthony Trollope's cathedral city, as Lovett admits in an author's note). A junior lecturer who's fond of P.G. Wodehouse, Arthur finds his values at odds with those of many of his colleagues, who prefer teaching seminars on J.K. Rowling rather than Shakespeare. His life is upended by the arrival of an attractive American, Bethany Davis, who has the job of digitizing the local cathedral's ancient manuscripts, and whom he fears threatens his own private quest for the location of the Holy Grail. Bethany gradually brings Arthur out of his emotional shell, and the two become research partners. The light tone … blends well with the clever academic sleuthing.”

Written in a fast-paced British screwball comedy manner, this is the first of a series of eight (to date) books, plus a number of short stories. Great fun and perfect summer reading! From Booklist: “Madeline ‘Max’ Maxwell has stumbled upon the dream of a lifetime: train and work as a historian for Saint Mary's Institute of Historical Research. Brought in for an interview by longtime mentor Mrs. DeWinter, Max quickly learns that Saint Mary's is more than the typical academic hallowed hall. The key to their success is time travel; historians are trained to jump back to various historical events to observe and record, keeping their influence to an absolute minimum so as to avoid any time-space continuum hiccups. All is dandy until Max learns of a plot spanning thousands of years to disrupt Saint Mary's success and thwart its director, Dr. Edward Bairstow. Max and her colleagues travel back to dodge dinosaurs, protect valuable treasures, and save Saint Mary's, all while falling in love. Taylor has written a madcap and very funny hodgepodge of a novel … “

“Lib Wright, a young English nurse trained by the legendary Florence Nightingale, arrives in an impoverished Irish village with a strange mission. Eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell is said to have eaten nothing for four months. With tourists thronging to see the child, and the press sowing doubt, the baffled community looks to an outsider to bring the truth to light. Lib's job is simple: to stay in the girl's bare room at all hours, watching her. An educated skeptic repelled by what she sees as ignorance and superstition, Lib expects to expose the fast as a hoax within days. But the long hours she spends with Anna begin to erode all her assumptions about the child, the Irish, and herself. Is Anna a fraud or a "living wonder"? “

I have never been a fan of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. But I am hooked on the detective series written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The first book in the series finds Cormoran Strike barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office. Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers.

“It is the winter of 1537, and England is divided into those faithful to the Catholic Church and those loyal to the king and the newly established Church of England. Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's feared vicar general, crusades against the old Church with savage new laws, rigged trials, and a vast network of informers. Queen Anne Boleyn has been beheaded and the monasteries are being dissolved - their treasures pillaged and their lands eyed greedily by courtiers and country gentry. But having put down one people's rebellion, Cromwell is afraid another might topple the realm. So when one of his commissioners is murdered in the monastery at Scarnsea on the south coast of England, he enlists his fellow reformer, Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer renowned as "the sharpest hunchback in the courts of England," to head the inquiry.”

J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. “The book is an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths [and] … does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.”

A spellbinding novel about three unforgettable individuals thrown together by war, love, and their search for belonging in the ever-changing landscape of WWII London. Well written , sad and clever.

A collection of interesting, pessimistic, and hilarious short stories about Sedaris's thoughts and experiences with OCD, homosexuality, family functions, hitchhiking, and nudist colonies.

Heidi is a work of fiction written in 1880 by Swiss author Johanna Spyri, originally published in two parts as Heidi's years of learning and travel (German: Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre) and Heidi makes use of what she has learned. It is a novel about the events in the life of a young girl in her grandfather's care, in the Swiss Alps. It was written as a book "for children and those who love children."Heidi is one of the best-selling books ever written and is among the best-known works of Swiss literature.