I need to update more regularly, or end up with a monster list like this one. I read Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams and can't remember a thing about it. One I do remember is Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh. Excellent novel about a woman who works in a women's health clinic which is targeted by anti-abortion protestors.
Finally read Richard Powers' Bewilderment. Brilliant start, but it bogged down for me in the middle. I'd still read whatever he writes, but not one of my favorites.
Big disappointment: The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. Maps! The New York Public Library! And just a very blah novel filled with two dimensional characters.
Two five star books: The Sentence by Louise Erdich and French Braid by Anne Tyler. I think this was the first Erdich book I read, too. Hard to believe Anne Tyler is 83 and can make her writing look so simple that she still gets shunted into "women's fiction."
I also read Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire. The best poem in it was the one about being a refugee, which I've read many times.
The latest in the Veronica Speedwell series, An Impossible Imposter, by Deanna Raybourn was a good palate cleanser. Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri was a bit confusing, as I thought I checked out a book of essays by her! It's a short novel she wrote in Italian, then translated into English. Interesting premise. I wonder if the limited descriptive language was intentional, or a result of writing in her second language?
Finally, I read my first Lisa Scottoline. What Happened to the Bennetts? is a thriller set around Philadelphia. I think she'd be a great airplane read. I plowed through it in about 5 hours, really wanted to see what came next, even if I had to suspend disbelief from about the third or fourth chapter.
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