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I've been a fan of Lehane's novels ever since the first one came out, long before the films and the awards. Although their violence is more graphic than I prefer, I love the strength and clarity of his prose, the depth of his characters, and the satisfying intricacy of his plots. I love the way Boston itself is a vibrant character in his stories.

Live by Night is the story of Joe Coughlin, a petty thief who happens to be the son of a chief of police, pulling heists with his two chums, when by mistake they rob a speakeasy owned by the powerful Albert White. Joe, more than his friends, intuits the possibilities in the scene and their ramifications. While they manage to escape with their skins, Joe has left behind his heart, given irrevocably to White's girlfriend, the beautiful Emma Gould, whom he sets out to steal as well.

This story is a sequel of sorts to his immense novel of Boston in the dawn of the 20th century, The Given Day. It's not necessary to have read the earlier novel, in which Joe is a minor character. We start here in 1926, seven years after the end of The Given Day. The Jazz Age is in full swing, and Prohibition is giving rise to criminal mobs while undermining everyone's sense of what it means to be law-abiding.

A tale of gangsters and mobs, filled with the violence and duplicity that comes with that way of life, the story follows Joe's rise in the world of crime, including his eventual move to Florida to build a rum-running empire. It's not a world I would normally choose to read about, but as always Lehane's prose draws me in. I hate the violence, and Joe himself is ambivalent about it.

What I have learned is that violence procreates. And the children your violence produces will return to you as savage, mindless things. You won’t recognize them as yours, but they’ll recognize you. They’ll mark you as deserving of their punishment.

The people in Lehane's novels go beyond stereotypes to probe the complex and conflicting motives and desires that drive us. We make choices, compelled by conscious and unconscious forces, and we learn to live with the consequences.

Joe was reminded, not for the first time, that for such a violent business, it was filled with a surprising number of regular guys—men who loved their wives, who took their children on Saturday afternoon outings, men who worked on their automobiles and told jokes at the neighborhood lunch counter and worried what their mothers thought of them and went to Church to ask god’s forgiveness for all the terrible things they had to render unto Caesar in order to put food on the table.

Joe has always considered himself to be an outlaw, not a gangster. Someone who chooses to go his own way instead of abiding by society's rules, the rules of the daytime whose denizens have “sold out the truth of yourself for the story of yourself”. I remember pulling all-nighters as a student, the sense of power when you look out over the sleeping city and think I alone am awake. I own the night. I own the city.

His father plays a small but critical role here, and the theme of fathers and sons is subtly developed in a number of ways. Delusion and deceit, including self-delusion, thread through both the violence and the tenderness, through the betrayals and the love, the alliances and the friendship.

It takes a lot to keep me interested in a novel about gangsters, especially when it moves from Boston to Florida, but Lehane pulls it off. This book didn't pack the emotional wallop for me that his other books, including The Given Day, deliver but that probably says more about me than about the book. Have you ever been surprised into liking a book that you were sure you'd dislike?

Michel, an austere and studious young man pulls himself away from the history of the Classical world long enough to get married, mostly to please his father who—dying—worried about leaving his son alone in the world. Michel barely knows Marceline, but he respects her and feels some affection for her. It is only when they are embarked on their honeymoon that he discovers she has a life and a mind of her own. A greater surprise is to come when, still traveling in North Africa, Michel, already frail, nearly dies of tuberculosis, only surviving through Marceline's tender and competent care.

He is deeply changed by this experience. Having decided, at his lowest moment, that he wants to live, he devotes himself to life with all the selfish strength of the invalid, demanding certain foods and, as he regains his strength, brushing off Marceline's company to walk out alone.

This is a brief novel, the simplicity of the prose masking the subtle changes Michel undergoes as he struggles to discover what, in his new self-absorption, he actually wants.

To a man whom death's wing has touched, what once seemed important is so no longer; and other things become so which once did not seem important or which he did not even know existed. The layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there.

He learns to live in the present, indulging himself, following his obsessions. Then, when Marceline becomes pregnant, he begins to imagine a future. It is this investigation into time—its malleability, its deceptiveness, its betrayal—that most interested me. Reading this right after Nabokov’s Speak, Memory seemed a continuation of that conversation. I was reminded too of Rilke's poem, one I always think of at this time of year:

Already the ripening barberries are red,
and the old asters barely breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

The other aspect of the novel which fascinated me was the more obvious theme of selfishness versus generosity, balancing what we owe to others with what we owe to ourselves. Gide brilliantly works that theme through Michel's story, with Marceline and other characters providing alternate possibilities. I highly recommend this short but powerful novel. It will set you thinking.

Rereading this remarkable memoir has been even more delightful than the first time. And more awe-inspiring. From the poetic beauty of his sentences to the intricate structure of the book, Nabokov's consummate writing skills are on display.

The memoir covers his youth and young adulthood, up to the age of 40 when he and his wife, Vera, emigrated to the U.S. The chapters are arranged thematically rather than strictly chronologically. So, for example, one chapter is the story of the most memorable of his nannies, Mademoiselle, while another is about his first attempts at poetry.

All of the chapters are suffused with nostalgia for the lost world of his youth, a golden time as the favored eldest son in a wealthy, aristocratic family in Tsarist Russia. Nabokov maintains that our understanding of that time has been colored by Soviet propaganda, and that it was in fact a time when Russians enjoyed a great deal of freedom of speech and press.

His parents moved between a large house in St. Petersburg, made of pink granite with frescoes just under the roofline, and Vyra, the enchanted country estate whose loss he most mourns, with vacations in Biarritz. Nabokov evokes these very personal recollections with an emotional intensity that leaves me feeling that I too made a house behind the sofa and watched in mortification and pity as my tutor gave a thoroughly pedantic and boring talk with lantern slides to the sons of neighboring landowners. He accomplishes this through the specificity and relevance of his details and the resonant beauty of his prose.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumble bee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Though of course they do. Another resonance is historical. Approximately the same age as the 20th century, Nabokov's loss of his golden childhood world with the Russian Revolution in 1919 coincides with the western world's loss of a way of life. The Great War ended England's long Edwardian afternoon; the countries on both sides were never the same after the loss of a generation and the economic destruction of the war.

The intensity also comes from his surprising and piercing images. For example, he ends one chapter recalling how his father used to be summoned from the dinner table to mediate some local disagreement. The gratitude of the peasants tended to take the form of tossing him up in the air three times, like the old woman of song tossed up in a blanket. Nabokov sees him through the window:

There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky.

Note the unexpected, yet perfect word choices: “sprawling”, “imperturbable”.

These incidents remind me of the advice from noted memoirist, William Zinsser, whom I often quote in my workshops: “ Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life.” It's up to you to delve into them to discover that truth.

I wanted to talk more about the structure. Each chapter is a perfect circle, ending where it began. Or perhaps a spiral: “In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.” After all, we arrive at the end with a deeper understanding, a more intense experience. The book as a whole follows the same pattern, with a most satisfying ending that pulls together unexpected pieces.

In this book Nabokov is concerned with the workings of time and memory and loss. He uses certain themes or threads to stitch together his thoughts. Some are obvious like his Lepidoptera adventures, and some more subtle, such as the rainbow theme.

Speak, Memory is on a couple of lists of best nonfiction books, one of the 20th century and one of all time. It is a true masterpiece, stunning on every level.

This graphic novel, a gift from my dear friend, Kate, is a fabulous introduction to the Civil Rights Movement for those too young to tackle Taylor Branch's trilogy. Nate Powell is responsible for the dramatic graphics, while Andrew Aydin is the co-writer with Lewis. It's not a dry history. Instead, it is Lewis's personal story which makes it far more powerful.

Personal stories, truthful ones, are the way we open ourselves and learn each other's truths, the way we find our common ground.

The authors use the device of Obama's inauguration day on 20 January 2009. A woman has come from Atlanta with her two small boys for the inauguration and has brought them to Lewis's office to show it to him. Although he is on his way to the ceremony, Lewis takes the time to show them some of the mementoes in his office, one of which leads him to tell them about his childhood on a farm in Alabama.

This is Book 1. It goes up to the lunch counter sit-ins, ending with Martin Luther King, Jr. coming to Nashville to support Lewis's group. Of course I have vivid memories of the events described here. One thing I'd forgotten was how unsupportive the older generation of African-Americans were of the boycotts and sit-ins. Lewis portrays them as comfortable with the status quo and willing to accept partial solutions.

I'm sure he's right, but I also remember real concerns about giving up the separate-but-equal facilities. Just as single-sex schools allowed girls to learn in an environment where they aren't being pummeled by the social mandate to not outshine the boys, schools were a safe—if deficient—haven for youngsters of color. Similarly, many today still mourn the loss of the thriving Black centers of culture that faded away after integration.

Not that anyone wants to go back. The graphic novel format is especially effective at conveying the overt and hateful racism of the time. Though I occasionally wonder if that wouldn't be better than today's pervasive if covert racism—opposing commonsense laws simply because a Black president signed them—these pictures remind me of how much worse it was.

I look forward to the rest of the books in the series and hope they are widely read.

This novel follows Eleanor Burden, a woman with a peculiar responsibility. She has returned from a visit to Vienna in 1898 with a secret destiny. Although she lost the “love of her life”, she carries home with her a mysterious journal that lays out her future and that of the world. Once back in Boston, she marries stolid banker Frank Burden and takes her place in society while secretly pursuing the tasks assigned to her by the journal.

As she moves forward through the events of the early 20th century, such as the sinking of the Titanic and two world wars, she meets and works with many giants of history, such as William James, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. A few hints are dropped about the origins of the journal and a man named Wheeler Burden.

I didn't realise when I started it that this book is a sequel to his first novel, The Little Book. Although reviews say that it can stand alone, reading the first book, in which Wheeler is apparently the main character, would have allayed the rather frustrating withholding of information through far too much of the book. Much would have been clear right from the beginning if I'd read the earlier book.

The tone is quite distant and dry, that of someone from the future, a historian, recounting the events of Eleanor’s life and assuming her feelings and reactions based on extensive research. Documents such as letters and journals are cited, supplemented with enough dramatic scenes to keep the story alive. Due to this voice, I found it hard to engage with the characters. They seemed created to serve the plot rather than the plot growing out of the characters.

The story, though, intrigued me. Eleanor's commitment to fulfilling her destiny and her occasional questioning and despair provide fascinating insight into questions of predestination and free will. The philosophies and theories of Freud and Jung are described adroitly and fit naturally into the story. They contribute to the uncertainty about what constitutes sanity and what psychosis.

Historical details reveals the extent of the author's research. I enjoyed experiencing the grand sweep of history in a single novel, reminding of taking Western Civilisation at university from a professor who announced each new dizzying wave with the words, “We now see appearing on the horizon . . .”

Essentially a fairy tale, the story received many rave reviews. Perhaps I would not be so lukewarm in my praise if I'd read its predecessor. What sequels have you read that truly stand alone?

It's always interesting how one person can love a book, rave that it's the best book ever, and the next person find it ho-hum. One of my book clubs selected Mitchell's book at the urging of one member, backed up by glowing reviews. One professional reviewer called it a page-turner; for me, not so much.

Jacob de Zoet, an earnest and honest young man, comes to Japan in 1799—a five-year undertaking—to earn enough money to be acceptable to his fiancé's father back home in The Netherlands. Jacob and the other employees of the Dutch East Indies Company are confined to a small artificial island called Dejima that sits in Nagasaki harbor, connected to the city by a well-guarded land bridge.

No other European country has ties with Japan. Fearful of outside influences, especially Christian ones after putting down a bloody rebellion, Japan enforces a policy of strict isolation. Only on rare occasions is the Chief invited across the bridge to confer with the Chamberlain, and the Japanese are not allowed to go to Dejima except as translators, soldiers, and—rarely—students. The Dutch workers are not allowed on pain of death to bring any Christian artifacts onto the island, a rule Jacob, the son of a preacher, immediately breaks.

Arriving with Jacob is Vorstenbosch, who will be the interim Chief since the previous one passed away. He sets Jacob the task of untangling the financial records, mangled during the corrupt rule of his predecessor. Of course, curtailing their thievery doesn't endear Jacob to the others, a rough bunch of louts.

Despite my friend's recommendation, I was bored by the first part of the book: uninteresting and unpleasant characters, all familiar types; unclear plot direction; ugly environment. Mitchell embraces the trendy aesthetic of frenetic jump cuts made more hyper by the use of present tense. Short scenes are thrown at the reader with no transitions between them and no connecting narrative. There's little foreshadowing, and multiple plotlines are left hanging. I felt like I was being pelted with sharp bits of glass that may or may not ever be used to form a coherent mosaic.

The second part abandons Dejima entirely, going off into the countryside to follow two Japanese characters. At least they each have a plotline. Later we return to Dejima, but not to Jacob's exclusive point of view. We debated at some length about what purpose the second part serves and how it relates to the rest of the novel, if at all. As one member of my book club said, it is as though the second part is a different book entirely, a Gothic novel stuck in the middle of an incredibly detailed realistic novel about life in this lonely outpost at the end of the 18th century.

The details are indeed amazing. Mitchell's research is formidable, especially about the minutiae of everyday life. I appreciated the harsh realism; most historical novels draw a sentimental veil over some of the more pungent facts of life in olden days, like the bathing only once or twice a year or the primitive lavatories. There are moments when the book rises to greatness, a few passages here and there that moved me deeply and that I will remember for a long time. One member of the book club noted a small chapter from the point of view of a slave, unconnected to anything else in the book, which she called a “jewel”, so beautifully written.

I struggled with the story, bewildered by the choppy writing and lack of a traditional narrative arc. The use of the present tense puts the reader more in the moment but adds to the feeling of whiplash. But I'll caution again that just because it wasn't to my taste doesn't mean it won't be to yours. Certainly many people love it. And even within our small group, one person liked the first part and not the rest, another the second, while I really only liked the third part.

What we did agree on was the perpetual relevance of the theme of corruption and dishonesty, not perhaps the main theme of the book but certainly present throughout. While I would like to believe people will behave well even when they are not observed, many do not. One of our members told a story of a briefcase left on a subway in Japan that was still on the seat when the train completed its circuit and returned to the station, followed by her recent trip to Heathrow where someone's suitcase had sprung open on the luggage carousel; by the time it came around again everything had been stolen by the other passengers. We went on to talk about the corrupt practices in some of our city's departments. So the book is definitely a good one for prompting book club discussions.

To complete such a complex and ambitious novel is a huge accomplishment. That it didn't appeal to me shouldn't keep you from trying it. I certainly admire the book and recognise Mitchell's achievement.

How have I not come across award-winning mystery writer Thomas H. Cook before? True, this book is labeled a thriller, not a genre I usually read, but it unrolls at such a deliberate and elegant pace that it turns out to be exactly my cup of tea.

Philip Anders, a middle-aged literary critic, is shocked by the death of his best friend, the successful writer Julian Wells, at the home Julian shared with his sister in Montauk on Long Island. Though the two have known each other since childhood, Philip cannot imagine why Julian would commit suicide. He tells Loretta that he wishes he'd been there to stop him, but is flummoxed when he realises that, not knowing the cause of Julian's despair, he doesn't know what he could have said to stay his friend's hand.

To answer that question, Philip begins retracing Julian's footsteps, trying to learn where things went sideways. Although Julian wrote true crime books about history's greatest monsters, serial killers like Andre Chikatilo and Countess Báthory, immersing himself in their darkness, there is no easy answer, no new disappointment to explain his action.

Philip starts to question his own understanding, recalling that he has never understood the dedication in Julian's first book to “Philip, sole witness to my crime.” It was written after the time the two men spent together in Argentina toward the end of that country's Dirty War. The gay adventure had turned dark when their tour guide, Marisol, disappeared. The two searched unsuccessfully for her. Despite the ugliness and atrocities of the time, she seemed so transparently innocent of political involvement that there had to be another explanation.

As some of us were discussing at my poetry reading this week, one of the tasks of middle age seems to be to discover or refine the narrative of your life. Real life is a crazy jumble of false starts, accidents, and serendipity. As we blunder through, trying sometimes just to make it to the end of the day, or at most till Friday, we construct a sort of narrative of cause and effect, intention and resolution. Nearing the last part of life, many feel the need to smooth the rough patches and fit the outliers into the pattern. Julian's death pushes Philip to do just that, and he begins pursuing Julian through his books.

The writing is masterly; the pacing magnificent. I love an intelligent read like this, one that challenges my preconceptions and delivers a satisfying conclusion. My only quibble is a personal one: I hated the descriptions of the terrible crimes committed by Julian's real-life subjects. Call me lily-livered, but it seems to me that these days gore is way overdone. Television dramas complete to show the most grisly remains, the worst tortures, the most terrifying serial killers. Actually, though, as Hitchcock showed us, the most terrifying moments are the most banal: a footstep outside the shower curtain, a game by two college students, the lit window of a passing train. In retrospect I understand why the carnage here is necessary to the story; I just don't like it.

I do like the book, though; it is easily one of the best books I've read all year. It made me questions and rethink some basic precepts. Philip quotes his friend: “‘There is no more haunting story than that of an unsolved crime.'” Truly this is a story that will haunt me.

I was saddened to learn of Heaney's death this week at what seems to me now the young age of 74. In his honor I salvaged this 2010 collection of his poetry from the depths of my to-be-read pile.

What a treat it is! First the cover, a detail from an illuminated manuscript of The Divine Comedy, a row of sages in red and yellow robes, hands linked, against a deep indigo sky. The lower part, where the men stand, is somewhat damaged, the paint cracked. Their expressions vary from sad to stern to pleased.

Then there is the title, a marvel of compression, but one that seemingly holds no mystery. I thought first of the obvious: passing fire buckets and parent to child and our strands of DNA. Read on, though, as these poems draw us close and even closer to mysteries such as “a wood that talked in its sleep” or “a wrist protruding like an open spout”.

Turning to the first poem, I was beguiled. Describing one brief moment, Heaney almost casually opens it out to encompass a world of meaning. Every poem left me dreaming and thinking and rereading. His use of language, seemingly simple phrases, is extraordinary, each word, each phrase packed with meaning.

Heaney's intense focus on the smallest of details gives these brief poems resonance. This poem, where he describes three occasions when he might have embraced his father, made me feel again the last weeks of my own father's life.

And the third

Was on the landing during his last week,
Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm
Taking the webby weight of his underarm.

His poems though brief seem the result of thought and long deliberation. He takes commonplace happenings and comes at them slantwise to see them afresh. Even the small moment of being left at school by his parents yields a powerful emotion:

Seeing them as a couple, I now see,

For the first time, all the more together
For having had to turn and walk away, as close
In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.

In these poems he brings together and shares tesserae from all of his ages—climbing with Jim Hawkins into the ship's rigging, buying a used copy of the Aeneid, being carried on a stretcher, hearing funeral bells toll. Heaney fashions the final mosaics, examining the questions that absorb us at the end: what is the use of a life, my father's life, my own?

Celebrate the man. Read his work.

Like most readers, I'm attracted to a book by its cover. I've been meaning to read some of Auster's books, and fell in love with the cover to this one. It's a photograph of a completely white room, vaguely industrial, with exposed pipes and heating ducts, furnished only with a cot placed under the single window and a desk and chair. So far, we're talking about my fantasy through all the years of being a single mom working multiple jobs—perhaps every writer's dream—of a place where no one would bother me and I could just write.

However, smack dab in front of the bed, there's a white horse, standing there staring out at the reader. So even before starting to read, I know we've entered the realm of the surreal. The story starts with a man sitting on the bed in that room (minus the horse). Everything in the room is labeled: wall, desk, etc. He can't remember his name or why he is there. He's not sure if he's been locked in or is free to go. I thought at first it was a prison cell; then perhaps a hospital room, but we are not told.

Of course, by this time I'm thinking of Kafka, but I'm also thinking about my recurrent struggles to pull up the word or name that has just slipped my mind. We decide to call the man Mr. Blank. Throughout the day, Mr. Blank is visiting by a number of people who bring meals or harangue him. All the while he is struggling to remember who these people are, why he feels guilty when he looks at the photographs on the desk. Also on the desk are two manuscripts which he starts reading.

If I'd read other Auster books, I'd have twigged to what was going on sooner, but it still didn't take me long. Scary, amusing, self-referential, the story unfolds quickly. Auster is known for postmodernist games, but this brief book reads more like a fable or a cautionary tale. By coming at his subject sideways, Auster manages to surprise and intrigue a (on some topics, at least) jaded reader like me.

This 2012 novel is a departure for Toni Morrison. It's much shorter than her other novels; the language is unusually spare; and the structure sets her an intriguing challenge. My book club all enjoyed it, and found much to discuss. Home is the story of Frank Money, back a year from Korea and still suffering from what today we would call PTSD: periods of rage or lethargy, lost time that he cannot recall. We first meet him waking up in a mental hospital in restraints after one of these episodes. He has to escape, though, and get back to Georgia to rescue his little sister.

Unwilling to go back to Lotus, Georgia when he was first discharged, he has only recently found a measure of peace in a relationship with a woman named Lily, when he receives a mysterious note that says, “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.” Rescuing his sister from whatever is threatening her has been the driving force of his life, right up until he and his two best friends joined the Army to escape from the boring emptiness of Lotus. They both died in Korea, and Frank cannot bear to face their families. But he has to go to his sister, who works for a doctor outside of Atlanta, and he has to get there as fast as he can. It is not clear what city he is in, perhaps fittingly, but has to make his way to Portland—Oregon, I assume—and then to Chicago before going on to Atlanta. Once he finds her, the only place he can take her is Lotus.

The chapters alternate, more or less, with a first person narrative by Frank. He speaks directly to whoever is telling the story. The other chapters, while all third person point of view, move between the characters: one being close in on Cee, Frank's sister; another on Lily; another on Frank's step-grandmother, etc. This structure becomes an extraordinary exercise in voice, as Morrison slightly adapts the language and the syntax for each character: Cee's helplessness showing in incomplete sentences and dreamy descriptions, for example, while Lily's practicality comes across in unadorned, businesslike prose.

While the title makes it clear that this is a story about home, it is also a story about fighting: what we fight for, who we perceive as the enemy, or when instead of fighting we disappear in the night. Scattered throughout the story are incidents of the casual violence and injustice that people of color suffered during the 1950s, more widespread than those today.

At least one person in my book club remained unconvinced by Frank's return to Lotus, by his finding it no longer the straitjacket it seemed to him as a boy, but instead the ideal place to live. Of course, our view of things changes as we grow older, but to me the appeal Lotus holds for Frank is its safety. It is the one place where he and Cee are safe, just as it was the safe place his parents fled to when driven from their homes in Texas, and the place their step-grandmother came to hide from those who shot her first husband because they wanted his gas station.

While one might think Lotus is the home referred to in the title, what the story tells us is that home isn't a place. It's even more than the strong bond of family: Frank and Cee became so close because their parents, working multiple jobs, ignored them; their grandfather didn't care about them; and his wife actively abused them. No, the real home here is the community: the collection of women who nurse Cee back to health, the people who take care of the orphaned boy who stumbles into town, the men who help Frank out along the road.

I understood what my book club friend meant, though, because I too thought Frank's change a bit abrupt. The story sometimes seemed more like a fable than events naturally unfolding. Yet I read it through almost in one sitting, captivated by the characters. I finished it full of admiration for Morrison for trying something new, something so challenging, at this point in her career. I went back to look at how she created all these subtly different voices while at the same time maintaining a consistent narrative tone: a remarkable accomplishment. Read it for the story, and then admire the risk-taking and the mastery.