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Luther Albright is a civil engineer who not only designs dams but also designed and built his own home, alert to every one of its systems, constantly fine-tuning the wiring and plumbing. His family life as well seems pleasantly under control, with a loving wife and an agreeable teenaged son. He seems to have a perfect life, until a minor earthquake exposes faults in its foundations.

Written in first person from Luther’s point of view, the events of the novel unfold through his language and interpretation. I can see why some people in my book club found this first novel bland and mundane, but I really liked it. Bezos perfectly captured the way some engineers—often the most competent—lack people skills that the rest of us take for granted. Luther was an extreme example, but I certainly know people like him.

I liked Luther. I felt for him. He thought he was doing the right things, both in his professional life and his home life, not realising that he didn’t understand his family's, his co-workers', or indeed his own emotional needs.

The story is organized around a series of “tests” to which Luther is subjected, and part of the mystery is understanding what the tests are, why they are being administered, and who the force is behind them. As Luther struggles, long-buried memories of his childhood begin to surface. I found myself thinking about the various ways we find to express love, resentment and other emotions.

Bezos did a fabulous job of taking us through these shifting relationships with friends and family. I also liked the way office life was presented. Bezos really captured those co-worker relationships: close without being close, familiar without necessarily liking each other. She described so well the way alliances shift between being competitive and supportive.

I don't think the book would have worked if written in any other point of view. For me, what made it interesting was seeing what was going on inside Luther's head. My only minor complaint was that the wife and son were a bit too good to be believable. But I highly recommend the book. There is a lot going on beneath the surface of this deceptively simple story.

This novel is set in Chautauqua, where a family prepares to sell their long-time summer home. I enjoyed it a great deal—in fact, I picked it up off a table when I was at camp (yes, adults too sometimes go to summer camp) and became so engrossed that I inadvertently walked off with it, much to the dismay of the book's owner who ended up searching all over camp for it. Needless to say, I was terribly embarrassed about having stolen his book but that didn’t stop me reading it straight through once he was done with it.

Part of what fascinated me was that O’Nan’s description of the summer home took me back to the place on the Chesapeake Bay where we sometimes summered when I was a child. The musty smell, the cardboard walls, the odd-tasting water, the cluttered garage . . . all resonated with my own half-buried memories. But it was really when the adult “children” went upstairs to unpack that a shiver of recognition tore through me. The upstairs area, where they had slept when young, was one large room with beds at either end, just as ours was.

Rounding out the physical description of the home were the shifting relationships between the family members: alliances and competitions, informed by memories of past betrayals and allegiances. These, too, made me think of my adult siblings and the way our carefully distant relationships have been altered by the events of the past year as our remaining parent slipped away.

I thought O’Nan’s book absorbing and thought-provoking, but in coming to that judgment, how much of a factor were my memories? So often my response to art—whether a book or music or visual art—depends largely on what I bring to it. There have been many popular and award-winning books that I came to with high expectations only to be disappointed, as I was with The Dante Club a few weeks ago. Would I have liked them better if I had stumbled across them with no introduction, such as happened with Behind the Scenes at the Museum back in April? There have been paintings such as Charles Ritchie’s Study for “Pike” whose fascination for me might stem from the strong memories they evoke rather than from artistic merit (however defined).

In the translation class I’m taking, we discussed Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator” in which he says that “In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a certain public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an ‘ideal’ receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man's physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”

As a writer, I understand and agree with the idea that you cannot write for the reader, but out of yourself, the deepest, most authentic self you can summon. At the same time, I do care about the response of my readers. That is to say, I want them to respond. However, readers bring such a variety of experiences, prejudices, amities and antipathies to the table that there is no way to anticipate what their response will be and, judging from my book club’s discussions, their responses will vary considerably. I like Stephen King’s image of writing the first draft with his study door closed and the second draft with the door open.

Max Morden is an “almost old” man who, after the recent death of his wife, returns to the village where he summered as a child. Despite the controlled narration and the delight he takes in language, he is clearly in a bad way and tries the patience of those around him, saying once that “if there is a long version of shrift”, that is what he needs.

Another story about a self-described “middling man”, I found this book hard to warm up to at first. The narrator is a pedantic man, precise and playful with words, but his word games, as with other tricks the narrator employs to hide his feelings from those around him and even from himself, have the additional effect of distancing the reader. This reader, anyway. I had trouble engaging with the character or his story, picking up the book an putting it down several times before it finally caught my attention through the sheer virtuosity of the writing.

If I were teaching a course on how to use vivid, unusual imagery to describe people, places, weather, mood, etc., I would assign this book as required reading. For example, Max hears a recently switched-off car “still clicking its tongue to itself in fussy complaint”, and “faintly from inside the house the melting-toffee tones of a palm court orchestra playing on the wireless.” I can’t remember the last time I picked up a dictionary while reading a novel, yet had to look up a dozen words here that were new to me yet wonderfully accurate for their context.

But what really won me over were the rare but devastating insights about childhood and loss and how memory works or doesn’t. Tossed in as almost casual asides, they made me read on, hungry for more.

The children, Max himself and the two children he becomes friends with, are anything but idealized. Max’s recollections openly portray their selfishness and cruelty, their curiously attractive coldness. One of the children is mute, though whether by choice or not is unclear. The uses and limitations of language, however, affect all of the characters and there is much employment of body language—scratchings and sprawlings and outstretched arms—as well as descriptions of freckles and noses and even body odours to convey what is happening. Max’s mother, afraid of the sea, would only play crocodile (as we used to call it) in a shallow pool but was dragged into deep water by her husband’s manacle-like grip on her wrists.

The sea is a continuous presence, binding the present to the past, enduring in the way that things do while people come and go. I would have said that I’ve read so many descriptions of the sea that no one could say anything new about it, yet again and again I was struck with fresh remembrance, thinking oh yes, I’ve known it like this.

At a certain point in life, it seems as though there is nothing left to do but count over the deaths of those we have loved and look forward to our own. Despite my initial difficulties, I was captivated by Max’s story as he, almost in spite of himself, began to reconnect with the past and present, this world and the people in it.

Natsume is one of the greatest Japanese writers. I'm told that some of his books, though not this one, are part of the standard curriculum. Written in 1910, this is the story of Sosuke, a mid-level office worker who lives with his wife Oyone in a rented house at the bottom of a cliff. Childless after three miscarriages and stillbirths, they have drawn together, contra mundum, sitting in their parlor every evening on either side of the lamp that creates a circle of light in the dark world around them.

The book opens on a Sunday, the one day of the week when Sosuke doesn’t have to work, a day of melancholy for him, longed for but so quickly gone. There is so much that he wants to do, but he usually just ends up going for a walk and visiting the public bath. Although he lives and works in Tokyo, he cannot afford to enjoy its many pleasures. Sosuke and Oyone’s precarious finances become even further strained when they have to assume responsibility for Sosuke’s younger brother. Then Oyone’s health begins to fail.

These may seem like commonplace events, yet Soseki made me care deeply about these characters. After it was pointed out to me that the Japanese language does not have as many adjectives and adverbs as English, I noticed how plain the language in this book is. Thoughts and events are recounted sparingly, enhancing the bleakness of the characters’ lives while making the rare simile, when it comes, strike with great power.

I found the beginning of this book tremendously sad, entering into the mind of a man who can hardly bear the stress and tedium of his life, yet lacks the will to make a change. What I’ve heard about the lives of Japan’s salarymen gives new meaning to Thoreau’s remark about people living lives of quiet desperation. Last year when one of the trains in Tokyo was out of service, Jeremy said that it was probably because of a jumper, adding that there seemed to be at least one suicide every day.

Sosuke begins to become friends with his landlord Sakai who seems to have everything Sosuke desires: children, success, leisure, limitless funds. Sakai has a life, as people say nowadays. In one of their conversations, Sakai talks of his own younger brother who has become what Sakai calls an adventurer, traveling in Manchuria and Mongolia, hoping to make a fortune. To Sosuke, an adventurer is someone decadent and desperate, even corrupt. Yet it is hard for me not to wish that Sosuke had a little more of the adventurer in him. I thought of Lucinda Matlock from Spoon River: “It takes life to love life!”

Some parts of the book puzzled me, but the introduction by Peter Owen, which I did not read until after finishing the book, helped a great deal. As the gradual unfolding of Sosuke’s past begins to explain his current predicament, so Nietzsche’s image of the Gate of Eternal Return, where the past and future meet, helps to explain the meanings behind this remarkable book.

I’ve almost gotten to the point that when I see “Bestseller” splashed across the cover of a book and several pages of quotes from reviews inside, I’ll just put that book down and move on. I am so often disappointed by such books. They don’t live up to one-tenth the expectations raised by the front matter. Such a hard sell makes me wonder if the publishers made the mistake of paying a big advance for what turned out to be a stinker and are now pushing the book to try to recoup some of their losses.

I was drawn to this book because I tend to enjoy literary mysteries, that is, mysteries about books and writers. Also because I’ve been reading Dante this year. There actually was a real Dante Club. In this version, the club consists of several famous authors (Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes & Greene) struggling to translate Dante's Commedia into English, under pressure from local conservatives to abandon their effort and shocked by a series of particularly gruesome murders.

Great, I thought. Right up my alley, especially since I'm currently working on translating some Italian poetry. However, I found the beginning very hard going, mostly because the point of view skipped around from one character to another—sometimes staying with each character for only one paragraph before moving on!—and the sheer number of characters jumbled into the first few chapters.

I came close to dumping it after 50 pages, but stuck with it, not just because of Dante (whose work had finally made an appearance), but also because of the time and place (post-Civil War Boston). I'm glad I did, because it got better, although not (in my opinion) reaching the breathless heights promised by the pages of praise from reviewers or the author's compliments to himself in the interview at the end. Still, I enjoyed it. Pearl did a very good job of integrating the mystery into the various threads of the story, and the historical detail was excellent.

Parker is expert at creating the sense of place that I missed so much in the Leon book. Nostalgic as I was for the Boston area when I first picked up a Spenser book, I found myself transported to the places I knew. While I didn’t actually hang out with criminals and murderers, the people in the books rang true to me, close enough to the folks I knew. I owe Robert B. Parker a great debt for his having written the Spenser books, and had the opportunity to thank him at a signing at Mystery Loves Company in Baltimore some years ago. He put on a cowboy voice and said, “Just doin’ my job, ma’am.”

Blue Screen is not a Spenser book. In fact, it is the one where two of his new series detectives, Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone, meet. I’m not alone in admiring Parker for taking the risk of creating new characters. The Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone books don’t measure up to the early Spenser books, but they are okay. In fact, a friend of mine remarked that, although movies made from books are usually disappointing, the Jesse Stone made-for-television movies have actually increased her enjoyment of the books.

Parker always does a terrific job with sidekicks. Spenser’s dryly wise-cracking friend Hawk is one of the great characters of the genre. In this book, we get at least one satisfying scene with Sunny’s friend Spike; if you haven’t met up with him yet, you’re missing something. And her father-in-law. We don’t see so much of Jesse’s deputies, whose gradual development I’ve begun to relish.

Sunny is hired to protect Erin Flint, an action film star. Erin’s husband/producer has arranged for her to be in the starting lineup of the baseball club that he owns, a publicity stunt to advertise her upcoming film and also increase the value of the team. Sunny is to protect Erin—who compares herself to Jackie Robinson—from hotheads angry about a woman breaking major league baseball’s gender barrier.

The story twists and turns, revealing secrets that tear people’s lives apart. Unfortunately, though, the book tends to bog down occasionally in long conversations between people analysing their relationship. Listening to people talk about their relationship is immensely tedious, unless it is your own of course. Sometimes even then. Also tedious are conversations between a person and his or her shrink. I would rather see those insights expressed in action.

Not that the book is lacking in action. And the changes the various characters undergo are true to life, as emotions emerge from behind the bluster and reticence frays around the edges. The puzzle, too, is satisfyingly solved and order restored.

I first started listening to this book on a long car ride, but had to switch to something else because it was putting me to sleep. Granted, I was tired to start with, but it seemed like a lot of talking with this person and that about matters not related to the crime. Later (and more rested) I found myself better able to stick with it, although still vaguely disappointed.

I think I expected more of a sense of place. I mean, Venice after all! Not that I would expect natives to rhapsodise about tourist spots, but I had hoped to understand a bit better what it is like to live there. I like the way Laura Lippman uses Baltimore almost as another character in her books. A mention or two here of the traghetto and a water-taxi didn’t quite do it for me. I was amused that I could still convert lire to dollars almost unconsciously—talk about your useless skills. In a museum in Chiusi a few years ago, I noticed they had a display of different denominations of lire notes and coins. It still seems odd that things from my lifetime are now part of history.

There were some hints of regional discrimination, organised crime and official corruption. But I wanted the feel of daily life in the city of dirt and dreams, not a civics lesson. Unfair, of course, to criticise a book for not being what I expected. I’ve mentioned before that I particularly like mysteries for their puzzle, and the puzzle here was certainly interesting.

When a long-abandoned field is plowed, some human bones are turned up along with a signet ring with the crest of the Lorenzoni family. The patriarch, Count Lorenzoni, runs a huge business with fingers in all kinds of pies. He had started with almost nothing but his fierce ambition to rebuild the family fortunes and restore the family’s honor, deeply tarnished during the war when the Count’s father betrayed the city’s Jews to the Germans.

Almost two years previous to the story, the Count’s only son, Roberto, had been kidnapped. The authorities had frozen the family’s assets, so the Count was unable to pay the ransom, and nothing more was heard of the boy. Could the body in the field be the missing Roberto? If so, who had kidnapped him and why?

Once I let go of my expectations—none of Nevada Barr’s suspenseful chases through national parks here or Ian Rankin’s devastating character development—I began to enjoy this book for what it is: a sober story with much to say about families and what can go on within them.

Songs are stories, too, even when there are no words. Every year I collect the songs I’ve been listening to over and over, and am usually surprised to find a common theme emerging. Switching from cassette tapes to an ipod has meant that my playlists have gotten longer and more dynamic. Here is this year’s list:

An Untold Story – Assaggio No. 1 In G Minor, Casanova soundtrack
Over The Rainbow, Eva Cassidy
Jamaica Say You Will, Tom Rush
Super Duper Love, Joss Stone
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes, Paul Simon
Adia, Sarah McLachlan
Everything is Free, Gillian Welch
Cowsong, Kate Rusby
The Spotted Cow, Tim Radford
Pony, Tom Waits
House Where Nobody Lives, Tom Waits
A Case Of You, Joni Mitchell
Blue, Joni Mitchell
Largo from “Winter”, The Four Seasons, Yo-Yo Ma et al
Falling In Love Again, Marlene Dietrich
Illusions, Marlene Dietrich
La Route Enchantee, Charles Trenet
Menilmontant, Charles Trenet
La Vie En Rose, Edith Piaf
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Edith Piaf
In The Still Of The Night, Billy Ekstine
Night And Day, Ella Fitzgerald
I've Got You Under My Skin, Dinah Washington
Moon Dreams (Live), Miles Davis
Vincent (Starry, Starry Night), Josh Groban
Lately, Aengus Finnan
Shenandoah, Keith Jarrett
Gypsy Round, Bare Necessities
Ramsgate Assembly, Bare Necessities
Lord Balgonie's, Susan Conant
Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
Died For Love, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
I Wish, Kate Rusby
Cruel, Kate Rusby
Botany Bay, Kate Rusby
Jamestown, Alistair Brown
A Sailor's Life, Finest Kind
The Female Rambling Sailor, Ian Robb
Clog à Ti-Jules/Bedeau de l'Enfer, Elvie Miller & Naomi Morse
The Discharged Drummer, Nightingale
The Black Isle, Becky Tracy
Theidh mi dhachaigh (Return to Kintail), Alasdair Fraser
The Dark Island, Maggie Carchrie
Cuccuruccu Paloma, Caetano Veloso
Hable Con Ella, Alberto Iglesias
Cinema Paradiso: Looking for You, Yo-Yo Ma/Morricone
Cinema Paradiso (Se), Josh Groban
Cinema Paradiso: Nostalgia, Yo-Yo Ma/Morricone
Moon River, Frank Sinatra

This is the first Kingsolver book I’ve read, in spite of numerous recommendations from friends. I found much to like in it, not least the lovely illustrations of moths and other critters on the end papers, but also much that was problematic.

The title refers to the awesome fertility of a humid southern summer, when honeysuckle can overrun a wall in a single season. The story takes place on fictional Zebulon Mountain and the small farms of the nearby town of Egg Fork, clearly in the remote Appalachians. Although the state is not named, it appears to be Virginia or West Virginia. The setting is perhaps the best part of the book. Kingsolver captures the sweet, almost dreamy, explosion of life in the southern woods, lovingly describing mushrooms, softly rotted trees, mouse-eating snakes, and moths of all kinds. She brings to life the sounds of an old farmhouse and the wavy, antique glass of its windows.

Nestled in among the other fauna are three sets of people, whose stories intertwine. Deanna is a wildlife biologist living alone on the mountain, maintaining trails, expelling out-of-season hunters and—unofficially—searching for signs of coyotes moving into the area. She meets a mysterious stranger on the trail, a man whom she finds disturbing in more ways than one. Down the mountain, where civilization starts, Lusa struggles to adapt to the farm life she has married into and the extended family that comes with it. Closer to town, two elderly neighbors feud over pesticides and the way the world has changed in their lifetime.

I enjoyed these characters and their stories. Kingsolver switches gracefully from one story to another, delineating the change with chapter breaks. However, she is less graceful at drawing analogies between the lives and passions of her human characters and those of her critters. She pounds home the comparison, not just in one chapter but over and over.

The other area where I would have appreciated a little more subtlety was the proselytizing about ecology. Yes, I’m sympathetic to the cause, concerned about disturbed habitats and threatened (and actual) extinctions. But I don’t want to read lecture after lecture about it in a novel. I’m starting to think that there is just no way to talk about any creed or dogma in fiction. So many of my stories have ended up in the shredder because they turned into rants. For a writer, having strong opinions can be a real drawback! I struggle to figure out how to set up a path without bullying the reader down it, to suggest an alternative way to frame an issue without forcing it on the reader as this book forced its issues on me.

Still, despite its weaknesses, this was the right book to read, here in the middle of my own southern summer, with the sparrows, hummingbirds, cardinals, robins, and even a bright goldfinch today swarming over the feeders; tree frogs and crickets going crazy; vines crawling over the trees by the run; and the dank sweet smell of the run itself after a week of rain.

I loved this book. It’s quite short, a series of vignettes about a young girl named Sophia and her grandmother, drawn from summers spent on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Sophia’s father appears in some of the stories, but he is a peripheral presence, busy working at his desk or taking the boat out to get supplies. They are the only people on the island.

What is remarkable about these little stories is how tough they are. Jansson enters fully into the child’s world of magic forests, special bathrobes, and visiting friends. She manages to write about that world without a trace of sentimentality and so truthfully that I found myself stumbling over long-buried memories of my own childhood foraging in summer woods, clambering over rocks and peering at insects.

Even more refreshing is the grandmother’s resilient candor. The stories are most often from her point of view, and I loved the way she treats the child, directly, as an intelligent being who could be expected to hold up her end of things. The old woman doesn’t cater to Sophia or fawn over her, not even when the girl is shouting with anger or trying to hide her fear when swimming in deep water, not even when the subject of Sophia’s dead mother comes up. Yet the grandmother—whose aches and pains are relayed without self-pity, who crawls under bushes to hide the fact that she’s smoking a cigarette, who is not above using a swear word to distract the child—will work behind Sophia’s back to carve animals out of wood or create a Doge’s palace for a pretend Venice.

I find it incredibly hard to write about children. In many stories they are either syrupy sweet or too prescient, miniature adults. The child as lonely outsider has been done to death, and the bratty, know-it-all children who populate sitcoms are just plain annoying. But this book is a perfect model for how to write about a child in a way that is new and honest.