Karen’s Picks

Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey

Painter Michael Boone is trying to get his life back in order. He is a formerly “very famous” Australian artist whose art has fallen out of favor. He’s just been through a difficult divorce, and he’s responsible for his mentally handicapped brother Hugh. Michael is just beginning to paint again when a mysterious young woman walks into their lives and changes everything.

Carey has fascinating comments on art and the value and struggle of artwork. Michael “Butcher” Bones has a raw comic voice and his huge brother Hugh speaks in a great swirl of impressions. This is a strange and fascinating book if you are interested in modern art and don’t mind some raw language.

The Master by Colm Toibin

Toibin imagines the life of Henry James during a period of difficult transition in the author’s life. The novel explores the reserved and watchful nature of James who makes choices that isolate him from those he cares about the most. The lyrical writing and insightful details carried me along. You can read about how James created his novels from the everyday encounters of his life. The repressed sexuality and sense of cautious reserve led Janet Maslin to comment in a New York Times review on how the book expresses “the redemptive power of literature as a saving grace and the redemptive power of art to express what cannot otherwise be said.”

Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne

For anyone who has ever sat through a dysfunctional family gathering (that has to be everybody), this is a fascinating read. When two sisters and their estranged father come together for a family reunion at Thanksgiving, they are haunted by their different memories of the past. One of the daughters is writing a book about Mark Twain’s daughters. She realizes how their conflicts eerily mirror those of her own family. A warning by one of the guests at dinner that “families are toxic” and “blood is bloody” proves prophetically true.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This is a fascinating collection of character studies. Lincoln gathered around him all of his political enemies. Through his sense of forgiveness, his capacity to lead and sense of understanding, he shaped a team of some of the best minds of the time to help him through the devastating years of the Civil War.

Goodwin writes with such power about “Lincoln’s great troubled, triumphant life” that you get swept along by her narrative and enthusiasm for her subject. I heard in an interview that Doris felt sad when she finished writing the book, because she loved spending time with Lincoln. “He is so companionable.” I felt that way also as I finished the book.

Two For The Road: Our Love Affair with American Food
by Jane & Michael Stern

The Sterns’ latest book tells of their travels and food adventures as they eat their way across America. This memoir tells about how they met and traveled across the country since the 1970’s visiting “unlikely restaurants in small towns.”

As you read, you find yourself craving barbecue and homemade pie.

Roadfood by Jane & Michael Stern

This book makes you want to "Hit the Road," especially if you appreciate All-American diner food. Check out your favorite spots. This is a fun present for the traveler on your gift list.

Clearing Land by Jane Brox

Jane has written a poetic elegy for an earlier way of life. She includes deeply-felt memories of her own family farm in Dracut and connects these thoughts of how “the land figures in our lives, our history, and our culture.”

This elegantly written book is filled with powerful New England memories. Her earlier book, Here and Nowhere Else, tells even more directly of her own family farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One has a title derived from her immigrant grandfather’s evening toast and his hopes as he settled in the Merrimack Valley.

I love the way Jane writes about our landscape. As I drive around, I remember her descriptions of our land and our heritage.

Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh

I LOVED this book. It’s a real “old fashioned novel”. . . a family saga. As the grandaughter of coal miners, Haigh creates a whole neighborhood of characters. I began to care so much about many of them that I couldn’t wait to get back to my book. The story is set in a coal mining town near Pittsburgh in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Its neighborhoods include Little Italy, Swedetown, and Polish Hill.

There is a quote that I like from a review: “Reading Baker Towers is the literary eqivalent of rifling through a thrift shop’s rack of 1940’s housedresses.” Also, from the Chicago Tribune: “a song of praise for a too little praised part of America.”

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

The author interviewed one of Japan’s most famous Geishas before writing this fascinating novel. She told him of her life with more candor than he ever expected. As you read this book you enter a world where appearances are everything, where girls are auctioned off to the highest bidder, where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men, and where love is scorned as an illusion. The woman whose story was told (and changed in a number of ways) in Golden’s novel, wrote her own autobiography called Geisha with photos and details of her life. These books carried me into a world that I had heard of, but never could have imagined.

A Little Love Story by Roland Merullo

Janet is very smart and unusually attractive, an aide to the governor of Massachusetts, but she suffers from an illness that makes her, as she puts it, “not exactly a good long-term investment.” Jake is a carpenter and portrait painter, smart and good-looking too, but with a shadow over his romantic history. After meeting by accident they begin a love affair marked by courage, humor, and a deep and erotic intimacy.

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

The stunning new novel from highly acclaimed author William Trevor is a brilliant, subtle, and moving story of love, guilt, and forgiveness. The Gault family leads a life of privilege in early 1920s Ireland, but the threat of violence leads the parents of nine-year-old Lucy to decide to leave for England, her mother’s home. Lucy cannot bear the thought of leaving Lahardane, their country house with its beautiful land and nearby beach, and a dog she has befriended. On the day before they are to leave, Lucy runs away, hoping to convince her parents to stay. Instead, she sets off a series of tragic misunderstandings that affect all of Lahardane’s inhabitants for the rest of their lives. If you are in the mood for a sad and poignant tale, this is such a powerful book.

Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller

As the novel begins there is a death in the family. Miller shows the impact on each character with such grace and understanding that I became Lost in the Forest and couldn’t wait to get back to the story. It is a tale of love, betrayal and sexual awakening.

Franklin and Winston by Jon Meacham

“Two men . . . who through their genius . . . wit, common will, and uncommon friendship saved the world.”

Meacham writes with anecdotes, memories, and great quotes — this book is very readable. We discussed this in both of our store book groups, and everyone loved it!

Nobody’s Perfect, Anthony Lane

“Lane writes prose the way Fred Astaire danced: his sentences and paragraphs are sublime.” —The New York Times Book Review

This book is a selection of Lane’s writings in The New Yorker over the last ten years. His wonderfully funny comments range from profiles of Buster Keaton to Martha Stewart. An article on Lego blocks is followed by one on Alfred Hitchcock films.

The title comes from the closing line of “Some Like It Hot.” Lane is such a film and book lover with such an irreverent and zany sense of humor that we would read out loud to each other: “Listen to this!” “Did you read what he said about Ian Fleming or the Oscars?” This is a perfect gift book for film and book lovers.

A Hole in the Universe, Mary McGarry Morris

Gordon Loomis has just been released from prison after serving twenty-five years for a murder sentence. He returns to his old house, but the neighborhood has become run-down and dangerous. It’s a fascinating tale of guilt and the attempt for redemption — about memory and the hope of returning “home”. Morris has such sympathy for her characters and the ability to create a whole neighborhood of memorable people. Her plot drives right along to a very satisfying conclusion.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

This has been one of my favorite books in the last few years. Inspired by comic books, it’s a larger-than-life novel of the American Dream. The book is filled with golems and magic and an escape artist who in an amazing sequence leaves Nazi-occupied Prague and travels to New York. He and his young cousin begin to write comic books about the Escapist! who in one sequence punches Hitler in the jaw. They get into trouble with some Nazis and have an office in the Empire State Building and end up famous in the golden age of comic books. There is such a sense of energy, joy, and invention in Chabon’s writing that you can see why he won the Pulitzer Prize. I keep recommending this book to anyone who will listen.