What I'm Reading Now

I LOVE this series:

In the #1 New York Times bestseller Moscow Rules, Gabriel Allon brought down the most dangerous man in the world. But he made one mistake. Leaving him alive…

Over the course of a brilliant career, Daniel Silva has established himself as the “gold standard” of thriller writers (Dallas Morning News), a “master writer of espionage and intrigue” (The Cincinnati Enquirer), and the creator of “some of the most exciting spy fiction since Ian Fleming put down his martini and invented James Bond” (Rocky Mountain News). Now Silva takes that fiction—and his hero, the enigmatic art restorer and assassin Gabriel Allon—to a whole new level, delivering a riveting tale of vengeance that entertains as well as enlightens.

Six months after the dramatic conclusion of Moscow Rules, Gabriel has returned to the tan hills of Umbria to resume his honeymoon with his new wife, Chiara, and restore a seventeenth-century altarpiece for the Vatican. But his idyllic world is once again thrown into turmoil with shocking news from London. The defector and former Russian intelligence officer Grigori Bulganov, who saved Gabriel’s life in Moscow, has vanished without a trace. British intelligence is sure he was a double agent all along, but Gabriel knows better. He also knows he made a promise.

Do you know what we do with traitors, Gabriel? Many things have changed in Russia since the fall of Communism. But the punishment for betrayal remains the same. Promise me one thing, Gabriel. Promise me I won't end up in an unmarked grave.

In the days to come, Gabriel and his team of operatives will find themselves in a deadly duel of nerve and wits with one of the world's most ruthless men: the murderous Russian oligarch and arms dealer Ivan Kharkov. It will take him from a quiet mews in London, to the shores of Lake Como, to the glittering streets of Geneva and Zurich, and, finally, to a heart-stopping climax in the snowbound birch forests of Russia. Faced with the prospect of losing the one thing he holds most dear, Gabriel will be tested in ways he never imagined possible. And his life will never be the same.

Filled with breathtaking turns of plot and sophisticated prose, and populated by a remarkable cast of characters, The Defector is more than the most explosive thriller of the year. It is a searing tale of love, vengeance and courage created by the writer whom the critics call "the perfect guide to the dangerous forces shaping our world" (Orlando Sentinel). And it is Daniel Silva's finest novel yet.

Booking It--Influence

Are your book choices influenced by friends and family? Do their recommendations carry weight for you? Or do you choose your books solely by what you want to read?

I don't read only books that have been recommended by friends and family, but their recommendations have often led me to some of the best novels I've ever read. I hate to think of books I'd have missed if someone hadn't steered me in their direction.

So, what book(s) do you recommend that I read? I'm open for suggestions.

My Next Listen

Talk about sensual prose . . .

My newest audiobook is enthralling. I was hooked from the very beginning--as much by the language as by the plot.

(Simon and Schuster Audio; 15 hours and 40 minutes; Narrated by Bianca Amato and Jill Tanner)

Amazon.com Review

Settle down to enjoy a rousing good ghost story with Diane Setterfield's debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Setterfield has rejuvenated the genre with this closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths. She never cheats by pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this atmospheric story hangs together perfectly.
There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father's shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it's the truth. Because of a biography that Margaret has written about brothers, Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. At their initial meeting, the conversation begins:

"You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone."

She [Vida] shrugged. "It's my profession. I'm a storyteller."

"I am a biographer, I work with facts."

The game is afoot and Margaret must spend some time sorting out whether or not Vida is actually ready to tell the whole truth. There is more here of Margaret discovering than of Vida cooperating wholeheartedly, but that is part of Vida's plan. The transformative power of truth informs the lives of both women by story's end, and The Thirteenth Tale is finally and convincingly told. --Valerie Ryan

My New Listen

This book has been recommended to me by several people over the last few years, but I'd never found (or made, I guess) the time to read it. So, after a recent recommendation, I decided to make it my next audiobook. I'm about two-and-a-half hours into my listening experience, and I'm enchanted.


From Publishers Weekly
A fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient, this novel is an impressive achievement "a story that will make you believe in God," as one character says. The peripatetic Pi (ne the much-taunted Piscine) Patel spends a beguiling boyhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of a zookeeper. Growing up beside the wild beasts, Pi gathers an encyclopedic knowledge of the animal world. His curious mind also makes the leap from his native Hinduism to Christianity and Islam, all three of which he practices with joyous abandon. In his 16th year, Pi sets sail with his family and some of their menagerie to start a new life in Canada. Halfway to Midway Island, the ship sinks into the Pacific, leaving Pi stranded on a life raft with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After the beast dispatches the others, Pi is left to survive for 227 days with his large feline companion on the 26-foot-long raft, using all his knowledge, wits and faith to keep himself alive. The scenes flow together effortlessly, and the sharp observations of the young narrator keep the tale brisk and engaging. Martel's potentially unbelievable plot line soon demolishes the reader's defenses, cleverly set up by events of young Pi's life that almost naturally lead to his biggest ordeal. This richly patterned work, Martel's second novel, won Canada's 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In it, Martel displays the clever voice and tremendous storytelling skills of an emerging master.

Spring Break Reading

One of my goals over Spring Break was simply to read for pleasure. So, what'd I read? Well, I've finished two want-to-reads and I'm re-reading a have-to-read for my Honors Class. I'd recommend all of them.

From Publishers Weekly

Set in 1907 Wisconsin, Goolrick's fiction debut (after a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It) gets off to a slow, stylized start, but eventually generates some real suspense. When Catherine Land, who's survived a traumatic early life by using her wits and sexuality as weapons, happens on a newspaper ad from a well-to-do businessman in need of a "reliable wife," she invents a plan to benefit from his riches and his need. Her new husband, Ralph Truitt, discovers she's deceived him the moment she arrives in his remote hometown. Driven by a complex mix of emotions and simple animal attraction, he marries her anyway. After the wedding, Catherine helps Ralph search for his estranged son and, despite growing misgivings, begins to poison him with small doses of arsenic. Ralph sickens but doesn't die, and their story unfolds in ways neither they nor the reader expect. This darkly nuanced psychological tale builds to a strong and satisfying close.

From Publishers Weekly

Fans of Picoult's fluent and absorbing storytelling will welcome her new novel, which, like Harvesting the Heart, explores family dynamics and the intricacies of motherhood, and concludes, as did The Pact, with tense courtroom drama. In the small town of New Canaan, N.H., 33-year-old Mariah discovers that her husband, Colin, is having an affair. Years ago, his cheating drove Mariah to attempt suicide and Colin had her briefly committed to an institution. Now Mariah's facing divorce and again fighting depression, when her eight-year-old daughter, Faith, suddenly acquires an imaginary friend. Soon this friend is telling the girl how to bring her grandmother back from the dead and how to cure a baby dying of AIDS. As Faith manifests stigmata, doctors are astounded, and religious controversy ensues, in part because Faith insists that God is a woman. An alarmed Colin sues for custody of Faith, and the fear of losing her daughter dramatically changes meek, diffident Mariah into a strong, protective and brave womanAone who fights for her daughter, holds her own against doctors and lawyers and finds the confidence to pursue a surprising new romance with TV atheist Ian Fletcher, cynical "Spokesman of the Millennium Generation." Though the novel feels a bit long, Picoult's pacing stabilizes the increasingly complicated plot, and the final chapters, in which Mariah fights for Faith's custody in court, are riveting. The mother-daughter relationship is all the more powerful for being buffeted by the exploitative and ethically questionable domains of medicine, media, law and religion; these characters' many triumphant transformations are Picoult's triumphs as well.

And my re-read:

Amazon.com Review

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable.

Booking It--Recent Sadness

What’s the saddest book you’ve read recently?

It's gotta be Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper. Sad, but wonderful. One of the best books I've ever read. But, yeah. Sad.

P.S. It's soooo much better than the movie.

"New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult is widely acclaimed for her keen insights into the hearts and minds of real people. Now she tells the emotionally riveting story of a family torn apart by conflicting needs and a passionate love that triumphs over human weakness.
Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate -- a life and a role that she has never challenged...until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister -- and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.

My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth trying to discover who you really are, if that quest makes you like yourself less? Should you follow your own heart, or let others lead you? Once again, in My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult tackles a controversial real-life subject with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity."

What I Just Finished

"Bass, a historian of the Christian tradition and editor of Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for Searching People, dissects the elusive concept of time within the realm of Christian theology and practices. Using rich personal stories, she shares how time is truly a gift to be savored, not a tempest to be tamed. Bass understands the societal stress men and women feel to produce and provide within ever-decreasing time slots. She also knows how liberating these daily 24 hours can become when we practice living in the now. Bass's eight chapters outline her basic premise in time management: receiving each day as a gift from God. She encourages readers to open their hearts every morning in quiet thanks to God for life, to learn to structure their lives with flexible regularity, to use their time for things that matter and to live today confidently, without fear. She also discusses the benefits of keeping the Sabbath (on the actual Sabbath day or not), observing the Christian year with all its special holidays and religious celebrations, and counting days and moments with an eye on eternity. Bass's perspective and message are indeed timeless."

"A profoundly useful book. . . . It reminds us forcibly that we are embodied creatures gifted by God with time too precious to fritter or work away. In its recommendations for healing our relationship to time it is often unsettlingly revolutionary, frequently subversive of our secular culture, and always full of Dorothy Bass's honest and generous reflections on her own life. It is a pleasure to recommend it." (Roberta Bondi, author, A Place to Pray: Reflections on the Lord's Prayer and Memories of God)

Booking It--Best Recent

What’s the best book you’ve read recently? (Tell me you didn’t see this one coming?)

Hands down, it's got to be Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. And this novel would not only be my best recent read, it would go on my best-all-time list.

Gilead is set in Gilead, Iowa in 1956 with the minister, John Ames, facing death from heart disease. He has a young wife and son whom he loves deeply and decides to leave his son a family history. He tells of his grandfather, also named John Ames, a fire and brimstone preacher from back east who went to Kansas to fight for abolition and then went to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War. John Ames, his father, reacted strongly to his father's violence and became a pacifist preacher. The Ames household when all three generations lived together was one of an uneasy truce. As Ames realizes his time on earth is limited, a friend from earlier in his life who left in disgrace returns to visit. Ames' life had been a solitary one before the blessing of his cherished wife came late to him in life. As he watches his friend and wife begin to bond, he must decide whether to tell his wife of his friend's past. Marilynne Robinson (author of Housekeeping) has written a novel about fathers and sons, loneliness and love, faith and family and Gilead has received high praise. The Washington Post says Gilead is "so serenely beautiful, and written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read it."

Next on my list of recent favorites would have to be Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm always following a book trail. Sue Monk Kidd mentioned Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing in her Dance of the Dissident Daughter, and it sounded interesting. I'd already read and enjoyed Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, so based on Kidd's recommendation and my prior experience with Atwood, I'm going to give it a try.

"Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole."

A Different Kind of Postmodern Novel

I've discovered a new author to add to my "Favorite Authors" list--Jodi Picoult. A friend at Ole Miss recommended her books to me a while ago, but I've only lately had time to start reading her. So far, I've read My Sister's Keeper, Plain Truth, Change of Heart, Vanishing Act, and I just finished The Pact. I'm addicted.

What's so wonderful about Picoult is that her books are great reads, yet at the same time they are well-written and thought-provoking. You get all the fun of recreational reading without the guilty feeling that you're wasting time reading junk.

Her novels that I've read so far have dealt with the medical ethics of bioengineering, teenage pregnancy, religious fundamentalism, family relationships, faith and doubt, legal ethics, truth, organ donation, the death penalty, the "kidnapping" of a child by her own parent, alcoholism, teenage suicide, and more. Picoult explores these relevant and intriguing issues with respect, never over-simplifying them or using her novels as a soap box.

Another thing I really like about her novels is that she constantly surprises me. I can't always figure out what will happen, and she doesn't take the easy way out. Her endings are unpredictable, no deux ex machina or pat solutions.

Postmodernism is not my field (wanna weigh in here, Ian?), but, in a way, it seems like she's using postmodern techniques, but not to the extreme of Pynchon or the other famous postmodernists (this is not a criticism, just a comparison of styles). In each of these novels there is a search for "truth," yet she reveals the story through multiple perspectives and shifts in time (but it still feels linear because the reader is never confused about where a scene fits in the story) without ever revealing the one "truth" a reader of traditional novels looks for. The narrative feels "finished," yet there is rarely complete closure. She explores big questions without giving definitive answers, yet it is an honest exploration. I never feel that she's toying with the reader.

If you haven't read her yet, you should.

Stephen King's Summer Reading Suggestions

Looking for something good to read this summer? Here are Stephen King’s suggestions:

Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens (King says this novel “explains the whole Bernard Madoff mess”)

Shatter, Michael Robotham (suspense)

Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson (pirates!)

The Tourist, Olen Steinhauer (spies)

Drood, Dan Simmons (tangentially related to Dickens and very, very long)

Dog On It, Spencer Quinn ("canine noir," explains King)

Handle With Care, Jodi Picoult (legal/medical thriller)

I don't know. I'm pretty sure I'll read the Picoult. She's already got me hooked. And I love Dickens but have never read Little Dorrit. King's Madoff claim has made me curious, so I'll probably read it, too.

McCarthy-ism

I read. A lot. Reading is my job; it’s my homework; and it’s my hobby. And I read widely—fiction and nonfiction, classic literature and best sellers, crime fiction and books of poetry, memoirs and essay collections. That much reading translates into a pretty long list of books read. So how can this happen?

Every year Kane Webb, a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, writes an article I eagerly anticipate—a “Best Books of 20??” column. He chooses people he knows who are “reading addicts with interesting taste” and asks them this question:

“What was the best book you read [this year]? And why? It doesn’t have to be new, just new to you. Re-readings don’t count—unless you can make a great case.”

The column was long. It took up good-sized chunks of two pages and the whole back page of the Perspective section. And you know how many of the selected books I’d read? Two. Only two.

That’s depressing.

Of course, the brighter side is that I now have several books to add to my “must read” list. And one of those in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Two people selected it as their Best Novel and it popped up on quite a few of the “Also Recommended” lists. One reader, who’s also an English Professor, declared that this “relentless” novel caused him to “have to re-write his lectures on plot structure,” and the other said that, as soon as he finished the novel, he wanted to reread it. In fact, he says he often picks the book up just to reread the first sentence. That sounds like a book worth reading to me.

Way to go, Wroblewski!

If you’re looking for your next great read, I’d like to recommend David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I finished it late the other afternoon, and all I could do was be very still and think, “Oh my. Oh my.”

I sat there for a long time, just holding the book and thinking about the story. My mind just could not let it go. On through the evening, insights about the novel kept coming to me. Light bulb moments, beautiful connections, ah-ha!’s. The longer I thought, the more I appreciated the novel—and its author. I love it when that happens.

This novel combines what’s great about American literature with the best of British literature. And it’s a truly awesome endeavor, even more amazing when you realize that it’s Wroblewski’s first novel. (And I mean awesome as in “inspiring awe,” not as in “like, awesome, dude.”) Whatever his next novel is, it already has a place on my “must-read list.”

One suggestion: If you decide to read this novel, please don’t cheat yourself by reading any synopses, reviews, or spoilers. If you can keep yourself from reading the book blurb, even better. Give yourself the gift of coming to this novel without any information about it other than the knowledge that it’s a wonderful book. Don’t let someone else prepare you or tell you what to think. Let all the discoveries, connections, and realizations be your own. You won’t regret it.

Then, after you read it, call me and we’ll talk.

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Today is Veteran's Day. As Maya Angelou says, "How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!"