I have to start being more conscientious about my GoodReads account.

The Whistling Season is the story of the Millirons family – father, Oliver, and his young sons Paul, Damon, and Toby. The book opens in 1909, shortly after Mrs. Milliron has died, leaving the family to struggle on alone on their farm in rural Montana. Oliver is browsing the want ads, hoping to find a housekeeper, when he comes across an ad reading “CAN’T COOK BUT DOESN’T BITE.” This introduces Mrs. Rose Llewellyn of Minnesota to the Millirons, along with an unexpected traveling companion, her brother Morris Morgan.

The plot, which I won’t divulge, is fairly straightforward. The pleasure in reading The Whistling Season is getting to know the characters and the setting. Please don’t be put off by this – entertaining characters in an interesting setting are more than enough to carry this charming story.

Much of the action takes place in the rural one-room school that the boys attend – Toby in first grade, Damon in sixth, and Paul in seventh. The school is a microcosm of the small community of Marias Coulee, Montana, and we are able to watch as the values and mores of that town are played out throughout the book.

But Doig has deftly selected to frame this story with short sections that move us into the future: 1957, when Sputnik has rocked the US confidence in being the best and the brightest, and education is suddenly seen in a new light. At this time, Paul Milliron is a grown man and is State Superintendent of Schools for the State of Montana. It is his responsibility to announce that Montana is closing its rural schools and busing the students to larger schools. Not to worry, parents are assured – no student will be bussed more than a one and a half hour ride each direction.

On the eve of this decision, he has returned to Marias Coulee one more time to reflect on the impact that little school had on his life, and it is actually “adult Paul” who is telling the story. This simple device allows Doig to inform his narrator from a remove that a child – even a very bright child – couldn’t pull off. It works in the same way that the adult “Kevin Arnold”, adult narrator of “The Wonder Years,” can tell us young Kevin’s story without making him seem unnaturally precocious.  As “adult” Paul relives the role of the school in his childhood, aware that its fate – and that of every rural school along with it – rests in his  hands, he realizes,

Forever and a day could go by, and that feeling will never leave me. Of knowing in that instant, the central power of that country school in all our lives.

I was completely charmed by this book and its cast of characters. It took me back to a time past that may be idealized, may be romanticized, but touches a core of nostalgia for a simpler, more straightforward life than we seem to be able to manage today.

Grade: A

It is by no means necessary to read these books in order. While there is a sequential view of life in Holt, CO, each book stands squarely on its own. And Eventide didn’t disappoint. It picks up with the McPheron brothers, Raymond and Harold, elderly ranchers living outside of Holt. Here’s how the book opens:

They came up from the horse barn in the slanted light of early morning. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond. Old men approaching an old house at the end of summer.

This style is part of what makes all of Haruf’s writing so powerful. The spare, precise language succinctly evokes the time, the place, the people, the tone. Seemingly unadorned, these books contain some of the most beautiful and striking images I’ve ever read. The Amazon.com review hits it squarely: “Haruf’s books are so low-key and straightforward that a careless reader might miss the fact that they are about everything that life has to offer: love, sorrow, malice, understanding, and the connections that make and keep us human.”

There are several story lines to follow: that of the McPheron brothers and their teenage charge, Victoria Roubideaux; Luther and Betty Wallace, a mentally disabled couple raising their children as they try to negotiate the intricacies of modern society; DJ, an eleven-year-old boy responsible for himself and his elderly and infirm grandfather. The gist of the book is the individual struggles of these people and the small ways they provide succor to each other and others in their path.

This description may put you off by sounding sentimental or maudlin, but that’s because I don’t possess the same facility with language that Haruf does. He breathes life into his characters and situations with the most delicate of tools: exquisite writing. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Ron Charles, book editor for the Washington Post, had to say about Haruf and Eventide:

It works only because Haruf describes their ordinary tragedies in prose that’s strikingly unadorned. Their struggles are raised by this clarity to such an extraordinary vision that at the end of some chapters I was left wondering, Who in America can still write like this? Who else has such confidence and humility?

Quotations don’t do it justice, anymore than a tuft of prairie grass could convey the grandeur of an open plain. Every decoration has been stripped away, leaving a narrative that almost never hazards an interior thought or authorial comment, forcing the story to rest entirely on Haruf’s flawless selection of detail and ear for dialogue.

This is easy to do badly, as a thousand Hemingway imitators know, but Haruf never missteps, and I wish his books were required reading for anyone learning to write.

If you want to see how a true master writes, if you want to meet characters who will stay with you for days, weeks, years after you close the book, if you want to find faith in the human spirit, then pick up one of these stellar books.

Grade: A+

The blurb promised, “The Abundance is a luminous, bittersweet novel of India and the American Midwest, immigrants and their first-generation children, and the power of cooking that bridges the gulf between them.” It sounded like something I would be interested in, and I happily accepted the offer.

Two things happened which may somewhat influence my review, and I want to be completely transparent about this:

1. Due to my own technological ineptitude, there was a delay in my receiving a digital copy of the book. The publisher kindly mailed a hard copy to me.
2. During the brief delay while I waited to receive the book, I read Kent Haruf’s new novel, Benediction.

Why would this influence my review? Both novels are end-of-life stories in which the main character is diagnosed with, and then succumbs to, cancer. Both take the reader through the process of dealing with the diagnosis and, subsequently, reviewing their lives and relationships. In other words, these are similar novels in terms of content and emotional weight. They are very different novels in terms of style and form, and it’s difficult to make unbiased comparisons. Please keep this is mind as you read this.

The Abundance focuses on the protagonist’s relationship to her daughter, Mala, which has been strained through most of Mala’s life. When the book opens Mala is a grown woman with children of her own. After learning of her mother’s illness, she and her mother come to terms, and to closeness, as Mala takes on the responsibility of learning the native recipes that her mother makes. Along the way we get a good view of life for middle class immigrants trying to negotiate the terrain between the old ways of their youth and the American practices of their grown children.

On this front, the book didn’t disappoint. This is a family that only suffers cultural chasms, not poverty, ignorance, language barriers, etc., as many new immigrants experience. Majmudar does a fine job of helping us understand what those might be. I appreciated the front row seat into a way of life that is outside my personal experience.

However, for me, the book was “neither fish nor fowl” – in other words, the internal conflict of the mother (who is unnamed, which bothered me) is directed toward her children to the point that we rarely feel her own emotional turmoil. Both the physical and spiritual experience that we would expect to be part of this story are largely glossed over. We never get close enough to the children to truly understand their own conflicts and motivations. As I read, I found myself engaged in the story but always expecting something that was never delivered.

The impact of this book, for me, is synonymous with a fast food meal - my appetite is sated, but not satisfied.

Grade – C

Benediction is the third in a trilogy of novels about life in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. It seems to be somewhere northeast of Denver and light years away from any metropolitan city I’ve ever visited. Life is slower, people are more connected – not necessarily better, nicer, more tolerant, but the citizens of Holt seem to live with the agreement that they ARE each others keepers when times get hard.

And in Benediction, time gets hard for Dad and Mary Lewis. The book opens in the doctor’s office where “they could tell by the look on his face where matters stood.” Where matters stood was that Dad – so-called by everyone, related or not – didn’t have much time left. When they return home, the couple sit outside to consider what needs to be done. Mary brings him a beer.

He sat and drank the beer and held his wife’s hand sitting out on the front porch. So the truth was he was dying. That’s what they were saying. He would be dead before the end of summer. By the beginning of September the dirt would be piled over what was left of him out at the cemetery three miles east of town. Someone would cut his name into the face of a tombstone and it would be as if he never was.

It is with exactly this spare and devastating prose that Haruf takes us through the last days of a man’s life. Dad wasn’t a perfect man; he was a perfectly believable man who regrets his mistakes, loves his family, is respected by his community, and moves slowly toward redemption at the end of his life. As a man of the world, he fears he will leave only a small ripple. He has Mary drive him past the hardware store he owns, now run by his employees, and as  he looks through the window at a man making a purchase, he begins to cry. Later he says, “It was only a simple little goddam thing. That’s all it was.” When she says, “What was, honey?” he replies:

Me crying in town back there at the store. That’s what set me off. It was my life I was watching there. That little bit of commerce between me and another fellow on a summer morning at the front counter. Exchanging a few words. Just that. It wasn’t nothing at all.

But in spite of Dad’s dismissal, we see the impact that his life had – good and bad – on those who moved within his circle. We come to love and understand him. Through his eyes we see the beauty and wonder of a simple life.

The book is introduced with a definition of “benediction” – the utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness. Through Dad’s eyes, and those of his loving family and community, we experience the poignancy, the humanity, and the fragility of a blessed life.

Grade: A+

Bernadette is a complex heroine: a non-practicing architect, a past winner of the Macarthur genius grant, and a serious agoraphobic. She is married to Elgin, a top Microsoft inventor and the star of the “fourth most viewed TED Talk.” She is the mother of a 15-year old daughter, Bee, a bright prodigy at her middle-tier, eco-friendly, progressive private school. To say that Bernadette is unorthodox is more than an understatement. She is so reluctant to leave her home, she hires a “virtual assistant” in India to electronically “run” her errands; she moves her family into a building that was once a home for wayward girls; she wears a fishing vest for the convenience of having her glasses, keys, etc. readily available.

The mothers at Bee’s school (whom Bernadette refers to as “gnats”) scorn her. The architectural world she has abandoned considers her a mysterious and iconic revolutionary. Her husband fluctuates between admiration of and frustration over her, when he isn’t too preoccupied to think about her at all. Her daughter loves her.

One of the strengths that Semple brings to this story is to make Bernadette a sympathetic character, not just another eccentric crazy. You see her through the eyes of her husband and daughter, and you root for her the whole way through.

The action revolves around an upcoming trip to Antarctica to reward Bee for her achievements at school. Bernadette, of course, is dreading it, which sets off a series of events that culminate in her disappearance. The documents that comprise the book help solve the mystery of where Bernadette has gone and what she has done.

This book is often laugh-out-loud funny, and it’s impossible not to enjoy the roasting that the oh-so politically correct moms, school, and city get. But underneath it all is a story of a damaged woman who fiercely loves her family – and whose family fiercely loves her.

Grade – A

The Dinner

Lohman is a family man, living with his wife, Clare, and their 15-year-old son, Michael. The story takes place in the course of a single evening in which Paul and Clare go out to dinner with Paul’s brother, Serge, and Serge’s wife, Babette. It is immediately clear that the relationship between the brothers is tense, Paul being resentful of Serge’s success. Serge is a politician poised for a winning bid for Prime Minister. It isn’t immediately clear what Paul does, but we see right away that he isn’t in Serge’s league.

The story unfolds through the course of the dinner and the action is, in fact, separated by the individual courses: aperitif, appetizer, main course, etc. By the middle of the meal we know that Paul’s son, Michael, and Serge’s son have committed a terrible crime. They haven’t been caught yet, but the parents have come together to discuss how it should be handled. That they can’t agree is widely foreshadowed by the obviously rivalry between the men.

This is a subtle, dark book in which nothing is really as it seems. It kept me interested most of the way through although, for my taste, it was a little anti-climatic. The plot was doled out a bit too slowly, the characters became a bit unbelievable. Still, it has its strong points and may, in fact, make a better movie than the book.

Grade: B

Lust! Murder! Lies! Sex! This novel, based on a real-life event, has it all!

In 1927 Ruth Snyder and her lover, Judd Gray, conspired to murder Ruth’s husband, Albert. This is a fictionalized version of the events that led up to Albert’s untimely demise, and the famous trial that followed.

The story is a familiar one: a young, unhappy woman has made the mistake of marrying an older man whom she doesn’t love. Her husband, Albert, seems to share her ambivalence. In fact, he keeps a large oil painting of his deceased previous fiancé prominently displayed in the bedroom and has named his boat after her. He gives Ruth an amazing amount of freedom, especially considering the times, to go out with other male “pals”. It is on one of these outings that she meets Judd Gray, a handsome lingerie salesman who has his own problems at home. The two, Ruth and Judd, begin a steamy love affair that soon has turned Judd into an alcoholic and has Ruth plotting her husband’s murder. There could hardly be two more inept murderers, and the police quickly bring them to justice.

This is no who-dun-it.

At first it wasn’t clear exactly what Hansen had in mind when he decided to write about this event, which was widely chronicled at the time and about which several non-fiction accounts have been written. It seems that he was interested in exploring what brought these two morally bankrupt, but once law-abiding, people together. He has done a fine job of laying the foundation for the crime.  By turns funny, pathetic, and shocking – but never boring - Hansen lets us see how this may have transpired: the initial attraction and seduction, the manipulation, the human weaknesses. He then follows the famous trial, during which Ruth does everything possible to throw Judd under the bus. Ultimately I came away with a modicum of sympathy (tinged with disdain) for the hapless Judd. Ruth just had it coming!

Grade: B

I began with the first of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, Never Mind. This bleak and disturbing introduction to the series tells the story of Patrick’s childhood, the son of a sadistic father and alcoholic mother. The writing is outstanding, but it takes a certain amount of courage to work your way through it. I found that I needed to take a break when I was done, but I’m not giving up on reading more. I just need to gather up my courage!

Grade: A

I was very excited about the release of this follow-up novel to Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day. It follows the Coughlin family from Boston to Tampa, Florida when young Joe gets seduced and then trapped into the early days of organized crime, brought on by Prohibition. If you haven’t read The Given Day you will still be able to understand and follow the story line and characters. If you have read The Given Day you might, as was I, be mildly disappointed in this second in what is planned as a trilogy about the early 20th Century. I am a big fan of Lehane’s, but this is not one of my favorites.

Grade: B-

This one was a book club selection and, to be perfectly fair, I would never have picked it up otherwise. I’m not an Alice Hoffman fan, nor do I enjoy magical realism, so you can see that I began from a biased point of view. This is the story of the Jews disastrous escape from the Romans to the Judean desert in 70 CE. If it had not been for the magical realism mentioned above and the ham-handed writing, this could have been a fascinating story. For me, it was so irritating and annoying that I gave it up after 100 pages.

Grade: D

This was a quirky little story about a man who received a letter from a co-worker from his past that ultimately inspired him to walk 500 miles across Britain in the belief that by doing so, he could keep her alive. It was a light, enjoyable read with odd characters and a sympathetic hero that made the longlist for Britain’s 2012 Man Booker prize. Not nearly competition for the Man Booker winner, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (read my review), but an enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

Grade: B

Winner of the National Book Award, I recommend that you run to the nearest bookstore, buy a copy, clear your calendar, and immerse yourself in this outstanding piece of literature. I believe it is Erdrich’s best book yet, out of a series of great books, and will be a strong contender for my favorite book of the year. It’s a coming-of-age novel based on a young Ojibwe boy’s attempt to deal with the aftermath of a family crisis. I loved everything about this book -the narrator, the narrative, the sociological and legal issues that arise when a crime is committed on an Indian reservation, and the deft play between tragedy and comedy.

Grade: A

I am a great fan of Michael Connelly, particularly the Harry Bosch series, so when I heard in September that this was scheduled for release Nov. 26, I pre-ordered the Kindle version and prepared myself for the long wait. I was not disappointed. If you are a fan of police procedurals and/or crime in LA novels, I recommend this book. It’s genre fiction; if you only read literary fiction, this isn’t for you. If you sometimes like to read for pure entertainment, you could do a lot worse than Michael Connelly.

Grade: A

Along with the above novels, I have intermittently been reading these two outstanding short story collections by two extremely gifted writers. Although very different in style, voice, and “topics,” there are some remarkable similarities in theme. I haven’t come across one story in either collection that doesn’t pack a punch. If you like short stories, I highly recommend both.

Well, this about sums it up. As you can see, I’ve been busy reading. I’ll try to be a little more focused on getting busy writing!

Winter of the World is the second in what Follett plans to be a trilogy chronicling the 20th Century. The first book, Fall of Giants, covers the beginning of the century to the end of World War I. Winter of the World picks up with the Nazi rise to power and continues through the advent of the atomic bomb.

I think the main problem is that the story of World War II is already told, and told well. City of Thieves, Diary of Ann Frank, Maus, Winds of War, The Tin Drum – well, the list goes on and on. In order for any book on this subject to be of interest or import, it really needs to bring something new to the table. Winter of the World tells the same old story, but Follett overreaches in his attempt to bring all sides of the story together. Even at more than 900 pages, it’s a difficult task to do well.

In this book, Follett tells the story through the eyes of various characters from each of the major players -the US, England, Germany, Russia (very, very little included on Japan and the Pacific) - the same characters we met in Fall of Giants, plus their offspring. This large cast of characters results in superficial treatment of both the events and the characters. Interspersed with trite dialogue you’ll find an over-generalization of the events. As a reader, I was frustrated on both scores.

Even the greats are allowed a misstep or two, so I’m willing give Follett a pass on this disappointing book. However, I’m not willing to spend the time needed to read the last 450 pages when there are so many deserving titles on my long TBR list!

Grade: Incomplete

This is all told as my rationalization for why the laundry isn’t done, the insurance check isn’t mailed, and the floor is covered with unvacuumed golden retriever fur. From the moment I picked this book up, I didn’t want to put it down. Ever since I finished The World According to Garp in the 1970s, I’ve looked for a book that so seamlessly and completely blended tragedy with comedy, that made me laugh as it broke my heart. And – this is, to me, a plus – there is no wrestling and no bears (you John Irving fans will know what I mean). It is not hyperbole to say that this is my favorite book of the year.

There are a million reviews out there to give you a synopsis of the story. I don’t know why so many reviewers and bloggers want to tell you what happens, but I hate that and try not to do it any more than necessary. If you want to know a lot about the plot, you should look somewhere else. The title tells you most of what you need to know. The narrator, Benjamin Benjamin, fills in the details in the first chapter (titled “hooked on mnemonics” [sic]) when he applies for a certificate in caregiving:

Conveniently the Department of Social and Human Services has devised dozens of helpful mnemonics to help facilitate effective caregiving. To wit:

• Ask
• Listen
• Observe
• Help
• Ask again

As you read, you will understand how and why these fundamentals come to be revised. ‘Nuff said.

Evision masterfully weaves humor and pathos throughout this story – there are more examples than I could possibly give, but here’s a taste:

As a father and son struggle to salvage some sort of relationship, Ben observes,  “Bob and Trevor are having a moment, or at least Bob is doing his best to make it a moment, while stuck to the heel of his outstretched cast, three squares of toilet paper stir gently in the desert breeze.”

However, there are other moments when Evision forces us to look squarely in the face of those truths we would rather not ever have to face:

Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you’ve ever taken for granted, every plan or possibility you’ve ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you’ve ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant. Sooner or later, it will happen. So prepare yourself. Be ready not to be ready. Be ready to be brought to your knees and beaten to dust. Because no stable foundation, no act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from this fact: nothing is indestructible.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this book is one of despair or hopelessness – quite the opposite. Ultimately you are left with the feeling that there is nothing that can’t be overcome. When you close the cover (or slide the power switch) you will feel good, you will have faith restored. You will believe that you can triumph over adversity – or at least survive it. Just remember to ask, listen, observe, help, and ask again.

Grade: A+