The Chaperone (Laura Moriarty)

This historical novel tracks the real-life story of Laura Brooks, Hollywood silent-film star and famous wild girl, from the perspective of a fictional character. When Laura was 15 she had the opportunity to study dance in NYC under the condition that she travel with a chaperone. History says very little about who this chaperone was, so the author imagined Cora, giving her a back story involving the New York orphan trains. Cora is a wonderful heroine, brave and tolerant and caring. I enjoyed being in her head as she confronted and overcame the prejudices of her time and culture to bring love and joy to the people around her. In places the plot seemed a little too pat, with some people's decisions motivated more by the author's decisions than the characters', but for me it all worked. The writing is clear and compelling, though the atmosphere and environments are not as well drawn as the people are. I recommend it for anyone who enjoys historical fiction or is interested in the changes in society from the 1920s to the 1960s.

An Officer and a Spy (Robert Harris)

A gripping fictionalized retelling of the famous Dreyfus Affair that tore France apart at the start of the 1900s. Dreyfus was a Jewish army officer falsely accused of spying for the Germans, stripped of his rank, and imprisoned under the harshest conditions. Everyone from the highest levels of the government to the people in the streets believed him guilty and hated him with indescribable passion, partly because of widespread fear of Germany and partly because of rampant antisemitism. Piquart, the narrator of this tale, was as convinced as anyone of Dreyfus's guilt to begin with, but after Dreyfus was convicted Piquart took over as head of the army's intelligence division and became aware of inconsistencies in the government's case. The more he dug into it, the more convinced he became that Dreyfus was actually innocent and the German spy was still at large. His story, historically accurate but turned into an epic, fascinating novel, is one of courage and righteousness triumphing at last over power and greed. Highly recommended.

Einstein: His Life and Universe (Walter Isaacson)

A fascinating look at Einstein's life. Isaacson seems to have done impeccable research and presents his portrait of Einstein with balance but also with obvious admiration for the amazing man he was. I thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to learn more about this important character who shaped much of modern life. Isaacson even manages to give a clear overview of the basics of Einstein's science and his thinking about quantum mechanics, with no math and nothing too intimidating. It's not a detailed picture, of course, but enough to get an understanding of what was going on in that wonderful mind. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Jill Lepore)

I've never been a big comic-book fan, and only remember Wonder Woman from her TV days with Lynda Carter playing the Amazon princess. This book details the history of how Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a harvard-trained psychologist and inventor, by some accounts, of the lie detector test - and advocate of feminism and free love. This is a fascinating story because Marston is such an outre character. He was never really successful at any other career except Wonder Woman, and he very deliberately used her to project propaganda that women can and should have power over men to make the world a better place. His is a story of contradictions, though. While pressing the agenda of women's rights and independence, in his own life he ruled a small harem with a wife, a live-in mistress, and an occasional other mistress who often visited and lived with them for a time. The mistress wore a wide bracelet on each arm as "love bonds" to symbolize her subjugation to Marston; they are eerily similar to Wonder Woman's bracelets that allow her to deflect bullets. This history delves deeply into the lives of Marston and those around him, including his women, his business dealings, and his family. The author argues that Wonder Woman, by herself, bridged the gap in women's rights from the suffrage movement in the 1910-1920 time frame and the resurgence of "women's lib" in the 1960s, keeping the flame of feminism alive. I'm not so convinced. She was clearly a force for strong, independent woman in the 1940s, but after Marston died in 1947 her message was much diluted and she became a pretty face in tight clothes, focused on finding a husband rather than saving the world. One clear sign of this change: The Wonder Woman comic book for years in the 1940s had a four-page section on Wonder Woman in History, profiling strong, independent, world-changing women. In the 1950s, this section changed to one giving wedding tips. How far she had fallen.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Eimear McBride)

This is the story of a troubled girl growing up in a disturbed family, overshadowed by her brother's childhood brain surgery and her single mother's religious fixations. I admired the author's unique language, using broken sentence fragments and neologisms to convey the broken, emotionally forceful story she wanted to tell, but it didn't work for me. I was constantly focusing on the words and had difficulty pushing through them to the story itself. This probably reflects a failure on my part to appreciate the poetic rhythm of the language and how it could pull you in, stuck in my own literal thinking. but there it is. I can recommend it to anyone who is more open than I am to the abstract impressionism the author is going for here.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)

This gloriously heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel jumps back and forth through time, telling the story of the Georgia Flu pandemic that wiped out 99.9% of all humanity in a space of weeks. We meet a cast of people who faced the end of the world, some who made it through and some who didn't. We learn of their lives leading up to the disaster, getting to know who they are and where they came from. We learn of what happened to them as civilization fell apart, and for those who survived, what their world was like for the next decades. Every person is fully realized, every setting and event is hauntingly true, and moments grab you without letting go: the realization that you have eaten your last orange ever, that you will never, ever know what happened to your loved ones, that there is no choice you can make that doesn't end in disaster and death. It is a splendid story, skillfully told, and I loved it.

The Suicide Index (Joan Wickersham)

The author circles through the thoughts, feelings, actions, and images relating to her father's death decades ago from suicide. The book is truly structured as an index (the chapter titles are in outline form, alphabetized), which fits with her overall theme of trying to make sense of her father's action, to give it some kind of rational form. Wickersham doesn't try to dodge the unpleasant responses of everyone involved, looking squarely at how her image of her father shifted, how her mother struggled to regain her balance, how hard it was to talk with her young son, how survivors of suicide connected to share their silent grief. The book confidently finds the line between honesty and bitterness, between love and sentiment, as the author acknowledges the ambiguity of her situation and the lack of real answers. Highly recommended.

The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)

This story was all the rage when it was released, in serial form, back in 1859, and it's easy to see why. Sometimes described as the first mystery novel, there is a lot of mystery here, with mistaken identities, secret assignations, brooding mansions on bleak hills, dastardly villains, and impossible love. A drawing instructor falls in love with one of his pupils, who is engaged to another man, though a mysterious woman in white warns that the marriage will come to a bad end. The plot has enough twists and turns for anyone's taste, and most of the characters are fascinating, larger-than-life individuals, both good and bad. From our modern perspective, though, the central love interest is a nobody: she is lovely, and plays the piano well, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be anyone there. We much preferred her mannish, resourceful sister, and wish he had fallen in love with her instead. Still, this old book holds up well, and I can recommend it.

Lush Life (Richard Price)

This is a kind of police procedural, a will-they-catch-'em mystery instead of a whodunit. It begins by introducing a collection of colorful characters, then bringing them together with a bang when one is murdered. The rest of the story tracks the aftermath of that murder on the victim's friends and family, the police officers trying to solve the crime, and the criminals involved, all set in a gritty New York City that was a character in itself. The story is a gripping one, though I often found myself lost in the no-doubt authentic street slang. In the middle my patience with some of the more self-destructive characters flagged, but not enough for me to consider quitting before the story came to its resolution. Was there closure, redemption, or healing for anyone? I doubt it. But the story did resolve, and it felt as real as anything I've read.

Peking to Paris (Dina Bennett)

This is the author's story of a 35-day road rally across Asia and Europe in 2007, made by over 100 classic cars duplicating a trip over much the same route in 1907. I enjoyed a lot of the details of what the trip was like, including experiences in crowded Chinese cities, vast Mongolian deserts, and frustrating Russian checkpoints. The ongoing saga of their car's inadequate shock absorbers was, forgive me, absorbing. I was less enthralled with the author's harping on her overly-fragile emotional state. She was upfront about admitting that slights she perceived from other rally members evoked the angst of her 13-year-old self; I was less likely to find this charming or enjoyable in an adult. I would have preferred to spend more time on the journey, less on her inner securities. I can say that I liked parts of it, but don't feel that my life was better in any way for having read it.

Killing Jesus (Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard)

I was glad to read this book because it painted a vivid picture of what life was like in the time of Jesus (sometimes too vivid, in the case of the excesses of some of the Roman leaders). If it had not called itself an accurate historical document I would have enjoyed it more, because it was so clearly elaborated beyond what history can tell us and bent to O'Reilly's own biases. I suppose I could forgive the statements about the weather on a particular day, or what Agrippa was thinking as he stood looking out a particular window, as unimportant attempts to bring the narrative to life. But when he describes how Mary gasped in shock at finding Jesus teaching at the temple at age 12, because he had never shown such an ability before, I am left wondering how he could possibly know this, and such unsupportable insight is rampant in the text. He also ignores a lot of biblical scholarship when he assumes, for instance, that the Gospels were actually written by the specific Apostles for which they were named, or that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. All together I found it an interesting book if one is careful not to take it too seriously, but I can't really recommend it.

Orange is the New Black (Piper Kerman)

The book on which the Netflix series is based contains virtually no sex, drugs, or violence. Kerman was a rebellious young woman who got involved briefly in the drug trade after college, once carrying drug money for her girlfriend who arranged transport for the ring. She got out of the business quickly and went on with her life, but five years later the feds caught up with her, and then five years after that she was in a minimum-security Federal women's prison. What I found most striking about her story is that there was almost none of what I would have most feared, but was still worse than I dreamed. She was never attacked or even threatened, physically or sexually, though there were occasional moments of harassment. The only drugs she saw people using were those handed out by the medical staff at the prison. Until the last few weeks of her stay she never actually wore orange or shackles. Still, the system was brutal, demeaning, and dehumanizing on a level that seems carefully calculated. I was moved by this view of what life was like for her on the inside, and almost want to try the recipe for prison cheesecake.

The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)

I confess: I skimmed this book. I'm just not cut out for speeches on philosophy and reality that go on for pages and pages without a break. It's a classic, though, so I stuck to the end, all 854 pages. In the years before WWI, a young German engineer, Hans, goes to a sanitarium high in the Swiss Alps to visit with his cousin who is being treated there for TB. His visit is meant to last three weeks, but shortly after his arrival he is himself diagnosed with TB and winds up staying for seven years. During his time there other patients arrive and leave, some via cure, some via death, some via simply being fed up with the routine of the place. And routine it is, with patients spending hours each day in mandatory rest cures, constantly taking and tracking their temperatures, and indulging in five hearty meals each day. There are numerous interesting incidents--romantic infatuations, seances, blizzards, duels--but none of it seems to add up to much, at least not for me. I suppose it has given me an insight into the life and times of pre-war Europe, but that doesn't seem enough to counterbalance those 854 pages.

Family Matters (Rohinton Mistry)

This is a close-up, unflinching portrait of a family in present-day Bombay struggling with many issues. The central character for most of the book is the family patriarch, living with his two adult stepchildren, who seem to be too bitter and focused on complaining about life to have ever married. He has Parkinson's and, on one of his daily walks, is injured, putting an intolerable burden of nursing and care on these two. Across town his biological daughter is living with her husband and two children in a two-room apartment, and his relationship with them is loving and tender. How will this family deal with the patriarch's escalating needs for care when money, space, and patience are stretched thin? Mistry paints unforgettable pictures of all the people, from the patriarch to the laborers hired to haul heavy things, and the epic city of Bombay itself. My personal preference is for stories with more likeable characters; as this story goes on, there are fewer and fewer of those to curl up with. The last section of the book, which I originally took for a small epilogue but spanned at least a chapter, seemed almost to come from a different story entirely - the main character had changed in ways that did not feel entirely justified. These are the only weaknesses in an otherwise fine novel.

After Visiting Friends (Michael Hainey)

In this memoir, the author describes his search for the truth about his father, who died when he was only six. Although the people and events are drawn clearly, there seemed to be missed opportunities to bring the story to life. Pages and pages were devoted to detailing the interviews with people who had little to add to the story, but there was not enough about two core people: the author and his mother. We see both of them from the outside, from a distance, and never get to know either of them well. Though the author describes how the loss of his father colored his childhood, there was nothing much about his current life; he mentions a girlfriend in passing, but we are never told about this relationship or about anything in his professional life aside from pursuing the investigation. This made the story seem distant and passionless.

Hikikomori and the Rental Sister (Jeff Backhaus)

In Japan, it is something of an epidemic that young men who feel too much pressure become hikikomori, withdrawing from the world, and rental sisters are employed to coax them out again - here the concept is applied to a man closer to middle age who withdraws after a family tragedy. After trying for three years to get her traumatized husband to emerge from his room, his wife engages a young Japanese woman as his rental sister. The story was engaging enough, but ultimately not really satisfying. It seemed that there was too much sex involved; it distracted from the actual inner lives of the people involved. It seems to be the view of the male author that a sister couldn't accomplish what a lover could. I don't agree.

The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt)

Aside from being perhaps 20% longer than it should have been, this is a remarkable book. Theo grows up from an anxious but happy boy through tragedy,neglect, and disturbance to a broken, wounded, but still coping man. He was drawn with dead-on accuracy at each stage of his scattered life, and I cared about him a lot. Other characters were less clearly drawn or less plausible, and some of the changes he went through were not as thoroughly justified as I would have liked, but on the whole it was engrossing and touching. I am unsurprised to learn that it won the Pulitzer.

A Reliable Wife ((Robert Goolrick)

Ralph Truitt, the stern, upright titan of business in a small town in Wisconsin in 1907, long widowed, placed a newspaper ad seeking a "reliable wife." Catherine Land, who answered the ad, is not who she seems to be. We follow the two of them, their lives, past and present, and their deepening relationship, built on lies and lust. There is a whole lot of lust in this book; most of the characters seem driven by unslakable desires. The author explores in some detail life in the darkest, most depraved corners of society, as well as the life available to Truitt, who seems to be limitlessly wealthy.There are secrets within secrets here, but aside from one surprise in the middle of the book, few of the secrets are so very secret after all. I found the setting and the characters interesting and well-drawn and I cared what happened to them, even as they seemed larger than life, nearly mythic. There was more lush, slow description and is my preference, and I found myself skipping paragraphs and whole pages, especially toward the end of the book. This first novel is not without its problems, but its strengths outweigh them.

Spin (Robert Charles Wilson)

One quiet evening in October, everything changes. All Earth's satellites fall out of the sky at once and the moon and stars flash and vanish. We quickly discover that the universe outside of Earth's atmosphere is experiencing time differently than we do; millions of years pass every day. The sun rises the next morning as usual, but it's a bland imitation of the real thing, with no sunspots and no aurora. As scientists compute the time differential, it dawns on us that within a few decades we will have outlived the sun, engulfed in its swollen surface, and no matter what this barrier is that blocks us from the universe, we will die. Who did this to us, and why, and how will humanity cope? Though these events are literally world-shaping, Wilson tells it in the most personal, compelling way, by focusing on one man, following him from the childhood night when the stars disappeared to the unthinkable new world he finds as an adult. Through his eyes we observe two people, one vital to the planet, one vital to his own soul, and this makes us care. I very much liked the book. It makes me think about big ideas and about human questions.

The Forgotten Garden (Kate Morton)

This story sprawls over more than 100 years to unravel the mystery of a 4-year-old girl found abandoned on the docks in Australia in 1913. She could tell no one her name or how she came to be there, and nobody ever came to claim her; all she had was a small suitcase with some clothes and a book of fairy tales. A local family took her in, but she spent most of her life trying to discover her past. The mystery was passed down to her granddaughter, who was finally able to uncover the whole story. It was engrossing, moving, horrifying and touching, all at once. I very much enjoyed it.