Published by Bantam Dell, 2001, 336 pages. What makes a movie great? Why are some movies memorable while others disappear into obscurity? The foundation underlying the performances and the directing is the screenplay. A screenplay can make or break a film. Going to the Movies is a combination of memoirs and a lesson on the …
A Gentleman in Moscow: Amor Towles
Published by Hutchinson / Harvill, 2017, 512 pages. “If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.” In 1922, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to house arrest by the Bolsheviks for being an aristocrat. The Count’s home at the …
Pachinko: Min Jin Lee
Published by Hachette / Head of Zeus / Apollo, 2017, 560 pages. “History has failed us, but no matter.” Pachinko is about Koreans living in Japan, a group of immigrants about whom not a lot has been written in fiction. The book starts in a little fishing village in Korea. Hoonie, a man with a …
The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Life with an Enchanting Tawny Owl—Martin Windrow
Published by Picador / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Bantam Press, 2014, 320 pages. “Shaving is tricky with an owl on your right shoulder.” Especially when the owl sees it as a game, pecking at the razor at the end of each stroke and trying to eat the shaving cream. Meet Mumble, the Tawny Owl …
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese
Published by Vintage, 2009, 560 pages. This is a rich story, interweaving the lives of people working at a clinic in Addis Ababa run by a Christian mission (known as the Missing Clinic by the local people and everyone else) with the history of Ethiopia from the 1950s to the late 1970s. Sister Mary Joseph …
Judas: Amos Oz
Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de LangePublished by Chatto & Windus / Vintage, 2016, 288 pages. “Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved. Some of …
The Cure for Death by Lightning: Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Published by Houghton Mifflin / Virago, 1996, 304 pages. “The scrapbook was my mother’s way of setting down the days so they wouldn’t be forgotten. This story is my way. No one can tell me these events didn’t happen or it was all a girl’s fantasy. The reminders are there, in that scrapbook, and I …
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Macbeth: Jo Nesbo
Translated from Norwegian by Don BartlettPublished by Hogarth, 2018, 624 pages. Original version published in 2018. A town in Scotland where the sun never breaks through the clouds, pollution hangs heavy, unemployment is high and people are in thrall to a potent drug called the brew, manufactured and sold by the drug lord, Hecate. This …
Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat—Chris Stewart
Published by Sort Of Books, 2009, 180 pages. It all began when Chris Stewart, 29 and out of work, bumps into a friend. “My great-aunt Jane has been on at me for weeks to find her a skipper [for her yacht], and I thought of you straightaway.” Which was a little odd because Stewart had …
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Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling—Philip Pullman
Published by Alfred A. Knopf / David Fickling Books, 2019, 455 pages. “[T]he image of the reader is solitary. We are each alone when we enter the borderland and go on to explore what lies in it and beyond it, in the book we’re engaged with. True, we can come back and and talk about …
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Talking About Books 