Simply Wonderful Books

I woke up thinking of how many book I hadn’t yet mentioned here . . . they swirled through my head in a tornado. If I didn’t have a pile seven feet tall of books on my nightstand, here are the top five books I’d re-read today:

A Fine Balance by Rohintin Mistry

“Though Mistry is too fine a writer to indulge in polemics, this second novel is also a quietly passionate indictment of a corrupt and ineluctably cruel society. India under Indira Gandhi has become a country ruled by thugs who maim and kill for money and power . . . A sweeping story, in a thoroughly Indian setting, that combines Dickens’s vivid sympathy for the poor with Solzhenitsyn’s controlled outrage, celebrating both the resilience of the human spirit and the searing heartbreak of failed dreams. “ Kirkus.

All that and also a page-turner. All his books are wonderful.

A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton

“The Goodwins, Howard, Alice, and their little girls, Emma and Claire, live on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Although suspiciously regarded by their neighbors as “that hippie couple” because of their well-educated, urban background, Howard and Alice believe they have found a source of emotional strength in the farm, he tending the barn while Alice works as a nurse in the local elementary school.

But their peaceful life is shattered one day when a neighbor’s two-year-old daughter drowns in the Goodwins’ pond while under Alice’s care. Tormented by the accident, Alice descends even further into darkness when she is accused of sexually abusing of a student at the elementary school. Soon, Alice is arrested, incarcerated, and as good as convicted in the eyes of a suspicious community. As a child, Alice designed her own map of the world to find her bearings. Now, as an adult, she must find her way again, through a maze of lies, doubt and ill will.” From the book jacket.

And written so well you could bathe in her words. Another page-turner.

Mudbound by Hilary Jordan

“In 1946, Laura McAllan, a college-educated Memphis schoolteacher, becomes a reluctant farmer’s wife when her husband, Henry, buys a farm on the Mississippi Delta, a farm she aptly nicknames Mudbound. Laura has difficulty adjusting to life without electricity, indoor plumbing, readily accessible medical care for her two children and, worst of all, life with her live-in misogynous, racist, father-in-law. Her days become easier after Florence, the wife of Hap Jackson, one of their black tenants, becomes more important to Laura as companion than as hired help. Catastrophe is inevitable when two young WWII veterans, Henry’s brother, Jamie, and the Jacksons’ son, Ronsel, arrive, both battling nightmares from horrors they’ve seen, and both unable to bow to Mississippi rules after eye-opening years in Europe.” Publishers Weekly

I dare you to start this book and not immediately fall in love.

Jump at the Sun by Kim McLarin

“With a big house in an upscale Boston suburb, a doting scientist husband and two cute daughters, Grace, heroine of this penetrating novel of family affection and disaffection, is living the middle-class black woman’s dream. But as she tends to her kids’ wearying demands, fends off her husband’s desire for a son and watches her sociology Ph.D. go to waste, she feels like “a claustrophobic in a mining shaft” and fantasizes about ditching her family. It’s no idle daydream—her grandmother Rae repeatedly abandoned her children to search for whatever satisfactions life had to offer a Mississippi sharecropper’s daughter, while her mother, Mattie, who sacrificed her happiness for her children’s, offers an object lesson in the toll that family devotion can take. McLarin (Taming It Down) weaves the stories of three generations of mothers and daughters in astringent prose (“You couldn’t be expected to live without them, but you’d better remember at all times, even with the good ones, that it was you against them,” Grace muses of the wild cards that are men). Her characters chafe against the bonds of poverty, racism and feminine stereotypes, but their deeper struggle is to resolve their longing for fulfillment with ties of the heart.” Publishers Weekly

All of McLarin’s books belong on your ‘to read right now’ list—a wonderful and engaging writer.

At Home in The World: A Memoir by Joyce Maynard

“If you don’t want to invade the privacy of J. D. Salinger, you can shun altogether Joyce Maynard’s memoir, AT HOME IN THE WORLD. Or you can skip the rest of the chapters and move on to her remarkable life. But if you follow either of the above paths, you’ll miss a portrait of a comic genius, Salinger himself. Perhaps Ms. Maynard didn’t intend to draw humor from a painful episode, but that’s what she did for me and I laughed over the eccentricity of the hermit of Cornish. Surely he’s laughing himself, unlike the solemn asses now shooting their squibs at this wry, painful, engaging book.” Frank McCourt, author of ANGELA’S ASHES

I loved this book when it came out, not just for Maynard’s portrait of Salinger, but for the all-to-believable portrait of a far too young woman caught up way beyond her own level of understanding by her relationship with the far older Salinger.