Few book recommendations

In January of 2009 I was in the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans.  I had spent a few days visiting Jenn, along with my once-husband John, getting to know NOLA in the winter.  From there I was flying to Rome to meet my friend Tom, who was renting a little flat and invited me to sleep on the couch for a week.  How could I turn that down?  But wandering through the airport, waiting for my flight, slightly hungover from a night of Sazeracs, I found myself in a bookstore and bought a paperback copy of "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout.  It's a very good book, a novel in the form of connected short stories, all held in place by the character of Olive Kitteridge, not a very likable woman but one of fierce character.  If you haven't read it, do so.  (It won a Pulitzer Prize for literature, not that it matters, but is of interest.)

Yesterday I just finished Strout's current novel "The Burgess Boys" and I can easily recommend that you read this one, too, but for different reasons.  This one is more of a summer beach novel, easy to read, very well-defined characters that again are not endearing but who are familiar in a vague, personal way.  We have all known characters like these: the bossy older sibling, the younger one that stoically takes the abuse, the absent yet present parent.  A couple of twists and turns keep it lively and it ends on a good, satisfying note.  Curl up with it, you will be happy you did.  It's not a great novel but a good one.

A totally different novel is "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann. (Winner of the National Book Award.)  Dense and dark, again with characters and stories that are marginally intertwined, and each section almost seems to have been written by those separate characters, in different styles. The book isn't easy to read but it is compelling.  Most of the characters are difficult but multi-layered and human.  They have flaws and vices, their actions are unpredictable and often unflattering.  Like all of us in real life, they deal with their own demons and are often at the mercy of those demons. Grief is present (as it is in everyday life) and the characters try and wade through this grief and its accompanying sadness with the best hope of finding something redeeming.  I can't say this is an uplifting book but it isn't depressing and when it ended, I sat thinking about it for quite some time. There is hope at the end, as there is always hope in life, but it isn't easy to find.  McCann makes you care about the story, about the characters, about the links between their lives.  It is definitely worth reading.

And for something on the other side:  "The Swerve" by Stephen Greenblatt.  Non-fiction, this won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, not for its exciting writing but for the broad view of a epic poem written in 50 BC.  The poem is the philosopher Lucretius's "On the Nature of Things" and his remarkable theory that all matter is made up of tiny particles called atoms and it's the random collision of those particles that make up life.  Boldly presenting this theory at a time of religious zealotry was not just brave but scandalous. The book explains how this poem was lost and then found again in the 15th century and how its ideas were so far ahead of its time.  This book won't keep you up nights but it will make you marvel at the power of the written word, the power of scientific thought and the power of perseverance.  You can read it for an hour, put it down and pick it up a week later and be glad you did.  When you are finished you will be even happier you read it, partly because it makes you feel a little bit smarter for going the distance.