Dear Great Book Guru,  Last weekend I was at a delightful dinner with friends (most delicious butternut squash soup ever!) where someone mentioned a new book about Lake Success -a neighborhood bordering Queens and Nassau- a place many of us knew. Are you familiar with this novel?

Dining with Delight

Dear Dining with Delight, LAKE SUCCESS by Gary Shteyngart is the story of one man’s search for the perfect life. Barry Cohen is a forty-five year-old Princeton grad who manages a billion dollar hedge fund and lives a life of incredible wealth and good fortune with $20, 000 glasses of whiskey and an extensive collection of million dollar watches. When we first meet Barry in 2016, his fortunes have just taken a hit - his perfect wife despises him, his perfect child has been diagnosed as severely autistic, his perfect hedge fund is collapsing, and Barry himself is being pursued by the FBI for insider trading. His solution is to board a Greyhound bus and travel cross country in search of a long-lost college girlfriend who will make his life perfect again. Barry is a supremely narcissistic character that both horrifies and fascinates us. This Master of the Universe offers us a glimpse into a world in which most of us are outsiders looking on from the shores of a mythical Lake Success.  Recommended!