Dear Great Book Guru, I just came home from a wonderful evening of Scottish music, drink, and poetry - the annual Burns Night at St. Luke’s here in Sea Cliff. What great fun and great conversations!  One of the musicians mentioned an engrossing new novel he had just read about a man looking back over the decades at moments he remembered and questioning why those moments had significance rather than others.  Familiar with the book? A Fan of Robert Burns

Dear Fan of Robert Burns, I’m guessing the book is BAUMGARTNER  by Paul Auster.  Like Burns, Auster takes the pieces of his life and incorporates it into his fiction. Baumgartner is a seventy-year-old philosophy professor who is deeply mourning his wife’s death ten years earlier.  It was a sudden, avoidable swimming accident and Sy Baumgartner revisits that day over and over imagining what he could have done to prevent the tragedy.  Interspersed with this memory are short vignettes of their time together, early childhood incidents living in Newark, his grandfather’s tales of life in Kiev, his attempts to remarry, and encounters with strangers that change destiny.  Throughout this short novel (220 pages), we see how Baumgartner is attempting to control outcomes and make sense of the tragedies he experiences – his and others.  A very thought provoking look at the power of memory and a beautiful love story also - highly recommended!  

 Dear Great Book Guru,  My book group just read “Two Gallants” a  James Joyce DUBLINERS short story and we had a lively discussion about Ireland then and now.  Of course, my thoughts turned  to Ireland as a setting.   I would love to read a novel or a mystery set in the Emerald Isle - perfect for this time of year or… really any of time of the year!  Lover of an Irish Setting

Dear Lover of an Irish Setting,  A few months ago I came upon a series of literary mysteries by an Irish born writer  Dervla McTiernan  (now an Australian citizen) set in Dublin and Galway.  While I have enjoyed all three, my favorite was THE SCHOLAR. The story delves into the world of international big pharma laced with sinister Irish academic overtones.  Emma Sweeney is a researcher in Galway University and lives with her partner, Detective  Cormac Reilly. Driving home late one night, she comes upon the body of Carline Darcy, heir apparent to the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Darcy Therapeutics. The company is involved in funding university research, political parties, and a myriad of philanthropic projects.  Emma mistakenly gets Reilly involved and suspicion immediately turns on her. Was she jealous of the young heiress’s recent discoveries or was she afraid her research would be found to be fraudulent? The many faceted world of scientific espionage mixed with familial intrigue leaves the reader wondering who the real villain is and…. could it be our Narrator?

 Dear Great Book Guru, Having rung in the New Year with great enthusiasm, I am now ready to begin a year of intense and pleasurable reading.  Do you have a good book to start me off?  2024 Determined Reader

Dear 2024 Determined Reader, As a Christmas present, I received a very interesting, unusual book I think you might enjoy: BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL by Jonathan Lethem.  Not a novel in the traditional sense, this is a series of anecdotes, short, short stories, musings - all connected by characters that remain nameless - identified only by nickname or type (Wheeze, Younger Brother, Bully etc.), or sometimes simply a letter (C). The book covers the 1970’s up to 2019 and is set in a small area of downtown Brooklyn - Boerum Hill.  The boys - and they are almost all boys - are living in a world defined by gentrification. Race, class and income all work to separate them but the Dean Street boys as they call themselves are linked by propinquity through the decades. The crimes they experience are at times petty and sometimes horrific, but certainly color their youth and adult lives.  Who is the narrator who recounts these tales? Only at the very end do know for sure. Critics have called this an autonovel - a fictionalized autobiography, but this work is much more: a history of New York City, a paean to childhood, a socioeconomic study of gentrification, but mostly a compelling story of lives shaped by place and time. Highly recommended!