Dear Great Book Guru, There are many things I miss during the pandemic, but I especially miss traveling.  We had many trips planned for 2020 and all have been cancelled.  Could you recommend a book that will transport me to a faraway place at least in my imagination?  A Wishful Traveler

Dear Wishful Traveler, I know the feeling – we keep wondering if we will ever revisit one of our favorite destinations - magical, magnificent Venice - but  I do have a vicarious literary alternative: TRACE ELEMENTS by Donna Leon.  This is Leon’s 29^th Guido Brunetti mystery set as always in Venice, and once again offering us a glimpse into the many facets of life in this most beautiful of cities. Her mysteries are always more about moral dilemmas than actual crimes. There is little overt violence and often a morally ambiguous ending. Leon calls herself an eco- detective because she writes about ecologically damaging crimes. In this novel, a young widow asks Brunetti to investigate the death of her husband. The husband had been employed by a testing company that measured the cleanliness of Venice’s water supply. Shortly after submitting questionable results, he died in a mysterious motorcycle accident. What seemed like a private tragedy, is soon revealed to have much wider implications. All of Venice is endangered and Brunetti wonders what a good man can do in the face of a global catastrophe. A disturbing call to action and highly recommended!

 

Dear Great Book Guru, With cold nights and chilly days upon us, my thoughts turn to a good read - a novel with a message…  Any thoughts?     A Chilled Reader

 Dear Chilled Reader, I recently read a short, widely admired novel you might enjoy: A CHILDREN’S BIBLE by Lydia Millet. We follow a group of twelve children - mostly teenagers - who are spending the summer together with their parents in a sprawling lakeside house on the East Coast of the United States. The children are contemptuous of their parents’ languid lifestyle. When a spectacularly destructive storm hits, the children leave the adults behind and head out on what looks like a merry adventure. They soon realize the storm is not a local phenomenon but is impacting the entire world…. the apocalypse has begun. Eva the narrator takes charge and tries to save the children particularly Jack - her young brother - who has brought along a children’s version of the Bible - a castaway from one of the adults. Jack is obsessed with the book and begins to see biblical allusions to the events around them. The children come to believe Jack’s Bible is coded to help them understand the cataclysm the world is experiencing, and we come to see this novel as a prophetic testament to the unraveling of the cosmos because of eons of neglect and malfeasance.  Frightening yet highly recommended!

 

Dear Great Book Guru, With the coming of Fall and the start of school, I feel I should add some non-fiction to my reading list.  Present day politics is always fascinating but there are so many new books coming out, I find it hard to choose.  A recommendation?  Seeking Knowledge

Dear Seeking Knowledge, Last week I read an enlightening albeit very disturbing book: CASTE by Isabel Wilkerson. Her premise is that strict, often hidden lines divide and keep us apart. Caste can be seen as casting roles in a huge production with society being the producer. Because of your role, you are assumed to have certain qualities, personality traits, deficiencies, virtues, and vices. Whatever you do, your role or caste determines the outcome. Wilkerson traces the American caste system to colonial times and the human need to have an underclass. The concept of scapegoat which goes back to the earliest stages of human history is also addressed. She spends a large portion of the book linking the caste systems of America, Nazi Germany, and India, seeing a common thread based on bloodlines, stigma, and divine will with the cruel logic of casteism requiring a bottom class for those in the middle  to measure themselves. The book abounds in anecdotes that exemplify her observations. In the end, she offers some optimism that our society will be able to move beyond present divisions to a shared humanity. Highly recommended!

 

Dear Great Book Guru,  With the coming of Fall, my friends and I  have resolved to broaden our reading- We want to explore other lands, other cultures in fast paced novels.  Where shall we begin? Eager Learners

Dear Eager Readers,  Last week I  read a book I think you will find just right: BEIJING PAYBACK by Daniel Nieh. The novel opens with Victor Li and his sister Jules meeting with their father’s attorney to discuss his estate. College student Victor has led a very comfortable life in the suburbs of Los Angeles - a basketball player with many good friends, a beautiful home, and a devoted sister. But all this changes when his father is found murdered and Victor discovers he was not a simple restaurateur but a smuggler and part of a vast international crime syndicate. He is left with enigmatic instructions to return to Beijing where he quickly becomes embroiled in a glamorous world of glitz, intrigue, and incredible violence. We go back in time to China’s leanest Communist years and the horrors of his father’s childhood. As a way to escape, he and his friends joined together to form this criminal enterprise which continues to the present, resulting in his murder.  Throughout the novel, Victor reminds himself of advice his father gave him - now all the more important - as he travels in both worlds his father inhabited.   He (and the reader) is faced with moral quandaries as he confronts the roots of his privileged immigrant experience. Highly recommended! 

 

 

 Dear Mystery Maven, I recently read a strange albeit compelling mystery by a favorite author of mine - Ottessa Moshfegh’ s DEATH IN HER HANDS.    The novel seems in the beginning a traditional mystery.  A lonely seventy-two-year-old widow, Vesta Gul, finds a neatly written note on the ground near her home - an abandoned Girl Scout campsite.  “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her body.”  But there is no body, no evidence of a murder.  Vesta decides to solve the “crime” and goes to her local library to find out how one goes about solving mysteries.  We soon learn more about Vesta than we ever learn about Magda.  At first, she tells us in glowing terms about her husband Walter, an older academic who has recently died.  As the novel progresses, we realize he was domineering, unfaithful, and cruel to Vesta.  With each presumption she makes about Magda, we learn something of Vesta’s life.  Her interactions with neighbors and even her dog show us a woman of great curiosity and kindness, but also someone who has lived an unexamined life.  Throughout we wonder how reliable a narrator Vesta is… but we always feel genuine affection for her.  Recommended!

Dear Great Book Guru, My book group is looking for a meaningful novel to discuss - something topical but also with a strong story line.  We will be meeting virtually and people have confessed to finding themselves easily distracted so we really need a compelling read.  Help!  Determined but Distracted

Dear Determined but Distracted, I have just the book for your group: SAINT X by Alexis Schaitkin. This debut novel opens in 1995 on an unnamed Caribbean Island. An affluent American family is taking their yearly island vacation to “beat the winter blues.”  It is a familiar story of leisure-seeking, racism, poverty, wealth, and elitism… but a few pages into the book the teenage daughter is found dead on the beach. The remaining 335 pages detail the impact this death has on her parents, the resort workers, their families, the aging movie star who finds her, the girl’s college classmate,  boyfriend,  teacher, and especially her seven-year-old sister.  The story jumps eighteen years and this young sister is now a fledgling book editor living in Brooklyn.  As she is about to alight from a taxi, she notices the driver’s name - it is that of one of the men originally suspected to have been involved in her sister’s death.  For the next six months, she obsessively insinuates herself into his life as she tries to learn the truth about the tragedy that shaped her life and the lives of so many.  Highly recommended!

Dear Great Book Guru, My book group has included films of interest for some of our virtual meetings, and we recently discussed Spike Lee’s DO THE RIGHT THING.  We all had so much to say about this 1989 film that I was wondering if there was a book that might stimulate a similar spirited discussion.  Any thoughts?   A Summer to Remember

Dear Summer to Remember, I just read a book that covers many of the topics your movie probably discussed, especially the sense of neighborhood and the part that it plays in our lives. James McBride’s DEACON KING KONG opens in September 1969 with the killing of a young drug dealer in Brooklyn. The highly unlikely assailant is an elderly deacon from Five Ends Baptist Church - a man known as Sportscoat.  The novel analyzes the impact the murder has on the African-American and Latino residents who witnessed it, members of the church where Sportscoat had served as deacon for many years,  the local  police, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportscoat himself. We also learn about the victim and his family… and most vividly this South Brooklyn neighborhood and the Causeway Housing Projects where the story unfolds. We see that the lives of all these people overlap in many, many ways and truth is hard to define.  McBride’s compassion for his characters is evident throughout making this a highly recommended choice!