Category Archives: Novels

11.11.14
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ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE-WORTHY OF NYT BEST SELLER STATUS

Anthony Doerr’s novel All The Light We Cannot See is worthy of its New York Times Best Seller status.  This wonderfully written book , like The Book Thief, tells a story unfolding during World War II, primarily through the eyes of children.

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Set in France and Germany, a blind girl raised by her locksmith father is brought into the middle of a search for a fabulous  jewel. The jewel is removed from the museum where her father works to keep it from the occupying Germans. Meanwhile a young German boy growing up in an orphanage with his sister is co-opted by Hitler Youth because of his demonstrated skills in working with radio receivers.

Lives intersect during the search for the missing jewel and for the location of a hidden French Resistance radio transmitter, located where else but in the attic of the young girls uncle’s home in Brittany where she has fled from the German occupation of Paris.

Doerr’s organization of the novel is pleasing to the reader.  The chapter construction  splendidly carries the story line filled with suspense, intrigue,  the realities of war and wonderfully portrays the love between a father and daughter. The book moves very quickly but the reader never feels pushed or rushed.

I highly recommend All The Light We Cannot See, a very good read  for teenagers and adults. I would predict that it will be among the best novels of  2014.  Anthony Doerr  is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector and the memoir Four Seasons In Rome.  

10.03.14
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TRAVERSE RICHARD RUSSO’S “BRIDGE OF SIGHS “

Richard Russo’s 2007 novel Bridge of Sighs, published six years after his Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls, captures the rhythms of small town life in Russo’s own inimitable style. In Bridge of Sighs Russo transports the reader to upstate New York where he delivers many of life’s complexities and social issues through a wide cast of characters whose lives are interconnected through intricate webs of relationships.

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The menu of contemporary issues is complete: Racism, mental illness, bullying, teenage sex, tyrannical fathers, loyalty without love, love without loyalty, divorce, reconciliation, industrial pollution, Cancer, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.

From this churning pot of small town contradictions emerges in Venice , a world renown artist, made famous by placing on canvas  mental images of the provincial place of his boyhood. A local legend says that lovers will be granted eternal love and bliss if they kiss on a gondolagat sunset under Venice’s Bridge of Sighs. Will unrequited love appear?  Without question a good read from a great American novelist.

Also by Richard Russo: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, The Whore’s Child

08.12.14
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MARK GREANEY- SUPPORT AND DEFEND=THE TOM CLANCY TRADITION CONTINUES!

Support and Defend is the first Tom Clancy novel written exclusively by Mark Greaney  following  Clancy’ s  death in October of  last year.z

imagesIn this new book, Greaney captures  present day fears by building a tale around the theft of top-secret CIA files by an underling within the department. Shades of Edward Snowdon’s exploits are ever-present as Dominic Caruso , a familiar hero to all Clancy fans, embarks on a personal mission to retrieve access  codes to the data before  CIA  human assets throughout the world are compromised. Dominic  is  the primary character throughout this adventure with The Campus  playing only a supporting role. The President and son are missing from this adventure.

Support and Defend is fast paced and straight forward in its plot development as compared to other Clancy books.  However, Greaney puts a surprising human face upon ” Transportation Director” Adara Sherman! Not always ,” all business!”

Mark Greaney is carrying on the Tom Clancy tradition. A daunting task!

05.29.14
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THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON-SUNSET ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER

Larry McMurtry’s new novel The Last Kind Words Saloon  takes the reader on an imagery ride into the sunset of the Old Wild West that he pictured so vividly in his previous classic Lonesome Dove.  Don’t look for a traditional story line in this latest McMurtry offering. Rather, this is what I call a chapter book ,which moves very quickly through images of the fading  lives  and lifestyles of  some of the Old West’s  iconic figures.

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Through short , crisp chapters,  the reader glimpses  days and nights with Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday,  and Jessie Earp the keeper of The Last Kind Words Saloon.   You will be re-acquainted with  Charlie Goodnight, the one-time Texas Ranger turned cattleman that was prominent in McMurtry’s fabulous novel Comanche Moon.  The trail passes through McMurtry’s home Texas turf from Long Grass  to Mobetie, then on to Tombstone, Arizona and of course the O.K. Corral. Men in search of  a last frontier.

The Last Kind Words Saloon  is  a last watering hole, a lost way of life, a friend fading with age as the Old West disappears before the eyes of the very men who established the treasured folklore.  With hope , they journey with a  faded marquee, The Last Kind Words Saloon, seeking to find a new place, which time has now forever lost.

Search Gordonsgoodreads.com for other great McMurtry books including  Lonesome Dove, Comanche Moon,  Dead Man’s Walk, Streets of Laredo and The Last Picture Show. 

 

 

04.19.14
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THE GOLDFINCH-ALLEGORY TAKES WING

Since completing The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt the novel has won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Forgive me , but I had speculated that to myself prior to the announcement, after reading only a hundred pages.

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The plot is indeed complicated and the characters surrounding Theo Decker’s evolution into young adulthood evolve in pyramids of detail that can at times be overwhelming. However, Tartt never leaves any doubt as why each player in her cast influences  life choices made by the protagonist.

Park Avenue, Las Vegas, Lower East Side, Amsterdam. The societal character of these destinations is ingrained in the story. Tartt’s research and attention to subtile nuance is extraordinary. Tartt will immerse even the knowledgable New Yorker in the sounds, sights, energy and social theatrics of the city. Her descriptions remind one of  a Pete Hamill character in a smoke-filled  Daily News City Room banging on an Underwood under a green eye shade lamp at 1 AM , amid a torrential rainstorm roaring  against window panes!

Theo’s mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and there begins the connection with The Goldfinch a 17th Century painting by a Dutch Master that is worth millions. Of course, it was his mother’s favorite work of art and remains both symbolically and physically the centerpiece  and road map of the novel.

Theo’s life after his mother’s death could have been traditional Park Avenue, thanks to loving parents of a classmate. Even after Theo’s alcoholic father appears with his latest love , Xandra , and whisks him off to Las Vegas , the caring Barbour’s do not disappear. Each of Tartt’s characters stay in the mainstream until the very end, including Hobie the master of antique restoration and Theo’s only rock.

Without revealing the story, this book will take you to the worlds of drugs, antiquities, New York Society , the art world underground and dozens of subtile stops including a decaying Las Vegas subdivision offering no hope to residents of foreclosed abandoned homes. The landscape of this novel is immense and the attention to intricate detail ( Peal and Co.) and antique restoration is of the calibre of a well researched treatise on the subject. Yet, it all comes together with meaning and purpose, but not without expecting much time, thought and introspection on the readers part. The use of the editors marker was sparse.

From Theo, late in the journey. ” Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart than can’t be trusted–? What if the heart , for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civil responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly held common virtues and instead toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? ” Get the picture? Theo traversed all of the aforementioned territory and lived to tell the tale.

Other books by Donna Tartt: The Secret History and The Little Friend.

 

03.03.14
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THE LAST PICTURE SHOW-COMING OF AGE-OSCAR WEEK

It seems coincidental to be posting Larry McMurtry’s semi-autobiographical  novel The Last Picture Show on the morning after the Oscars. The 1961 book became the screen play for the 1971 motion picture adaptation starring Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman and Timothy Bottoms as Sonny ( presumably Larry McMurtry).  The picture won two Academy Awards with a total of eight nominations and was followed by a sequel based on McMurtry’s  novel Texasville. McMurtry grew up in West Texas  thus becoming the natural setting for The Last Picture Show.  Surely the book is McMurtry’s coming of age in a everybody knows everybody small town with little to do and less to offer.

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” Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. There was only one car parked on the courthouse square-the night watchman’s old white Nash. A cold norther was singing in off the plains, swirling long ribbons of dust down Main Street, the only street in Thalia with businesses on it. Sonny’s pick up was a 41 Chevrolet, not at its best on cold mornings. In front of the picture show it coughed out and had to be choked for a while but then it stared again and jerked its way to the red light, blowing out spumes  of  white exhaust that the wind whipped way.”

Enter the cast of characters, buddies, girl friends, oil field rough necks , the pool hall king, the football coach and his unfulfilled wife, Roberta ( Mrs. Popper). “When Sonny kissed Mrs. Popper outside the Legion Hall it seemed to him that the whole spectrum of delicious experience lay suddenly within his grasp.” And so goes this marvelous adventure of growing up i the 1950s in what could be a hundred other American small towns.  McMurtry’s brilliance nails nearly every nuance  of teens stumbling into adulthood.

It is fitting that we post The Last Picture Show during Oscar week. McMurtry is the author of some 40 screenplays including Lonesome Dove  and he co-authored the screen play for Brokeback Mountain. He has also written thirty highly acclaimed novels including Lonesome Dove for which he won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  The book was the basis of the TV series and the blockbuster motion picture of the same name.  Search goordonsgoodreads.com for overviews of McMurtry’s other great series of books on the American West.

01.21.14
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THE BOOK THIEF-THE NOVEL-STEAL WHATEVER TIME NECESSARY!

With a prodigious use of allegory, Marcus Zusak has written an enthralling human story of ordinary people caught in the trauma of  Second World War Germany.  In each of the captivating pages of The Book Thief,  an ethos and optimism arises from the hearts of children, momentarily displacing the horrors of the war.

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Zusak chose Death, The Grim Reaper, as the narrator of his story. The protagonist is  a young girl, Liesel Meminger, handed off  by her mother to German  foster parents after Liesel’s brother dies in her arms on the floor of an unheated rail car.  At her brother’s  burial Liesel recovers the only memory available, an abandoned copy of The Grave Diggers Handbook. Thus The Book Thief  is born. This is a story of words, an accordionist, fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist fighter, thievery, friendships, love and family and above all a relationship between a daughter and step-father.

The Book Thief is a portrait of how war and the Holocaust causes ordinary people and families  to reshape their lives to survive.  Meet Liesel’s step-father and mother Hans and Rosa Hubermann, her best friend and partner in book thievery Rudy and the Jew Max, hidden from  the Nazis for two years in the basement of the Hubermann home.   Zusak is such a marvelous story-teller that the journey is never predictable, even as death himself narrates the tale. The story is told so beautifully that the reader may consider clearing the time for the final 200 pages in one sitting.

A word from the Narrator: “I wanted to tell the book thief many things about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn’t already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”

I have not seen the motion picture but as stated many times before, a good rule of thumb is to always read the book first!

I highly recommend The Book Thief for readers of any age. Other books by  Markus Zusak are Fighting Ruben Wolfe, Getting the Girl and I Am the Messenger.

Enjoy!

01.14.14
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COMMAND AUTHORITY-CLANCY’S LAST STAND

So much written in the Tom Clancy novels is prescient and his final book, Command Authority, written before his death in late 2013 , is no  exception.  The latest Jack Ryan novel written with fellow writer and researcher Mark Greaney is all about the future aims of Russia connected to the emergence of the Russian mob following the collapse of the USSR.  Who fills the vacuum and what are the aims of Clancy’s new villains?

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Clancy casts a wide net in Command Authority including  Swiss bankers and secret organizations formed from the remnants of the old KGB.  There is government corporate takeovers with millions of unaccounted funds to trail to money laundering though numbered  Swiss accounts.  Topping the  greed list is the lust for power by the new elite in the Kremlin eager to reclaim lost Russian territory and international prestige. Of course there is abundant hardware in hand and in the air.

In the middle of all of the intrigue is President Jack Ryan, Jack Ryan Jr. and of course  important roles for John Clark, Ding Chavez, Dominic Caruso and Sam Driscoll. Clancy cleverly creates a flash back sub-plot to Jack Ryan Sr’s  former career at CIA in England which directly connects to the present day un coverings there by his son Jack Ryan Jr.   The stories intersect perfectly in typical Clancy fashion.

For Clancy fans, place me at the top of the list, it is sad contemplate the end off this wonderful series.  It has always been difficult to choose favorites because each resonates with its place in time.  Tom Clancy was brilliant in introducing his characters squarely in the middle of the action , always on the edge of reality.  I will miss wondering if the Clancy story unfolding in his novels will be on the front page of the morning paper.  In many cases Tom Clancy has come very close!

Enjoy Command Authority and reflect on the previous seventeen wonderful Tom Clancy adventures.

01.06.14
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Nebraska-No, Not The Movie

When I finished reading Willa  Cather’s  novel One Of Ours it came as no surprise that in 1923 the novel was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Cather lived from 1873  to 1947.  She was born in West Virginia but grew up in Nebraska thus the wonderfully evocative setting for this novel.

At the turn of the 20th century the generation  that inherited the pioneering industry of Nebraska’s homesteaders found themselves prospering beyond the dreams of their forebears. Fortunes were made and the Wheeler family was among the most successful with hundreds of acres of wheat, corn and abundant range. Wheeler son Claude, by the time he was 21,images had attained everything imaginable, a wife, beautiful home and a future inheritance. However, within this young man there was an emptiness , a feeling of failure, a lack of romance and a predictability that would surely deny an unfulfilled destiny.

Cather’s beautiful writing flows through the seasons on the great plains in Technicolor but though it all evolves a restlessness within Claude that separates him from the ordinary. So the evolution of this young man unfolds , carrying him to France and then the trenches  of Verdun.

Of  course, there must be much of Cather herself in these pages remembering that she lived out her life in New York City, far from the fields of Nebraska where she grew up in this pre-war era. The gathering storm of the First World War was glorified by  Over There  and The Yanks Are  Coming and  Claude, the  boy from the plains, now a young man, heard in the call to war  a glimpse of his destiny and made his decision to enlist, to see what life in a larger world might offer. Your time will be well spent  joining Claude on his journey, one that many make in their lifetime.

Willa Cather wrote 12 novels, including One of  Ours.  Others of note are O Pioneers, My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather may be an author you have overlooked.  Find the time to enjoy her writing.

10.31.13
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SYCAMORE ROW FOLLOWS A TIME TO KILL-THRILLING!

If you have been anticipating the newest novel from John Grisham get Sycamore Row now. You will not be disappointed but rather overjoyed!

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No, I do not think it attains the level of suspense of  A Time To Kill  however, the story line is captivating and grabs the reader on every page.  Grisham is never laborious and writes in a captivating an energetic manner.   The Sycamore Row plot and story line is wonderfully developed and as always his characters are  alive and real, including  the manner in which he brings forward Jake and Lucian from a  Time To Kill.  You are rooting for another victory from the first page  and Judge Atlee becomes as fascinating as Judge Noose!

I rank Sycamore Row along side another of my all time Grisham favorites Pelican Brief and The Firm. A Time to Kill remains at the top of the list. Enjoy!