B. Morrison's Blog, page 19

What Comes Next and How to Like It? by Abigail Thomas

There are many ways to write a memoir. You can make it a mostly chronological narrative of a particular time in your life—a small, self-contained period—as I did in my memoir Innocent. Still working chronolgoically, you can hopscotch through the years following a particular object or relationship, as J. R. Moehringer did in The Tender Bar. You can concentrate on a particular incident and explore how it ripples through the rest of your life, as Marguerite Duras did in The Lover.

You can abandon...

Matrix, by Lauren Groff

In 1148, Marie de France at 17 has been running her family’s estates since the death of her parents and trying to avoid coming to the attention of Eleanor of Aquitaine, with whom she has a familial connection. When Eleanor does notice her, she declares the tall, sturdy girl with a rural accent too gauche for marriage or life at court, and sends her to England to be prioress of a run-down abbey.

Initially homesick and shocked by the poverty and near-starvation of the nuns, Marie summons the stre...

The Great Alone, by Kristin Hannah

Thirteen-year-old Leni Allbright is used to her family picking up and moving on the spur of the moment. Now, her father Ernt, having lost yet another job, has decided to move them to Alaska where they will live off the grid on land he has suddenly inherited from his Vietnam War buddy. Leni hopes this will be the new start that will make everything okay and—a great reader—she’s excited to be going to the place Jack London called the Great Alone. Her frail, former hippie mother Cora will follow ...

This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, by Jacqueline Winspear

I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging memoir from the author of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. Some of the themes and settings will be familiar to readers of those novels. Here, Winspear deftly adds family stories to her own memories of growing up in a working-class family in post-war England.

It is the war, both wars, that color their lives. Her grandfather’s shellshock from the Great War makes him hard to live with, panicking at the sound of a dropped pan. Her father, who could never bear lou...

The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

In this entertaining new book from the author of A Gentleman in Moscow, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is returned to his family’s farm in June of 1954 by the warden of the work farm where the young man has just served a brief term for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett has a well-thought-out plan for how to create a stable life for himself and his younger brother. The boys’ mother has long been out of the picture, so since their father’s death, eight-year-old Billy has been staying with neighbors, Mr...

The Magician, by Colm Tóibín

Tóibín has long been one of my favorite authors. This new story of the life and times of author Thomas Mann rises to an even higher level. Born in a provincial German town in 1875, Mann navigates his birth family’s dynamics, formed by his conservative and proper father and his lovely and unpredictable Brazilian mother. His much older brother Heinrich is the favored one, expected to become a famous writer, so Thomas keeps his own ambitions to himself. He must also hide his homosexual desires.

Th...

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I played hooky today, lured by the beautiful weather to work in the garden instead of writing the blog post I’d planned.

As I dug in the dirt, I was reminded, as I always am this time of year, of this wonderful children’s book. Ten-year-old Mary Lennox, orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India where she lived with her parents, is sent to Yorkshire to live with her cantankerous uncle in his gloomy house on the moors. There is a walled garden that has been locked and hidden ever since her aunt’s d...

Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce

London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle.

She became fascinated with the golden beet...

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

While all Colson Whitehead’s novels are well-written, their subjects and genres vary widely, much as Graham Greene wrote literary novels like The Power and the Glory and what he called “entertainments.” After The Underground Railroad and the wrenching Nickel Boys, Whitehead seems ready for something a bit lighter. Harlem Shuffle is entertaining, for sure, with serious undertones.

Ray owns a used furniture store in late 1950s and early 1960s Harlem. He’s always on the alert for an angle, milking...

Wrecks and Ruins, by Eric Goodman

The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi values the beauty of things that are imperfect, unfinished or ephemeral. Drawing on Buddhist concepts of the fleeting nature of this world and life’s inescapable suffering, the wabi-sabi aesthetic differs from Western ideals of beauty and perfection, based on those of ancient Greece.

In this engaging story, Stuart goes beyond wabi-sabi. Having decided that “some items held more weight—more meaning—when distressed or damaged,” he collects shards of brick from to...