Real Estate, Real Mess
I must confess I thought this book would be more about the property market in DC and the experience of buying a house. And to some extent, it is about the pursuit of a house, but the focus is not really on...
All in Moderation
So go Ezekiel Emanuel’s 6 prescriptions for longterm wellness, which seem reasonable enough. Emanuel has an impressively lengthy resume as an oncologist and bioethicist at several Ivy League universities. He also worked on the Obamacare Act and thus helped to...
Grief and Survivor’s Guilt
Tara Menon’s debut novel opens with a horrifically vivid image. The narrator is at an upscale restaurant being served whole fish, when, one by one, the diners start to choke and cough, and then regurgitate pieces of a human body...
Windows into Working Women’s Lives in 1920
I may have foolishly failed to take Susan’s advice about reading Death Comes to Pemberley, but at least I had the sense to follow up on her recommendation of Women’s Hotel. From the very start, Lavery’s droll style made me...
More about a perfect family
Having read Newman’s Sandwich, I somehow felt I had to also read its sequel, Wreck. I am not sure exactly why, given that Sandwich was okay but not brilliant by any means, and its protagonist, Rocky, a mixture of annoying and lovable, sincere but...
Secrets in the Outback
The most famous novel about an Australian sheep farm is probably The Thorn Birds, a melodramatic novel about forbidden love that still had a powerful sense of place (Germaine Greer described it as ‘the best bad book I’ve ever read’,...
The infinite diasporic variations within a community
From the outset, this is clearly a very thoughtfully put together novel. The author ponders how to render her characters’ names, characters who “move within various Chinese-speaking regions of the world”, to “denote their code-switching in a way that would...
The Fruits of Inheritance
David Davidar’s House of Blue Mangoes was published in 2001 and received excellent reviews. The cynic in me wondered whether reviewers were ever likely to criticize a debut novel from an author who also happened to be the CEO of...
Lives in Transition
This is a novel about Claire and Eliot, married for decades, when Claire enters the last few weeks or months of her life, stopping cancer treatment after 8 years. At the start of the novel, Claire drops her bombshell –...
Slices of Life
Allegra Goodman’s Intuition was a delightful read. Set in a biomedical laboratory (and there are far too few books in such settings, but I might be biased), it focused on a young woman with a crush on an older postdoc...
Nuggets of observation, but too few of them
This book is slightly curious for being one of those about a black girl, but her blackness is very much in the background of the story, not seemingly all that important to her life story at all. In fact, for...
My kid’s famous. Let’s ride this train.”
People of my age might view the phenomenon of influencers with vague bewilderment. Who are these people, and why are they so famous? How do they make money? And why do people want to be influenced by them? Some, if...
Deathly cardboard characters
I was warned not to bother reading this book, but having recently been rereading many of P.D James’ Adam Dalglish novels, and even a Cordelia Grey novel, and having been utterly thrilled anew by James’ artistry and craftsmanship, I threw...
Honor killing?
In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, an Afghan family moved to Pakistan as refugees. Years later in 1997, they migrated to Northern Virginia, arriving in the dead of winter, with no extended family to help. The small, tightly-knit Afghan...
Color faultlines in 1940s San Francisco
Amy Chua is famous for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a sort of memoir, as well as recommendations for bringing up children. She is a legal scholar and has written two other books, World on Fire, about ethnic hatred...
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