This is the second book in Smiley’s Langdon trilogy, a saga about an Iowan farm family over the last 100 years.  I read the first book, Some Luck, a little over a year ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Early Warning is even better.  It covers the years 1953-1986, and Smiley deftly interweaves real life events into the lives of this fictitious family.  Rosanna and Walter Langdon had five children, four of whom married and had children, so there is a large cast of characters.  Fortunately, there is a family tree at the front of the novel, which I relied on often at the beginning but needed less and less as I read on.

Early Warning is a delightful read.  I just reserved the final book in the trilogy at my local library and look forward to learning more about many of these very human characters.

Poetically profound, this second unconventional memoir of Smith’s, describes, for the most part, her life after the death of her husband and brother.  Dreams are interwoven with reality and exotic sites are written side by side with the constants of Smith’s daily life.  There are also sections telling of her awe of certain authors who have made an impact on her and why.  Interspersed throughout this magical memoir are photos taken, most of them with an old Polaroid camera.

M Train is not the type of work that grabs the reader immediately.  Rather, I found that certain images and events of Smith’s popped into my head days after I finished her final chapter.

The subtitle for this work is:  How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World.  Another subtitle that would have been as appropriate is:  How Far Females Have Come in The United States in the Last 60 Years.  Using court cases as well as the personal experiences of O’Connor and Ginsburg, Hirshman illustrates the evolving role and the discrimination women have faced since the mid 1950’s.  To get to where we are today has been a slow, incremental process.

Sisters in Law also gives biographies of two Supreme Court Justices with very different backgrounds, philosophies and political views who still managed to respect each other and work well together.

This much acclaimed novel is, basically, the story of a marriage told from two points of view.  The first half of the book describes the marriage through Lancelot Satterwaite’s eyes.  He is loving, trusting, loyal and has a way of making everyone adore him.  The second half is Mathilde, his wife’s , version.  She has a  past that she goes to great lengths to cover up.  Despite the fact that this is a marriage fraught with secrets, Lancelot(Lotto) and Mathilde are very much in love and are good for each other.

Groff’s sentence structure-sometimes awkward,  with lots of fragments-took a while for me to get used to.  However, despite that, I found Fates and Furies an engaging, thought-provoking read.

In Afghanistan, a family with no sons is able to have one of its daughters follow the ancient custom of bacha posh.  She dresses like a boy, has tasks that a boy normally carries out, and is allowed the freedom boys in her country have until she reaches puberty.  Rahima takes on this custom and it is her narration as well as her great-great-grandmother, Shekiba, who illustrate many of the hardships women in Afghanistan have endured in the last century.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell is very interesting, easy to read and, at times, suspenseful.  Anyone who enjoyed The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns will want to read this debut novel.  I look forward to reading Hamids second work of fiction, When the Moon Is Low, which was recently published.

The perfect book for the reader who wants a good love story with likable characters.  The central focus of Allende’s novel is Alma Belasco, who is forced to leave her family in Poland at the age of eight when Hitler comes to power.  She is sent to live with her wealthy relatives in San Francisco where she eventually falls in love with the gardener’s son.  Subplots include her lover’s life in an internment camp in Arizona, Alma’s caregiver’s troubled, secretive past, as well as a host of engaging characters residing at Lark House, a retirement home.

The Japanese Lover is a work of historical fiction that pursues themes of identity, displacement, exclusion and many types of love.

Eva Thorvald’s mother leaves her in infancy in the care of Eva’s father who is a cook in a Minnesota restaurant.  Whenever he tries a new dish, he imagines how baby Eva will enjoy it.  She inherits his keen palate and love of cooking, and after years of hardship, Eva becomes a well-known and innovative chef in Minneapolis.  Along the way, she meets an assortment of homespun characters.

This is Stradal’s first novel, and hopefully his works will improve the more he creates.  Although I didn’t dislike Kitchens of the Great Midwest, it did nothing for me. The descriptions of food fell flat, the characters were one dimensional and at times the plot was disjointed.

Although this is the most recently published book by Japan’s most popular author, it is actually the first two works he ever wrote.  Written between 1969 and 1979, these two novellas share most of the same characters.  Like most of Murakami’s works, the plot is almost impossible to describe while his prose is succinct and casual.  These are not nearly as good as some of his later works, however; one can see the beginnings of a great author.

For me, the introduction was the most interesting part.  In it Murakami describes how he decided he was a writer as well as the process he used to invent his own style.

For those of you who do not like long, slow reads that touch on uncomfortable subjects, skip this blog.  For the rest, this novel was one of the best works of fiction I have read in the last decade. In a nutshell, it follows the lives of four friends from the time they are in college until they are in their late 50’s.  Of these four, the work focuses on Jude St. Francis, and orphan who, up until the age of fifteen, experiences an enormous amount of physical, psychological and sexual abuse.

Yanagihara’s writing is so accurate and realistically descriptive that there were times I almost felt I was sharing experiences with Jude and his friends.

Warning:  There are parts of this book that are emotionally difficult to read, especially sections that describe many types of abuse including cutting and rape.

A work of historical fiction centered on the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, also known as Sisi.  The novel begins when Sisi leaves her rural life in Bavaria to accompany her mother and sister, Helene, to Austria where they have been summoned to meet the Austrian Prince, Franz Joseph.  He is betrothed to Helene but falls in love with Sisi and marries her, much to the dismay of his mother.  The book ends with Elisabeth’s coronation in Hungary.  Sisi goes on to live another thirty-one years which leads me to believe Pataki plans on writing a sequel.

The Accidental Empress is a fast, easy read that piqued my interest in the Hapsburg Empire.