Monday, May 14, 2012

Literary Monday - 5/14/2012

Three titles so far during May:

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles - the book opens on the last day of 1937, when two young women living in a New York boardinghouse meet a wealthy young man at a jazz club.  The events of the next two days change all of their lives forever.  The descriptions of New York in the 30s are wonderful.  Towles uses a female narrator (he's a man), and she comes off just a little too hard and masculine.

So Much for That by Lionel Shriver - Shep Knacker has dreamed all of his life about retiring to an island paradise and living off the proceeds of the sale of his company.  Just as he is about to realize his dream, his wife informs him that she has cancer and that he needs to keep his job because she needs his medical benefits.  At the same time, Shep's best friend Jackson (who works for the same company) has a daughter suffering from a rare hereditary disease.  Shriver also wrote We Need to Talk About Kevin, and I enjoy her writing very much.

Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer - historical fiction set in Hungary and Paris that focuses on a pair of Jewish brothers who leave Hungary to study, one to Paris to study architecture and the other to Italy to study medicine, who are caught up in the tragedy of WW II.

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