"Behind The Scenes at the Museum" by Kate Atkinson. **

• British author
• Audiobook
• Originally published in 1995
• Review:  So-so......

"The Devil's Highway" by Luis Alberto Urrea. ****

• Audiobook
• Non-Fiction
• Mexican author
• Orignally published in 2004
• Review:  This is an intense, disturbing, horrifying, and yes, thought provoking true story of migration to the United States from Mexico.  A must read if you ask yourself why this whole immigration issue is so complicated.  

"Leviathan" by Paul Auster. ***

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published in 1993
• Setting:  Wisconsin
• Review:  I was somewhat disappointed in this novel.  Not my favorite by Auster.  A man retrospectively analyzes the decline of his friend, whose demise is explosive, literally.

"The Light Between Oceans" by M.L. Stedman ****

• Book Club selection, April 2013
• Australian author
• Debut novel
• Setting:  Australia, Point Partaguese & Janus Rock
• Characters:  Tom Sherbourne (WWI vet, lighthouse keeper), Isabel (his wife), Lucy-Grace (infant washed ashore with her dead father), Ralph & Bluey (men who make deliveries to Janus Rock)
• Review:  A tragic, poignant tale of deep pain, deep love and the consequences of both.  Stedman creates characters who are oh so human, who make horrid choices and must live with the consequences, yet are good souls at heart.  It is an engaging tale with the isolation of the lighthouse keeper's life mimicking the solitude with which one endures guilt, feels sorrow and also experiences love.  Very nice debut!

"Zoli" by Colum McCann. *****

• Irish author
• Originally published 2006
• Setting:  Much of Eastern Europe from WWII era forward
• Characters:  Zoli(poetess, singer), Stanislaus (her Grandfather),Swann (Irish/Slav, activist, writer, lover to Zoli), Stransky (wants to publish Zoli and make his fortune off of her), (Enrico, her husband), Francesca (her daughter)
• Epigraphs:
• "If you keep quiet, you die.  If you speak, you die.  So speak and die."---Thar Djaout
• :But in our century, when only evil and indifference are limitless, we cannot afford unnecessary questions; rather, we need to defend ourselves with whatever there is to hand of certainty.  I know that you remember...". John Berger, "And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos"
• To get back before dark is the art of going."---Wendell Berry, "The Collected poems of Wendell Berry 1957-1982"
• Quotes:
• "There are times in a fountain's life, Grandfather said, when even it must learn to swallow piss."
• "My voice was not as sweet as Conka's, but Grandfather said that it hardly mattered, the important thing was the right word, to pull it out, or squeeze it short, and then dress it up with air from my lungs."
• "...the owls were in the sycamores and things would never change."
• "...so many candles had been hollowed out from potatoes that there were not enough insects to gather round them."
• "There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock--perhaps that's me, or perhaps I must tell it before it's forgotten or becomes, like everything else, something else.".........Swann
• "Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it's still impossible to land exactly where we took off."
• "We're drinking off their coffin lids......". - Stransky making living from those who are doomed
• "Stransky once wrote that only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located.  So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way, becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself."
• "There are always moments we return to.  We are in them.  We rest there and there is nothing else."
• "What truly bothered her was the idea that her songs were being taken and put back together again by a machine."...first use of tape recorder
• "How strange it was to be so liked amongst those she could never quite comprehend."
• There is an old Romani song that says we share little pieces of our hearts with people and the further we go along, the less we have for ourselves until there is not enough left to go around and that's called traveling, and it's also called death, and since it happens to us all there's nothing more ordinary than that."
• "You can make them swallow any lie with enough sugar and tears.  They will lick the tears and sugar and make of them a paste called sympathy."
• "The worst burden in life is what others know about us."
• "That was one of my first lessons about the West--they do not ask twice.  You should always say yes.  Say yes before they even suggest that you might say no, say yes even before they ask you to say yes."
• "Stanislaus used to say that wars were fought especially for the carvers of stone....".
• "You do not cross the mountains in Austria, you follow the valleys and the rivers.  It is like you are held in the clasp of a breast, not always a kind breast, but one that will guide you along anyway."
• "It seemed to me that there were two different worlds, that of trees and that of engines:  one seemed clear, the other dark."
• Just Notes:
• Romanis identified with Communism for a long period
• Based on the life of Polish Gypsy poet, Papusza, good link.......http://thegypsychronicles.net/literacy-orality-and-the-poetry-of-papusza-2/
• the struggle was caught between the Gypsys wanting to be left alone, the people wanting them to assimilate
• The "Big Halt"....removed wheels from gypsy carts...no reference to it really happening
• Classic water/revirth imagery between her life in the East and life in the West...p.222
• Review:   Once again, Colum McCann demonstrates a gifted ability to tun a phrase and tell a story.  Journey into the very soul of Zoli, fashioned after a famous Romany poetess.  Travel Eastern Europe as she must survive by first being co-opted as a Gypsy spectacle then as a wounded, hunted, shunned victim of her times and her ancestry.  Feel her pain, her joy, and her spiritual journey as revealed by McCann's elegant, soulful prose.  Fabulous book!

"Theft: A Love Story" by Peter Carey. **

• Audiobook
• Originally published in 2006
• Australian author
• Review:  I tried three hours of this eight hour audiobook and just could not engage with the story.