"The Last Judgement" by Iain Pears ****

• Audiobook
• #4 in Jonathan Argyle series
• Originally published 1999
• Englsh author
• Review:   A very enjoyable art history murder mystery!  Jonathan Argyll and his lady love, Flavia, of the Art Police in Rome move between London, Paris, and Rome to solve the case.  Fast-paced, betrayal and double crosses that have reached past the WWII era and French Resistance movement to present day lead them a chase.  Good read!

"And The Mountains Echoed" by Khaled Hosseini. ***

• Audiobook
• Originally Published in 2013
• Afghani author
• Review:  Frankly, I was disappointed in this novel.  Set in Afghanistan, this is a saga across generations.  Initially powerful and engaging, I did not think the cross generational method worked well, seeming to lose momentum.

"The Snow Child" by Eowyn Ivey ****

• US author
• Originally published in 2012
• Set in 1920s Alaska
• Summer Sub Club with Beth
• Review: Imagine the cold and isolation of an Alaskan winter.  Add to that a strong dose of loss.  Depressed yet?  don't be, because out of the morass of darkness comes a lovely story about choosing to survive, choosing to suspend logic, about choosing to believe that there are mysteries in life which defy explanation.  Fairy tale or reality?  It doesn't matter to Mabel, Jack, Garrett, Esther and George.  It certainly doesn't matter to Faina, the beloved and lovely snow child.  This is a delightful and poignant story.

"Day After Night" by Anita Diamant ****

• Book Club selection...July 2013
• USA author
• Originally published in 2009
• Epigraph:  "Know that every human being must cross a very narrow bridge.  What is most important is not to be overcome by fear." - Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, 1772-1810
• Characters: Shayndel (former fighter, Polish Zionist), Tedi (hidden Dutch Jew, magical scents), Leonie (French, former prostitute), Zorah 9concentration camp survivor)
• Ease with which they kill the former SS member
• Memory as an inescapable enemy
• Review:  Anita Diamant has a notable ability to bring a story alive out of the history books, or Bible in the case of "The Red Tent".  I had never heard about the internment of Jews by the British, and was immediately intrigued with the story.  Diamant's deceptively simple writing style manages to convey deep affect, character development and the emotional energies which work on the psyche of the characters.  The four protagonists have all escaped to Palestine, only one from a concentration camp.  Their experiences and memories, losses, and survivor guilt work on them in differing ways, all of which are powerful.  I think this is a post Holocaust story which is more bearable to read than some others, although clearly shadowed with the horror of Nazi Germany.  Survival, the drive to be free, the desire to love and be loved are such powerful, vital forces!

"Love, Anthony" by Lisa Genova ***

• Audiobook
• USA author
• Originally published 2012
• Review:  A nice book about love, loss, healing and autism.  Nice narration by Debra Messing.

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald *****

• Audiobook, narrated by Jake Gyllenhall
• Originally published in 1925
• USA author
• Review:  Nothing to say that hasn't already been said.  An amazing piece of writing!

"Speaking From Among The Bones" by Alan Bradley. ****

• Audiobook
• #5 in the Flavia de Luce series
• Originally published 2013
• Review:  Wow!  This is definitely my favorite in the series so far!  Flavia is witty, precocious, and vulnerable.  And.......a huge cliffhanger ending!

"Miss MacIntosh, My Darling" by Marguerite Young...Volume I.....****

• Summer Sub Club 2013 with Beth
• US author
• Originally published 1965, although early excerpts were published in magazines prior to the novel being published
• Setting:  Starts in New England, bus through Middle West
• Characters:  Vera Cartwheel (narrator, seeking Miss MacIntosh), Catherine Helena Cartwheel (her mother, opium addict), Miss MacIntosh (Vera's nanny and savior, opposite of mother), Mr. Spitzer (mother's late fiance's brother, visits mother daily), Australian bushman (visitor of her mother's, Cousin Hannah, bus driver, old couple on bus, pregnant girl on bus
• Epigraph:
• Volume I:  "For all dead loves and all remembered things, I have traveled through many seas"
• Vocabulary:
• mooncomb:
• Quotes:
• p.4..."Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roarings of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart's weaknesses, have turned stonily away, would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united?  Every heart is the other heart.  Every soul is the other soul.  Every face is the other face.  The individual is the one illusion."
• p.9...Description of Miss MacIntosh....."And my search for this life was because of one already dead, she who had passed beyond, she who had been the moral guide, the unswerving, the true, her heart as stout as hickory or oak, her mind so sensible that she  could not be deceived by any illusion or enchantment, she who was forever alone, outside, not taken in by all the sycophant luxuries of that opium paradise, a poor servant with patches on her best black cotton gloves, a fishnet reticule and rimless eye-glasses and no make-up, not even a touch of lip rouge, her face its natural color, her old black canvas umbrella lifted against the rain or sunlight as she had used to walk along the seashore, preferring that marginal estate to my mother's house where, though the roarings of the surf like the roarings of lions should fill it, the sea itself was but another dream and faraway as if it were intangible."
• p.14....the mother...."She had gone to bed for no reason at all, only that she had found the so-called real world unsatisfactory, that life had failed her, that her sensations had been numbed, that she had missed the contiguous impressions which might have been here, that she had always been confined."
• p.40..."We should fold our clothes each evening as carefully as if we never expected to put them on again."...Miss M
• p.64..."....her old black umbrella still uplifted and bugling on the wind, for the wind was quite contentious--never to flee from the heart of life, always to live in the services of others, to know no soul but the soul of man, no heart but the other heart, no self-protection, all souls as equals, all men as brother and alike."...Miss M..civil rights era
• p.86...you died every minute you lived."
• p.108..."Perhaps when life is gone, life continues in the mind and all we should ever know of death would be what we imagined, this vivacity of roaring stars, whirlpools, whirlwinds, this illusion that we lived or died."..... notions of life and death revisited repeatedly in this novel
• p.110......"Marriage was always marriage to something you had not foreseen, something surprising...., these terrible shiftings of hearts, of faces, naturally, seeing the other face.
• p.190..."Was it from me or from the world around me that sorrow came, just when I was happiest?"
• p.245..."That night I was confronted suddenly by the forlorn something which had been hidden like that in everyone's heart which no one dares to face, he knowledge at each mus wear a mask which screens him from himself and pushes him farther and farther away into the reaches of the imperial darkness, he knowledge that the external world we take for granted is but insubstantial as a mad man's dr4eam, all we know or shall ever know, and we are always bald when we are robbed of our illusions, and we know no who we are or where for we were only these and always fading."
• p.266..."Was God as a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, a brother born from adversity a root out of dry ground, a nail fastened o a sure place.........".....many questions of God...
• p.293...What was so rare a thing as common sense, that which she fiercely believed in, the middle brow, the middle way, the average life?"
• p.373..."Death is that which is caused by our partial knowledge."......hmmmm
• p.623..."Perhaps he was the sea shell who could be the musician only when he was untenanted."....Mr. Spitzer....sad
• p.623..."Was life a legal fiction, a realm which could never be proved, disproved, an imaginary house with its intricate ivory porches no waves should ever reach, its lights already lost?"
• p.624..."He surely had gone on many errands of which he had forgotten the meaning and intent and had made of vacancy his amplitude."
• p.628....Life was but a small circle of light, an incandescence different from any star, for its light did not mate with the light of this world and shone sometimes when all other stars went out, and perhaps Mr. Spitzer's fitful light would shine if there were........".
• p.628....."Who knew what was real?  Who knew what was unreal or where one ended and the other began or whether, indeed, there was only the illusion."
• p.631....."He had found the impossibility of committing suicide, for he had died merely by living, by continuing from moment to moment."
• p.640..."A blind portrait painter was surely no more strange than a deaf music critic.....".
• p.859...."And as for Miss MacIntosh, how different she seemed from all the other here--as  the Rock of Ages in a land where all things crumbled, as a guide who knew her way, as the acme of common sense, as the sure footed Pilgrim, the one person never dreaming where all might dream, ye never dream of her, as the one person whose hands and feet were far more important than the dreamless head which gave to itself no false glories, no vain imaginings, as the one person who was simple and bold and clear, never to be deceived by the deceiver, not even by the fog surrounding us!  The fog might invade her and unknit her bones, ravel out her soul from her body, little doubt, but never would she yield to the fog."
• p.889...".....she was afraid of everything.  She was afraid of the moon in the cloud, afraid of leaves over her, afraid of moths, afraid of the hoot owl, afraid of the eagle, afraid of the sparrow, afraid of migratory birds, movie stars, and ordinary people.  And that was why she had developed so much courage.
• p.930..."Once she ate in a noiseless cafeteria and thought she had found simple humanity, for no one spoke a word, and then she saw that it was a cafeteria for mutes only, and that was why she fled to another."
• Notes:
• Dreamscape...stream of consciousness
• lyrical, lush prose
• Very 60s.....yet exquisite
• Mother's ability to recount the minutiae of Mr. Spitzer's activities was a very interesting notion.....ask Beth what purpose she thinks this bit served?........
• p.23...."The horizontal person, she lay still, her .......and she dreamed, as she would say, this perpendicular world of motion.....".
• p.30...."The conditions of mortal life were such that, for others as for herself, the dream must suffice, for reality bears with it always an aspect of fateful disappointment..."
• The MacIntosh.....she wore one at all times.....it was a place to tend to the wounded (p.50...i.e. an injured bird).....such as Vera
• Visit by Australian bushman.....
• p.65...the things she left behind......umbrella, glasses, macintosh and more....
• The notion that Mid-Western small town America was more solid......p.71....."...the other America, the interior, the small town, the routine of Monday following Sunday, Tuesday following Monday, the washings on the lines, the voices of little children, baking day, recipes, knitting for the mission at some far Arctic post.".....
• twelfth birthday dividing line between irresponsibility and responsibility."
• 14th birthday, pivotal event with Vera and Miss MacIntosh....truth, disillusionment
• the notion of Moses in the bulrushes being like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly
• Love the blind war veteran who visited art galleries with his seeing eye dog
• three minutes of happiness in a lifetime is about all life offers
• p.642...."Ah, what infinite paradoxes there were in the lidded or the lidless box!"......?
• the umbrella shielded Miss MacIntosh from the harshness of electric light....."Who wants to see what God has hidden?"
• Themes:
• reality/illusion
• idea vs action
• transition from 50s to 60s, influence of drugs, questioning authority
•  Reviews
• Volume I Review:   At first I was absolutely mesmerized by the elegant, lyrical verbosity of this writer.  Every sentence is so full of metaphor, simile, and incredible language.  I know that this novel took the author 18 years to write and that portions were published in magazines along the way.  I think it may be a novel best read in doses, allowing the reader to savor the writing and ponder the myriad of ideas touched upon throughout the tale.  The stream of consciousness style takes the form way beyond Salman Rushdie and I thought he was amazing at it.  The characters of Miss Mackintosh, Vera Cartwheel and her opium-addicted mother, and Cousin Hannah are primary, joined by a wide variety of interesting folk along the way.  Plot?  This novel requires patience and the ability to let go of preconceived notions of structure and plot.  I have finished the first volume and am not certain of the plot...even after 600+ pages!  Nonetheless, I am eager to return for volume II and to see where this all goes. 
  
  I am giving the novel 4 of five stars at this point, reserving the right to change my opinion after reading volume two.  The diluted plot is the reason I give it four instead of five stars........let's see how this turns out.
•  
• Final Review:  Okay.....1197 pages later.....Do you think that it is possible that your entire life has actually been someone else's opium induced hallucination?  If you are Miss MacIntosh, armed with your mackintosh, sturdy shoes, and 1950s Midwestern practical approach to life you would likely say, no way!  Come back down to earth.  Who really knows for sure? This mammoth literary opus tackles the issue.  Not surprisingly, it was published in the 1960's when it became cool to question absolutely everything, such as, where is the line between truth and fiction, between reality and illusion?  Other issues include 200-300 page analyses of characters' psyches.  Uh huh.....oi! The writing is magnificent.  The characters are simultaneously  psychologically  absurd, profound, terrifying, and impossible to fathom.  Yep, an intellectual and literary feat of mastery.....and very difficult to read and digest.....and worth the enormous effort.  Can you say contradiction!  If you rely on plot, do not turn to page one.  Just step away from the novel.  Otherwise, I recommend reading it in stages.  Savor it.....do not let it make you suffer!

"The Forgotten" by David Baldacci ***

• Audiobook
• Originally published 2013
• Will Robie series, #2
•  Review:  So-so

"Nemesis" by Jo Nesbo ****

• Audiobook
• #2 in the Harry Hole series
• Originally published in 2002
• Review:  Another excellent Harry Hole (pronounced Holla) murder mystery.  The complex plot involves bank robbery, gypsy vendettas, strange alliances, trust and betrayal.  What more do you need for a great read to curl up with?