I was surprised by how compelling Pearl S. Buck’s THE GOOD EARTH was. It is the storyof one man’s life, the complete arc of his life, from boyhood to very old man.  Wang Lung is a poor, nearly destitute farmer’s son when he marries O Lon, a “slave”, as all orphan serving girls were called.  This is their story set amidst the ferment of the ancient Chinese ruling powers breaking up in early 20^th century. That historical background is a vivid and integral part of the plot. Buck makes Wang Lung and O Lon’s troubles, triumphs, follies, cruelties and relentlessly hard, attentive work more sharp and real to the reader than today’s news. Pearl Buck was raised in China, spoke and wrote Mandarin Chinese, and seems to have understood everyday life in China better than the U.S. State Dept of that time.  THE GOOD EARTH deserves all the accolades it received during the 20^th century and deserves to be re-discovered.

THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO by Stephen Galloway uses a real-life event: a cellistin Sarajevo who played Albioni’s Adagio everyday to honor the 22 citizens killed by artillery fire in the public square where he performed.  The novel uses that as a focal point as he tells the story of four fictional Sarajevans affected by his courageous playing and of course deeply affected by the senseless bombing they endured for two years.  It has an almost lyrical quality even though the subject is war, because the characters, especially the college girl who finds she has an aptitude as a sniper, are so vivid and real.

WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel won the Man-Booker Prize this year for her novel aboutThomas Cromwell and the swirling politics and religious battles in England at the time of Henry VIII’s wish to divorce his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn.  This is not a “historical novel”.  Though there is plenty of background detail about Tudor history, dress and manners, Mantel’s book is an examination of the rapaciousness of orthodoxies, the potential for killing by those who are certain they are right, and the debt we owe to people of good will and pragmatic good sense, like Thomas Cromwell, who ensure that that destruction is often averted. There is a quality to her writing that is luminous and glowing, perhaps because she loves this character she has created.  And you will love him too.

Anne Cleeves’ RAVEN BLACK is a mystery set in the Shetland Islands.  It is a perfectplace for a “closed room” mystery, since so few people are there and those that are can rarely leave during the winter months.  The death of a pretty young woman causes the whole population of the island to re-examine another death of a young girl years before, and of course they begin to suspect their neighbors.  The plot is believable, the characters interesting and the setting is rich and interesting.  I like it when the story could happen in no other setting than the one it is told in, and that’s the way this book is. This is the first of a trilogy and it’s an excellent start.

THE CHALK CIRCLE MAN by Fred Vargas is another notable mystery of the past year.  Vargas is a French woman, real first name is Frederique, and she writes crime fiction featuring Inspector Adamsberg.  There is an astringent quality to her stories, they are filled with oddball characters and unusual circumstances and yet you feel a cool distance from the action.  The habit of philosophical ramblings of some of the characters adds to this rarefied world feeling.  I liked Adamsberg, he is a refreshing surprise among the mumbling, morose European detectives and I liked this strange story.  Very French, but that’s a good thing sometimes.

A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL by Rebecca Solnit is on one NY Times critic’s list of the bestbooks of 2009, and other lists too, so I will add my voice to appreciative applause.   Solnit is a very thoughtful, graceful writer who tackles an interesting topic:  that disasters/tragedies bring out altruistic qualities in people, a solidarity and communal helping that is often ignored by the press and especially by “governments”. She examines such different events as the San Francisco earthquake, the Battle of Britain Blitz, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.  I myself have often noticed that photos of people in the midst of floods or fires seem relaxed, composed, full of energy, even cheerful.  Solnit tries to account for that and show us the ability most of us have to not just make do but to join together to make something better. A fine book.

GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR by Paul Theroux tells of his repeat journey all across the continents of Europe and Asia by train that he first told about in his fabulous THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR in 1973.  Now he goes again to see what has changed and of course finds that he himself has changed a lot too.

He’s a fabulous travel writer because he is so opinionated, picky and shrewd.  He is also fearless.  His return to the backwaters of Southeast Asia, then during the Viet Nam war, now full of dilapidated boats plying the rivers filled with travelers is amazing and his experience in Siberia on the way home is worth the whole book.

Here’s hoping for more great books in 2010.

Favorite Fiction about the Second World War (in alphabetical order by author)

David Benioff, CITY OF THIEVES (Siege of Leningrad, great teen aged narrator and interesting plot)

William Boyd, RESTLESS (Terrific plot with a female protagonist, about a little know aspect of the war, the S.O.E., an adjunct to the British Intelligence, that was sort of unregulated)

Helen Dunmore, THE SIEGE (Siege of Leningrad and what civilians endured)

Ken Follett, KEY TO REBECCA (Spies in Cairo in 1942, compelling and surpriseingly historically accurate)

Alan Furst, DARK STAR and NIGHT SOLDIER (set in Eastern Europe and sometimes Paris and Madrid in the 30s, but all about the coming war.  Call them pre-war spy stories. They are outstanding.)

Robert Harris, ENIGMA (good book and good movie about Bletchly Park and the code breakers)

Philip Kerr, BERLIN NOIR (Private eye non-Nazi German in early years of the war)

Nevil Shute, A TOWN LIKE ALICE (The struggles of men and women prisoners of the Japanese in Burma and Singapore make a great story and excellent movie)

Evelyn Waugh, MEN AT ARMS (The first book of his WWII triology, the second one, OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN is good too.)

Favorite Memoirs/Autobiographies/Diaries

Lord Alanbrooke,  WAR DIARIES (Indispensable detail about the back story of Churchill’s government. And since he was an important and responsible officer of the B.E.F. in May 1940 over in France, the section on Dunkirk is amazing.  His name used to be Alan Brooke.)

Anonymous, A WOMAN IN BERLIN (Courageous and brutal diary of her life in Berlin during the take over of Berlin by the Russians.)

Ernest G. Heppner, SHANGHAI REFUGE (His story of life in Shanghai after escaping Nazi Germany in 1939.  A little known aspect of the war that bears retelling.)

Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly TO WAR WITH WHITAKER (Vivid first person account of her accompanying her husband to war in Palestine in early 1940 and staying on, against regulations, to rise and become personal secretary to Jumbo Wilson, British General of Middle East.  A fascinating woman in a fascinating place.)

Victor Klemperer, I WILL BEAR WITNESS 1933-1941 (A German Jew who kept a diary and lived.  It is a one of a kind chronicle.)

Harold Nicolson, DIARIES AND LETTERS (Read especially the volume covering 1939-1940, he was a member of Parliament and knew everyone and was an early Churchill supporter. He was also the husband of Vita Sackville-West and tells very movingly about their near hopelessness in April and May 1940)

William Shirer, BERLIN DIARIES (A detailed account of what this American journalist experienced in 1939 Germany.)

Favorite Histories and Biographies

Rick Atkinson AN ARMY AT DAWN (Good account of America’s invasion of North Africa and all the huge mistakes they made, but also the American army’s steep learning curve)

Sarah  Helm, LIFE IN SECRETS (Biography of Vera Atkins, head of S.O.E. It is unbelievable that her story is so little known, and Helm a London Times journalist had to really dig around to find out what she writes.  Apparently officialdom tried to bury it all. )

John Lukacs, FIVE DAYS IN LONDON, MAY 1940 (Day by day, almost hour by hour account of the most fragile moments of the war. A terrific book.)

John Lukacs, THE LAST EUROPEAN WAR 1939-1942 (The most thoughtful and original historian of this period.)

Ricahrd Overy, WHY THE ALLIES WON  and THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN (Thorough, thoughtful historian and good bibliography)

Barrie Pitt THE CRUCIBLE OF WAR: WESTERN DESERT 1941 (The very readable and thorough history of that dire year in North Africa.)

Barbara Tuchman, STILWELL AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN CHINA 1911-1945. ( A biography of General Stilwell, most of the book focuses on his leadership in China and Burma and Tuchman does her usual excellent research and retelling of the character of this great man.

Favorite Holocaust books

Leo Bretholz, LEAP INTO DARKNESS (His autobiography of escaping from the German Nazi grasp three different times.  I’ve heard this man in person and he’s just as alert and observant now as he must have been as a 17 year old Austrian Jew.)

Rich Cohen, THE AVENGERS (The true story of three teenagers in Vilna Ghetto who decide they’ll resist.  They did and they miraculously lived.  Cohen is nephew to one of the teenage girls.)

Charlotte Delbo, AUSCHWITZ AND AFTER (Put in the camps because of her work with the French Resistance, she writes about her life with the most brilliant insights and compassion. A little known work, but outstanding)

Anne Frank, THE DIARY (No Holocaust list without this one, and if you get to Amsterdam, go see her house.  It makes it all so horribly real.)

Phillip Halle, LEST INNOCENT BLOOD BE SHED (A small town in France, in the Massif Central area, decided not to cooperate with the conquering Germans.  Thus they saved hundreds of Jews.  Not one townsperson gave away their secrets.  There’s a good video about this town’s work, too)

Primo Levi, THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED (Something about his spirit is so compelling, poetic, sensitive almost holy.)

Jane Yolen, DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC (A young adult novel about a present day Jewish American girl mysteriously transported back to Poland in 1939, she knows what is going to happen but cannot convince anyone that it will.  Of course she ends up in Auschwitz with her 1939 family.  One of the best young adult books on the Holocaust)

Favorite Movies/TV series on WWII

LUCIE AUBRAC (French movie about the French resistance)

HOPE AND GLORY (Britain during the war, through the eyes of an 11 year old boy.)

FORTUNES OF WAR (Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh as a young couple in Rumania, Greece and Cairo during the war.  I love this movie.)

THE TRAIN (French resistance trying to stop the Germans from taking a train load of great French art back to Germany in the last days of their occupation of France, with Jeanne Moreau and Burt Lancaster. There are many famous and memorable train scenes.)

PIECE OF CAKE (A riveting account of an R.A.F. squadron Sept 1939-Sept 1940, lots of beautiful Spitfires flying around, though I’m told that many scenes were model airplanes.  Pay no attention to the DVD cover, the romance part is minimal.)

ENGLISH PATIENT (Cairo during the war setting, which gets me every time, and a terrific story of a British Indian Sikh sapper and Canadian nurse.)

AU REVOIR MES ENFANTS (Louis Malle directed this powerful film.  It is based on his own experience at a Catholic school during the war that hid a Jewish boy.)

BATTLEGROUND (Made right after the war, Spielberg said it was the best war movie ever made.  I’ve watched it several times and it is great.)

DANGER UXB (The story of the sappers who disarmed bombs that fell in London and didn’t explode.)

SCHINDLER’S LIST (Totally memorable. I especially like that it was shot in black and white.)

DAS BOOT (I don’t like German movies, but this movie about a U boat and the crew is masterful)

THE YOUNG LIONS  ( Montgomery Clift, as a Jewish G.I. and a blonde Brando as a German army officer)

CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS (Resistance in small town Eastern Europe, is the background for a coming of age story.)

ZELARY (Czech resistance, a love story, beautiful scenery and a great score. Won an Oscar in 2003 for Best Foreign Film)

PATTON (George C. Scott makes this riveting, well, Patton’s outsized personality

CONVENTRY by Helen Humphreys is a new book just out this month and reading it started me thinking about the many terrific books set during WWII that focus on one woman and her struggles.  Humphreys tells the story of 42 year old Harriet Marsh who unfortunately finds herself on fire watching duty at the cathedral the night of the horrendous fire bombing of Coventry, England.  The back story of Harriet opens the book, she is an 18 year old bride of a young man going off to fight in the First World War, who expects to be home by Christmas.  He’s killed two weeks after he lands in France and thus Harriet becomes a widow at age 18.  The novel then jumps to November 1940 and that hideous night. When the drone of the German planes gets close, Harriet escapes off the roof of the Cathedral and finds herself in the company of another fire warden, a young man in his late teens. The bombs start falling and the fires begin. Throughout the night, they dodge burning debris, collapsing buildings, and run from street to street to try to get a safe distance away from the center of Coventry.  The story vividly describes the relentlessness of the bombing that lasted the whole night, the heat and smoke of the incendiary bombs, and the helplessness and unpredictability of it all.  But the most powerful part of Humphreys’ writing is her telling the story without over doing the emotions of the main characters.  They are in shock, not feeling much, just doing the next thing, frantically practical.  They are trying to run away, to help whoever they come across if they can, and to avoid death.  It’s almost matter-of-fact.  And that tone in her writing makes these characters seem very real, very human and helps us understand how people survive horrible conditions imposed on them by sheer bad luck.

Another book that has the same quality of matter-of-factness yet describing a particularly terrible time and place in the WWII is THE SIEGE by Helen Dunmore.  Set in Leningrad during the winter of 1941-42, the protagonist is Anna the 23 year daughter of a small family from the intelligentsia are caught in the German’s army siege of that great city.  Deprivation, not bombing, was the weapon of the invaders and during that winter it is estimated that 600,000 people died from starvation or disease.  Anna struggles to keep her family alive, stealing food, working in numbing cold, and giving her frail younger brother her own food to eat. This was a time when finding one spoonful of honey is a life saving event. She has a lover who is off fighting at the front, and that keeps her will to live from flickering out.  This novel was short listed for both the Whitbread Award and the Orange Prize and it is one of my favorites.

And Joan London’s elegant novel GILGAMESH is also about a lone woman confronted by the capriciousness and menace of war, but in this story, the protagonist actually goes toward the danger in order to find a better life.  The author is Australian and writes about Edith, a teenage girl in Western Australia in 1937, who comes from a family of poor English immigrants who came out to Australia to farm but they’re lazy, self-involved and don’t know how to work.  So they are dirt poor and only Edith is practical enough to learn how to feed them by becoming a housemaid.  Along comes a long lost cousin from England who brings his Armenian friend.  Edith falls in love with the friend and gets pregnant but the boys leave before she knows she’s pregnant. Two years later she decides she must go find him, he was the one person who was ever kind to her, and so starts her quest, with their two year old son.  The trouble is she headed right toward what will soon be war-torn Armenia. She is not daunted.  The title refers to the epic tale of the quest of the Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh, and it is a fitting use of the name for this clear eyed, single-minded and diligent girl who is seeking to have a meaningful, loving family.  This is a terrific book, and just this month the author had another novel, THE GOOD PARENTS, published in the U.S. that is getting rave reviews, so I hope more people will find her first book too.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s CEREMONY, published in 1975 is at the top of my list.  My book group read it, and usually I don’t just love the books we read, but this one is unforgettable.  It’s the story of a WWII vet returning to America and trying to gather the strands of his life together.  His situation is made especially difficult by the fact that he is a Navajo, raised by his rather cold and censorious aunt.  Her son, his cousin, was the favored one of the family who died while the cousins were fighting together in the jungles of Southeast Asia. It’s a story of the protagonists rightful rage and sorrow and his personal isolation. And it is a hopeful story of his struggle to learn his native ways, “the ceremonies”, as a way to recover and grow.  Silko wrote evocative descriptions of the places in and around New Mexico and Arizona and she created totally believable characters.

The second book that I loved was Garry Wills’ LINCOLN AT GETTYSBURG: THE WORDS THAT REMADE AMERICA.  His analysis of the 272 words of the Gettysburg Address will illuminate both the text and the character of Abraham Lincoln.  I was drawn to this book because of all the talk about the Obama-Lincoln connections.  Mr. Obama is a gifted speaker, but after reading this book, we can only hope that he continues to grow in wisdom as Lincoln did.  The depth of Wills scholarship in placing Lincoln in the context of literary and public speech on the 1830s and 40s, and his bright sparks of insights into Lincoln’s commitment both to careful writing (he didn’t write the address on the train on the back of an envelope), and to the Union of the United States, makes this book a revelation.  We were a lucky country to have him for those 5 years.

The best of the rest of books I read in 2008:

Two Tony Hillerman mysteries, in honor of his death last fall, surprised me with how good they were and how well they stood the test of a decade or so.  SKINWALKERS is the first book in which Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn work together and I liked both the use of place as an integral part of the plot, and the realistic and fleshed out character development that let you get to know these two men and pushed the story forward.  The second one I read, THE THIEF OF TIME, has both men too and the same sensitivity to Navajo ways and the conflicts with white society that make the story so interesting and believable.

William Boyd’s RESTLESS is a first rate mystery/thriller set in present day London, with flashbacks to World War II and the British spy network, the S.O.E (Special Operations Executive).  The central figure in the book is a 60 something woman who had been in the S.O.E. and now fears for her life due to what she knows about something in that particular past.  Her daughter, an instructor at Oxford, knew nothing of her mother’s past and can hardly believe it.  Many of the war exploits in the book are taken from real life, so you can learn a little bit about what went on in the slightly under the radar spying group.  Boyd is a British novelist who usually doesn’t write mysteries and he has brought his abilities of character development and plot to create a compelling, well-paced story.

Another book about that same group, the S.O.E. was A LIFE IN SECRETS: VERA ATKINS AND lTHE MISSING AGENTS OF WWII by Sarah Helm.  The author is a journalist for the London Times and the Independent.  Her thorough research into the life of Atkins and the S.O.E. reveals much that is untouched by usual histories of WWII and the intelligence community.  Indeed, so little has been written about this group, begun at Churchill’s request to “set Europe ablaze” with underground/resistance fighters, that you begin to wonder what else happened that we don’t know anything about.  Atkins was a complete outsider to the Whitehall and the government, yet rose to be the head, for a while, of this strange mission.  And what happened to the many agents, most of them women who were recruited, trained and sent over to Europe?  Helm tries to find out.  This is an unusual history of the Second World War.

Christopher Hitchens’ THOMAS PAINE’S RIGHTS OF MAN is part of series of short books about important books in American history.  I knew very little about Paine except that he wrote a book called COMMON SENSE and is often quoted in books about the founding of the United States, so this title seemed interesting.  Hitchens succinctly recounts Paine’s early life in England, how he came to America (with the help of Benjamin Franklin) and how revolutionary he was and still is today.  Hitchens can’t figure out why Paine isn’t studied much in American history classes, and concludes that he is such an outsider and he didn’t stay in America so he doesn’t fit neatly in any pigeonhole.  Paine would probably like that.

A really old book, now out of print, LeGrand Cannon’s LOOK TO THE MOUNTAIN is so much fun to read, I had to include it.  It’s a classic historical novel about a young couple pioneering in remote New England in the 1770s.  Too bad this book is out of print, because you feel like you are on the freezing water in a birch canoe as they make their way up the river to their homestead, and in their remote log cabin when they first hear that the colonists are fighting the British.

Tony Hillerman

SKINWALKERS is the first of Hillerman’s books to feature both Joe Leaphorn, the crusty, smart and slightly cynical, middle aged Lt. in the Navajo Tribal police force and Jim Chee, a young, thoughtful and observant officer in the same force.  I had never read this one and luckily I had a copy on my shelf.  It was a good place to become reacquainted with his work.

Hillerman captured me from the first page with his description of Jim Chee being woken from a sound sleep by the sound of his newly adopted cat dashing into his trailer.  The cat was almost feral and wouldn’t come inside unless something outside really scared it.  Chee realized something was amiss, not in “harmony”, out there.  And so the story begins.

The clarity of detail in describing the arid desert world of the Navajos: the animals, birds, tracks, dust, weather, and of course the people and their religion.  The simple, yet subtle interplay among all the creatures of this particular part of the world are what mark Hillerman’s books out from among so many others.  These details convey knowledge, deep empathy and the love the author feels for Indian country and its inhabitants and the descriptions are integral parts of the story line, not just window dressing.  Every plot of his books hinges on close observations of the people and the place. And his characters are people you want to spend time with.

The author is not Navajo and sometimes he was taken to task for writing about people and culture that is not native to him.  But Hillerman told Jim Bencevenga, a writer for the Christian Science Monitor, about growing up in the 1930s in rural Oklahoma on an

Indian reservation and playing with other Indian kids and when they played “cowboys and Indians” the other kids always wanted to be the cowboys and Hillerman played the Indian.  Hillerman said the other kids wanted to win.  That’s how the author began to learn about the world from the Indian point of view.
Marilyn Stasio in the International Herald Tribune said Hillerman’s novels “blazed innovative trails in the American Detective story”.  But few can follow that trail, because of the unusually lucid writing using details of another culture to build a believable plot, and his compassionate exploration of the metaphysical meaning of crime, being out of harmony with the world

I recommend Hillerman’s novels, especially the ones written between 1970, the publication of THE BLESSING WAY and ones published in the early 1990s.  And when you read them, I like to consult a map of the Four Corners region where the action takes place.  A few of the hardbacks had such a map on the end papers, but alas mostly you will have to find your own.

Invitation to book burning in Munich, 1933

A few years ago I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. It’s a place of profound importance, so much so that the Washington D.C. Chief of Police requires new recruits to spend a half day there. During my visit I saw a special exhibition about book burnings by the Nazis. What astonished me was the date of the first one, May 10, 1933. Within 9 weeks of gaining power, Hitler staged a public burning of books, which he said were “Un-German”. Books by Jack London, H. G. Wells, Emile Zola, Thomas Mann, Freud, Einstein and many others were taken from the libraries and bookstores thrown on the bonfires. These demonstrations were public, the international press covered it, but the protests and outcries from other governments and peoples were muted. One of Hitler’s very first acts was a potent and intimidating and successful show, not attacking people but attacking ideas and thoughts in the form of the written word. From then on any ideas different from or dissenting from Nazi dogma would not be tolerated, and of course soon it would be the writers themselves and the readers and other deemed to be “Un-German” who would be thrown into the bonfires.

The last week in September is Banned Book Week here in the U.S.A. Displays and lists from the American Library Association and the American Booksellers Association describe attempts by individuals or groups across the years and across the country to have certain books or certain authors’ works censured, sequestered, banned, everything from photos of native women in the National Geographic to Huckleberry Finn to The Color Purple. All these proposals have two things in common: first, the person or group wanting a book banned fear the power of the written word to make people think, and second, they wish to make others conform to their own view of the world, their own truth and not to know other ideas. To accomplish that goal they must control access to the written word.

A lot of people just roll their eyes and scoff at these censoring requests, they say that those people are just fundamentalists, racial bigots, narrow-minded dummies, or even just scared soccer moms wanting to “protect” their kids from ugliness, so it’s nothing to worry about. I don’t agree. No, people or groups cross the line when they want to tell all of the rest of us, via the public library, the public school, the media, what is and what is not okay to look at and to read. It seems outlandish, over-the-top, right? But if what you read is so powerful and can make you question and perhaps think about other ways of being, other views of the world, people who want control must try to control what you and I look and read.

Now we have a person, running for the second office in the whole country, who as Mayor of her small town, tried to get the public librarian to withdraw certain titles, just because she requested it! We don’t know which books the Mayor wanted banned, we are told that her request was merely “hypothetical”. She just wanted to know how the librarian would respond to a request to ban certain books? In a way, that version of the story is even worse. The narrow-minded, calculated coldness of such a fishing expedition, chills me, I think I’d rather have the Mayor being a huff about some gay pastor’s book, than coolly looking for a method of suppression of whatever seemed “unsuitable”. And of course, when the librarian explained that the library had a serious evaluation policy and guidelines about acquiring books for the library and it was not based on one person’s point of view, even if that one person were the Mayor, that same Mayor tried to fire her.

I conclude that the Mayor has read only the Second Amendment of the Constitution, about the right to bear arms. Somehow, she skipped right over the First, yes, the First Amendment, in which our right to freedom of speech, and of the press shall be protected.

We must re-dedicate ourselves to defending those rights guaranteed in the First Amendment. We must have no censuring, no sequestering, no suppression, no banning, and no destruction of books.

For further reading about Banning books:
George Orwell 1984
Jorge Luis Borges FICCIONES
Ray Bradbury FARENHEIT 451
Ursula LeQuin VOICES
Fernando Baez A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF THE DESTRUCTION OF BOOKS

Maybe it’s just that some people haven’t fallen into a book. It’s that experience of diving into a book and being completely captured by the world brought to life by the words on the page. I love to inhabit some books not just because of rich descriptions of place, or the page turning action, though those are important, but it is the aptness of each telling detail, the action that follows naturally without contrivance, and the characters who are emotionally true, they act that way because of who they are, not because of what’s needed by the plot.

Some books that I love to fall into and have read and re-read are not “great literature”, though some are. But here is my list of 13, a dirty dozen, of compelling, enthralling enveloping reads.

• Jane Austen, EMMA
• Robert Caro, THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: THE PATH TO POWER (esp. Chapter 27 & 28 “Sad Irons” and “I’ll Get It For You”)
• Michael Chabon, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY
• Deborah Crombie, KISSED A SAD GOODBYE
• Isak Dinesen, OUT OF AFRICA
• E.L. Doctorow, THE MARCH
• John LeCarre, THE HONORABLE SCHOOLBOY or TINKER, TAILOR
• Patrick O’Brian, H.M.S. SURPRISE
• George Orwell, BURMESE DAYS
• John Steinbeck, EAST OF EDEN
• Anthony Trollope, THE BARCHESTER NOVELS (a triology)
• Mark Twain, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE

Now what are some of your faves?