I am reading a very excellent book now - nonfiction- called The Lampshade : A Holocaust detective story from Buchenwald to New Orleans by Mark Jacobson. The title is fairly self explanatory but what starts it off is this guy buys an old lampshade in a junk shop in New Orleans after Katrina; the guy he buys it from calls it a "Nazi lampshade"; he has it DNA tested and the results say it IS human skin. To find out more, you have to read the book.

Elmore Leonard's latest, Djibouti, just came out and its all the things you read EL for. Much better than his last few efforts. Its about a female documentary filmmaker working on the pirates in East Africa - Somalia, etc. . Call and reserve now, its probably going to have a long waiting list.

I finally finished Freedom (Jonathan Franzen) and it was consistently good all the way to the end. The end wasn't completely satisfying, but that's the way life is, isn't it?

Also, I started reading a book by Marti Lembach, The Man From Saigon, which I missed when it first came out. It's a first person narration of the Vietnam war by one of the few female reporters there. INTERESTING.

Jonathan Franzen just produced a new book, Freedom, which I love so far (about the first three or four chapters). His last one, The Corrections (admittedly some time back), was the perfect portrait of American midwestern life in the nineties. Read that one first if you get put way down on the hold list for Freedom.

I am also enjoying reading Shadow Country : a retelling of the Watson saga by Peter Mattheissen about old South Florida. It's a very atmospheric book. It reminds me of some of the Rivers Of America series, particularly Sea of Grass, about the Everglades.

Just finished In The Woods by Tana French. It was so good I'm going to read her next two as soon as possible - The Likeness and Faithful Place. Truth be told, I liked this one better than the Girl Who books that are so popular now.

Also, I liked Mr. Clarinet by Nick Stone, with main character Max Mingus, and Don Winslow's California Fire and Life. Good stories along the Harry Bosch lines.

Two new books out now, very popular; First, The Irresistable Henry House by Lisa Grunwald, about, get this, a "practice baby" from a college home economics department in the 1950s. Apparently there were a lot of colleges that did this back in the days when every woman's destiny was to be a wife and mother -- take a baby from a local orphanage and have a set of home ec majors take care of it for a year, then send it back and get a new baby to take care of next year.

"Taking care of an infant is the only important job most of you will ever have"

Henry House manages at age 10-12 months to charm the house mother into keeping him.

The other, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, is about an English language newspaper in Rome and the lives of the people that work there. Very very good.

For those whose tastes run to challenging boundaries, John Waters has written a new book of memoirs, called, ironically I suppose, Role Models. The thing is, he is right about so many things, e.g. "being rich means you can buy any book you want and not worry if you can afford it." Or, his advice on buying art. Like he himself says about many things, "It's a freakshow but you gotta see it once." Still not for tender ears though.

There's a good, funny new book out now that concerns the publishing industry, titled After the Workshop: a memoir by Jack Hercules Sheahan: a novel by John McNally, who has also written a couple of other funny books, particularly America's Report Card.

Also, Jules Feiffer, who I always loved, has written an autobiography titled Backing Into Forward. It tells his whole story from childhood, including his collaboration with Norman Juster producing The Phantom Tollbooth, which is a wonderful J-book for any strong reader age 10 up.

For non-fiction I have two new titles: Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman, a memoir by a young female preppie who ends up doing fifteen months on a years-old drug charge (she let a friend she thought was exotic and exciting talk her into doing something stupid; when the friend was caught she ratted out everybody she ever met in her entire life, as middle-class perps do).
The second is The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum which I thought was just fascinating. In the first page or so of the book it says that in France arsenic used to be nicknamed "poudre de succession" or "inheritance powder" for its usefulness in dispatching kin who tarried too long this side of the Great Beyond. The first part of the book concerns heavy metals and organic poisons, the second tells of all the ways the federal government poisoned alcohol to keep people from drinking during Prohibition. You were really playing Russian roulette to drink back then unless you could get smuggled Canadian/Cuban liquor or had access to decent 'shine.

I just finished a a thoroughly enjoyable debut novel called Through the Pale Door by Brian Ray. The Atlanta Journal Constitution said that if there were an annual Southern Gothic Fiction Award, this book would undoubtedly get it. Its narrator (first person) is an art student who takes a summer job at her dad's steel plant as a respite from her crazy mother who is a revolving door admission at the psych ward. Nevertheless there is a first-love story too, and the book is surprisingly upbeat, not at all the woe-is-me tale that kind of story often is. A strong strong recommend.

Another goldie oldie -- I've just been reading "A Town Like Alice" by Nevil Shute, who wrote "On The Beach". It is really really good - I'm surprised it hasn't been made into something by the Merchant Ivory or at least the BBC crowd. Post-feminist except the author is a man and books by men are in the basement you know.

For non-fiction, I am reading a good book titled "In Search of King Solomon's Mines" by Tahir Shah. He is of Afghan descent but grew up in England and has a British sense of humor.

"Was there milky froth around its mouth?"
I said that there was.
The surgeon licked his lips.
"Rabies" he declared menacingly.
"The woman was blind," I said, "she couldn't see the animal's condition. Are you going to give me twenty-one jabs in the stomach?"
"There's no anti-rabies serum in Ethiopia," said the doctor. "You'd better go back to your hotel and rest."
He began to write out his bill.
"What if I start frothing at the mouth?"
"Don't bite anyone," he said.

Joe Hill and Peter Straub both have new books out. Joe Hill's book is "Horns" and doesn't suffer from second-book syndrome at all, only slightly less intriguing than Heart-Shaped Box. Peter Straub's book is "A Dark Matter" and is also of course very good in a long-storytelling style.

A new novelist, Belinda Bauer, has just published a first effort titled Blacklands, about a serial child killer and the events around him, told from of the point of view of a young boy (you know its English), nephew of one of the victims. A marvelous first effort.