I love memoirs. The best new one (that I can tell) is The Receptionist : A Education at the New Yorker by Janet Groth. The narrative is good enough that you don't get (too) distracted by all the Famous Literary Names. Really.

         Beth Gutcheon is always a good bet, and she's written a social-life book herself, titled  Gossip . I don't really like that title, it makes the book seem like some relation to Gossip Girl, which it's not. Anyway  the book is very good and lively.

     For fans of  Edith Wharton, a reworking of  The House of Mirth, with emails/photos replacing the secret letters :  The Gilded Age: a novel by Claire McMillan.  A Cleveland (!) debutante is the Lily Bart character, who returns home after New York and rehab, attempting to take off where she left off.

My mind has been on Cintra Wilson lately, for some reason.  She not too recently ended her hilarious fashion-criticism shoppers guide in New York mag - The Critical Shopper - and I hope she give us something new soon.  She published an novel in 2004 called Colors Insulting To Nature - a family drama of the eighties very worth reading.  She first came to my notice from her short story on the USA bookshelf - The Abounding Gutter;

                          "A total love rocket pulled up outside: a perfect 1967 Pontiac Tempest, loud and
                           proud. Custom license plate: GODARD.  And a slick guy got out, all hip and angular,
                           greasy blond hair all high and bent over like tall grass somebody sat in, green sharkskin
                           suit, polished black steel-toed boots.  He got out and walked in all concave, like he
                           needed to protect us from his royal coolness or he might accidentally freeze our eyeballs.
                           We were riveted."

The "tall grass" is pretty good, but the "all concave" nails it.

     There's a new book out, Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple which is very funny and fast moving, about a post-millenial family in Seattle and what happens when their daughter gets perfect grades all through middle school and then demands her parents keep their end of the deal -- a family trip to Antarctica! There's a lot more to the story than that, but it's funny all the way through.

     The Perfect Gentleman / A Muslim Boy Meets the West  by Imran Ahmad. EVERYONE should read this book. It's an autobiography taken year by year (it's divided into school years) of this young man from Pakistan (originally) who grows up in England.  It's very informative about Islam, as well as being smart and self-deprecatingly funny, in the British way.

    For nonfiction, I am reading an excellent book that came out June 2011, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, who also wrote The Men Who Stare At Goats, later made into a movie, and Them, about fringe cults in America. The psychopath test, invented by psychologist John Hare, is a checklist of "attributes that psychopaths possess" although all of us have them to some degree, and psychopaths are excellent at manipulating people, so it's not exactly an infallible tool.  The unvarying condition of all psychopaths though, is lack of empathy;
           
                        "(She) was interviewing a psychopath once. She showed him a picture of a frightened face  and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them."

     Anyway the book is told first-person story style and is funny and interesting.



    Another book that came out about the same time, The Hottest Dishes of Tartar Cuisine by Alina Brodsky, is another first person narrative, fiction this time, by one bazinga of an old lady, set in modern day Russia. Actually she's middle-aged, but she keeps things moving, especially with her completely cowed daughter and her grandaughter. This one is pretty funny too, mainly because you can't believe some of the things this old bat does. Reminds me of some of Ruth Rendell's old ladies.

  I just finished a couple of very good new books this week. The first one, The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli, is a small town murder mystery told in the first person by one of the younger members of the Rand clan, famous for being local thieves, but never violent. One of them, however, DOES go on a killing spree, but is framed for an additional murder which someone else committed. Disentangling this is the story line. Needless to say the Rands are all very Damon-Runyonesque and amusing, especially to someone who's never had a break-in at their place of residence. Anyway, it's still an interesting, well paced book.

Next is Syndrome E, by Franck Thilliez, a French writer, very fast paced and interesting. Its starting point is a mysterious old film short that makes people commit suicide after watching it (shades of The Ring!). The assigned detective team is a psychologically-damaged older man and single-mother younger detective combination, fairly common, but they split up often enough to keep things moving. The translator seems to want to make sure he or she doesn't miss a single idiom, but otherwise it's excellent, and unusual.

James Renner has written an unusual crime novel called The Man from Primrose Lane, which starts off as a regular crime/mystery/thriller (a good one, by the way), but then veers off into the second half of the book on a science fiction tangent. I normally don't care for science fiction, but this is skillfully done enough that I actually kept on and finished the book. It was pretty good.

Also, James Lee Burke's latest Dave Robicheaux novel, Creole Belle is out, seems to be just as good as the others. We learn more about Cletus Purcel, who is close to being more interesting than Dave.

Of special note to librarians; The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai. A small town librarian (actually the town is Hannibal, about thirty miles from the even smaller town I grew up in) helps a 10 year old boy run away from home - his mother is afraid he has "homosexual tendencies" and is sending him to some deprogramming camp run by a sleazy Reverend White Trash. The heroine says "he's only ten years old, I don't think he's anything-sexual" -- on the other hand, as another reviewer says, every adult that sees the kid thinks he's gay. Of course she ends up bringing him home in the end, without getting in trouble.  Adventures along the way - a very good read.

      For nonfiction, I just finished reading a wonderful book by John Yow, The Armchair Birder Goes Coastal: the secret lives of the birds of the Southeastern shore. A lot of it is about Dauphin Island. Anyway it takes each particular species of bird and tells travelogue style about his contact with it, descriptions, and what Audubon and other authorities say about it. Just really interesting especially if you start off being interested in birds.

     Just finished reading  The Good Father by Noah Hawley, which was excellent, and unusual; the story of a father, a successful upper middle class doctor, whose son from his first marriage assassinates a popular Presidential candidate.  The book mainly describes all the mental acrobatics this guy performs to keep from facing the facts: his son did do this evil thing, and he did it alone. The quality of the writing makes this book worthwhile.

A sad note, as of yesterday -- Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, died at age 91. Along with everything else, the man obviously loved librarians. The ALA or someone should find out the name of that early librarian that turned him on to books when he was little and institute some kind of annual prize in her name, like the Booker or the Christie -- a prize for librarians!

Mother's doing pretty good now, her spirits are much improved. She doesn't have to go back to the doc until June 22, which sounds optimistic.

Anyway I just finished The Expats by Chris Pavone which was all in all a pretty good read. It combines a modern yuppie novel with a spy thriller.  Also, a female main character. Recommend.

For videos, Vengeance, a Japanese film, was very good.  Also, one I meant to get to long before now but didn't, probably because it's animated -- Grave of the Fireflies -- very worth watching. I don't remember the authors/directors but theyre easy to look up.

Now mother's sick. Had a bunch of lumps in her breast and under her arm removed last Mon. Mostly she's dealing with it ok, has some down times where she says " Oh, I wish I could just go ahead and die and get it over with." Caroline is here and she is much better at dealing with this than I am.

Anyway; John Burdett's new Bangkok mystery is out, Vulture Peak. It's just as good as the others.

Also, for a Janet Evanovitch readalike; Lisa Lutz's Spellman series, starting with The Spellman Files.

Another new author, Vanessa Diffenbaugh, has written a wonderful new book called. The Language of Flowers. Sounds almost like a romance novel doesn't it? In fact, the main character of the book spends her childhood in the foster care system with all that implies, although the author resisted putting in any sexual molestation incidents. One of the main themes of the book is second chances, important to all foster children and those who love them. Ms. Diffenbaugh spent years as a foster parent so she knows.
There really is a language of flowers by the way. There's a BBC series called Rosemary and Thyme where a murder in a past century is solved by reading the flowers planted in a garden in a certain order.

Author Ronald DeFeo, has his first novel out, Calling Mr. King, a crime novel about a hit man along the lines of Lawrence Block's hit man John Keller, only his thing is architecture, not stamps. I'm looking forward to more in this series. Very good.