Sisters by Nancy Jensen

These sisters, and their female descendants, cannot catch a break. Bad luck in the form of sexual abuse, poor choice of husband and sexual partners, misunderstandings and miscommunications, and so forth. The original two sisters are separated when they are teenagers because of a tragedy, and one of them disappears and stays lost on purpose.

An essential part of the book is the genealogical chart in the beginning - without it, keeping track of the many descendants would be impossible. The chapters skip years and narrators, so careful attention to the details is needed.

Fortunately the characters and their situations are all interesting, and the writing is excellent, so as a reader I was captivated enough to keep track of the complicated events and numerous characters.

Of course, I wanted a happier ending, but I cannot argue with the author's decisions.

Piano Lessons by Anna Goldsworthy

A memoir of the relationship between pianist Anna Goldsworthy and piano teacher Eleonora Sivan. Anna started lessons with Sivan at age 9, and she chronicles the relationship with her teacher and the lessons she learned about music, life, love, and playing the piano. A good read, very true to the the experience of learning a musical tradition.

Nightwoods by Charles Frazier

An excellent novel. Frazier has all the right tools in his arsenal. Nightwoods tells the story of Luce, who inherits her sister's twin children, after her sister is murdered by her husband. The children witness the murder, and are damaged by the experience and the abuse they suffered at the hands of their father. They don't speak, they kill chickens, and they start fires. A suspenseful plot pulls the reader along.

The other significant character is the setting, the mountains of western North Carolina and other areas of the South, from the 1960s. Maybe this is why I enjoyed the novel so much - that is the South of my childhood, and it rang true and vivid for me.

Much better, in my opinion, that Frazier's Cold Mountain or Thirteen Moons. It is violent, but the ending is much more satisfactory than his earlier novels. Highly recommended.

Marrying Mozart by Stephanie Cowell

The opposite of the screenplay Amadeus. In this novel Mozart is thoughtful and sensitive, but the the real center of the novel are the four Weber sisters. Mozart befriends all of them, eventually marrying Constanze after being jilted by another. They all played a large part in his early life. Very interesting novel, authentic and entertaining.

Vivaldi's Virgins by Barbara Quick

An interesting novel, set in the early 18th Century in Venice. The Pieta used female musicians in their choir, orphans and foundlings - virgins, in other words. Vivaldi wrote much of his music for them. The novel follows the life of one o the foundlings as she comes o age and discovers who her parents were. Music plays a large part in the novel.

Clara Schumann by Nancy B. Reich

The best English biography of Clara. Finally answered the question for me of how Robert Schumann died: Tertiary neurosyphillis.

If Jack's In Love by Stephen Wetta

A surprisingly good first novel, a traditional coming-of-age story. Jack is thirteen, and the youngest son of the white-trash Witcher family. As is usual in coming-of-age novels, he begins to see his parents and brother as they really are, makes friends with an adult (a Jewish jeweler) outside the family, and has his first girlfriend and kiss. His brother is also implicated in the murder of his girlfriend's brother.

It's told throughout from Jack's viewpoint, which does wear thin part way through, but the suspense of the mystery pulls us through the rough spots. The ending is satisfying if not unexpected. Overall an excellent novel.

The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams

Harold Roux is a minor character in this re-printing of a literary novel from 1974, but he and his hair stand as a symbol for what happens to the major characters. Harold is bald, at 24, and desperately hiding that fact with a bad toupee. He is intent and learning and embracing the finer, higher, things in life, but is assaulted on all sides by the other young WWII veterans at college. Ultimately Harold loses his toupee, and and is violated and assaulted to the point that he flees.

He is a symbol, of course, for what happens to the Catholic virgin freshman Mary, and to some extent all the other characters. The book is a strange mix of novel-within-novel. At the top level is Aaron Benham, writing a novel - "The Hair of Harold Roux", about Allard Benson, himself a writer and friend of Harold Roux, who is also writing a novel. All these fictional worlds collide and mirror each other. It's clear that Aaron Benham is chronicling his own life as he writes, which makes the reader wonder if the real author, Thomas Williams, is doing the same with the entire complex construction of stories within stories.

It's a reprint of a novel that first appeared in 1974 and which won the National Book Award, deservedly brought back to life. Warning: there are some really nasty jokes and smutty incidents - typical of college humor, but which may be highly offensive and shocking to some readers.

Lust for Life by Irving Stone

The classic biographical novel about Vincent Van Gogh. Stone, in the end note, says that, aside from a few fictional scenes, "... the book is entirely true." He based his fictional account of Van Gogh's life on his letters, which were saved by his brother, Theo Van Gogh.

The facts may be true, but there is certainly a spin placed on the interpretation of those facts by the author. The novel spends most of it's time and energy on Van Gogh's early life - his failed love affair in England, his attempt to be an Evangelist, his early training as an artist. Throughout he is described as someone who takes a passionate love for something to an extreme.

The most interesting period of his life is his time in the south of France when he first had his "attacks" and when he had his most creative period. Sloan seems to say that Van Gogh's illness was epilepsy that started late in middle age, exacerbated by the absinthe that he drank and his years of near starvation.

If you've seen the excellent movie of the same title based on the book with Kirk Douglas then it's difficult not to picture Van Gogh as Kirk Douglas or vice versa!

The Headhunter's Daughter by Tamar Myers

At first I couldn't decide if this was intended to be drama, satire, or comedy. Now I think it is a clever combination of all three. It's the story of a white baby raised by black Africans in the Belgian Congo back in the 1950s. It's told with humor and satire combined with a keen sense of the different cultures - the author is the daughter of missionaries and spent time in the Congo as a child. Well done and insightful.

The Sojurn by Andrew Krivak

No happy ending here. But then it's a war novel, the Austrian/Italian front in WWI. The hero is a young US citizen, whose father took him back to Hungary as a child. He grows up herding sheep with his father, enlists, becomes a sniper for the Austrians, and has some horrific adventures before the war ends. His troubles don't end there, since he has to get "home". But where is home?

It's well written and captivating, if depressing. An interesting look at a forgotten front in a war that is fast receding from human memory.

Leaving Van Gogh by Carol Wallace

An interesting novel. An account of the last year or so of Van Gogh's life, told from the viewpoint of the doctor and art lover, Dr. Gachet, who befriended Vincent and Theo Van Gogh. The good doctor has problems of his own, and the book spends more time with his character as observer than with Van Gogh's. The author has remarkable insight into Van Gogh and his art, the the affect that his personality had on his brother Theo and Doctor Gachet. Highly recommended.

Adam Bede by George Eliot

George Eliot (aka Marian Evans) was so far ahead of her contemporaries. Her realist novels read as if they had been written a hundred years later. Of course, she skirts around some of the more difficult subjects in Adam Bede: the relations between Hetty and Arthur are only hinted at, and the murder of the child is related after the fact.

But her characterizations are so much more realistic than anything that Dickens produced it is hard to even draw a comparison. Pip seems a caricature next to Adam Bede. And all of Dickens' female characters lack the depth of a Hetty or even a Mrs. Poyser from Adam Bede.

An excellent novel, well worth reading again and again.

George Eliot: The Last Victorian by Kathryn Hughes

An excellent biography of a fascinating author. Mary Ann Evans, or Marian Evans, or Marian Lewes, or Marian Evans Lewes Cross, or George Eliot: the profusion of names gives you a hint of how complicated her life was. In a time when divorce was difficult (if not impossible), she lived happily with a married man for decades. Her life is as complex as the characters in her novels, and this biography deals with the details without obscuring the big picture.

After reading it, I wish that I had know her, which is the ultimate proof that this biography works.

Then Came the Evening by Brian Hart

A dark, somber, moody novel, but expertly written. It tells the tale of a shattered family: the father in prison for murder, the mother hitting rock bottom, the 20 year-old son never knowing his father. Things really get going when the father gets out of prison and the son attempts to bring the family together on the deceased grandparent's old ranch. But the father cannot change, the mother's guilt is overpowering, and the son grows away from them, forming new bonds.

What is disturbing is the cavalier attitude of the father toward murder. He is not a psychopath, or even even disturbed - he seems perfectly normal, yet thinks nothing of shooting a policeman, for instance.

Despite the dark tone, it is an excellent book, well written.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

A historical memoir, which I think points out the problems with this genre. How can one write a memoir for someone other than the author? In this case, the author is writing her grandmother's life, even though she died when the author was only a child.

It reads like a series of anecdotes, and lacks any cohesion. A much better plan would have been to write fiction, and include the modern granddaughter in the story. A good example would be Fannie Flagg's "Fried Green Tomatoes".

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

An intriguing book that tells two parallel stories. The historical fiction of Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Brigham Young in 1875, and Jordan Scott, a gay man kicked out of his fundamentalist Mormon sect. The details revealed about the history of polygamy in the Mormon Church are interesting and insightful, and the modern portion of the book brings everything full circle and reads like the headlines of current events.

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

I bought this book because of the title - since it resembled me a little too much. But it turned out not to be about a man who loved books, as much as a man who had a compulsion to collect books. It could have just as well been about a man who collects guitars, or a woman who collects quilts. It's creative non-fiction, and suffers, like most books in that genre, from having to adhere to fact. It would have been much better as fiction with a different plot.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

An intriguing look at life for women in China before the abolition of foot-binding. Lily and Snow Flower, tow pre-pubescent girls, become laotong, or sort of cross between pen-pals and best friends for life. They also have their feet bound and undergo the cultural discrimination against women of their time. Women are nothing, and girl children are less than nothing. It's a very interesting glimpse of a culture that is, fortunately, gone (I hope).

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

A look at life through the eyes of a autistic teenage boy. Very well written and convincing. Christopher, the autistic boy, sets out to discover the mystery of who killed the neighbor's dog, and in the process overcomes obstacles that seem insurmountable for someone like him. He also discovers secrets about his family that mean little to him, but affect the reader.

Good Faith by Jane Smiley

The real estate novel, and of course it is about greed and corruption. An odd man comes to town - Marcus Burns, and finds everyone willing to go along with his plans to get rich with little effort. Of course, there is quite a revelation late in the novel, which I won't spoil here. It's well written by Pulitzer winner Jane Smiley.