All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang

A sensitive portrayal of the lives of two poets, one who is successful, wins awards, teaches at a university, and is married with a child, and one who works on a single poem all his life and lives a quiet, minimal life. This is literary fiction, concerned with the characters relationships to poetry, each other, and their friends and family. It's well written, insightful, and probing.

It begins slowly, however. A BAM! POW! opening is not to be expected from a novel of this type, and things do pick up and become interesting as the novel progresses, but the opening is particularly bland - it could do with an interesting sentence or a unique situation to draw the reader in. I'm afraid many readers who pick the novel up and read the opening may put it down again and miss out on a good read.

The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle

I'm a big fan of T. C. Boyle, and this book is well-written and meticulously crafted, as I have come to expect from Boyle, but, I was just disgusted with two of the main characters. The novel tells the story of Professor Kinsey and his inner circle of sex researchers. Kinsey and his wife are historical figures, the rest of the characters are fictional. Kinsey is portrayed as overbearing, authoritarian, obsessed, domineering, abusive, and borderline perverted - all of which is probably close to the mark historically. And I really hated him.

The other major character, and the narrator, is John Milk, the first researcher that Kinsey hired. He is weak and easily led, treating Kinsey as a god, to the detriment of his own marriage. I'm sure Boyle, in the manner of Dickens, chose Milk's name on purpose - he really is a milquetoast. I wanted him to stand up to Kinsey, quit his job, maybe buy a gun and take some revenge, but he could never bring himself to do much of anything.

So I liked the writing but hated the two most important characters! What a dilemma...

Percival's Planet by Michael Byers

An excellent novel on so many levels. It tells the story of the discovery of the planet Pluto, from the viewpoint of the people involved and their friends and family. The characters revolve around and influence each other in much the same way that the planets revolve and perturb each others orbits. The characters are real, interesting, and varied. Several times I was surprised by their actions, only to realize in retrospect that the author had done an excellent job steering their behavior.

The plot, most of which takes place in 1929-1930, is framed by a begging and ending in the current time, which was also well done. The beginning sets the stage (literally) and gets the reader engaged in the story and anxious to find out what really happened.

Highly recommended.

Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund

An odd book, one of that sub-genre of fiction that borrows characters from another work of fiction, in this case Melville's Moby Dick. The best recent example I have read of this sub-genre is "March" by Geraldine Brooks - an excellent book that borrows characters from "Little Women". "Ahab's Wife" centers around the women who was barely mentioned in "Moby Dick", the wife of Ahab.

The writing is excellent, the author a real craft person, but the big is big and loose and self-indulgent. Melville's book is also big and somewhat self-indulgent, but it had the focus of a harponeer on it's destination. At times I had to wonder where "Ahab's Wife" was headed - it wandered all over the literary landscape. But still, it is a good read and worth the time.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

An interesting book, the Pulitzer prize winner for fiction in 2009. Interesting and fun to read. A series of related short stories that at least mention the character of Olive Kitteridge, a crusty New Englander that taught school for years. The stories involve people that knew her or were influenced by her, her husband, son, and so on. They are all finely crafted and suspenseful. Well worth a read.

Work Song by Ivan Doig

This is a pleasant enough book, basically a reminiscence of 1919 Butte, Montana. Morrie Morgan, a character from Doig's earlier novel, "The Whistling Season", blows into Butte, penniless and without prospects, and becomes a peripheral character in a conflict between the miner's union, a communist worker's group, and the mine owners. The conflict can be summarized as: union good, communists bad, capitalists evil. Only the union viewpoint is examined - none of the characters belong to any of the other groups.

There is not much depth here. The plot is thin, the characters are not surprising or even very interesting, and the ending is blah. Doig's earlier novel, "The Whistling Season", was much better.

Beautiful Maria of My Soul by Oscar Hijuelos

Hot Latin Lovers! This is the story of the life of Maria Garcia, the beautiful Cuban dancer from the author's previous novel, "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love", which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. "Mambo Kings" had more hot sex scenes than all the previous Pulitzer Prize winners combined, and this novel continues in that same tradition.

Maria grows from a poor illiterate child in rural Cuba, to a dancer in the pre-Castro nightclubs of Havana. She meets Nestor Castillo, one of the brothers at the heart of the Mambo Kings, and inspires him to write the classic love song that is the title of the novel.

The story follows Maria through her life, as she loves many men, has a daughter, escapes from Cuba to the US, marries, and so on. Always, her love for Nestor is something she cannot forget.

In an odd twist, the author shows up in his own novel as a character!. I cannot remember this happening in any of the other thousands of novels I have read. It's an intriguing twist to the story, and adds some verisimilitude, leaving the reader wondering what is real and what is fiction.

The novel is well done and satisfying, the love scenes are hot and graphic, and the portrayal of Cuba and Cubans realistic. Highly recommended.