Recent Reads

A month or so ago, I read  The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, because some of my college classmates were reading it and talking about it. 

I admit that it was a page-turner, and I didn't figure out  "who did it,"  but I so disliked the characters, especially the girl in the title, that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.

Then, while I was at Cape May, and after, I read All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr,  and loved it.

I could read it again, with pleasure, except for the chapters on the young German boy's experiences in the Nazi school.  The chapters on Paris, and the young girl's years there in the museum with her father, as well as their years in San Malo, were so interesting.  I loved how the father carved models of all the houses of their neighborhoods in each location for the daughter to learn by feel, and then follow in real space. I loved the descriptions of the boy's genius with making and repairing radios.
I loved the courage and large-heartedness of so many of the characters. 

Then, in the last week, I finished reading Someone by Alice McDermott.

This was not my favorite novel of hers; that was Charming Billy. However, her first person narrator's description of her family and neighbors, her whole first generation Irish/Brooklyn/Catholic culture were enormously interesting to me. Because my own Irish family settled in relatively rural/suburban Philadelphia, on a small farm, and it was my father who was first generation, it was not like anything in my own experience.  But I liked the story very much; so much that I was sorry when the book ended.

Today I began to read The Lost Symbol  by Dan Brown.

Managed to get through the first three chapters and gave up on it.  It's terrible.  More of the same stuff as the DaVinci Code.