"The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss" by Anderson Cooper- ****

●  Audiobook
●  Non-Fiction
●  Originally published in 2016
●  Review:  I will say up front that I am an Anderson Cooper fan, and I really wasn't familiar with his mother's infamous childhood.  I was totally engrossed with this book.  I listened to the audio version, with Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt,  narrating.  It was interesting on multiple levels.  Themes included the mother-child relationship, the tragedies that shape a person's future, the difference in parenting styles, and life among the old world of old money.  It ain't all it's cracked up to be.  Excellent listen!

"Between The World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates *****

●  Audiobook
●  US author
●  Originally published in 2015
●  Review:  A powerful essay/letter from the author to his son.  He shares his struggles, questions, beliefs about African American  identity in the United States.  His prose is evocative, poignant, and painfully direct.  As a Caucasian American,  the author opened my eyes to new perspective, and I appreciate that. 

"The White Castle" by Orhan Pamuk *****

• Nobel prize winning author
• Turkish author
• Originally published 1985, this translation in 1990
• Vocabulary:
• orrery:   an apparatus showing the relative positions and motions of bodies in the solar system by balls moved by a clockwork
• ergovan:  
• Epigraph:  "To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person--what else is this but the birth of great passion?....Marcel Proust, from the mistranslation of Y.K. Karaosmanoglu
• Quotes:
• p.12...I suppose that to see everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time.  It is because I too have succumbed to this disease that I published this tale (prologue)
• p.13..."Many men believe that no life is determined in advance, that all stories are essentially a chain of coincidences.  And yet, even those who believe this come to the conclusion, when they look back, that events they once took for chance were really inevitable."
• p.32..."So like tow dutiful students who work faithfully at their lessons even when the grown-ups are not at home listening through a cracked door like two obedient brothers, we sat down to work."
• p.37..."...a prattling began on the subject of how human beings were created in pairs, hyperbolic examples on this theme were recalled, twins whose mothers could not tell them apart, look-alikes who were frightened at the sight of one another but were unable , as if bewitched, ever again to part, bandits who took the names of the innocent and lived their lives."
• p.63..."I encouraged him, perhaps because I already sensed then that I would later adopt his manner and his life-story as my own."
• p.65..."...just as man could view his appearance in a mirror, he could examine his essence within his own thoughts."
• p.90..."...prediction is buffoonery, but it can be well used to influence fools."
• p.123..."While I looked apprehensively into his face, I felt an impulse to say 'I am I'.  It was as if, had I been able to find the courage to speak this nonsensical phrase, I would obliterate all those games played by all those gossips scheming t turn me into someone else, played by Hoja and the sultan, and live at peace again within my own being."
• p.143..."It was as if everything were as perfect as the view of that pure white castle with birds flying over its towers, as perfect as the darkening rocky cliff of the slope and the still, black forest......would never be able to reach the white towers of the castle".....
• Notes:
• p.39...the pasha wanted a weapon "to make the world a prison for our enemies."....
• the frustration of being surrounded by people who did not want to know what they did not know
• never connected the words infidel and infidelity before
• the mirror was hugely significant object in the book....seeing self and other
• use of nightmarish stories to influence the pasha's mind, rather than science
• switching back and forth in being the favored one
• the sultan brought a mimic to exemplify the shared and specific traits of both men
• constant desire to "rouse ourselves at last and take action, of the future and the mysteries of our minds."  p.127
• Going int the forest, always a symbol of mystical transformation...p.137
• all genius has some evil
• Review:  Brilliant, again, as always.....Orhan!  A mind-bending story of identity, of dreams, of the schism between Eastern belief and Western discoveries.  This will stick with me for a long time to come.  Pamuk's writing, his plot, his ability to layer theme upon theme, is extraordinary!  Can you tell I am a huge fan?

"Our Souls At Night" by Kent Haruf ****

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published in 2015
• Review: An absolutely lovely, poignant story of two lonely elderly people seeking comfort and friendship, and maybe more.  

"The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough ***

• Non-Fiction
• Book Club selection
• US author
• Originally published in 2015
• Review: A very readable history of flight and the Wright Brothers.  I very much enjoyed the family history and the familial relationships.   I could feel the tension building up to the first flights.  After that, I found throughout book to be a bit dull.

"Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither" by Sara Baume *****

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published in 2016
• Internal monologue of isolated man who adopts a dog
• Review:  Marvelously written, poignant and shocking story!  So deceptively simple at the outset.  A lonely man rescues a lonely dog.  The entire novel is comprised of the man's internal monologue and the reader is drawn in oh so slowly as it all unravels.  I was moved by the powerful prose of this writer.  I look forward to reading more of her work.

"New and Collected Poems: 1975-2017" by Jay Parini ****

• Early Review edition for Librarything.com
• USA
• Poetry
• Originally published in 2016
• Review:  I read most of these poems aloud to myself.  I particularly liked Parini's poems about nature.  They called to mind those wonderful poems by Robert Frost.  Overall the collection evoked a sense of yearning for the simple, lovely pleasures in life and in nature.  Very nice collection!

"The North Water" by Ian McGuire ****

• English author
• Originally published in 2016
• Setting:  Greenland whaling trade, 1850s
• Vocabulary:
• bathos:  the sudden appearance of a silly idea or event in a book, movie discussion, etc., that is serious in tone
• chunter:  to talk in a low inarticulate way
• flensing:  to strip (as a whale) of blubber or skin
• gallimaufry: hodgepodge
• Quotes:
• p.19..."Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage."
• p.19..."What does 'free' even mean? Such words are paper-thin, they crumble and tear under the slightest pressure."
• p.51..."Sumner's opiated mind slips its moorings and drifts backwards, sideways, through fluid dreamscapes as fearsome and as thick with unnameable life as the green arctic waters which press and crash only twelve wooden inches from his head."
• p.78..."Affection is a passing thing.  A beast is no different from a person in that regard."
• p.88..."If you are seeking persons of gentleness and refinement, Sumner, the Greenland whaling trade is not the place to look for them."
• p.105..."Words are like toys:  they amuse and educate us for a time, but when we come to manhood we should give them up."
• p.136..."Their world is hard and raw enough, they think, without the added burden of moral convolution."..whalers
• p.141..."Behind every piece of sweet-smelling female loveliness lies a world of stench and doggery....he's a lucky man who can forget that's true or pretend it isn't"......regarding the brutal work of  getting the whalebone for the corsets of fine ladies
• p.156..."Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor."
• p.200..."He has walked much too far, he knows it now:  he has strayed from his true purposes, he is lost and bewildered, and his failure is complete."...sums up Sumner's experience.
• Review:  A whaling tale, a tale of civilized men returning to their primal existence.  This is not a nice story.  This is not for the,faint-hearted.  However, if you want to feel a sense of being on the whaling ship, of smelling and tasting and hearing and seeing the brutality of survival, and the brutality of man, than this is the book for you.  Somehow, the author manages to convey primal, brutal details with lyrical prose.  I could not put the book down once I had gotten into it and gratefully inhaled the bits of wisdom spaced throughout its pages.  Very interesting.

"A Whole Life" by Robert Seethaler ****

• Austrian author
• Originally published in 2015
• Setting:  Austrian village just pre WWII until 1970s
• Characters:
• Andreas Egger (fictional), mountain man, abused by uncle, crooked leg
• Marie:  Egger's wife
• Horned Hannes:  mountain encountered at beginning, alive, and at the end, not
• Quotes:
• p.2..."...it  had turned icy-cold again, and the snow fell so thickly and incessantly from the sky that it seemed softly to swallow the landscape, smothering all life and sound."...nice alliteration
• p.22..."He though slowly, spoke slowly and walked slowly; yet every thought, every word and every step left a mark precisely where, in his opinion, such marks were supposed to be."
• p.25..."Then he would think about his future, which extended infinitely before him, precisely because he expected nothing of it."
• p.27..."....Egger carried inextinguishably within him:  a pain that, after the brief touch of a fold of fabric, had sunk into the flesh of his upper arm his shoulder, his breast finally settling somewhere in the region of his heart."...falling in love with his future wife
• p.30..."Scars are like years, he said:  one follows another and it's all of them together that make a person who they are."
• p.31..."His kind of man needed to lift up his eyes and look as far as possible beyond his own small, limited patch of ground."
• p.44..."You can buy a man's hours off him, you can steal his days from him, or you can rob him of his whole life, but no one can take away from any man so much as a single moment.".....hmmm..Egger's employer
• p.85..."If you're on the way to Hell, he'd say, you have to laugh with the devils:  ;it costs nothing and makes the whole thing more bearable.
• p.130..."Egger was profoundly shocked by this unexpected encounter.  Almost a whole life lay between Horned Hannes' disappearance and his turning up again."
• Review:  A quiet gem of a read.  When it comes right down to it, what constitutes 'a whole life"  Is it our memories, although they change with time?  Is it who we have known?  Is it the challenges we have faced and the manner in which we have done so?  In the end, it seems to me that it is an ephemeral notion, and Robert Seethaler quietly, eloquently, and simply portrays that.  He somehow captures the unimportance, yet undeniablility, of the passage of time.  He takes the reader into the mind of a man who is deceptively simple, because he is quiet, yet his internal world is vibrant, sensitive, and profound.  Lovely story of one man's whole life, which no one can really tell at all.

"Shylock Is My Name" by Howard Jacobson *****

• Early Review edition for LibraryThing.com
• Publish date Feb. 2016
• US author
• Vocabulary:
• obloquy:  harsh or critical statements about someone, the condition of someone who lost the respect of other people
• chthonic:  of or relating to the underworld
• indurated:  having become firm or hard especially by increase of fibrous elements <indurated tissue>
• Characters:
• Shylock....religious Jew, "the Hebrew", protagonist, symbol of timelessness
• Strulovich....cultural Jew, father of Beatrice
• Beatrice...runs from father only to appreciate his value later, modern child, wants to be a performance artist
• Leah....Shylock's dead wife
• Plurabelle....the spoiled smart type, manipulator, 
• Kay...Strulovich's wife, bedridden and mute from stroke, calls Strulovich a "Judeolunatic"
• D'Anton....Plurabelle's procurer
• Barnaby...........Plurabelle's beautiful and brainless lover
• Gratan....Beatrice's Gentile lover, footballer, gave Nazi salute during match
• Quotes:
• p.12..."When mothers see what's been done to their baby boys the milk turns sour in their breasts."....intense
• p.13..."...there is no end to what those executioners we call fathers do.  First they maim their boy children than they torment them."
• p.17..."Sometimes....even the fortunate and gifted can feel their lives are mortgaged to a perplexing sadness."
• p.18..."Only someone who enjoyed the benefits of great wealth himself could have been made so angry by the great wealth of others--the difference being that he hadn't had to earn his, the fact of which also made him obscurely angry."
• p.25..."For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some covered after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows"
• p.27..."Whether it's a flaw or a stratagem I cannot say, but they have always put themselves at the centre of every drama, human or theological.  I think of it as a political sadness.  The glue of self-pity is very strong."
• p.33..."A girl who would sleep with her father's enemies was of a succulence beyond description, plunder that exceeded in value even Simon Strulovich's rubies and turquoises."
• p.34..."Beatrice's presence cheered her, but she seemed to wish to see her only on her own, as though they were separate families, individual spokes of a wheel that had fallen off."...just like that metaphor
• p.49.."It's an invariable law that fathers love their daughters immoderately."
• p.54..."Wounding doubt wounds not as fatally as wounding certainty."
• p.66..."After so many years of eing told what Gentiles see when they look at us it's hardly a surprise that we end up seeing something similar.  That's how vilification works.  The victim ingests the views of the tormentor."
• p.67..."Jews hunched over their private parts.  Jew hunched over their money.  In the eyes of Gentiles it's one vas fevered panorama of degenerate self-interest."
• p.83..."Christianity, when all was said and done, counted as no more than an interregnum; the only true distinction was between Judaism and paganism."
• p.112..."And finally, he failed to see that a gallery of British Jewish art was any less intrinsic to North Cheshire than an ostrich park would have been."
• p.120..."There was no fine point of etiquette that said a father interviewing an accidental Nazi sympathizer who wanted to sleep with his daughter had to wear a tie."...LOL
• p.122..."..the magnetic force of indurated revulsion..."
• p.175..."Every transaction between Jew and Gentile is metaphorical."
• p.177..."To lose to Jews is to lose to half-men."
• p.251..."Sadness is among the tools which those who would live nobly employ to distance themselves from the farcicality of existence engulfing everyone else.  The unfairness, the banality, the repetition of cruelty.  That some are delivered to far grander sorrows than these is proved by their sadness."
• p.273..."To the modern mind there is a dignity in being tricked.  it confirms the preposterousness of existence."

• Notes:
• Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine...a character
• Plurabelle's trap with three cars, a BMW, a Porsche, a Volkswagen, p.21
• p.37...eloquent description of the "covenant" Strulovich feels at the birth of Beatrice, the reasoning he wants her to marry a Jew
• p.40...Mehdi Mehdi, French Algerian ventriloquist whose dummy espouses Nazi affinity, but he himself says he does not
• Monkey....used as a metaphor for the primitive, in epithets, 
• Beatrice misses her father the one time he does not chase her
• Strulovich wants Beatrice to marry a Jew for "the sake of continuity", the "covenant"
• p.238....notion of God speaking vs. painting the world into existence, so the word rules over the senses, Shylock's thoughts as he gazes at and begins to appreciate Strulovich's artwork

• Review:   "Merchant of Venice" meets reality TV.  Not enough to decide whether to read this absolutely brilliant novel? I was deeply impressed by Jacobson's "The Finkler Question" and now feel comfortable saying that I think he is a brilliant writer.  Crisp, eloquent use of language coupled with a gripping plot and satirical wit matched by few make this an outstanding read. Meanwhile, the central theme of the novel, Jewish identity, is examined in depth.  Cultural Jews debate with religious Jews, both Jews debate with Gentiles. Using Shakespeare's play as a jumping off point, the author highlights the seeming timelessness of the Jewish position in society across time.  Anti-Semitism is described in all of its glaring subtleties as well.  A superlative story, an erudite dissection of Jewish identity, and writing to write home about. And it all starts with two Jews in a graveyard!

"Eleven On Top" by Janet Evanovich ***

• Audiobook
• #11 in Stephanie Plum Series
• US author
• Originally published in 2005
• Review:  As always, the characters were wonderful.  However,  the plot for this installment fell a bit flat. Oh well, can't win 'em all.  I  will still continue with this Stephanie Plum series.

"The Violet Hour: Great Writers At The End" by Kate Roiphe *****

• Early Review edition
• Publication in 2016
• US author
• Review:  If you ever ponder death, your own or someone else's, then I believe you would find this book to be brilliant, fascinating, and in some ways uplifting.  The author, who has had her own brush with death, shares the results of her in-depth research on the last days and lifelong influences of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak.  She adds commentary, but primarily lets the research speak for itself.  I will just add the words of James Salter, whom the author spoke with after completing her research, "We make our own comfort."

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"The Cure For Dreaming" by Cat Winters ***

● Audiobook
● US author
●  Originally published in 2014
● Review :  I have a hunch that a young adult reader might have rated this book more highly than I have.  While it had enjoyable characters,  and important historical information, the plot and themes were a bit more obvious than I enjoy.  I guess I am a glutton for punishment, and prefer a bit more obscurity and having to think more to get the point.

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll *****

• Audiobook, narrated by Scarlett Johansson
• English author
• This version published in 2015, originally published in 1865
• Review:  Johansson is an absolutely delightful narrator for this iconic children's story.  She brings all the characters to life.  Enough has been written about this.  I just loved listening to the story.  As an adult I can hear the poignant straddling of childhood's joys with childhood's fears, in a manner which endears and delights!

Summer Crossing by Truman Capote ****

• Audiobook 
• US author
• Originally published in 2004.  It was written in the 1940s, never published, then found among his papers after his death
• Review:  This audio version of Capote's novella was very good.  A 20th century Romeo and Juliet-esque tale set in the hot summer in NYC.  So, that tells you the outcome, but it is the wonderful prose of Capote's which makes this worth reading nonetheless.  His phrasing made me catch my breath a few times, it was so perfect.  Capote is a painter with words.  Lovely, lovely, tragic tale!

"The Early Stories of Truman Capote" by Truman Capote ****

• Audiobook
• Short Stories, written when author was a teenager
• Originally published in 2015
• Review: What a lovely collection of short stories.  Capote is able to say so much with his careful word choices.  He also ends his stories really well, which I believe to be one of the signs if a really fine writer.  Witty, eloquent, mournful, sarcastic, and clearly stories written by a man with marvelous powers of observation. Excellent!

"The Zafarani Files" by Gamal al-Ghitani ****

• Summer Read with Beth
• Egyptian author
• Originally published in 1976
• Review:  Feel like a satirical romp in Cairo?  This is the book.  Just when the marvelous character descriptions of the folks living in Zafarani Alley were beginning to seem a bit tedious.....zing!  Major plot development takes the story to a new level.  Basically this is about a universe inside a universe inside a universe, all of which are consistently absurd, and which seem filled with more conflict than resolution....until the Sheikh shakes things up for all!  Excellent read!

Computer glitch caused me to lose all my notes, quotes, etc.  DANG!

"The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah ****

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published in 2015
• WWII, occupied France
• Review:  I was uncertain about reading this WWII tale of a survivors.  I've read a lot of novels from this period.  I am definitely glad that I read this one.  Two sisters, seemingly polar opposites to one another in temperament, must survive WWII in occupied France.  This is a marvelous story of family, love, and above all, in my mind, honor and integrity.  Some wrongs can be ignored, while others demand action.  Excellent read.

"When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kanalithi ****

• Audiobook
• Non-Fiction, Autobiographical
• Foreword by Abraham Verghese
• Medical philosopher, neurologist, US author
• Originally published 2016
• Chronicle of his own death
• Review:  This autobiographical story of living with and being killed by cancer was extremely well written.  From firsthand knowledge I can say that the author captured eloquently the feelings associated with living with cancer.  It was a courageous act and I would recommend this book to anyone affected by cancer, whether as a patient, or as someone who cares about a patient.