The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Strain
by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
William Morrow, 2009, 416 pp.

What a scary, thrilling ride! I took The Strain to bed the first night to read before going to sleep. Big mistake. It became my daylight-only book because it scared me so badly that I could not read it after dark. It reminded me of my first Stephen King novels - the ones that kept me awake at night and made me jump at the slightest noise. The story is well written and well paced. I did not find any slow passages and as I read I could see it, as it will no doubt one day be, on the big screen - a real blockbuster. These are not nice vampires and you are not going to fall in love with them. I had forgotten how much fun a good scary book can be and I look forward to the next installment with bated breath and delectable dread.

The Pleasure of My Company: A Novella by Steve Martin

The Pleasure of My Company: A Novella
by Steve Martin
Hyperion, 2003, 176 pp.

I found The Pleasure of My Company to be a charming, tender and witty little book. Daniel Pecan Cambridge (our neurotic narrator) proves that we are all just a little more alike than we might think. I also enjoyed Mr. Martin's previous novella, Shopgirl. As a person who delights in experiencing the world, and most definitely books, in a visual and tactile way, there is something that I just loved about these slim volumes. I suppose that means I will never stand in line to buy a Kindle (yikes!) because for me a book is a total experience and this whole package is a true delight.

Guest Shot by David Locke

Guest Shot
by David Locke
Jove, 2001, 432 pp.

Exciting thriller written by New York Times best-selling art historian Robert Rosenblum under the pseudonym David Locke. A booking agent for a nationally televised talk show receives a call from someone offering to be a guest on the show. The Mystery Guest, as he comes to call himself, intends to discuss a murder that he is going to commit. He then plans to "do the deed" and subsequently return to the show to talk about it. And - even more chilling - he believes that he will be able do it over and over without being caught. The premise is a good one for a suspense novel and it is well-written with good plot twists and fully formed characters. I enjoyed every quickly turned page!

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

The Wednesday Sisters
by Meg Waite Clayton
Ballantine Books, 2008, 304 pp.


The Wednesday Sisters is the endearing story of five young women in 1960's California, transplants from around the country, meeting by chance in the neighborhood park. Each woman comes from a different background and brings a unique backstory to the group. They share a love of the Miss America pageant, their families and books. A chance remark leads to the start of a writing group and becomes a springboard for the bonds of friendships to form. NASA, the Women's Movement, questions of race and religion, anti-war protests all form the historical context in which the five mature as women, as mothers and wives, and as writers.

This is the third "chick-lit" novel I have read in just a little over twice as many months that uses a relatively recent era as it's backdrop. Each of them used pop culture to represent the time period...songs, events, clothing styles, fads, etc. One of them used pop iconography to such an extreme that it distracted the reader from the storyline and called attention to itself in a kind of irritating pop culture name-dropping. In the second, the story was a bit more evident but the pop culture references were still pesky and overabundant. In The Wednesday Sisters, though, the historical references work to both inform and propel the story forward. The characters have depth and voice and even though I was not immediately drawn to all of them, I was drawn in by their stories and I wanted to know more about each of them. Most of all, I suppose, I wanted to know why Brett always wears white gloves. But then, didn't everybody?

I would recommend this as a great book club pick!

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
by Jamie Ford
Ballantine Books, 2009, 304 pp.


Henry Lee is Chinese. The button on his coat will tell you that if you see him on the street, walking to his all-white prep school. His home in Seattle's Chinatown sits only blocks from Nihonmachi, the Japanese section of the city, but to his parents Nihonmachi is a no-mans land filled with evil, murderous people. America and China are both at war with Japan and the atrocities in his homeland only serve to further demonize the Japanese in Henry's fathers eyes. Henry's parents want him to be American and in an excess of zeal for this goal ban him from speaking Cantonese at home even though that is all they understand. This is the first of many disconnects for Henry. He is caught between cultures, teased and laughed at by the other Chinese children for going to the white school and then bullied at that school by his white classmates. Drawn to the jazz he hears on his walks to and from school, Henry strikes up a friendship with Sheldon, a black street musician. The music touches a place in Henry that nothing else has in his young life. In school, as a "scholarship" student, Henry must work in the school cafeteria every day at lunch with Miss Beatty, the gruff lunch lady. This is yet another opportunity for his fellow students to make fun of him as Miss Beatty leaves him to serve lunch alone while she goes out for her break as soon as he gets there. Then one day, there is another scholarship student in the cafeteria to help him, an Asian girl named Keiko. Henry is no longer the only Asian in the school, but he is still the only Chinese student.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet deals with many things - race and ethnicity, family, loss, Seattle jazz and the Japanese internment during the war. However, the true essence of this novel is a love story. It is a story of hope against great odds and the surprise and joy of finding something that you thought was lost forever. This is a beautifully written novel. I highly recommend it.

Whitethorn Woods
by Maeve Binchy
Anchor reprint, 2008, 446 pp.

As the section headings indicate, Maeve Binchy's most recent book is all about "The Road, The Woods and the Well." The Road in question is a new bypass around the town of Rossmore, Ireland. The Woods are the Whitethorn Woods of the title which the proposed road will go right through. And the Well , located within Whitethorn Woods, is a shrine to St. Anne that will be completely destroyed if the road is built.

St. Anne's Well has touched many people over the years. There is great disagreement as to the holy and/or magical properties of the cave and it's ancient statue. The whitethorn bushes at its entrance are adorned with the petitions of it's visitors. Prayers and pictures, bits of paper pinned to the branches by the hundreds. The bypass is progress - the new, the convenient. The well is history, the mystical, the ancient. One will surely destroy the other if it is allowed to come to pass.

The story is told by many voices, each chapter a different character. All have some link to the town of Rossmore. Some live there, some were born there, some have visited and some have done desperate things there. Each character's bit of the story leads in some way to the next snippet. The chapters are also organized in pairs where the consecutive chapters are a husband and wife or a brother and sister or friends and you are privileged with two viewpoints of roughly the same story. The whole thing sounds like a very complicated way to tell a story. The delightful thing is that it is not at all a complicated or difficult way to read a story. I found that as each person's bit of the story unfolded, I had no problem remembering their relationship to previous characters and tales. The story almost blooms in the mind, each piece adding to the whole picture at a comfortable, easy pace, jolted here and there with the staccato of shocking enlightenments. It is Maeve Binchy at her best.