NY: Viking, 2005.
Lurie is a first-rate storyteller, and has been for fifty years now, though her oeuvre isn’t huge. You take a stroll with her around a college campus in upstate New York, and she tells you things about the academics she knows, and their families, and before you know it, you’re caught up in their lives and relationships.
London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
In the mid-1960s, young Cartwright, a native of Johannesburg, arrived at Oxford to pursue an M.A. The place took hold of him almost instantly and lodged itself deep in his personality and psyche, as happens to a great many of those privileged to study there.
Latham, NY: British American Publishing, 2002.
Among American academics who are also at least part-time Anglophiles there is often a fascination with — almost a yearning for — the University of Oxford, the font of higher education and scholarship among English-speakers. I share that fascination and I’ve always enjoyed books about Oxford and even films and TV dramas set there (yes, like Inspector Morse), and so I picked up this volume on the strength of its title.
NY: Viking, 1982.
Canada, being a small nation, hasn’t produced that many first-rate literary minds, but among those she has Davies leads the pack. He was a Shakespearean actor, a playwright, a newspaper editor, a professor of English, a busy novelist, and head of a graduate college in Toronto, and it’s the latter two careers that figure most in this first volume of a satirical trilogy. (Davies did a number of trilogies.) There are three narrators who take turns leading the reader through events and we see each of them through the eyes of the other two, which makes the whole story exist in multiple dimensions.
NY: HarperCollins, 1964, 1936.
When I went through library school — back when that meant deep knowledge about books, not online databases — one of the requirements was several semesters of exposure to various genres of popular fiction, since you can’t recommend to patrons what you aren’t familiar with yourself. Mostly, when it came to mystery novels and detective stories, that meant the classic authors as they were in the 1960s: Ngaio Marsh, Ross MacDonald, Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, Dorothy Sayers, and especially Agatha Christie. I didn’t read mysteries as a kid (science fiction was my thing) but I discovered several authors whose work I could appreciate, and I’ve found many more since. But I never could handle Agatha Christie.
As a retired public librarian (very large system in a very large city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of other people for more than 40 years. Since 1999, I've been posting my reviews to a personal website, but I'm now shifting my reviewing jones to this blog.
I have been a semi-professional genealogist since the 1960s and I have another blog of book reviews in the field of family research! To read those, go to BookSmith's Genealogy Book Reviews.
