Bowen, Rhys. The Victory Garden.

Seattle: Lake Union, 2019.

In addition to a couple of rather lighthearted historical mystery series, Rhys Bowen (the pen name of Jane Quinn-Harkin) has published a number of highly readable standalone historical novels, all (so far) set earlier in the 20th century, beginning with In Fairleigh Field in 2017. They generally get pigeonholed as “women’s fiction,” but they’re not particularly romantic and there’s no ongoing theme, either, except that they focus on female characters dealing with big problems. I’ve read half a dozen of them now and enjoyed them all. The author has a good grasp of the detail and atmosphere of time and place and a knack for creating characters you can become invested in.

Tartt, Donna. The Goldfinch.

NY: Little, Brown, 2013.

I’m a very heavy reader. I get through 80-100 books per year, and have done for more than fifty years. So when I say this is one of the absolute best books I’ve read in the past decade, that means something. Usually, when I begin a really fat book (and this one is 775 pages), I know that, however good it is, the sheer size will become wearing and I’ll have to take a break from it halfway through and read something else for a while. But that never happened with this one. As I came to the end of each section, with Theo being dragged off to Vegas, or trying desperately to get back to New York, or packing for Amsterdam, rather than pausing, I just kept going, anxious to find out what was going to happen next. I found Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, beautifully constructed and haunting in its characterizations. I’ve read it three times in the past twenty years. For me, her second one, The Little Friend, wasn’t nearly as successful. The characters were somewhat unconvincing, I thought, and the pace tended to plod. But again, that is very definitely not the case this time out. This one takes off like an express train leaving the station and it never slows down for a minute.

Callaghan, Jo. In the Blink of an Eye.

NY: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

AI has been in the news a lot lately, and everyone thinks they know what it is, but most people really have no idea what real “artificial intelligence” is about or what its future possibilities are. The exception to that “everybody” is  probably science fiction fans, because we began thinking about the concept of artificially engineered intelligences decades ago. This fascinating police procedural yarn sits neatly — and clearly by design — between those two sets of expectations.

Adams, Alice. A Southern Exposure.

NY: Knopf, 1995.

Alice Adams was one of the great storytellers of the late 20th century, best known for her short stories, but I’ve always loved her novels. And she was one of the great delineators of character, too, painting deft portraits of urbane but conflicted Northern women and smart but constricted Southerners. And she could set them in their milieu and tell you all the important things to know about them in just a few sentences. The setting this time is the small college town of Pinehill (North Carolina, probably, though it’s never specified) and the time is 1938, with the Depression having made a lasting mark, especially on communities that were never that well off to begin with. And most people are aware by now that another war is coming, though few will say so and most don’t want to think about it.

Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine.

NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

This is a reread for me, but I had read several of Baker’s short stories in the New Yorker when he reworked a couple of them into this, his first novel, and I’ve read everything he’s written since. Partly, it’s because I guess I identify with his somewhat obsessive/compulsive attention to everyday detail in the world around him. The first thing he can remember accomplishing in his life is tying his shoes; “shoes are the first adult machine we are given to master.” Then he adds the refinement of pulling up successively on each crossover of the laces in order to make one’s foot feel “tightly papoosed.” (Similarly, observing the milkman making deliveries was “my first glimpse of the social contract.”) He’s also the sort of person who began to worry on first learning at the age of ten that his brain cells were constantly dying. (He later devised a number of competing theories, all described here, as to why this process wasn’t making him stupider.)