“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” It's an alternate world and it's not a pretty one. Our main character, Winston, is a party official in a totalitarian world: "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Big Brother is always watching. Winston is not totally under the thumb of Big Brother, however; soon he is sought as a "thought criminal," for his acts of insurrection that include such simple acts as keeping a journal and thinking for himself. And always 1984 will remain as a warning, a caution, a reminder.

Helene Hanff is a writer in New York, and it is she who first writes to the bookshop at 84, Charing Cross Road about books she is seeking, and, slowly, oh so slowly, Hanff and the bookseller, Frank Doel, become friends. It's a twenty-year correspondence, a twenty-year friendship, all centering around the love of books. Delightfully funny. Exquisite.

Abel is set to have a lovely picnic with his wife when all his plans are upset by a hurricane. He finds himself alone on the island, and he learns he must rely upon himself. There's no children's writer that respects his readers as much as William Steig. What a vocabulary. What descriptions. What lovely illustrations.

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, The

Junior has had enough. He’s seen enough lives wasted on the reservation, people destroyed by a potent combination of alcohol and hopelessness. Junior makes his move; he leaves the comfort of his reservation school for the white school twenty-two long miles away, a world away from the reservation.

A tough book to read, full of poverty, alcoholism, and, worst of all, the brutal lack of hope. It felt absolutely true. As I read this book, I felt like I did when I was watching the movie, Beowulf, hating the violence, hating the cruelty, yet fully believing the underlying truth of the world, knowing this is the way the world is, wanting to reject it, to fix it, to heal it, and not having the tiniest clue as to how to do so.

"You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."

And that's the start of our introduction to one of life's most charming main characters, Huck Finn. Huck fakes his own death to escape his abusive dad, and goes through a series of wonderful adventures, meeting oodles of scary characters along the way.

I wasn't happy when my seventh-grade English teacher announced that we were going to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Who wanted to read a book with a boy main character? Not me.

I completely changed my mind after we read together the very first chapter. The dynamics of the relationship between edgy Tom and his guardian Aunt Polly was spot-on perfect. And the story went on, and just got better and better. Skipping school. Tom got his fence painted and didn't do a lick of work---fabulous. Body snatchers in a graveyard. A haunted house. Lost in a cave. Witness to a murder. Buried treasure. Pirates. Attending his own funeral.

One of my all-time favorite reads.

Wine buyer Kermit Lynch takes us on a tour of the wines of France, through the Loire, Bordeaux, Languedoc, Provence, and all the other great wine regions. I learned so much about the making of wine and drinking of wine from reading this book.

Newland Archer has it all---he's a gentleman lawyer, occasionally popping into the office to do little bits of work, but generally occupying himself dining and socializing with his fellow affluent friends---and now, to cap off a wonderful life, his beloved May has agreed to marry him. What more could he want? Until he meets May's bohemian cousin, Ellen, and falls under her spell....I am enchanted with this story, set in 1870's Gilded Age New York City, when the values and morals adhered to by society were beginning to come undone. It will definitely be on my Best Reads of the Year list.

I picked up The Annotated Alice to help me thoroughly prepare for our upcoming bookgroup discussion of Alice in Wonderland. I don't think you could find any book that would explain and provide thoughtful commentary for the curious aspects of this very curious book. Just for fun, I also read Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by Alison Jay, along with the Disney Step into Reading version, and the board book version, Alice in Wonderland: A Colors Primer. And I read The Once Upon a Time Map Book: Take a Tour of Six Enchanted Lands (including Alice's) and Alice in Wonderland Adapted for the Stage.

Lord Slane is dead---what will become of his 88-year-old widow? The six children discuss this, and Lady Slane listens to all the plans and says, "I am going to live by myself." She goes on to say, "...I have considered the eyes of the world for so long that I think it's time I had a holiday from them. If one is not to please oneself in old age, when is one to please oneself? There is so little time left!" "I am going to become completely self-indulgent. I am going to wallow in old age." And so Lady Slane rents a favorite house and makes new friends and reflects back upon her life and encourages her young granddaughter to make the choices she did not make, picking the choices of one's heart. On old age: "The mind was as alert as ever, perhaps more alert, sharpened by the sense of imminent final interruption, spurred by the necessity of making the most of remaining time; only the body was a little shaky, not very certain of its reliability, not quite certain even of its sense of direction, afraid of stumbling over a step, of spilling a cup of tea, nervous, tremulous; aware that it must not be jostled or hurried, for fear of betraying its frail inadequacy." A little more on old age: "Those days were gone when feeling burst its bounds and poured hot from the foundry, when the heart seemed likely to split with complex and contradictory desires; now there was nothing left but a landscape in monochrome, the features identical but the colours gone from them and nothing but a gesture left in place of speech."

Remarque, Erich Maria

From the first sentence, this story takes you right into the experience of being a young naive person who has been sent into war. Paul Bäumer eagerly enlists with his class into World War I, but it is not long before all that he holds to be true is shaken when the bombs begin to fly.

It's the details of the war---the sudden increase in food rations after a large part of Paul's company is killed in battle, the shocking result of a bombing on human bodies, the experience of sitting with a dying man---that made this such a powerful read for me. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

Bernstein, Carl and Woodward, Bob

Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The

Finishing this book was a real achievement for me! I started it three times before I got hooked on the characters of Joe and Sammy. The ending was flat and a lot of the story felt forced, but, on the whole, it held together.

Bird, Kai and Sherwin, Martin J.

An Age Like This (The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters)

I heard it called the world's best known soap opera. I heard it called the world's greatest novel. It's the world's greatest novel. It's a brilliant intertwining of characters, characters who are as fully human as you can ever get on the page. There is Dolly Oblonsky, a matronly wife who has lost her husband's affections and doesn't know why and doesn't know what to do. There's her husband, Stiva Oblonsky, the womanizing yet charming fellow who can't stop flirting with women and can't manage money. There is Kitty Alexandrovna, the woman at the height of her beauty who is intrigued with the easily-bored Count Alexei Vronsky. There is Konstantin Levin, a country farmer, confused about life, estranged from religion, and deeply taken with the young Kitty. There is Alexei Karenin, the dutiful husband who seeks guidance about what is right. And there is Anna Karenina herself, the title character, who is swept up in a mad romance with Count Vronsky, and has to deal with the consequences, a situation where no move is a happy one for herself or for anyone else. I was especially taken with Konstantin Levin and his anguished search for truth and happiness, in his work relations with others, in the choosing of his wife, in his philosophy of life. I will never forget the final paragraph of this book, a paragraph that deeply resonates with me, lines from Levin as he finally is able to put together everything he has learned into a wonderful personal philosophy of life: "I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own fright and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it." I can see that I am going to be pushing everyone I meet to read this book. I apologize in advance. It's, after all, over eight hundred pages. But it's worth it. It's definitely worth it.

Second read completed. The characters are just as charming and fresh as I remember them. The book was a huge hit with my real life book club. One member said this might be the best book he has ever read.

The old stories are the best stories. I find this is more and more true. There is a reason books are considered classics, and that's because people have told them and read them, over and over, millions and millions of times, for many, many years. The stories in the Arabian Nights are electric and mesmerizing. The stories in the Arabian Nights are horrifying and vivifying. The stories in the Arabian Nights are charged with deep meaning and truth. You know many of these. Scheherazade. Aladdin and his magic lamp. Sinbad the sailor. Ali Baba and the forty thieves. Some are less familiar but also resonate with deep truth. The fisherman and the genie. The king and the physician. Abou Hassan. Codadad. This is a wonderful collection of old stories, beautifully illustrated. Be warned that these stories are a product of their time, when parents felt less need to protect their children from the darknesses of life, and there are lots of scenes of murder and slavery and vengeance and cruelty.

As I Please (The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters)

At Canaan’s Edge (America in the King Years)

de Groot, Roy Andries

Tedious and tedious and tedious. Sometimes reading this book felt like reading random pages of a (very popular) teen girl's diary. "I saw so-and-so and he is working on a new painting and Gertrude Stein was amused by him." "I saw so-and-so and he is writing a new novel and he bored Gertrude Stein." Yes, on and on and on. Every celebrity of her age visited Stein, I think. The book felt a like an thinly-disguised attempt to pump up the renown of Gertrude Stein herself. And the writing was unbearably tedious.

But, at the same time, some of the little stories were fun to read about. After all, Stein and Toklas hosted Hemingway. And Fitzgerald. And Picasso. Talked to them. Laughed with them. Ate with them. Argued with them.

Tedious. But oddly mesmerizing.

Babur, Zahiruddin Muhammad

Isherwood, Christopher

Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874–1950

Shaw, George Bernard

If you have never had the experience of reading the prose of one of those old, amazing newspapermen, Liebling is your fellow. And where does he take you? Why, Paris, of course. You just can’t turn down this ride.

Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by wealthy General Sternwood to look into the gambling debts of his daughter Carmen, and he ends up getting pulled deeper and deeper into the life of the Sternwood family. I listened to this as an audiobook on a long trip I took last week, and what a delight it was. The characters. The setting. The lingo. Pure delight.