I always look forward to a new book by Margaret Drabble—she is one of those writers who could make the phone book both funny and beautiful. The
Sea Lady (Harcourt, $24) is about the reunion of a couple of aging academics (one a marine biologist) who have quite a past. It’s about more than that too…the effects of difficult childhoods, how society changes over time, how people change when things don’t go according to plan. The language is the star here—I found myself reading gorgeous details about marine science late into the night.

This has been a good month for me because another of my favorite writers came out with a new book. Nicholas Christopher’s The Bestiary (Dial Press, $25) introduces us to Xeno Atlas, a young boy fascinated with a book called The Caravan Bestiary—an ancient manuscript that details all the animals left off Noah’s Ark. Xeno embarks on a journey to recover the manuscript, and along the way finds true love, clues to his own mysterious upbringing, and of course, a lot of fascinating lost knowledge! Reading a Nicholas Christopher book reminds you of what it felt like to dive into those great adventure stories you loved as a kid—but with a writer who knows that life can break your heart. If you read this and like it, be sure to check out one of my all-time favorite books, A Trip to the Stars also by Christopher.

The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva

Beyond Reach by Karin Slaughter

With the push to eat more fresh foods, foods grown locally and emphasis on a healthy diet, Anna Thomas’ 1972 The Vegetarian Epicure (Vintage, $18.95)is still relevant to today’s cook. My battered copy (purchased in 1973) has always maintained a prominent place in my kitchen. Thomas includes a wide range of tasty vegetarian meals. My favorites are the Indian foods, she gives several recipes for curry powders and once you make your own powders the store bought curry powder just won’t do. The recipe for corn bread is most delicious…think fresh fish, nice greens and mouth-watering corn bread.

My daughter and I had quite a chocolatey weekend trying out the recipes in Linda Collister’s brownies (Ryland, Peters & Small, $12.95). Our favorites were the “very rich brownies” (and they were) and the “black forest brownies”. The recipes are easy to read and precise. The brownies are, well, GONE!

The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho (HarperCollins, $24.95) tells the story of a young woman’s quest to “fill up the blank holes” in her life. Athena is the adopted daughter of a wealthy Lebanese couple. What starts out as an attempt to find her mother ends with Athena’s realization that you are what you believe yourself to be. Athena is seen to be a priestess in the pagan tradition a nature worshiper. The established Church sees her as a disciple of the Devil. Athena’s story is told by the different people in her life. The narrator has simply transcribed what he/she had been told. This novel is filled with philosophic quests on the meaning of life, what makes a matter in life. Athena’s realization that life is about “love” and that love simply is….

Poor Walter, his flatulence threaten to blow away his family’s vacation. This is the 5th book in the Walter the Farting Dog series. Walter the Farting Dog : Banned from the Beach (Dutton, $16.99)is a riot. Again, poor misunderstood Walter is vilified only to save the day by the end of the book. I used to think that the Walter books were great “boy reads” until I watched the reactions of “adults” reading about Walter’s antics. –Susan

From Nicki: Two Very Different Artists

I’ve been dividing my time between two biographies of two very different kids of nature artists. One is Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow (Farrar Straus Giroux, $30), and the other is Beatrix Potter,: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear (St. Martin's Press, $30). Bewick was probably the greatest woodblock engraver of the eighteenth century. His woodcuts of animals and birds were so precise and detailed that his books became standard reference works for naturalists until John James Audubon’s watercolors were printed over thirty years later. His finely drawn vignettes and landscapes are used so ubiquitously to illustrate English life (especially English country life) that even now most people are quite familiar with his work although they rarely think to associate a name to the small scenes that still decorate so many books and prints.

Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, will be forever famous as the creator of Peter Rabbit, and her 23 tiny books of children’s stories featuring field mice in waistcoats and rabbits with jackets and gold buttons have become fond and treasured items in nearly every child’s library.

Bewick and Potter both loved to draw as children, they both grew up in the country, and both were fascinated by the natural world outside their doorstep, but there the resemblance ends. In Linda Lear’s affectionate biography, Beatrix Potter was a gentle child with a steel core or resolve that saw her through illness and family misfortune. The world she drew and painted was a place of beauty and delight. The late Victorian era was a time of scientific advancement, of lady adventurers in the Arabian desert, of Exploration and Britian’s golden age. But Beatrix Potter’s explorations rarely take her farther than her own back door. I was not surprised to learn she had some formal training as a naturalist and scientist—her foxes and hedgepigs are quite accurate under their waistcoats and bonnets. I was surprised to find in the book a number of very lovely watercolor landscapes. Somehow, I had always thought of Potter focusing on the very small things within her domain. But she often raised her eyes to look towards the horizons.

There were a lot of things I was expecting from Jenny Uglow’s biography of Thomas Bewick, Nature’s Engraver, but one thing I wasn’t expecting to see was the first reproduced engraving to be of a man pissing against a wall. Bewick’s engravings—especially his country scenes, birds and animals, are so famously familiar that I never realized it was Bewick’s work I was seeing. But the Thomas Bewick of the late eighteenth century was a very different sort of observer than the Beatrix Potter of the late nineteenth. He was one of the first artists to illustrate the natural world accurately, scientifically, and he didn’t shy away from its darker side. His foxes don’t have tea with cats, they hunt and kill chickens. His horses are capable of kicking children.. And his wandering travelers are not above relieving themselves against a handy stone wall. Uglow’s biography is a dense and very vivid portrayal of a man who was very much of his time—an era when rationalism was the new religion, when scientific discovery was coming into its own, when man truly had begun to feel that he had dominion over the earth and all that it contained. It was an immensely exciting and intellectually stimulating era to live in, and Bewick—who began his life as a truant child who could not be made to go to school when he might be out wandering in the woods—was in the midst of it. his talent for woodcuts and engraving put him at the center of the book-binding industry, and thus at the center of much of Britian’s intellectual discourse.

Bookclubs: The Summer Reading List for Grown Ups

My book club has been on hiatus this summer, which is all very well for THEM, they all have vacations to go on and families to visit. But what about me? I’ve been reduced to writing an endless number of rather long, rambling emails to some very indulgent friends who have borne all my meandering opinions about Roberto Bolano and tedious speculations about the likely death of Harry Potter with great good humor. (you know who you are). My book club substitute during this time has been a couple of online literary forums like Readerville or Library Thing. And it was on Readville that I came across a rather animated discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses which apparently began on June 14th (“Bloomsday”)

Now I know people usually think of summer as a time for “light” reading, but I have found myself often returning to the classics at this time of year. Maybe because I finally have the time to enjoy them? So I have been reading Ulysses —a book that has always defied me—with the help of the much smarter people at Readerville and a guidebook called The New Bloomsday Book, and I finally, finally feel like I am equal to the task of reading Joyce.

So on the theory that I might not be the only person who takes on a classic novel or two during the summer, here are some great resources for folks who find themselves wandering through the canon:

Tilting at Windmills is a blog for people who are reading the new translation of Don Quixote —released to celebrate the 400th anniversary of its publication.

If Flannery O’Connor had a Blog A weekly dose of wisdom from a cantankerous and opinionated muse:

“You would probably do just as well to get that plot business out of your head and start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive...Wouldn't it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write rather than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”

The Bronte Blog Everything you never needed to know about Anne, Emily and Charlotte and their no-good wastrel brother.

Music in Joyce Who knew he could sing?

Illustrated Shakespeare is a gorgeous collection of Shakespeariana, including all the artwork ever inspired by the Bard. (Some of it rather more awful than others)

Jane Austen This is more of a “fan” site—religiously devoted to documenting every production of Austen-inspired hoopla out there. There is a lot out there.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Herman Melville

Ernest Hemingway

The Secret Store: Edible Fiction

Summer Reading You Can Really Sink Your Teeth Into!

Fried Green Tomatoes

Thankfully I am again finding time to read. I (and my family) have found that I become a very cranky person when I am separated from books for too long. My current reading choices seem to be centered on family…in all their loving, exasperating, different forms.

Still Life with Chickens (starting over in a house by the sea) by Catherine Goldhammer (Penguin, $12.00) is a memoir about the author’s first year post-divorce. Goldhammer finds herself divorced, raising a precocious pre-teen daughter in the suburbs of Boston, an area she dubs “Hearts-Are-Cold”. Although she loves the old house she and her husband raised their child in, she has never enjoyed or truly felt at home in the homogenous, sterile “Hearts-Are-Cold”. Lack of money and no employment opportunities in sight, she puts her house on the market. Her daughter is furious and in a move every parent will recognize as blackmail, demands that she get pets as compensation. Not just any pets, mind you, but chickens, the breeds of which she has carefully selected from the Murray McMurray chicken catalog (apparently the king of the chicken catalogs…the equivalent of the Burpee Seed Catalog for gardeners.) And as all guilty parents do, Goldhammer purchases the chickens. What ensues is raising chickens as a metaphor for life and family…they take a lot of love and care, are more trouble (and joy) than you expect, and seem to constantly surprise you. Goldhammer, her daughter and the chickens move to a rundown little gray cottage in a blue-collar beach community just a few miles from their original home. They discover interesting, eccentric neighbors who become friends and finally find peace in a home and life that truly fit.

The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson ( Doubleday, $16.95) is a slim volume about a great love. Fifty-year-old Ambrose Zephyr and his devoted wife, Zipper, are given the terrible news that he has a fatal illness and only a month to live. The Zephyr’s decide to embark on a trip. The alphabet has 26 letters…they have approximately 30 days and so they begin in Amsterdam and make their way through the alphabet with their travels. The letter can stand for a city, a country, a particular painting or landmark, but the intent is to make the most of their last days together.

What I really loved about this novel was its quiet way of telling the story of the Zephyr’s marriage and tragedy in a way that was not maudlin or ultra-sentimental. Straightforward language and small vignettes of their marriage give the reader the entire picture of who they are and how devoted they are to one another. I admire this about the Brits and this little 119- page novel managed to say a lot about family, grace and true love.

The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M. Homes (Viking, $24.95) is the memoir of an adopted daughter’s search for her biological roots. Homes was raised by an ultra-liberal, Jewish college professor and his artistic wife. While she has always known she was adopted and loves her parents, she confesses that there were many times when she did not feel “at home” in her own family. As an adult, she decides to find out how she “fits” by finding her biological parents. Armed with the clues her parents have (her mother was young, her father was Jewish and the name of doctor who helped with the placement.), she begins her search. Surprisingly enough, she is able to figure out her birth mother’s identity rather quickly and eventually summons up the courage to phone her.

Her biological mother turns out to be a very needy narcissist with a penchant for the dramatic. In addition, Homes later realizes her mother seems to be caught in a time-warp, somewhere in the Sinatra-swooning, mink-wearing, martini-drinking 60’s. Homes discovers that her mother was the mistress of her married boss while she was still in her teens. This man is Homes’ father. What ensues is Homes’ nearly maniacal obsession to find out everything she can about all of her biological relatives. The story manages to ask in unsentimental way the ultimate question that, everyone,.adoptive or not, wants answered:”Who am I and how do I fit in the world?”. Sometimes the answers just aren’t so clear-cut…life is gray seems to be the message. As an aside, the book is also interesting as a great study in how to use the internet to access genealogical information.

Homes left me feeling the way Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors) always leaves me feeling. The story is often tragic, but the way it is told is hilarious. Homes captures the spirit of both her families, biological and adoptive, with that same caustic self-deprecating humor. It is quite the tightrope and Homes handles it unflinchingly and beautifully. --Cathy

Ellen Elizabeth Hunter will be at Dee Gee's to talk about and sign copies of her new mystery Cape Fear Murder.