2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

March
2004

LIFE OF PI
By Yann Martel

Pi, a zookeeper’s son, has an encyclopedic knowledge of animals and practices Christianity and Islam along with his native Hinduism.  This curious sixteen-year-old is stranded on a raft after the rest of his family perishes in a shipwreck while on their way to a new life in Canada.  On the raft with him are a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra, and a 450- pound tiger named Richard Parker.  The tiger quickly eats the other passengers, and Pi is left to survive for 227 days using all his knowledge, wits, and faith to stay alive.

This exquisitely crafted and suspenseful novel is a magical reading experience about adventure, survival, religion, and what it means to be human.

April
2004

I DON'T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT
By Allison Pearson

This scintillating first novel is alternately hilarious and sad and the driven, irreverent Kate Reddy is the perfect narrator for this headlong voyage into the world of a high-powered hedge fund manager and mother of two. Plagued by guilt, she keeps a "must remember" list longer than her arm, shows up for important meetings with baby spit-up on her Armani jacket, and defaces supermarket bakery items so that they will look homemade at her daughter's bake sale.

With its chronicle format, lists and e-mails, you might mistake this novel for a Bridget Jones' Diary sequel, but Pearson's title is much more substantial. Kate's voice rings with authenticity and dark humor in a compelling novel on the plight of working mothers that manages to be both angry and funny.

May
2004

A HANDFUL OF DUST
By Evelyn Waugh

Few writers have walked the line between farce and tragedy as nimbly as Evelyn Waugh. In this satirical story, chosen as one of the 100 best novels by Modern Library, Waugh fiercely anatomizes the lifestyles of the rich and shameless in post World War One England.

Tony Last is the aristocratic owner of a large Victorian manor and the husband of a bored and restless woman who loathes life in the country. Brenda begins an affair with a worthless sponger to the delight of her gossip-loving "friends" and the despair of her husband. Tony flees to the jungle of South America where he encounters a purer form of savagery.

June
2004

BLESSINGS
By Anna Quindlen

Skip Cuddy is one of life's losers.  Abandoned as a child and wrongly imprisoned for a year, he now works as a caretaker on the estate of Lydia Blessing.

Lydia is wealthy, crabby, and isolated from the world.  Long widowed and still mourning her brother's death, her eighty years have not brought her much joy.

Into these difficult lives comes an abandoned baby, "its tiny, ugly baked apple of a face contorted by fear or frustration or hunger."  First Skip (who tries to keep the baby a secret) and then Lydia fall in love with "Faith" and the three of them form a surprisingly loving and sustaining, albeit temporary family unit.

Quindlen's novel is a work of glowing lyricism and genuine redemption. Here is a book that lives up to its title.

July
2004

THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS
By Ann Brashares

The “traveling pants” are a pair of thrift shop jeans, which somehow fit perfectly on each of four good friends with very different body types.  The fifteen-year-olds make a pact to share these magical pants via the U.S. mail in order to keep a connection between them as they separate for the summer.

Ann Brashares uses this conceit to travel among the girls’ very different geographic locations, experiences and self-realizations.  Strong, athletic Bridget is off to soccer camp in California, beautiful, distant Lena travels to Greece to be with her grandparents, hot-tempered Carmen visits her father in South Carolina and Tibby the rebel will be left at home to slave for minimum pay at Wallman’s.

Yes, it’s a young adult novel, but the four friends are complex and engaging and each of their voices is unique in this compassionate, insightful and lightly humored glimpse into the minds and actions of teenage girls.

September
2004

them
by Joyce Carol Oates

Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist.

A tale of class, race, and the horrific glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the edge of poverty in the riotous Detroit slums. A young woman struggles to rise above poverty and the trauma of life with an alcoholic father and a murderous younger brother. Loretta is scarred by circumstances well beyond her control that continue to shape her family through subsequent generations.

them is an extraordinary novel, a work that reveals Miss Oates' compassionate insight, her true narrative skill and her high artistry.

October
2004

SINS OF THE SEVENTH SISTER
By Huston Curtiss

Have you ever thought "this has got to be true-no one could make this up?" This memoir of the author's unconventional family, recalled by his seven-year-old self, fills the bill. In West Virginia in 1929, young Huston lived with his beautiful and unabashedly liberal mother Billy-Pearl and surrounded by their romantic, independent and often certifiably insane relatives. Billy-Pearl has a knack for attracting the desperate and destitute, including a castrated orphan and a black family on the run from the KKK.

Hughie sees his mother as larger than life and capable of saving the world, but he would certainly like to have more of her attention. The author draws himself as a sometimes selfish but caring child who has to learn that the world needs Billy as much as he does.

Sins of the Seventh Sister is brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, as alive with flamboyant characters as any book to come out of the South.

November
2004

THE CHOPSTICKS-FORK PRINCIPLE

THE CHOPSTICKS-FORK PRINCIPLE
By Cathy Bao Bean

"No father- especially an immigrant from China- says to his daughter, 'Please, marry an artist.'"

The author of this humorous and poignant memoir provides us with a unique window into the experience of a bicultural family. As Cathy the Chinese Confucian philosophy professor declares war on mice, her husband Bennett the Caucasian artist announces his "increasing respect for all sentient beings." As he discovers more of his Buddhist nature, she becomes more and more like Shiva "The Destroyer."

Cathy Bao Bean gives us a rollicking tour of the Bean method of merging work and play while negotiating cultural and generational divides. But the book is also a manual that
explains how anyone can benefit by greater awareness of the diversity within us and around us.

December
2004

A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY

A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY
By Haven Kimmel

Haven Kimmel remembers vividly what it felt like to be a kid. Born in 1965, she grew up in an Indiana town small enough for a grade-school girl to explore every corner and have strong opinions about the entire adult population. The book is less a formal autobiography than a collection of vignettes comprising the things a small child would remember: sick birds, a new bike, a pet chicken, the mean old lady down the street. 

Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit and dead-on observations rendered in lush but simple prose, this memoir gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky world of adults.