Mario Vargas Llosa: In Praise of the Stepmother

Called by many an 'erotic' novel, I don't feel it is sexy. The family's young son in the story is said to be 'innocent,' yet he is an expert seducer at a young age. The father of the family spends an hour each night in the bathroom taking care of his aging body, and here again everything is not as it seems. Some say the novel is 'wickedly funny,' yet I never laughed.

Is this book about a boy's precocious sexuality or about something else? What is this lively small novel really about? We'll never know, because the author never quite tells us.

Wait a minute! I have changed my mind about this book. The boy is pictured on the front cover as a baby, but what if he is really 15 or 16 years old, as indicated by the fact that his father will be giving him a motorcycle on his next birthday? That would change things. That would put an entirely different slant on the boy's presumed "innocence."

The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. He is mainly known for political and journalistic works.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was a person of high literary accomplishment and the author of Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, and The House of Mirth. Ethan Frome is a grim tale about the impossibility of finding love, beauty, kindness, or generosity in America, locked as it was into heartless Puritanism. Massachusetts in winter is the perfect setting for this tragic tale.

Edith Wharton, A Biography, by R.W.B. Lewis, is also well worth reading.

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

The main character of this novel, a 72-year-old Lebanese woman, worships writers. Every year she translates a favorite book into Arabic, then stores it away. Her work has never been read by anyone. She is divorced and has no children. She is on the outs with her family and has no friends. In the midst of social upheaval, her life is dedicated and disciplined, almost monastic. The book is surprisingly lively and absorbing.

“A paean to the transformative power of reading, to the intellectual asylum from one’s circumstances found in the life of the mind.”—LA Review of Books

Junot Diaz: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

As an English major and a cultured person, I found it hard at first to like this book. It is violent. It is written in a mixture of English and street Spanish. In other words, it is vulgar and full of slang. Yet it is so good at narrating the stories of the people in the Dominican Republic and later, Dominicans here in America, that it won me over and I had to say, "Wow!" This book won the Pulitzer Prize.

Here Is New York by E.B.White

Even though it is decades old, this little book is a gem of wisdom about New York City. For example, E.B. White says New York gives us two gifts: the gift of privacy and the gift of loneliness. He has certainly hit the nail right on the head!

Spencer Quinn: The Chet and Bernie Mysteries

Chet is a dog and Bernie is a private detective. I am really enjoying these stories and I think they would be good for ESL students, too. For example, Bernie might say, "This is a wild goose chase." That is an idiomatic expression Chet, the dog, cannot understand. He might look around and think, "I don't see any geese." But Chet never lets little things like not understanding English get him down. Also, this book is not about gun violence and drugs. It is about the intelligence of humans and the loyalty of dogs. 

Some titles: Dog On It and Thereby Hangs a Tail. These books were New York Times Bestsellers.

Bill Bryson: Dictionary of Troublesome Words

I laughed out loud quite often reading this book. Written for word enthusiasts and writers, it is perhaps best used as a short review of the subject of correct English usage and not a true reference book, since it is only about 230 pages long. The book covers not only mistakes with words and phrases, but also common spelling errors and punctuation bloopers.