When Helen Graham and her young son move into rural Wildfell Hall, moody farmer Gilbert Markham finds himself drawn to the beautiful, inscrutable new tenant. He proffers friendship and she, as pages turn, accepts it. Predictably, village gossip re: Helen‘s beauty and inscrutability prompts Gilbert to have... Second Thoughts! Difficulties ensue, impediments to felicity arise. This oldie-but-goody unfolds in letter and diary form— a diverting read!

This Anglophilic fairy tale features plucky Viola Withers, forced to live with in-laws following her husband‘s untimely demise. Essex country house exile is dreadful: stingy Mr. Withers and snooty Mrs. Withers take polite turns driving our widowed bride to the brink of despair. She weeps into pillows, dabs at red-rimmed eyes, and stumbles through enchanted woodland property— straight into the arms of Part-Time Prince Charming Cad Victor Spring!

Hush! Very much enjoyed this rambling exploration of introversion and appreciated practical suggestions on how Quiet Ones can make themselves heard above the roaring winds of cultural extroversion.

Heinrich‘s memoir of encounters with wild, winged creatures is revelatory. He focuses on anecdotal observation— as opposed to broad study of bands, bevies, broods, coveys, flocks, or gaggles— and the result is intimate and relatable. There are plenty of author-created black-and-white illustrations and a section of lovely color plates to gaze upon. All hail flycatchers and flickers, warblers and woodpeckers, hawks and harbingers of seasonal change!

When her minister father leaves the church in a puzzling, plot-propelling crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from pastoral southern England and thrust into gritty, grimy Milton. Repulsed by the industrial revolution-ness(?) of her new northern home and moved by the plight of local workers, our heroine becomes a proto-social justice warrior— even as she develops a tempestuous relationship with moody self-made mill owner John Thornton.

Spoiler Alert: It doesn‘t end well for George. The beauty of this one lies in its liveliness and readability, in its attention to details of personality and landscape. When there‘s speculation, it‘s skillful speculation. The Last Stand is flat-out good storytelling: a well-researched and commercially viable retelling of the iconic clash between Custer (ie acquisitive westward expansionism) and Sitting Bull (ie beleaguered Native American culture).

Meet Marguerite, Eleanor, Beatrice, and Sanchia: daughters of the Count of Provence, each sister lovelier and more fetching than the last. They rise from sequestered nobility to become lovely, fetching queens in France, England, Germany, and Sicily. Pageantry and poetry, chivalry and churlishness, courting and crusading... the regal sisters ascend in a time and place that celebrates masculinity more than fetchability.

This is good stuff... fresh and funky and intricately constructed. We‘ve got pop culture, punk rockers, old men, young women, the reminiscences of punker-turned-recording-industry-executive Bennie Salazar and the inscrutable comportment of Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant. With willy-nilly chronology and willy-nilly characters, Goon Squad has much to say about time, the human heart, and the importance of... the pause... in music and in life.

Set in WWII France and Germany, revealed through twined narratives, this beautiful book concerns itself with the internal lives of a sightless French girl and a gifted German boy moving toward inevitable meeting on the Brittany coast. As Marie-Laure and Werner navigate a broken, brutal world, big themes and intricate detail merge in prose that is at once sweeping and tightly composed, words that linger in memory long after the last page turns.

Jim (the Boy) Glass lives with his widowed mother and three unmarried uncles in small town Aliceville, North Carolina. He is growing up during the Great Depression, and he‘s beginning to explore the world beyond his loving, sheltered home. Jim the Boy and sequel The Blue Star are often classified as Young Adult Fiction by people who do that sort of thing. It‘s safe to say, though, that Ever-Maturing Adults also enjoy the tandem Bildungsromans.

If I climbed the wooden ladder to the attic, rummaged through a box labeled Misc. College Stuff, and resurrected my Twentieth Century Literature notebook, bet you I‘d find a scribbled marginal notation: Sherwood Anderson—pioneering narrative structure in Winesburg, Ohio. The short story cycle resonates today, a message from pre-industrial middle America to an age of fly-over states and coastal agglomeration.

We begin with something few have opportunity to utter: Yikes! Our island home and adjacent family-owned-and-operated alligator-wrestling theme park are besieged with trouble! But that‘s what‘s happening here, and that‘s the beauty of swamp fiction, we suppose. Swamplandia! makes us feel all brackish! and reptilian! and sweaty! It may deserve an award for morass literature. Someday, we‘ll think of it in positive terms. But for now, what the heck.

I have issues with anthropomorphism and was hesitant to pick up this cute little hardcover. While none of the featured octopuses hum Ringo Starr‘s aquatic masterwork, they do communicate and behave in strangely wonderful ways. They sense with their suckers! Taste with their skin! Eat with their armpits! Shift shapes and change colors at will! The author‘s enthusiasm for cephalopods is infectious... we‘re along for a bilaterally symmetrical ride.

This yummy cornucopia offers insight into food consumption in the 21st century, describing three important food chains that sustain us all: industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer. As we search for chicken in a McNugget drive-by, browse leafy greens at the local farmers market, or happily rummage for roots and berries in fields and meadows, Pollan encourages us to examine the ethical responsibilities and political ramifications of food selection.

Hannah Heath, rare book expert and rebellious adult child, discovers a bunch of tiny-whimsical-sort-of-squished-up-artifacts in the binding of a 15th-century Hebrew manuscript. Intrigued by these tiny-whimsical-sort-of-squished-up-artifacts, she embarks on a page-turning journey. This book about the book is carefully researched, well-crafted, and highly readable— with the exception of penultimate shenanigans ill-suited to a moody, sensitive novel.

A pleasure to read 13 linked stories featuring large-boned retired school teacher Olive K. in pivotal, supporting, or cameo roles. Olive is alternately brave, abrasive, maddening, vulnerable. She‘s a foil for machinations of her Maine hometown— and a formidable lens for exploration of the human heart. We don‘t stash stolen shoes in handbags and haven‘t defaced apparel with Sharpie pens... yet. But we do believe there‘s a bit of Olive in all of us.

As the story of Matthew and Callie Soames and four daughters unfurls— not unlike an evanescent moonflower— we witness moments of betrayal, deceit, heartbreak, and escape in the heart of 20th century America. But we also share profound moments of loyalty, honesty, healing, and homecoming. We like the way the moonflower vine climbs across the Soames‘ front porch and the way this modest, intimate classic twines into our reading lives.

This precocious book with a provocative cover traces the insipid misadventures of Sally Jay Gorce as she experiences expatriate life in 1950s Paris, i.e. hooking up with married men and beatniks and confirming herself as a silly naïf in social situations. Years later, a bookish friend recalls that she enjoyed this greenish book; however, she can‘t remember why she found it pleasant while the rest of our reading circle found it utterly repellent.

Imaginative history, slapstick comedy, rip-roaring adventure, exploration of race and identity, delivered in Twain-like tones. On the eve of Civil War, young slave Little Onion and abolitionist John Brown meet and, before one can murmur Huckleberry Finn, they‘re on the run, careening toward calamity at Harper‘s Ferry. The book doesn‘t resolve confusion re: Brown, but Little Onion‘s narrative voice gives the abolitionist flesh and blood humanity.

When unassuming Parisian bookseller Laurent Letellier stumbles upon an abandoned handbag, he feels compelled to return it to its rightful owner. There is no formal identification in the bag. There is, however, a red notebook, filled with all manner of jotting, musing, and beguiling disclosure. With effortless style and splashes of he said/she said humor, this novella feels old-fashioned yet modern, simple yet complex, frivolous yet philosophical.

Leafing (!) through this slim volume happily affirms that trees are apolitical, expressing no party affiliations and eschewing partisan dust-ups on Twitter. They are, however, civic-spirited: capable of networking, nurturing, warning others against danger, sharing nutrients with under-the-weather neighbors. This dispatch from a German forester offers a blend of scholarship and whimsy, a gentle reminder of the interconnectedness of living things.

An almost-classic based on real-life characters, penned by a real-life husband and wife team. When Katherine O‘Fallon travels from her Boston home to her uncle‘s Calgary ranch, she gains a bit of respiratory health and loses her heart to Mike Flannigan of the NW Mounted Police. Mountie Mike and Kathy, aka Mrs. Mike, live and love in harshly beautiful North Country wilderness, accruing bonus points for use of outdated pet name You Little Minx....

Doig‘s memoir speaks to the formative power of family: a father, a mother, a grandmother— people who loved him and nurtured him before sending him into the wider world. It‘s also a memoir of Western Montana‘s rugged wildness and how land shaped the life story. One could polish this off in an afternoon—but more satisfactorily, one may linger between the lines, savoring prose and poetry, the clear-eyed honesty and haunting nostalgia of Doig‘s voice.

This man called Ove is a curmudgeon, a wet blanket— a våt filt, so to Swedishly speak. Neighbors refer to him as the bitter neighbor from hell. But when a congenial young family moves in next door, Ove‘s world turns upside down and round about. As it turns round about, behind Ove‘s curmudgeonly facade is a story— and a heart-rending one at that. This charming consideration of collected connectedness occupies a special spot on my Ikea book shelf!