Cross-country adventures

Wordsmithery

Perhaps the subtitle says it best: the energies, gists and spirits of letters, words and combinations thereof : their roots, bones, innards, piths, pips and secret parts, tinctures,tonics and essences, with examples of their usage foul and savory in media current and ancient, offered in the joy of their perusal for the juicing up of gentle folk and rude.

Secret between us

Kirkus: Delinsky offers a polished drama featuring an otherwise responsible mother lying to police to protect her daughter... Delinsky does a fine job creating sympathetic characters with personal problems. Well-crafted and satisfying.

Louise Erdrich

Kirkus: Erdrich requires a degree of commitment not every reader will make, but fans will find that these stories distill her body of work to its essence.

It's a wonderful death

Boy meets girl. Girl is dead. Can love survive? The prolific de Lint (Dingo, 2008, etc.) has an easy but authoritative style that should draw readers into his subtly stylized worlds, where questions of existence and other realms are provocatively pondered.

Cairo modern

Published in Arabic in the 1940s, this cautionary morality tale about self-defeating egoism and ill-digested foreign philosophies comes from the same period as one of the writer's best-known works, Midaq Alley. Both novels are comic and heartfelt indictments not so much of Egyptian society between the world wars as of human nature and our paltry attempts to establish just societies.
Published in 1945, states book-a-day calendar, calling it an early work worthy of the masterpieces to come.

"I don't believe in God, but I miss him"

 Nothing to be frightened of

by Julian Barnes. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

 

A late arrival on the scene of English writers pondering and arguing the existence or nonexistence of God. Barnes inclines toward the golden mean: "I don't believe in God," he writes, "but I miss Him." He was once more inclined to the atheism of Hitchens, Dawkins et al., but now, 62 years on, he admits to less certainty and "more awareness of ignorance," to say nothing of a growing understanding that the good times on this side of the grass are finite. Gentle and lucid—a welcome change from the polemical tone of so many books on the matter (or antimatter, if you like) of the big guy upstairs.

Inspector Darko Dawson

Wife of the gods : a novel

by Kwei J Quartey. New York : Random House, 2009.

Kirkus liked it (thought, for Kirkus, these are tame words): Move over Alexander McCall Smith. Ghana has joined Botswana on the map of mystery. Quartey's approach to detective work is less charming and more sociological than McCall Smith's, his setting more rural and susceptible to the ways of magicians. There's plenty of room for them both, and the newcomer is most welcome.