“Dog Years”
Mark Doty
Harper Perennial (2007)
Paperback, 216 pages
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It’s not that I’m cold hearted. I have the same God-given compassion and empathy chip as the next person. It’s just that I’m not easily moved by human drama.

But tell me a sad story about man’s best friend and I’m a puddle. I have a special and inexplicable affinity for the canine. It’s my weakest of heart strings, the domesticated dog. So as I ambled through the public library on a recent day, I instantly was drawn to the golden face of a retriever on the cover of “Dog Years,” by Mark Doty.

“Dog Years” is a memoir of Doty’s life with his dogs, Arden and Beau. I expected a heartwarming narrative of the life and times of a man and his best friends, a sort of “Marley and Me.” This book was so much more. Continue Reading »

“Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America”
Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas
Beacon Press (2009)
Hardcover, 237 pages
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I am an Iowan. I was born in Davenport, spent my remembered childhood in Muscatine, went to college in Cedar Falls and now reside in Waterloo. Except for brief periods of time as a toddler and new graduate, my life has been in this state.

But as a 20-something young professional, my days in Iowa could very well be numbered — traditions with the state notwithstanding.

That’s the set-up behind the nonfiction “Hollowing Out the Middle,” a project by admitted urbanite couple Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas. The two brought their family to small-town Iowa, set up shop and went about observing and interviewing the lives of the town’s young inhabitants as they decided the perennial Iowa question: To go, or not to go? Continue Reading »

The “Griffin & Sabine” trilogy
Nick Bantock
Chronicle Books (1991, 1992, 1993)
Hardcover, 144 pages
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“Is it true?” one of the final letters included in “The Griffin & Sabine Trilogy” asks. “Do you think you are my perfect opposite?”

After experiencing the completely illogical — and totally irresistible — correspondence of artists Griffin Moss and Sabine Strohem, those lines catch in the reader’s throat.

The books’ star-crossed lovers are connected telepathically, but throughout the series, the British Griffin and South Pacific islander Sabine remain frustratingly separated by time and space. Instead of meeting in person, the couple can communicate only via postcards and the images they transmit clairvoyantly to one another. Continue Reading »

“The Lovely Bones”
Alice Sebold
Little, Brown and Company (2002)
Paperback, 328 pages
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Seeing heaven and earth through the eyes of a murdered 14-year-old girl is the backbone of a haunting, yet ultimately uplifting book by Alice Sebold, “The Lovely Bones.”

We meet Susie Salmon after she is dead and gone to a personalized heaven.

But we learn she’s not fully into the whole of heaven yet. She can’t get there until she can rectify her feelings toward Earth. She is in a kind of confined area, where she sits in a gazebo and looks down at her family.

She can’t get to the place where she can see her favorite grandfather until she stops “desiring certain answers” — why she was killed instead of someone else — and quits wondering how everyone else on Earth is feeling.

“Simply put,” says her heaven counselor, Franny, “you have to give up on Earth.” Continue Reading »

“Nell Hill’s O Christmas Tree”
Mary Carol Garrity
Andrews McMeel Publishing (2009)
Hardcover, 144 pages
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Call me fickle, I don’t care.

Back in the 1990s, I used to live for Martha Stewart’s TV Christmas special and her holiday decorating books.  I still use some of the recipes — like the one for Pecan Sandies — during the Christmas holidays, but I’m so OVER Martha.  She’s more about marketing than imagination these days, I think.

Now I love Mary Carol Garrity.  Forbes magazine named her “one of the hottest little retailers” for her mega-successful “lifestyles” Nell Hill’s stores in Atchison, Kan., and Kansas City, Kan.  Her stores and home are the incubators for her ideas. Continue Reading »

“Wicked”
Gregory Maguire
Harper Collins (1995)
Paperback, 519 pages
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With the arrival of Broadway musical “Wicked” to Iowa Sept. 23 at the Des Moines Civic Center, it’s only appropriate to do what the most thorough fans do before they see a movie or show: Read the book.

That way, if I do get down to Des Moines before the show closes Oct. 18, I can properly scrutinize and critique the musical for how diligently it stuck to the original novel, proclaiming my indignities to annoyed theater companions.

Seriously though, I can’t imagine how “Wicked” the musical could ever encapsulate even half of the 500-plus page “Wicked” the novel.

Maguire’s careful crafted world of Oz, with its landscapes and political crises, its religious-versus-pagan-versus-royalist quarrels and its precariously positioned characters, doesn’t seem to lend itself to being neatly packaged into a two-hour musical. Continue Reading »

“Blonde”
Joyce Carol Oates
Harper Collins (2000)
Paperback, 738 pages
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In “Blonde,” the young model has one request before her first nude photo shoot.

“Could you p-promise not to show the bottoms?” she stammers. “The soles? Of my feet?”

Stripped bare, the shy Norma Jeane Baker wants to preserve something of herself from the camera she simultaneously loves and loathes. Recently dropped from her movie studio contract, the would-be starlet is hard up for cash. Posing as “Miss Golden Dreams 1949” earns the aspiring actress $50, contributing to the rise and eventual fall of her alter-ego, Marilyn Monroe.

The scene, like many in the Joyce Carol Oates novel, is the re-imagining of an actual event. Baker did in fact pose nude in 1949. When the proofs resurfaced years later, the picture cemented the artist’s sexpot image, while undermining her attempts to be taken seriously as an actress. Continue Reading »

“Best Friends Forever”
Jennifer Weiner
Atria (2009)
Hardcover, 368 pages
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I didn’t make it to my 10-year high school reunion. Likewise, Addie Downs, the heroine of Jennifer Weiner’s new novel, “Best Friends Forever,” skips her 15-year get-together. My excuse? Legitimate travel conflicts, reinforced by a propensity for shyness that often surfaces in large-group social situations. Never mind I talk with complete strangers on a daily basis with relative ease. Hello, journalist? High school is an entirely different ballgame.

So I immediately sympathized with Addie’s choice to avoid the party — she has a much better excuse — given that she associates torment and humiliation with her adolescent years. Kindhearted, artistic and compassionate, Addie is also chronically insecure, and her reclusiveness and self-loathing stems from a lifelong struggle with binge eating and, therefore, obesity. Although she’s shed the extra weight at the novel’s opening, her self-esteem remains a work in progress. Continue Reading »

“Finger Lickin’ Fifteen”
Janet Evanovich
St. Martin’s Press (2009)
Hardcover, 308 pages
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“Sometimes it was good not to have a lot of expensive stuff,” muses narrator and main character Stephanie Plum nearly two-thirds of the way through “Finger Lickin’ Fifteen.” “Less to feel bad about when it got firebombed.”

For those who know the antics of Plum from Janet Evanovich’s previous 14 novels on the New Jersey bounty hunter (no, I do not count the between-the-numbers books), this quote is not so much telling, but reassuring. Plum is back — and so is the hilarious trouble that befalls her.

It’s difficult to sustain a series for at least 15 books, and some fans I’ve talked to were disillusioned by a few of Evanovich’s latest books. But those people also told me that the author was back on her game for “Fifteen,” and I’m inclined to agree. Continue Reading »

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
Stieg Larsson
Alfred A. Knopf (2008)
Hardcover, 465 pages
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I would love to see a study done — if one hasn’t already been — on the effect of book placement and circulation at libraries. Does anyone ever pluck a book from the bottom shelf on a whim? Or even the ones below eye level?

That’s how I ended up with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson — it was on the shelf at eye level. I was meandering through the library, looking for something to review, and it caught my attention. Somewhere in the dusty corners of my mind, I think some neurons fired and reminded me that it was supposed to be a really, really good book.

And it is.

Plot-wise, it’s something of a doozy to sum up. It’s the story of a libelous financial journalist digging around in the history of a well-known corporate family to solve a 40-year-old crime with the help of a talented but socially awkward hacker.

Still with me? More simply put — to oversimplify, really—this is a murder mystery. Except for all the ways that it isn’t. Continue Reading »