Stepping in the Write Direction

The storyline in We Begin at the End  by Chris Whitaker sticks to you like the scent of orange blossoms unexpectedly hitting you late at night as you drive past a Florida grove with the windows down. It is powerful and unforgettable. A series of events are invoked by an accident that occurs at night when a young girl goes looking for her older sister thirty years earlier. It blooms from there like droplets of color ink on wet paper, it’s expanding tentacles affecting primarily one family, and many who are part of their extended community. A number of crimes are committed, including murder, which must be solved or an innocent person may get railroaded by the overzealous prosecution. There is quite a bit of strong language as the main character Duchess is a teen with a traumatic life and a lot of rage, fear, and sadness inside. She often seems like a student with ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder.   By page seven readers are drawn in by an emergency situation as California’...

Snow by Orhan Pamuk is an invocation for life, love, art, beauty, family, friends and connections against a panoply of competing factions thirsting for power, imposing their rules and ambitions over traditions of the past, and the meat grinder such sociopolitical forces become, sucking lives into its vortex, hungry to neutralize all perceived as threats.  T he main character is Turkish poet, Ka, who after 12 years exiled in Germany, returns to Kars, Turkey, the town of his youth. He is now on a pilgrimage of sorts during tumultuous times (a local rebellion between radical Islam and western secular ideals). He has had writer’s block, unable to create poetry for some time, and arrives in Kars hoping to reignite a past unrequited love since learning this previous object of desire has recently divorced. He aches for love and to write poems again. The whole book transpires primarily during his three day visit to Kars, although in reading, it feels like a lifetime because so much happens...

I love the P. G. Wodehouse books. It amazes me that almost a century after they were penned, I’m literally laughing out loud at the wittiness of the plots, and the hysterical narrative. In my mind’s eye I shall forever visualize the incomparable actors Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie as Jeeves and Bertie Wooster respectively, while I’m reading! That perfect pairing is tantamount to God’s gift to Wodehouse’s legacy via the Jeeves and Wooster series.   Wodehouse spent a lot of time in the US, continuously from 1946 until his death in 1975, purchasing a home in Remsenburg, part of the Southampton area of Long Island, 77 miles east of Manhattan, and became a citizen in 1955 (but remained a British subject, although never returned or visited). Between 1952-1975 he completed 20 novels. The most well known of his books are likely the Jeeves and Wooster series. During WWII he was interned in a hotel in Berlin, and was released shortly before his 60th birthday, but made five ill advised broadc...