Fiction Books
The People’s Act of Love
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This is a very strange story with a particularly tangled and complicated plot. It takes place in a small village in Siberia during the time of the Russian Revolution. One would think that this piece of information would get the reader started fairly well on having a sense of time and place and the sorts of things that might be likely to happen next.
Loving Frank
Rating: 
With minimal interest in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life, I never would have purchased this book myself, so I’m glad I received it as a gift. The story covers the years 1903 to 1914 when a married woman named Mamah Cheney hired Frank to design a house
The Way the Crow Flies
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This book perfectly displays what I mean when I write that an author has flawlessly captured the child’s voice in his or her writing. The eight-year-old narrator in The Way the Crow Flies is true to life in every way and I was enthralled with her voice from page one:
Firmin
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This little novella is light on plot, but the writing is so lovely a storyline hardly matters. It’s hard to believe this is Savage’s first published work. He has the kind of voice that appears to be effortless—as if he is one of those mythical writers who sits down and types the whole thing out in its final form, with no revisions necessary.
City of Thieves
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In September of 1941, just two and a half months after Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the city of Leningrad was completely encircled and a siege that was to last two and a half years had begun.
The Glimmer Palace
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This novel takes place in cabaret-era Berlin and involves the birth of cinema—two topics that, for no good reason at all, I find strangely dull and uneventful. But since I was trapped on an airplane with no other reading material,
A Million Little Lies
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A memoir is one person’s memories of his life and can’t be expected to represent an exact rendition of absolute fact, as if a description of one’s life could be reduced to a provable mathematical formula.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
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There were problems with this book up until the end–an end that was powerful and sad and, yes, elegant. But I’m not sure it’s worth reading the whole thing just to get to the great ending.
The Crimson Petal and the White
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It is a theory he’s toyed with for a decade or more, though he’s sharpened it recently; it involves the abolition of what he terms “unjustifiable capital,” to be replaced with what he terms “equity of fortune”.
Life of Pi
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The zebra’s broken leg was missing. The hyena had bitten it off and dragged it to the stern, behind the zebra. A flap of skin hung limply over the raw stump. Blood was still dripping. The victim bore