10. Lullaby by Clair Seeber

Jess Finnegan is finally more relaxed about being a new mother to her eight-month-old son. On a lazy summer afternoon, she and her husband take the baby to the Tate Museum, where the day quickly changes their lives. After getting separated from her husband and son, Jess thinks they are still in the museum, yet after a few hours of not seeing them, realizes that something horrible has happened. Her husband’s cell phone is mysteriously answered, then switched off, and when she arrives back to their home, no one is waiting for her. Her husband is found later, severely beaten and unconscious in the hospital, with their son still missing.

This debut thriller from a British journalist starts out with a great plot and lots of intrigue and speculation, but it eventually grows outlandish. Possible kidnappers include the brother of Jess, who mysteriously appears after years of drug abuse and being estranged from the family. The Finnegan’s nanny, a young French woman, suddenly might have been having an affair with Jess’s husband and when pictures of her and the family’s young son are found, suspicions point to her. Add a cold, calculating ex-wife into the story, and unfortunately the book begins to meander. While the beginning is suspenseful and the modern London setting perfectly described, hopefully Seeber will use more realistic characters, such as a mother who seems truly upset at having her son go missing, in her next mysteries.

9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Re-reading favorite or special books is very important to me when I think of what books I want to read in the future. While I love exploring new books and authors, as well as keeping up with certain authors and series that I have fallen in love with, some books always call me back. Lolita is a prime example, and a book I read every year, without fail. It is also a book that I find something new with every time I read or listen to it.

When Humbert Humbert meets naïve widow, Charlotte Haze, his sexual obsession with young girls, or nymphets as he calls them, finally is fulfilled. Her daughter, Dolores, or Lolita, quickly becomes his only focus, so much so that he marries Charlotte just to be near Lolita. When Charlotte finds out his true intentions, she tries to expose his secret by mailing letters showing his devious behavior, yet is killed on the way to the mailbox. Humbert is now Lolita’s only relative and their cross country journey after her mother’s death begins their tortured affair.

While the Village Voice called Lolita “three hundred pages of sex in the head”, this brilliant novel is fully of comic observations on American society and beautiful language that allows readers to feel a range of emotions while reading it. Tragic, haunting, original, amusing, horribly sad, and often misunderstood, this is a classic that deserves to be essential reading for those who love literature.

This is what I thought of the book in 2007 when I read it: http://tcpl.org/sarah/2007/11/64-lolita-by-vladimir-nabokov.html

8. Lunch in Paris: a Love Story, With Recipes by Elizabeth Bard

Bard is working as a journalist in London and taking weekend trips to Paris when she meets her future husband, Gwendal. Besides a physical attraction to Gwendal (Bard famously writes on the first page that she slept with her husband halfway through their first date), she also is slowly growing in love with the famous city. She is soon spending more and more time in Paris spending leisurely afternoons at cafes and the street markets, and when Gwendal puts her name on the gas bill for his Parisian apartment, she knows that she is meant to live there.

Part love story and part food story, this book comes complete with relevant recipes at the end of each chapter. Bard starts out as an unsure American living in a foreign city with no job, no heat during the winter, and cooking on a tiny two-burner stove, and progresses into a wife that helps her husband grieve over the death of his beloved father and bring their two different families together. A quick, fun read for those who liked Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte and the traveling writings of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes, or lovers of everything French.