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.

7. Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich

Irene America is struggling in life. She is trying to complete her doctorate thesis about the painter George Catlin, while raising her family of three children, and dealing with her demanding, jealous, and possessive husband, Gil. Gil is somewhat famous for his increasingly raw and brutal portraits of Irene, and while he realizes that his wife doesn’t love him anymore, he cannot let her and their family go. Both Irene and Gil are alcoholics and their children are caught in the middle of constant fighting, hitting, and other abuses. When Irene realizes that Gil is reading her diary, she starts a new, hidden diary that she keeps locked in a bank deposit box where she writes her true feelings about her life and dissolving marriage, and manipulates her other diary writings to manipulate Gil into leaving her and their children.

While bleak and heartbreaking, Erdrich’s newest novel is also a gripping, emotional tale of a family gone wrong. Native American beliefs and culture are present throughout the short novel, as customary in most of Erdrich’s novels. Most readers probably will realize that someone is not going to make it out of the marriage alive, but the end is still shocking when readers finally get to that point. A tale of love, control, frustration, and survival make this a mesmerizing read.

6. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Written in 1967, when King isolated himself in Jamaica to focus on his writing, this is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last book. Out of print for over ten years, it has been finally reissued by Beacon Press and will be part of a new King Legacy series that will re-print some of King’s books. Although often contained in compendiums, the book was frequently cut of two chapters, leaving readers without a true feeling for the book until now.

Some readers may struggle with the dated phrases and language in Where Do We Go from Here, but that is quickly overcome by the universal messages that continue to resonate today. Topics such as the rise of black power, the continuing struggle against racism, poverty, fair wages, protests against the Vietnam War (and war in general), and militarism, are just as relevant now as they were in 1967. While focusing on struggles, the book is also optimistic and hopeful for a better future for all.

Look for a community-wide discussion of this title this spring in the Ithaca Community. Copies will be distributed to local libraries, book discussion groups, organizations, churches, and more, so that our community can come together to learn from this important work.

5. The Book of Fires by Jane Borodale

The sights, sounds, and smells of a gritty London in 1752 come alive in Borodale’s enchanting debut. Agnes Trussel is 17 and living with her impoverished family in the English countryside of Sussex. Her mother is downtrodden with numerous children that she can barely feed, and her father is constantly drinking and out of work. When Agnes discovers she is pregnant by a village boy that she has no desire of marrying, she knows she must flee her family before she disgraces them. A chance discovery of a dead neighbor and a secret stash of coins helps Agnes to London, where she takes a job with a fireworks maker, Mr. Blacklock. While fearful of her employer finding out about her pregnancy and theft, Agnes can’t help but get drawn into Blacklock’s quest to put color into fireworks.

Borodale does a marvelous job at creating a creeping sense of foreboding and tension about what will happen to Agnes and her child. Agnes is a sympathetic character and readers will soon be caught up with her plight, which Borodale neatly sums up at the end. For anyone who has walked along the Thames, Borodale’s description of a crowded and loud area full of busy markets, rotting food, rowdy pubs, and crime will make people see it the area it used to be. Details about the world of pyrotechnics of the time were fascinating and add to the historic feel of the novel. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction.

4. The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch

Sitting in the Byram Hills Police Department, Nick Quinn knows that he didn’t just kill his wife, Julia, in their upscale home. The only problem is that the police have an antique gun with his fingerprints all over it and gun powder was found on his hands. When a mysterious man enters the police interrogation room and offers Nick a pocket watch, and a chance to turn back the previous twelve hours of the day, Nick knows he has a chance to save his wife.

Readers must suspend belief a lot in this time travel suspense story. The premise is a great one, and at the hands of a more skilled writer, this book would have been fun to read. There are great setups to the story, including a town in disarray after a plane crash where all on board are killed, and some truly frightening bad cop villains, but readers also have to suffer through some hokey dialogue and convenient justifications on how Nick can suddenly have access to cell phones, computers and more when the town is without power. New Line Cinema have purchased the film rights, so this may be coming to a movie theatre soon, where I have a feeling it would work better.