Eva's 2016 Selected Book List, in order of copyright date.

1. For Esme—With Love and Squalor, by J.D. Salinger, April 8, 1950 NYer. 8000 word short story (One of his shortest-but it seemed long to me). Discussed by Jill Lepore in the Nov. 21, 2016 NYer. This is the one story Salinger almost let be filmed.

2. The Force of Tradition, A Case Study of Women Priests in Sweden, by Brita Stendahl, ©1985. Brita (1924-2016) was in my book group. Friends like Sissela Bok spoke at her Memorial Service at Harvard. Women were accepted into the Lutheran priesthood in Sweden since 1958, but there was a lot of resistance. Brita devotes six chapters to the personal stories of six woman priests. In other chapters she goes into the history of the debate, and the resisting faction within the church.

3. Connie Hagar, the Life History of a Texas Birdwatcher by Karen Harden. ©1986, 284pp. Connie (1886-1973) didn’t get heavily into birding until she moved to Rockport, TX when she was in her 40s. But did she make up for lost time! She hobnobbed with Ludlow Griscom and Roger Tory Peterson. Birders Herman knew—Henry Wiggins and Ruth Emery—birded with Connie.

4. The Door by Magda Szabo, ©1987 262 pp. The author (1917-2007) is Hungarian. Len Rix translated this novel into English in 2005. Set in Budapest, it’s a portrait of a char woman extraordinaire, a real character, Emerence, as seen through the eyes of one of Emerence’s clients. Conflicts between respecting an elderly person’s wishes and keeping that person safe were real to our aging book group, one of whose members is a retired manager of a rehab center. Little mysteries keep the reader turning the pages.

5. Confessions, the Making of a Post-Denominational Priest by Matthew Fox, ©1996. 291pp. Fox was b/ in Madison WI in 1940, the middle of 7 siblings. His father was a UW football coach. He entered the Dominicans at 18 and became a theologian. He’s a feminist and eco-aware. In 1994 he was ordained an Episcopal priest. He discusses the precipitous decline of Roman Catholicism.

6. Uncle Tungsten, Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), ©2001, 317pp. Sacks had a wonderful scientific education between the ages of 10 and 16, little of it gotten at school. His parents, both physicians, allowed him to set up a lab in their London home. He was often at his uncle’s light bulb factory. He hung out at the Science and Natural History Museums. There’s an account of the four Sacks boys’ musical educations. Oliver endured several unhappy years as a blitz evacuee

7. Sweetwater by Roxana Robinson, ©2003, 319pp. Isabel, 47, and Paul, 51, are newlyweds when they visit his parents and brother Whit at the family lodge in the Adirondacks. Paul and Whit’s relationship is oddly fraught. After a week a forest fire stresses out truths that should have been spoken years earlier. This novel, a book group selection, describes Isabel’s bipolar first husband.

8. Mastermind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber (1868-1934) the Nobel Laureate who launched the age of chemical warfare by Daniel Charles. ©2005, 265pp. The Haber-Bosch process revolutionized agriculture by turning nitrogen into fertilizer in quantities massive enough to feed the world. Some 2 billion people could not survive without it. But also Haber orchestrated the use of poison gas in WWI. An invention of Haber’s to fumigate insects became Zyklon-B, which later killed his own relatives. Haber worked at the juncture of chemistry and industry. He was a superb director of one of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. My heart went out to his first wife, Clara (1870-1915). She was a Ph.D chemist herself but totally lost her career upon marriage. Son Lutz emigrated to England in the 1930s. One of Lutz’s books makes the case that chemical warfare did not confer a military advantage. In a condolence note to Hermann Haber upon his father’s death, Einstein wrote, “It was the tragedy of the German Jew; the tragedy of unrequited love.” There’s ecology: All those tons of fertilizer end up as runoff pollution. “Haber was the patron saint of guns and butter.” This was a stimulating book on the limits of technology, political and economic history, ethics, and family dynamics.

9. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, ©2006, 220pp. Vignettes about Kurt Godel and Alan Turing alternate. MaryDan picked this up at a yard sale. I passed it on to Mark Molloy, once I saw it was a good fit with his library.

11. What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, read by the author. ©2009, 10 CDs A collection of NYer articles, which can be wearing to read. Yet in this recorded form I was able to soak up 8 or so of them painlessly. One of his more substantial topics tells the story of John Rock, the devout Catholic who invented the pill; Gladwell discusses plagiarism, job interviewing…

12. Where Men Win Glory, the Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakaurer. ©2009, 11 CDs. At 25, Pat walked away from a $3.9 million NFL contract to join the army. Instead of being sent to Afghanistan to fight the perpetrators of 9/11, he and his brother Kevin were sent first to Iraq. They were on the periphery of the Jessica Lynch rescue and associated propaganda. There was an account of a related friendly-fire debacle. Later, in 2004, in Afghanistan, Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire, a fact the gov’t did its best to suppress. Another War-on-Terror related book I read is I Am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai, youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. ©2012, 4 CDs. Presents a picture of life in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. At age 15 Malala was shot in the head by the Taliban. She was flown to Birmingham, UK, for rehab; I also read All In, the Education of General David Petraeus by Paula Broadwell and Vernon Loeb ©2012, 12 CDs, but my thumb is down on that one. Hagiography! Military tours of duty are so short! In 2011 Petraeus retired (on $220,000/yr pension) to become CIA director, but in 2012 he resigned when it came out he’d had an affair with Broadwell and given her access to classified info. Petraeus deserves a more warts-and-all biography.

13. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, ©2012, 384pp. We had a fine discussion of this in my book group. I have not so far sought out the next volume of the trilogy, but I might yet. Two friends meet in first grade in a rough neighborhood of Naples, perhaps in 1960 or so. The book ends when they are in their late teens. One is already married, the other finishing high school.

14. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, ©2013, 12 CDs. This is an acclaimed, award-winning novel but I thought the conceit sounded off the wall so I avoided it until now. The conceit is that Ursula, born in England in 1910, keeps having her life story interrupted by “what if” scenarios. More than once I checked that I hadn’t inserted a previously heard disc, because I was hearing words I’d heard before. But no, it was just the author’s signal that we had backed up to a node on the tree of possibilities and were going to slightly change events and branch off in a different direction. It works! Enough is kept stable, such as Ursula’s family of origin.

15. News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh, ©2013, 6 CDs. Short stories, but long enough and all related, that they seem like novellas. I did not get the feeling I often get from short stories, of being left hanging. We meet a family at the time a baby is born, then in another story that baby has grown up and is a professor. In the same coalmining PA setting as the author’s novel Baker Towers.

16. The Girls of Atomic City, the Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win WW II by Denise Kiernan, ©2013, 573 pp. (Large Print) Non-fiction. Photo plates. About the beginnings of Oak Ridge TN. Gen. Leslie Groves got the land in 1942 by eminent domain. About half a dozen women are featured. Even though I could not keep them straight (Well I knew Hattie was the black one), I enjoyed reading their accounts of the 1940’s--first time away from home, war work-- and a summary of the rest of their lives. One was a nurse, one a statistician, one a lab scientist, one sat at a station turning knobs. Guess which one was the janitress? All top secret. The streets were mud. When I visited relatives in Oak Ridge in 1959 it still was not yet incorporated.

17. Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson, ©2012, 13 CDs. History of computing 1930s-1950s, with an emphasis on John von Neumann (1908-1956). This came highly recommended by David Smith and Mark Molloy. There are a few obscure characters (Nils Boticelli??). Largely set at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. The mathematicians looked down on the engineers. Modeling weather was an early problem tackled. There’s some technical stuff I let slide by. I might have gotten a little more of that if I’d been looking at a printed page. The author is Freeman Dyson’s son, so he grew up among these giants.

18. The Children Act by Ian McEwan, ©2014, 5 CDs. Fiona is judge in family court. She’s got to make Solomon-esqe rulings. The case this novel focuses on is that of a 17 year old Jehovah’s Witness with leukemia who could be saved by a blood transfusion to balance the drugs he’d been given to kill the cancer cells. Fiona’s avocation is music. She plays piano while a fellow judge, a baritone, sings at the Court’s annual Christmas bash at Wigmore Hall. As the book opens, Fiona’s husband, Jack, 60, has told her he wants one last romantic fling with a 28 yr old colleague, but he wants her blessing. Fiona does not give it. Jack leaves.

19. Scalia, A Court of One by Bruce Allen Murphy, ©2014, 494 pp. Photo plates. Antonin Scalia (1936-2016) is a pre-Vatican II Catholic. He’s at odds with encyclicals against capital punishment and torture, but they are not ex-cathedra. Scalia could be affable, yet he often belittled his colleagues. He evolved a methodology, Originalism, that he would like to think yields the same result for the same reasons when applied by any judge. In practice it is not so deterministic. Scalia tried to strengthen the executive branch. He gave more weight to precedent than Clarence Thomas. I liked revisiting the public issues of my lifetime via this book.

20. US by David Nicholls ©2014. 12 CDs. Douglas and his son Albie have a difficult relationship when we meet them at ages 53 and 17. In the course of the novel we learn how they got there. Connie, an artist, tells her husband of 25 years, a scientist, that she wants a divorce. Douglas, hoping to win her back, proposes a grand family fling, a European tour. You can imagine how that turned out—surly teenager traveling with his unhappy parents. This novel won Nicholls the “UK author of the Year” award.

21. A History of Loneliness by John Boyne, ©2014, 337pp. Charts the precipitous decline in priestly status. The priestly abuse scandal went to the top, but this novel examines how it felt at the bottom. An Irish priest, Odran, personally innocent of pedophilia, nevertheless does not confront it when it is staring him in the face in the person of his friend. His sister shows signs of early onset dementia, but he ignores that too. Hannah’s sons, Jonas and Aiden, suffered from Odran’s fecklessness. He was imprudent in the way he rescued the lost 5 yr old; He was reckless invading the flat of a woman he had a crush on when he was a student in Rome.

22. In the Kingdom of Ice, the Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette by Hampton Sides ©2014, 14 CDs. Non-fiction, about the 1879-82 attempt by Capt. George De Long to reach the North Pole by sea. The ship was crushed. Some of the men survived. It’s amazing how resourceful the crew of 32 were. Some got to Russia in a dinghy and on foot. Mention of seabirds.

23. Reading Claudius by Caroline Heller ©2015, 274pp. Non-fiction. The first 130 pages are set in student circles in Prague in the 1930s. The author’s father was caught. His brother Erich, an academic in England by Spring 1945, learned of Paul’s survival via an Edward R. Murrow report from just-liberated Buchenwald. Murrow mentioned his inmate guide’s name, Dr. Paul Heller. Caroline and her brother Tom (MaryDan and Bob’s friend for 45 years) grew up in Chicago in the 1950’s. That’s covered too.

24. Small Mercies by Eddie Joyce, ©2015, 353pp. This book-group selection really put Staten Island on the map for me. It’s a multigenerational family saga set in 2011 with flashbacks. The youngest of three sons, Bobby, a fireman, was killed on 9/11. There’s a Brooklyn element. Seeing Brooklyn and the 9/11 Memorial this summer added depth to my appreciation of this novel.

25. The Brothers by Masha Gessen ©2015, 8 CDs. About Tamarlin and Jochar Tsarnaev, the marathon bombers, by a reporter who had covered the wars in Chechnya, and who herself had immigrated to Boston as a Russian-speaking teenager. The author interviewed family and friends back in Dagestan and other places parents Zubyat and Anzar had lived with their 4 children. Their marriage started well. They got Tamarlin into the best schools. I was appalled by the account of the convictions of Jochar’s college friends. 27 years for tossing a backpack in a dumpster? They were primarily motivated by hiding the marijuana. I was also shocked by the way the FBI elicits signed confessions. They turn one friend against the other. The one that turns gets 7 years, the other 27.

26. Rescue at Los Banos, The most daring prison camp raid of WW II by Bruce Henderson ©2015, 8 CDs. Non-fiction. The camp in the Philippines was populated mostly by American civilians. We get the backgrounds of selected inmates, and various soldiers involved in the rescue of 2000 people, many of whom were too weak to walk. The last CD gives an epilogue on the featured characters. A number of the survivors lived into their 80’s and 90’s and wrote memoirs.

27. Girl in the Dark ostensibly a memoir by Anna Lyndsey (pseudonym) ©2015, 6 CDs. I was engrossed in this story of an Englishwoman who, in adulthood, developed extreme photosensitivity. She moves in with her b.f. Pete in Hampshire. Her parents are musicians. But then an article in the Sept. 26, 2016 NYer by Ed Caesar suggests there was a lot of fiction in this story. He interviewed the real author, and experts in the field of her affliction she had inexplicably not consulted.

28. The Excellent Lombards by Jane Hamilton ©2016, 273 pp. Jane Hamilton and her husband are friends of MaryDan and Bob’s, so I know this novel closely enough tracks real lives to risk consternation among some readers. It’s about two cousins, each married with two kids, who inherited an apple orchard in Wisconsin and run it together. The author does not shy away from resentments that flare occasionally, or from the love lives of a longtime beloved employee and another cousin who spends his sabbatical at the orchard; Issues of encroaching exurbia come up, as does IPM (almost-organic) apples, and hobby farms.

29. Lab Girl by Hope Jahren ©2016, 282pp, in which I learn about the work and life of a geobiologist. Jahren was b/ 1969. One aspect of the book: an homage to her extraordinary lab assistant Bill. Biographical info—her childhood, career struggles and satisfactions, marriage, and motherhood —is interlaced w/ fascinating tidbits about plants. There are apt literary allusions throughout.