WickedGirl's Book Notes

Julian Barnes' Man Booker Prize-winning novel about Tony Webster, a retired Londoner who receives an unexpected bequest from the mother of a long-ago girlfriend and is forced to revisit the friendship, the breakup, and the suicide he thought he understood. A 163-page meditation on memory, documentation, and the way the stories we tell about ourselves quietly do us the favor of leaving things out.

Willa Cather's American masterpiece about Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie, told through the nostalgic memories of childhood friend Jim Burden. Luminous prose, elegiac tone, and one of literature's most enduring portraits of pioneer life and immigrant experience.

The second Kendra Michaels thriller from Iris and Roy Johansen opens with a multi-car pile-up on San Diego's Cabrillo Bridge that Kendra - a music therapist who was blind from birth until experimental surgery gave her sight in her twenties - sees instantly is no accident, and the case turns personal fast when the new killings start mirroring her own most famous past cases. Fast-paced commercial suspense with a strong premise undercut by formula and an obligatory romance beat.

The fifth installment of Alexander McCall Smith's beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series finds Mma Ramotswe investigating suitors, solving mysteries, and contemplating life's complexities with wisdom, humor, and her traditional build. Gentle, charming, and surprisingly profound.

Rainbow Rowell's beloved YA novel about two misfit teenagers who fall in love on the school bus in 1986 Omaha. A tender, painful story about first love, abuse, racism, and finding someone who sees you - praised for representation but not without controversy.

In 184 CE the Yellow Turban Rebellion broke the Han dynasty, and the next hundred years of warlord chaos resolved into three rival kingdoms - Cao Cao's Wei in the north, Liu Bei's Shu-Han in the west, Sun Quan's Wu in the south - before the Sima family quietly inherited everything and reunified China as the Jin dynasty in 280 CE; more than a thousand years later, in the 14th century, Luo Guanzhong took the long accumulation of historical chronicle, opera, and storytellers' embellishment around that century and produced one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, which Moss Roberts has rendered into 2,300-plus unabridged English pages featuring the Oath of the Peach Garden between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei; the strategist Zhuge Liang treated as something close to a demigod; the Battle of Red Cliffs as the inflection point; and hundreds of warlords, surrenders, sieges, and stratagems any modern Western reader is going to have to commit to in a way most modern novels do not ask for.