Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 4, 2009

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Dogs Plagued By Men

Richard Adams is best known for Watership Down (which I reviewed in November of 2008), his wonderful novel depicting the epic journey of a group of brave rabbits to find a new home and a more peaceful existence. The Plague Dogs, published five years after Watership Down, portrays two dogs…

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2

Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 9, 2009

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How The World Spins

Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann is a beautiful book of many layers. It is rich in characters, place, and time. The characters include two brothers from Ireland; a mother and daughter both “on the stroll” (prostitutes); two mothers from different worlds but sharing the loss of their…

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Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 14, 2009

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Christmas on Caffeine

Holiday Grind by Cleo Coyle is a great Christmas mystery. Warning: the mystery starts slow after the initial jolt of a back alley execution, but then after a few chapters, Holiday Grind really gets going again. I was drawn in by the mouth-watering descriptions of espresso drinks including…

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Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 2, 2009

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Dogs, Kids, and Video Games

Two recent books for kids are good additions to the family bookshelves. Flawed Dogs by Berkeley Breathed (creator of Bloom County) tells the story of one brave dachshund with a celebrated hair tuft and only three legs who falls in with the mutts of the world and leads them to…

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Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 23, 2009

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Your Own True Life

Back When We Were Grown-Ups by Anne Tyler is the perfect read for mothers and wives during this holiday time of year. I loved it. The book tells the story of Rebecca Davitch, brought into a large extended family when she was barely twenty. When her husband dies just six years later, Rebecca is…

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12

Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 28, 2009

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White Harts and a Nun Dressed in Blue

The Red Velvet Turnshoe by Cassandra Clark is rich with historical details, winding the realities of a medieval pilgrimage from England to Rome around an imagined plot of political intrigue. The brutal political jockeying that went on in England in the late 1300s…

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Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 30, 2009

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Life of a Poet

Lore Segal’s Lucinella was written in the 1970s as a very funny satire of the New York literary scene. The heroine Lucinella is a poet and we first meet her at Yaddo, soaking up the atmosphere and as many drinks as possible. The funniest bits of the book still ring true today (maybe that is why they…

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Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 18, 2009

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No Escape

Herta Muller’s The Passport is a relentlessly bleak, starkly realistic, and poetically searing novel about life in a small village under the strangling reign of Ceausescu. There is nothing light or airy in this book. Nighttime suffocates, daytime is drudgery, and even dreams, both sleeping and awake, hang…

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Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 11, 2009

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Sanely Grieving

Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir, Nothing Was The Same, is a deeply-personal and heart-felt homage to her husband, Richard Wyatt. Wyatt died of cancer in 2002. Jamison recounts stories from their almost twenty years together, years of love, support, passion, and understanding. Their marriage, childless…

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Nina Sankovitch in Nina Sankovitch

Dec 21, 2009

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Christmas Fit for a Queen

The Queene’s Christmas by Karen Harper, set during the early reign of Queen Elizabeth, is the perfect follow-up to the wonderful mystery novels of C.J. Sansom (set during the reign of Elizaeth’s father, Henry VIII), or to the thickly-paged, Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary…

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These were the top 10 stories published by Nina Sankovitch in December of 2009. You can also dive into daily archives for December of 2009 by using the calendar at the top of this page.