Peter Allison, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T RUN: TRUE TALES OF A BOTSWANA SAFARI GUIDE

A fun read. Short, lively stories (5-10 pp.) about a young man's adventures over the course of several years. Getting lost on a river with two friends, a first aid kit and some ramen noodles. Nearly being drowned. Being chased by a lion. Overrun with mice. Infatuated with birds. Tipped badly. Tipped well. You get the idea.

David Benioff, CITY OF THIEVES

I reread this last night. It stands up to a second reading. Don't be thrown by the fact that the protagonist of the story--a young Russian, age fifteen, in 1940s Leningrad--has the last name Beniov and that the story begins with a frame narrative (purportedly) about David Benioff interviewing his grandfather. It's pure fiction. But Benioff wrote the screenplay for KITE RUNNER years ago, and this book reads like a movie--fast-paced and intensely visual. It's the story of two men--the young Beniov and Kolya, a brash, lewd, sly Cossack--who are granted a reprieve for their respective crimes (looting a dead German paratrooper and desertion) and sent by a high-ranking Russian officer to find a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake. In Leningrad people are eating rats and there are no eggs, so the men leave, crossing German enemy lines. No more or I'll spoil it. Nearly everyone I've given the book to liked it, including all the members of my book club, my husband, and my former English teacher. (That's rare.)

Jamie Zeppa, BEYOND THE SKY AND THE EARTH

My sister went to Bhutan a few years ago and read this book on the plane on the way over--because it was one of the few books she could find written about Bhutan, a small country squeezed between India and Tibet. (It is closed to most tourists, but it is typical for my sister that she knew someone who knew someone in the royal family and was allowed in.) It's a treasure of a memoir, of the "woman immersed and transformed by another culture" ilk, and I found it more satisfying than EAT PRAY LOVE. Zeppa, a young Canadian woman, abandons her thoughts of entering a Ph.D. program to teach English in Bhutan for two years. She spends her first five months in a tiny rural village with sporadic running water, and her remaining time at a university, where she falls in love with one of her students and converts to Buddhism. It's by turns hilarious and poignant and thoughtful.
The best part of my sister's story about this book is that one night she and her friend found themselves in a bar in Bhutan. My sister had a long conversation with one man--extremely good looking, articulate--and finally asked if he's married. He replied, "I was ... I married my English professor .... but my wife and I are divorced, and she moved back to Canada." My sister stared. "Were you married to Jamie Zeppa?" "Yes." (This, too, is the sort of thing that happens to my sister.)

Laura Hillenbrand, UNBROKEN

Holy cow, this one is heartbreaking. Hillenbrand brings the same sort of energy, the same strong plot arc as she drew for SEABISCUIT, to the life of Louie Zamperini, one-time Olympic runner, bombardier on a B-24 in WWII, and survivor of Japanese POW camps. When his plane goes down in the Pacific, he and two other men float for 47 days on a poorly equipped liferaft, with sharks circling. Then he's taken to one horrifyingly inhumane Japanese camp after another, persecuted by a sadist called "the Bird." At times, I had to skip paragraphs and go back to them after I read ahead to find out how he survived. By page 200, I was jumping ahead to the end of the book. Ultimately, it's a story of courage and forgiveness, of letting go the desire for revenge that, left to itself, can bind us to our pasts. But be prepared to stay up half the night reading it. Or wake up in the middle of the night needing to finish it. Yes, it's 4:30 a.m. in Arizona.

Elizabeth Strout, AMY AND ISABELLE

Brilliant and terrifying. In a claustrophobically small mill town (I found myself thinking of Richard Russo), 16-year-old Amy's math teacher begins to molest her, and her mother Isabelle has no idea. Estranged from other people in town (and from her daughter) by what she imagines to be her own dark secrets, Isabelle only finds out because her boss comes upon Amy and Mr. Robertson in his car. Ultimately, the novel is somewhat redemptive--Isabelle finds her place by sharing the truth; but Amy is already almost gone. I'd compare the emotional intensity and the skill of the writing to that of LITTLE BEE.
By the way, has anyone out there read Chris Cleave's newest?

Alexander McCall Smith, LA'S ORCHESTRA SAVES THE WORLD

Very enjoyable, as with all Smith's work ... I've realized the reason I like him is he's a bit akin to Jane Austen ... and this book has some of her impulse ... with her "three or four families in a country village" in England. This (Smith's) novel is a small window, with a few characters, to provide a view of what life in the country was like during WWII, when foxes were making their way into henhouses against all efforts to stymie them with slats of wood, and when a Polish airman refuge might really be a German, but he played the flute beautifully. The one peculiarity with this book, and it's not a gripe, really, is that the first 253 pages carefully and delicately represents a short period of time--five or six years, during which La leaves London, moves to the country, plants her vegetables, begins her orchestra, and the war ends. Then in the remaining 40 pages, La goes from 34 years old in 1945 to 50 years old in 1961, with the only consistency being the two times she sees Feliks (the Polish refugee with whom she'd fallen in love). But the book charms.

Paul Auster, SUNSET PARK

Very good. A group of four troubled people, squatting in a Brooklyn house. As is usual with Auster, the characters are round, flawed, psychologically coherent. Miles, one of the four, and the figure at the center of the novel, has run away from his life for seven years, after he shoved his brother into the street, in the middle of a fight, and a car came around the corner, just at the wrong moment. Interesting that Jennifer Donnelly uses the same trope--accidental responsibility for a younger sibling's death--to pitch her heroine into the same trajectory of loss and recovery. Except with Auster's novel, the ending is bizarrely without closure. Just as Miles seems to get it together, he loses it again. And maybe that's the point.