Ann Patchett, THE DUTCH HOUSE

This is my favorite of Ann Patchett's books. It's a book to savor, with writing that sings and soars. I won't explain the plot as it would reduce this story to a series of events in a dysfunctional family--and that's not the point. The two main characters--the narrator Danny and his bold, hurting sister Maeve--are a pair united against the world who, despite their closeness, still hold different memories of events. As an adult, Danny repeats the mistake of his father at times--for example, marrying a woman and then buying a house for her that she doesn't want. But he grows wise and thoughtful, and his reflections on his sister and their past suggest the sort of psychological layering and evolution that are pure pleasure to behold in a novel. Masterful. Highly recommend.

Tommy Orange, THERE THERE

A powerfully written book about the Native American (or Native Indian, both terms are used) experience in Oakland, California. Because it is told from the POV of many characters, sometimes in first-person, sometimes in third-person, it portrays collectively the systemic effects of alcoholism, addiction, violence, and brutal historical loss. I found myself bracing for the train wreck that happens despite best intentions. The writing is often poetic, spare, lovely. Words taken out of context are never as powerful, but here are a few of my favorite lines: "A breeze came in and it felt like my arms and back were being scraped by it"; "it was something Dene had seen in his mom's eyes, something that looked like remembering and dreading at once"; "He was twelve. It was November, so it was easy to find Indians on TV"; "But inside every kind of sound lurked a sadness. In the quiet between your parents, after a fight they both managed to lose." Highly recommend.

Janelle Brown, PRETTY THINGS

I don't always love thrillers, but this one caught my interest and kept me reading for hours one day ... neglecting chores and refusing to cook dinner. It's a twined tale, told in two alternating voices, of Nina, the daughter of a grifter mom and Vanessa, born into a life of enormous privilege. Their lives intersect when they are both teens, and both come away from those years with a sense of having been terribly wronged by the other person's family. Years later, their lives intersect again.

What sets this book apart from some thrillers is the elegant, economical writing and the acute attention to the emotional life of the characters. These women are messy, ambivalent, troubled, and disillusioned, but they are also capable of reflection and growth. The themes running through are very current--the addictive quality of social media, the problems our young adults face when they get out of college with heaps of debt, and our desire for connecting meaningfully with new people when an identity is something that can be forged on the web. I think this book would please readers who loved THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, but it would also satisfy readers who liked LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE and the Broadway musical WICKED. It is a tale of family dysfunction but also a story about women learning to be strong in the broken places.

Lori Gottlieb, MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE

Insightful, compassionate, and engagingly written, this is a memoir of a woman who is both in therapy for herself and providing therapy to her patients in Los Angeles. For me, the book recalled the years I spent in therapy in New York, when I was in graduate school in my early thirties, with so much to learn about my own misbegotten assumptions and poor communication and coping skills. Much of this material felt familiar--the role of the therapist, the process of corrective experiences that help us to question our assumptions, discovering the space after an "event" and before a "response" in which choices are made, and identifying the ways we sublimate, repress and misdirect our feelings. But despite having seen much of this up close for myself, I enjoyed spending two days (it's a quick read, with short, economically written chapters) in this woman's mind.

Hilary Mantel, WOLF HALL

This is a bold and ambitious novel that took me 3 tries to read--but I'm glad I tried that third time. I've seen other reviews that mention how difficult it is to read. Part of the difficulty, I think, is that the book is written in the third person ("he") but focalized almost exclusively through Cromwell (as in, the camera is on his shoulder and the narrative voice is like Cromwell's speaking voice--wry and shrewdly observant, laced with zeugma and understatement). At times this creates some peculiar grammar. For example, Mantel uses the pronoun "he" to refer to both Cromwell and King Henry, or both Cromwell and Thomas More in the same sentence. But once I became used to having to reread paragraphs to figure out which "he" was saying or doing what, I was drawn wholly into the story. Mantel's world building is as complete and elaborate as (dare I say) Rowling's for Harry Potter--and Mantel's breadth of knowledge is awe-inspiring. Yet because Cromwell's subjectivity is so complete, and the events are always filtered through his sensibilities, I never felt I was being served a history lesson. If you've watched THE TUDORS, you'll find all the echoes of vengeance and desire and willfulness and conniving. I'll read the next.

Jared Diamond, GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES

Holy crow, what a book! And I had never heard of it until my son brought it home from school. How did I miss this Pulitzer winner? I think it was because the book won the same year I was immersed in studying for my PhD exams. There's my excuse. But I would say it doesn't matter that it was written 20 years ago. It holds up.

This book has a very ambitious scope and yet is still accessible, with anecdotes and examples and even bits of humor to keep the theory and the long history (he begins 13,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age ended) from turning dry. Diamond begins with a question posed to him by his friend Yali: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea but we black people had little cargo of our own?" More broadly, the question is why did some countries conquer others, develop more technology, expand their empires, acquire wealth, and so on, when others did not?

This book explores a range of what he calls "proximate causes," but the most significant "ultimate causes" are the geography and the ecology of different areas. One reason is that some environments allowed for a shift from hunter/gatherer to food production. Among other things, this enables people to stay put, which facilitates interactions such as collaboration and the formation of tribes as well as immunity to certain diseases (most of which come from animals, apparently); and food production, which allows for stock-piling, permits some people the option of not acquiring food, so they can devote their time to other pursuits--for example, trades, art, language, politics, religion--and the technology such as the guns and steel in the book's title. A key insight: because Europe is on a east/west axis (it's longest axis runs from Portugal to China, say) the climate is common across a long stretch, which facilitated the transfer of plants and languages and early technology. By contrast, North America and South America have an axis that runs north/south. The corn grown in, say, Nebraska might do well if transplanted down to a similar climate in South America, but how is corn to cross the arid desert and skinny little Panama in between?

Another distinction I liked was the one Diamond makes between two different types of information transfer, for disseminating ideas, skills, or technologies. One means is called blueprinting. I hand you a camera, and you use it as a model to make your own camera. The other is idea diffusion, in which you have seen me use the camera, so you know it's "out there" and ready to be created, and you go home and make one for yourself.

All in all, a dense but great read. Some of the chapters toward the end got a bit repetitive for me--but that's perhaps natural with a book that is covering all the continents and different cultures, all of which in various ways are following the lines of his general argument.

One of the most interesting suggestions is in the Afterword, when he explains that his discoveries about the different forms of organization of human groups have implications for business and our world today. (Bill Gates has applied some of these principles to his workplace, for example.)

An intriguing read, I would definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to understand the evolution of modern humankind.

Keith O'Brien, FLY GIRLS: HOW FIVE DARING WOMEN DEFIED ALL ODDS AND MADE AVIATION HISTORY

This true history reads almost like a novel, and O'Brien has a fine eye for the details that bring these individual women alive on the page. Maybe that's why this book broke my heart a bit. (A spoiler here: we all know that Amelia Earhart dies. All but one of the other four women die in ways that are either similarly violent or quieter tragedies.) The four other women he follows are Florence Klingensmith, Ruth Elder, Ruth Nichols, and Louise Thaden. Although they hail from different parts of the US and disparate economic situations, each woman faces the challenge of trying to be taken seriously as a pilot in an age when men were making statements like "If women spent more time making homes pleasant and less time trying to get men's jobs there would be less domestic trouble ... The world would be happier" and "Our experience has disclosed the fact that most women have insufficient mechanical ability and little desire to observe and learn." Arg.

Unsentimentally engaging and well researched, this book is for readers of Hidden Figures and anyone who wants to learn more about the 1930s and recovered women's histories. One of my favorite lines is the one O'Brien puts on the frontispiece, from Louise Thaden: "If you will tell me why, or how, people fall in love, I will tell you why, or how, I happened to take up aviation."