Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf is incredible. It’s low-key, but the operational definition of a page-turner. It opens with Addie Moore calling Louis Waters and inviting him to sleep with her. The twist is that they are seventy-something widow(er)s, and there’s no explicit sex. They defy the town gossips and family opposition. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said, “A fine and poignant novel that demonstrates that our desire to love and be loved does not dissolve with age.”
Kent Haruf is a best selling novelist. But this is the first book of his I have read. I literally couldn’t put it down. Haruf has a spare style—like Hemingway, without the macho. It’s a fast read, but you might want to linger. It’s truly gripping.
Truth: Marathon euchre and cribbage got us only so far. It’s only natural that talk turned to books. So here’s a list of books the four of us recommended to each other.
[Source: Goodreads]Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katharine Boo is beautifully written nonfiction. It’s about striving and hope in a Mumbai under-city, and won both a National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize.
Another excellent nonfiction read is Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden. It’s a gripping story.
The novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is moving, funny and good writing.
[Source: Goodreads]Two people praised the novel Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf as excellently written. It’s the story of a seventy-year-old widow and widower who become soulmates, written as Haruf was dying.
Purity by Jonathan Franzen was described as a “weird” but excellent novel about two young people with strange mothers, searching for their real fathers, one in San Francisco and one in East Berlin.
[Source: Goodreads]Iron-hearted Violet by Kelly Barnhill is YA fantasy, about a princess who is very smart, not pretty, living in a land of dragons and magic castles.
When we got to mysteries, there were too many to list, so we just went with authors: pretty much anything by Tara French or Donna Leon for books set abroad, Greg Isles, Kathy Reichs, Lee Childs, Jeffrey Dever, Janet Evanovich, Nevada Barr, or Dennis Lebane.
