The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman (1921) Viking Books

The words we needed to hear.  Ms. Gorman will be a significant contributor to American Poetry, with her own words, and the poets she inspires.  The United States and the world is a better place because of her poems and her actions.

She has another book coming out: Call Us What We Carry - I'm waiting for my copy.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (1999) Doubleday

Lionel Essrog, a man with Tourette’s, along with three other marginalized guys was recruited as teenagers by Frank Minna, who does questionable jobs for a couple of old gangsters.  His mentor went away for a few years with a brother.  When he came back, he created a car service as a front for a detective agency, which was really a front for doing what he always did.  Lionel is along as backup when his mentor is killed.  As a detective, even if that was a front, he feels obligated to bring the murderer to justice, in spite of his Tourettic tics.

The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen (1980) Ace Books

One of my favorite books by Saberhagen is An Old Friend of the Family.  I discovered that it was the third book in a series and decided to start from the beginning.

Vlad Dracula wanted to join the ‘modern’ society of Victorian England, specifically London.  He records five tracks recounting his efforts to blend in and the disastrous results of his experiment.  Dracula told from the viewpoint of the vampire.  The story reads with much action that parallels Bram Stoker’s novel and pre-dates Anne Rice’s Interview.

Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice (1944) Simon & Schuster

Marion Carstairs is a mystery writer raising three children with a lot of trust.  They hear a gunshot followed by another and followed by the sound of a couple of cars leaving.  They run to see what happened at their next door neighbor’s house.  There is a young actress screaming and a dead body.  They decide to solve this mystery so their mother can take credit and sell a lot more books.  There is a wide cast of characters and suspects abound.  Ms. Rice mixes humor and the standard mystery outline at work.  The book is entertaining from start to finish.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (2009) Ballentine Books

A marvelously intriguing book.  This is the story of a Chinese American boy in Seattle who befriended a Japanese American girl in 1942.  It follows the journey of the boy whose father is viciously anti-Japanese since they took over his native China.  Parallel to this is the same boy grown into a man who has lost his Chinese wife and discovers that the Panama Hotel has artifacts in its basement that were left by Japanese families when they were ‘evacuated’ during the war.  A jazz saxophone player provides a connecting role between the two time periods.  The writing is rich with poetic similes and observations of the human condition between generations and with young and old love.

Sabriel by Garth Nix (1995) Harper Collins

A girl is stillborn, then brought back to life by a magician and raised by him.  She is educated outside of the Old Kingdom and taught Charter magic.  In her senior year, almost ready to graduate, she is approached by a dead thing, and she banishes it back to death.  She receives a pack with her father’s sword and magic bells.  So, a quest is set for her to find her father’s body and redeem him from death.  She returns to the Old Kingdom, chased by the dead, who have taken over everything on that side of the wall.  She goes to her father’s home, is joined by his captive free spirit, in the form of a cat, sets sail in a paperwing, crashes into a sinkhole and frees a man trapped as the figurehead of a ship in a King’s graveyard.  All they have to do is find the body of Sabriel’s father, retrieve him from death, then defeat the most powerful dark necromancer of the time.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (2022) Random House

There are few books that I label as important - this is one of them.  The story follows Esme, the daughter of a worker on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.  As a child, she sits below her father’s desk and looks at the word slips the fall from the tables.  At one point she is sent to a boarding school with disastrous effect on her life.  She notices over time that the words not included in the printed work are about women.  She becomes friends with a brother and sister in the suffrage movement.  With him, she bears a child, who is adopted by friends who move to Australia.  She starts collecting these lost words and eventually they become a book titled Women’s Words and their Meanings.  At the same time as this immense project takes place, the world changes.  War comes and with it is the loss of many of the workers on the dictionary, including a compositor with whom she fell in love.  You will laugh at parts, be angry at others, and cry tears.  But you will read a very well written book and find it a satisfying read.