Browsings

Dirda, Michael. Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books. New York: Pegasus 2015. Print

First Sentences:

As readers of Browsings will discover in the weeks to come, I'm pretty much what used to be called a "bookman." 

 

This means, essentially, that I read a lot and enjoy writing about the books and authors that interest me....But my tone aims to remain easygoing and conversational, just me sharing some of my discoveries and enthusiasms.


Description:

OK, I admit it. I'm a hopeless sucker for books about books. Anything that covers ground about reading experiences and interesting titles, I'm all in. Whether the topic is about reading the encyclopedia (The Know-It-All: One Man's Quest to be the Smartest Man in the World), perusing every book on one shelf in the library (The Shelf: From LEQ to LES), thoughtful recommendations from someone who reads 6,000 books a year (One For the Books), or just a personal list of wonderful books organized by subject and complete with witty descriptions (Book Lust), I gobble up these books, copying enticing titles into my pocket notebook of "Books To Be Read" for later consumption.

My latest treasure in this "Books on Books" topic is Michael Dirda Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books. Dirda was a columnist for The American Scholar between 2012-13, taking the column over from the great William K. Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well, which to me is the definitive grammar and writing style advice guidebook. Quite large shoes to fill.

But Dirda can really write, and write he does on any book-related topic that strikes his fancy for his column, "Browsings." In this book, Dirda collects one year's worth of his short columns on a wide variety of topics, including:

Thrift store book shopping -

One thing never does change: the books you really covet always cost more that you want to pay for them. But, to borrow a phrase that women use of childbirth, the pain quickly vanishes when you finally hold that longed-for baby, or book, and know that it is your forever.

Book Collecting - 

Three important points for buying a collectable book : condition, condition, condition....Now you can easily acquire almost anything with a keystroke, if you have the funds. But where's the fun of that? Where's the serendipity? The thrill of the hunt?...that's not collecting, that's shopping.

Anthologies - 

Anthologies resemble dating. You enjoy some swell times and suffer through some awful ones, until one happy hour you encounter a story you really, really like and decide to settle down for a while with its author. Of course, this doesn't lead to strict fidelity.

His own life - 

I had graduated from Oberlin College and failed to win a Rhodes Scholarship -- a long shot, at best, given that I played no sports, earned mediocre grades as a freshman and sophomore, and had participated in absolutely nothing extracurricular. It turned out that zeal for learning and boyish charm weren't quite enough for the Rhodes committee... 

He introduces or refamiliarizes us readers with his favorite writers, such as:

• Everett F. Bleiler - author of The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, with summaries for 1,775 books written between 1750-1960;

• Irvin Leigh Matus - author of Shakespeare, In Fact, the definitive scholarly work about the life of the Bard, despite Matus having no formal education beyond a high school diploma, and incredibly had 20 years earlier been living on a heating grate behind the Library of Congress

• Charles Wager - Oberlin College professor who wrote essays on his college in To Whom It May Concern. Wager was the teacher whom Robert Maynard Hutching, renown president of the University of Chicago, said was the only truly great teacher he experienced during his years of education at Yale, Princeton, and many other universities

Dirda mentions his love of classic novels, especially those long-forgotten but are still captivating and worth re-exploring. He even developed and taught a course at the Univerisity of Maryland entitled, "The Classic Adventure Novel: 1885-1915" where students read King Solomon's Mines. Kidnapped, The Time Machine, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Man Who Was Thursday, Kim, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and Tarzan of the Apes (my favorite hero as a boy. I read all 24 Tarzan books three times before my parents made me move on). This wildly popular class led to his follow-up course "The Modern Adventure Novel: 1917-1973" which covered Captain Blood, Red Harvest, The Real Cool Killers, True Grit, and The Princess Bride. Who wouldn't want to take those courses with him and dive into these gripping novels?

Here's just a peak at a smattering of some of the other unusual titles Dirda mentions that caught my eye:

• Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind 
• The Moon Is Feminine
• The Man With the Magic Eardrums
• The Skull of the Waltzing Clown
• The Lost Continent
• When I Was a Child I Read Books 
• I Am Thinking of My Darling
• The Fangs of Suet Pudding
• The Bible Repairman and Other Stories
• The Venetian Glass Nephew
• The Man Who Understood Women 

I could go on and on about the treasures uncovered in Browsings, but I'll leave that pleasure to you readers curious about discovering new titles to explore, reading about the author's incurable scrounging through used book stores, encounters with famous and not-so-famous writers, and his pursuit of quality reads and reading experiences.

I've lived slow, dithered and dallied, taken my own sweet time, and done pretty much what I've repeatedly done ever since my mother first taught me to read so long ago: Found a quiet spot and opened a book. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Miller, Andy. A Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life  

Author Andy Miller decides to read fifty book in one year. Along the way, he writes an essay on each book about what the book means to him, his feelings for the author and background, and anything else delightful he can think of. He avoided Dan Brown's books. (previously reviewed here)

Queenen, Joe. One for the Books  

Here's a gifted reader, writer, and commentator on books (he reads up to 32 at a time!), guaranteed to fill up your To Be Read file with countless interesting titles you simply cannot live without reading. Wonderful writing and a goldmine of book ideas (previously reviewed here)

 

 

 

The Baseball 100

Posnanski, Joe. The Baseball 100. New York: The Athletic. 2021. Print.

First Sentences:

There are many words we sportswriters use way too often. We might write that something quite believable is 'unbelievable" and that something that falls well into the realm of the possible is actually "impossible." But, if I had to guess, I would say that most of all we use the word "unique" too often.

    [Comments on Ichiro Suzuki, the first player profiled - rank #100.]


Description:

It never gets old to discuss the greatest baseball players of all time. Ranking the Top 100 adds an even greater challenge. But backing up an all-time greatest list with statistics, first-hand observations, comparisons, and commentary from articles, books, interviews, and other relevant resources makes a strong case for which players and rankings shake out in a convincing Top 100 list.

In The Baseball 100, writer Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated, The Athletic, New York Times, etc. fame, presents his own well-researched list of choices for the greatest players of all time. And it is a compelling, convincing, fascinating, detailed, and astonishing lust. While I personally am no longer the biggest baseball fan, I absolutely loved reading about the players I have heard about or even watched play in my younger days.

The book is more than just Ruth, Cobb, DiMaggio, Berra, Mays, and other familiar names. No, Posnanski introduces the cases for less-famous (to me, at least) Bullet Rogan (#92), Charlie Gehringer (#87), Kid Nichols (#82), Monte Irvin (#69), Smokey Joe Williams (#62), Arky Vaughan (#61) and Oscar Charleston (unbelievably #5!). Each player gets 5-8 pages of stories, stats, quotes, media coverage, and interviews to substantiate Posnanski's case for their inclusion on this list.

And what a page-turner this book it, all 869 pages of it. I couldn't stop myself from reading about childhood heroes and learning about unknowns who with their dazzling skills made significant marks. I loved reading about their childhoods, with overbearing (Mantle #11) or gentle fathers (Mathewson #36); rich (Cobb #8) or poor (Aaron #4); naturally gifted (Mays #1) or driven but possessing fewer skills (Rose #60); good-looking (Williams #6) or short and squat (Berra #43); Jewish (Koufax #70) or racist (Collins #29); young (Feller age 16 #55) or Paige (age 58+ #10). Every player is given a detailed analysis and a recap of his moments of glory.

  

[Probably just listing these players' rankings might raise some arguments in any dedicated reader's mind, but that what makes this book wonderful.] Here are some highlights:

• Reggie Jackson #59 - "I didn't come to New York to be a star. ...I brought my star with me."
• Warren Spahn #49 - always wanted to be a hitter, not a pitcher until he saw his high school team's first baseman (Spahn's position) and said, "That guy is a lot better than I am" and decided then and there to become a pitcher.
• Yogi Berra #43 - had only 12 strikeouts in the entire 1950 season.
• Nap Lajoie #39 - under "fixed" conditions, went 8 for 8 on the last day of the season to beat Cobb for the batting title and win a new car.
• Satchel Paige # 10 - threw rocks as a boy to protect himself from gangs. "Rocks made a real impression on a kid's head or backside," he said.
• Jimmie Foxx #33 - after retirement from baseball at age 37, coached a women's baseball team and was the inspiration for the Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) character in the film, A League of Their Own.
• Johnny Bench #30 - caught a fast ball bare-handed just to convince his pitcher he had no speed that day.
• Pop Lloyd #25 - played catcher one game for the Macon Acmes. Since the team couldn't afford catching equipment, he played without a mask, knee or chest protectors, winding up with two swollen eyes and bruises all over his body. That was when he became a shortstop.
• Ricky Henderson # 24 - Jim Murray wrote of Henderson's squatting batting stance, "He has a strike zone the size of Hitler's heart."
• Lefty Grove #22 - in his first game, age 19, he pitched seven inning and struck out 15; in the second game he threw a no-hitter and struck out 18
• Tris Speaker #18 - played so shallow in center field that he made 450 assists (a record never to be broken - second is Mays with less than half that number). He also made six unassisted double plays.
• Stan Musial #9 - would go up to strangers celebrating in a restaurant, borrow a $1 bill, fold it into a ring, and slip it onto the fan's finger just to add to their fun and memories. He also carried a harmonica with him everywhere, but could only play four songs.
• Ty Cobb # 8 - in 1947, age 60, he was asked at an old timers' game what he would hit in modern baseball. "About 300," he said, "but you've got to remember I'm 73 years old."
• Walter Johnson #7 - A batter who faced him "saw (or didn't see) two fastballs go by for strikes and headed back to the dugout. 'You've got another strike coming,' the umpire shouted to the player. 'I don't want it,' the hitter said. 'I've seen enough.'"
• Ted Williams #6 - could "hear a single boo in a Fenway Park filled with cheers."
• Henry Aaron #4 - as a kid practiced hitting with a broomstick and a bottle cap.
• Babe Ruth #2 - in 1920 was sold by Boston to the "lamentable New York Yankees who had never won a single pennant in their entire existence."

I have dozens more of quotes I'd marked while reading, but I'll stop here. Suffice to say, it's a fantastic book for any baseball aficionado or even for a casual fan interested in human stories, history, culture, jargon, and even a bit of baseball. Get it now to read or pass on to someone you love. They will love you back for a long time as they work their way through the players' profiles ...each and every one of them.

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

More book recommendations

About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams.   

Simply wondrous oral history of the Negro Leagues as told through interviews with the men who played the game in those days of segregation. Real baseball lingo, lore, and memories here. Fantastic peek into that era, its players, and their baseball lives.

 

What To Read and Why

Prose, Francine. What To Read and Why. New York: HarperCollins 2018. Print

First Sentences:

Reading is among the most private, the most solitary things that we can do.

A book is a kind of refuge to which we can go for the assurance that, as long as we are reading, we can leave the worries and cares of our everyday lives behind us and enter, however briefly, another reality, populated by other lives, a world distant in time and place from our own, or else reflective of the present moment in ways that may help us see that moment more clearly.

Description:

The books I most eagerly and thoroughly enjoy are those that tell me about other books. Whether through an author's personal reading preferences like Book Lust by Nancy Pearl or Joe Queenen's One For the Books, or by recounting personal adventures with books like The Shelf (reading an entire shelf of library books) by Phyllis Rose or The Know-It-All (reading the entire encyclopedia) by A.J. Jacobs, anything that describes and thereby promotes great, interesting books is always my first choice.

What To Read and Why by Francine Prose ably fills the bill for me. She clearly understands the double joy of reading: the solitary time in the author's world and then the sharing of the book's ideas with others. And she suggests that "You've got to read this" are the words that should open every positive book review. She feels the best reviews of recommended books really are telling readers to "Drop everything. Start reading. Now."

Reading and writing are solitary activities, and yet there is a social component that comes into play when we tell someone else about what we have read. An additional pleasure of reading is that you can urge and sometimes even persuade people you know and care about, and even people you don't know, to read the book you've just finished and admired -- and that you think they would like, too. 

In What to Read, each of its thirty-three chapters covers one highly recommended book and author. They range from the more recognized Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and George Eliot's Middlemarch to the lesser-know (at least to me) Roberto Bolano's 2666 and Mark Strand's Mr. and Mrs. Baby. Along the way author Prose covers the lives (briefly) and books by Austen, Alcott, Munro, and Knausgaard, as well as Charles Baxter, Deborah Levy, and Mohsin Hamid, all of whom I was to varying degrees unfamiliar with.

Prose even includes a couple of chapters on related topics such as "On Clarity," "What Makes a Short Story?",  and "On the Erotic and Pornographic." Got your interest yet? Surely there is something to whet anyone's reading appetite in What To Read and Why. 

Here's a writer who clearly loves to read and enthusiastically share her gems will all of us. Now, a few tidbits to get you excited about her recommendations:

• [on "The Collected Stories" of Mavis Gallant]: I feel  kind of messianic zeal, which I share with other writers and readers, to make sure that Gallant's work continues to be read, admired -- and loved....She builds her fictions with moments and incidents so revealing and resonant that another writer might have made each one a separate story....Her fiction has the originality and profundity, the clarity, the breadth of vision, wit, the mystery, the ability to make us feel that a work has found its ideal form, that no one word could be changed, all of which re recognize as being among the great wonders of art.

• [on Patrick Hamilton]: With their intense, and intensely mixed, sympathies for the men and women who haunted the pubs and walked the streets of London's tawdrier districts just before, during, and after World War II, Patrick Hamilton's novels are dark tunnels of misery, loneliness, deceit, and sexual obsession, illuminated by scenes so funny that it takes a while to register the sheer awfulness of what we have just red.

• [on Andrea Canobbio]: Canobbio...avoids the obvious pitfalls, largely as a result of his acuity and inventiveness, of the specificity and density of his detail, the elegance of his style, and the depth of his psychological insight.

• [on Elizabeth Taylor (the author, not the actress)]: The best of her fiction is extremely funny, incisive, sympathetic, and beautifully written, but it can also make us squirm with uneasy recognition and tell us more than we might choose to hear about ourselves and our neighbors. Awful things happen in those narratives, not in the sense of violence and gore but of characters realizing awful truths about the lives in which they are hopelessly mired.

• [on Jane Austen]: No other novelist combined such a subtle, delicate moral sensibility with such a firm, no-nonsense grasp of the most material realities -- of the fact that money determines one's opportunity to live in the tranquil and gracious style to which one is (or would like to be) accustomed.

• [on Stanley Elkin]: Stanley was not only a maximalist of language, but also one of truth....That was one of the most astonishing and special qualities of his work: that piling on more and more -- more metaphors, more world, more sentences, more humor, more energy -- as a way of delving into, bringing to light, and forcing us to look directly into the heart of the simultaneously dark and scintillating mystery of what makes us human. 

Well, you get the idea. Francine Prose is a gifted writer herself, willing to read widely, analyze the importance of great writing, and share her loves with us. No one could pick up What To Read and Why without finding something unexpected and alluring, an author, title or review, that will make them immediately go into a bookstore, library, or online to obtain a copy of this new treasure. Highly recommended. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Pearl, Nancy. Book Lust.   

Absolutely the best, most compelling, delightful reviews of hundreds of recommended titles from the head librarian of the Seattle Public Library. Irresistible, and best of all Pearl has several other Book Lust titles available for travel, teens, etc. (previously reviewed here)

Special Post - The 30-Book Library

Robinson, Chris. "If I Could Only Have 30 Books" Medium, January 17, 2019. medium.com/@CRMusicWriter/if-i-could-only-have-30-books-6ec859b8ada4. May 10, 2019.

First Sentences:

[Marie] Kondo suggests that “ideally,” people should only keep 30 books. For me and a whole lot of people I know, that goes against every fiber in our being. 

Description:

The other day I read the interesting article If I Could Only Have 30 Books by Chris Robinson about reducing "one's library to only 30 books." Author Robinson was commenting on the current hype from Marie Condo to cut down and simplify one's possessions. Looking at his precious bookshelves, Robinson wondered what if, just maybe, he had to weed his own collection down to a handful of titles. What thirty titles would he hold onto? 

These keepers would be books that one could (and would) re-read many times with pleasure. They are titles that summarize who you are, how your mind works, and what you find valuable. This collection would be the very definition of who you are.

It got me to thinking about my own collection and which ones I judge would be the most indispensable of books. Here are my thirty titles, with six alternatives in case ... well, just because I couldn't really leave them off. Believe me, it was really tough to whittle down my collection to its essentials.  At least now, when people ask for recommendations, I can give them a list of my own "Best of the Best."

Go ahead, try it for yourself. Then add your favorite thirty to the Comments section at the bottom of this screen. I look forward to seeing your own must-have collections.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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About The First Sentence Reader blog

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Thirty Essential  Books - The First Sentence Reader

About Books

Book Lust - Nancy Pearl 

One for the Books - Joe Queenan

Fiction

Carter Beats the Devil - Glen David Gold 

The Great American Novel - Philip Roth 

I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes 

Moment in Peking  - Lin Yutang 

Q & A - Vikas Swarup 

To Serve Them All My Days - R.F. Delderfield

Humor

Food: A Love Story - Jim Gaffigan 

Never Cry Wolf - Farley Mowat 

The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion 

Wodehouse on Golf - P.G. Wodehouse

Non-Fiction

The New Ocean - William E. Burrows 

The Stars: A New Way to See Them - H.A. Rey 

Stone by Stone - Robert Thorson

Personal Histories

We Took To the Woods - Louise Dickenson Rich 

The Piano Shop on the Left Bank - Thad Carhart

Philosophy

The First and Last Freedom - Jiddu Krishnamurti 

The Importance of Living  - Lin Yutang 

Manners from Heaven - Quentin Crisp

Reference

Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare - Isaac Asimov 

The Norton Anthology of Poetry - Margaret Ferguson (ed) 

The Norton Shakespeare (complete works) - Steven Greenblatt (ed) 

Webster's New World Dictionary and Thesaurus - Editors of New World Dictionaries

Science Fiction / Fantasy

The Collected Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke - Arthur C. Clarke 

Enders Shadow - Orson Scott Card 

The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien 

Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien 

The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury 

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

**Extras** (too good to leave off any list)

Enders Game - Orson Scott Card 

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles 

The Martian - Andy Weir 

Moondust - Andrew Smith 

Soul of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery 

Three-Year Swim Club - Julie Checkoway

Dear Fahrenheit 451

Spence, Annie. Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks. New York: Flatiron 2018. Print.

First Sentences:

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Dear Fahrenheit 451. Shall we be --- wait, I know you guys! Do you remember me?

I'm your public librarian! I walked you over to the Murakami that time. I helped you get the DVD about exploring New Zealand and you came back and told me about how wonderful your trip was and we both got tears in our eyes. Remember when you said you paid my salary and mumbled "bitch" under your breath when I wouldn't do your kid's research paper for them? I'm that bitch!

Description:

When I read books, I tear off bits of my paper bookmark and place them in pages to indicate sections that have important (to me) phrases, clever thoughts, and references to books I'd like to read. Usually that means about 2-6 markers for my favorite books.

In Annie Spence's Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks, I had twenty-seven pages marked. I counted because I couldn't believe it. I wanted to remember so many books to record into my "To be read" notebook, as well as all Spence's clever, snarky phrases I wanted re-use on someone else and pass them off as my own. 

Spence, a public librarian, writes letters to her books. Seriously. She tells individual books why each has: A) influenced her life; B) infuriated/disappointed her; C) had an impact on a library user; D) unfortunately will be weeded out of the collection and relegated to the book sale table.

Sound kooky to you? Well, it's not. Maybe because I, too, am a reader and former librarian and have harbored similar thoughts about books, Dear Fahrenheit 451 works for me. I was completely captured by Spence's impassioned, one-sided conversations to individual books. I loved her intelligent, humorous, self-deprecating, and thoroughly engaging style and tone, and dream that someday I could write as engagingly and with the hipness she delivers on every page.

Some examples are in order:

• [to Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins Mystery Series] - God, I love wandering down dicey alleys with you, roughing people up if they need it...I've begun thinking of myself as one of your characters. I've started wearing dark sunglasses and popping my collar when I'm in public, looking furtively over my shoulder every few minutes, which makes the other playgroup moms nervous. I can tell. They've stopped offering me their extra Luna bars.

• [to John Steinbeck's Cannery Row] - You've still got that quiet lopsided charm about you....Your pages look just the right shade of yellow, your text just dark and smoodgie enough to give me a deep-nostril thrill ride. The only better smell than a creaky paperback for a book sniffer like me is a real inky graphic novel.

• [to Nikki Giovanni's Love Poems] - I like to have you around in the kitchen so I can read a poem while the water boils and another while the butter melts, and so on. It's a reminder to read slow and savor you, and the smells of the cooking make me more aware of my senses.

• [to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451] - You were created in a library, and I'm comforted by the fact that you'll remain on library shelves around the world. If we ever get to a point when you're not included in the core of a book collection, we're all fucked. Like "Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge" type fucked. Some days the world feels closer to that point than I'm comfortable with.

• [to Patti Smith's Just Kids] - I'm so smitten with you, I can't help but pick you up when I waiting for tea to boil or brushing my teeth. And especially in bed. Actually, in bed is where the trouble begins. My husband is jealous of you....I've been reading you in all of my spare moments. I haven't heard a word he's said to me to two days. 

• [to her own Future Book Collection] -  A locked door will lead into the room. This will be essential. There will be a doorbell; however, entry is denied unless visitor-candidates answer a series of questions posed by an exasperated robot voice: "Did you just put something in your mouth?" "Did you check in the pants you wore last night?" "Can I just get a minute here for Christ's sake?" Basically, my top three phrases. Once the riffraff is sorted through, serious visitors will be allowed inside if they agree to speak only about books or to remain silent and bring a cheesy snack....[the] books will be organized by Emotion, including "I'm Just Going to Read Instead of Do What I Need to Do Today" section, "Reminiscing About First Loves" section, "Am I Crying Through Laughter or Laughing Through Tears" section, etc]

Have to stop these now, but Spence give readers many more reading suggestions and witticisms in special sections, including:

• "Excuses To Tell Your Friends So You Can Stay Home with Your Books"

• "Turning Your Lover into a Reader"

• "Good Books with Bad Covers"

• "Books That Lead to More Books"

• "Books I'll Never Break Up With"

If you love reading, are looking for a wide variety of new books to peruse, or if just want to lose yourself in the wide-ranging thoughts of a clever person talking all things books and reading, Dear Fahrenheit 451 is the book to grab. But be advised. Your bedside table and list of books to be read will grow to epic size. I know mine did.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog
____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Queenan, Joe. One for the Books  

Queenan describes all aspects of his existence as a passionate book reader (who reads 32 books at a time!), including his preferences and dislikes in authors and topics, bookstores, and libraries, as well as strong opinions on borrowing/lending books, writing notes in books, and finishing a book. One of my favorite books about books. (previously reviewed here)

Pearl, Nancy. Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason  

An extensive bibliography of books and witty reviews organized by eclectic categories including "Academic Mysteries," "Armchair Travel," and "Australian Fiction," to "What a (Natural) Disaster," "Women's Friendships," and "World War II Nonfiction." Clever, passionate reviews make you want to get every book and begin reading each one immediately.. (previously reviewed here)

Berthoud, Ella. Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You   

Offers hundreds of high-quality and sometimes quirky titles and descriptions of the perfect books to fit with your needs of that moment, including "Abandonment" (Plainsong by Kent Haruf), "Age Gap Between Lovers" (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka) and "Aging, the Horrors of" (JItterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins).  (previously reviewed here)