Tolstoy Lied

Sometimes you pick up a book just because the title grabs you. And the fact that a reference to the opening line of Anna Karenina did that for me gives you all a good idea of how often I go clubbing or whether I might wear horn rimmed glasses or potentially get excited about NPR programming. It's a love story, a quirky, thoughtful one. Rachel Kadish, the author, is taking issue with Tolstoy's quote "Happy families are all alike- each unhappy family is miserable in its own way", and the implication that happiness in life and literature is boring and the only interesting subject material is tragic. I think she's absolutely right in her criticism of this trend- it's annoying and depressing. Ugh. It's particularly bad in modern lit. I drop prospective reading material like a.p. calculus when I read the word "bleak" in a blurb on the back cover. "Bleak" is not a compliment, dammit!
Kadish rambles a bit, but I like her novel's mix of English professor trying to balance a serious (but not bleak) career while falling in love (of course it can't go completely smoothly); I like her philosophical asides on books and romance and marriage, and yes, I like the happy ending.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Ever read a book that made you desperately wish you could buttonhole the characters and demand they immediately become your friends? That's this book. Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows create a witty, plucky English author who has used her literary gifts in wry short stories that manage to make a nation under fire laugh a little- no small feat. But she needs a new project, one a little more substantial. Inspiration comes in the form of a letter from a man she has never met who lives on the Guernsey Islands (which were occupied by the Nazis during the war). He and his friends accidentally created an unusual and eclectic literary society that becomes something rich and extraordinary in the lives of all its colorful members.
The book is epistolary for the most part- written as letters back and forth- a form I usually abhor as something contrived and frankly rather boring; here it's fresh, witty, and impossible to put down. I startled my husband several times by bursting into laughter reading this book, but I think he became slightly concerned when he caught me wandering through the kitchen with a stricken expression and tears streaming down my cheeks. Amazing story about the power of really great books, true friends, deep tragedy and triumph over it, and of course, true love. The best book I read this year, and one of my new favorites.