Recent Books.

Sarah's Key by Tatania de Rosnay was our last book club selection. Her writing was exceptional and the device in the early part of having chapters in alternating voices helped to ameliorate the difficulty of reading the description of the Holocaust. I'd put this near the top of the books I've read. My Norwegian friend, Berger, gave me The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen when he was here last fall. 764 pages long it is aptly described by a blurb on the cover by the INDEPENDENT, "Bruising and brilliant...This is a great river of a book...Magnificent...Unique." In the book the protagonist's grandmother worked at the telephone exchange and then says this about cell phones, "And later the Exchange itself was shut down as there was one great explosion of verbal diarrhoea n the 1990s; the whole industry was privatized and thrown to the four winds. It was impossible to get away from cordless conversation-the most intimate of things were shouted out as restaurant tables, secrets were spilled in supermarket queues and at bus stops. You were forced to listen to other people's arguments, threats and billing and cooing-in short society became one big bedroom where everyone talked to everyone else but mostly to themselves, and no one had anything to say." p. 593 My sentiments exactly!