Two Lives, by William Trevor

Two Lives is a volume of two novels. The first is Reading Turgenev, the second My House in Umbria.

After Rain NY Times review 

NPR review of Trevor's Selected Stories 

Paris Review interview with Trevor 

Reading Turgenev is the life of Mary Louise Quarry. My House in Umbria is the life of Emily Delahunty.

NY Times Review of Two Lives 

From the NYT review linked above:

"...Mary Louise...has spent the last 31 years in an asylum for the mentally impaired.... Emily Delahunty...has been on her own since her teens... has finally fetched up in the Italian countryside, presiding over a handsome villa...These two women are presented to us in the summer of 1987, when unexpected events will jolt each one, at least temporarily, out of her familiar patterns of behavior..."

The Big Seven, by Jim Harrison

...People from his class never spent a hundred dollars an hour to toalk to a shrink.... it was thought to be a scam. Only lawyers got that much.

...One professor used to like to quote Faulkner as saying "Keats 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of broken-hearted old ladies." Hemingway was ruthless with his children but would head to bed with a case of sniffles. Sunderson always thought Hemingway wrote very well but if you peeked under the covers you saw one of the worst pricks in the history of literature. Faulkner stayed home and drank and wasn't into serial marriages...

...what could you do about a fourteen-year-old boy who would commit cold-blooded murder? The paper failed to mention whether he was a Boy Scout or a junior member of the NRA. There were no clues other than the implicit one that he was a member of a culture dying of dry rot...

Back in the fifth grade each student had received a packet of Audubon cards resembling baseball cards but with photos of birds rather than players, and they were let out into the woods to match them to what they saw. An oriole was a prize sighting. Some boys cheated and sat around in the woods smoking cigarettes. He told his dad about this and his dad had said, "Once a cheat, always a cheat." He had pondered what this meant and came up with not much because he had noticed that cheaters seemed to do well at everything and being one might well prepare you for a career in business.

Another rough, drunken Sundersen novel by Jim Harrison. This one is a sequel to the one I just read, Great Leader. In it, Sundersen acquires a hunting cabin with a nearby family of backwoods people who are vodka-swilling armed maniacs, to be generous. A merry series of events ensue.

Girl on a Train, by Paula Hawkins

This book contains pure evil. It's a very effective thriller, captivating, written in an innovative style that suits the subject matter very well.

Rachel is the girl on the train, a young woman who rides to London, passing the same houses every day. On the terrace of one of them, she frequently observes a young couple whose life seems idyllic. That changes.

Furthermore, we learn much more about Rachel, as well as the other principle characters in this book, and we are led expertly down the path of mystery and suspense to its amazing conclusion.

Great Leader, by Jim Harrison

...

NY Times review

This is the first book I've read by Jim Harrison. His writing is unusual. There's a kind of economy to it that can be just a little confusing. He doesn't waste words on transition; a character will move from one place to another, one action to another, one time to another, with little or no explanation. Several times I had to stop and go back to see what I had missed, and usually discovered that I had missed nothing--I was simply being challenged to use my head to figure out what's going on. In general, I like this in an author; I don't enjoy reading unnecessary reams of exposition, but maybe Mr. Harrison overdoes it a little.

The story is pretty good. I like the Upper Peninsula Michigan setting, the cold and bleak images of Lake Superior, its role as a sort of symbol for evil in the book. Sunderson is a State Police detective who retires soon after the story begins, but who continues to hunt down his last suspect, a religious cult leader that he sometimes calls the Great Leader. The Great Leader's main transgression is statutory rape: he likes to have intercourse with underage girls who join the cult. He also welcomes adult women as long as they have lots of money to donate.

Sunderson is a complicated person, probably an alcoholic, although his personal brand of alcoholism doesn't exactly ring true, and I have a little expertise in this area. He is extremely sexually active for a 65-year-old man, and doesn't seem to have much in the way of moral compunction. Add to this his habit of spying on his 16-year-old female neighbor Mona, and it's a little difficult to see exactly from where his intense moral outrage against the Great Leader comes. Perhaps it's one of those instances where we hate others the most when they remind us of ourselves.

The Black Book, by Ian Rankin

An Inspector Rebus novel, (copyright 1993) in which Rebus becomes involved in several mysteries at once, which he, in his inimitable fashion, ties together, during which process he offends and alienates much of the Edinburgh police force.

This is a great book, a great mystery, and full of colorful language. While reading this book I decided to keep a list of what I imagine are "Scottish" words. Some of these I know the meaning of, some I guessed from context, some I need to look up. Page numbers are from my St. Martin's / Minotaur paperback edition, ISBN 0-312-97675-5.

• harr, n. Scot. and North Eng., a thick, wet fog along the seacoast.
  [1665–75; north var. of HOAR]*
• polis -- police
• ca' canny -- be careful?
• snell, adj. [Appears on p. 18 "weak sunshine and a snell wind" and 247.] Chiefly Scot. 1.    active; lively: a snell lad.
  2.    witty: a snell remark.
  3.    severe: snell weather. [bef. 900; ME, OE; c. OHG snel (G schnell) quick, ON snjallr excellent]*
•  stews -- I lost the page number for this one, but here's the quote I wrote down: "The Edinburgh establishment has never bided too far from the stews." (brothels)
• guttered -- "is he guttered?" [p.96]
• tadger -- penis [p.115]
• bunnet -- some kind of headgear [p.131]
• gey -- extremely? "...guide dogs are gey expensive these days..." [p.160]
• skited -- slipped, skidded? " ...nearly skited on wet linoleum..." [p.172]
• gardyloo -- "stepped under a gardyloo bucket..." [p.180] gardyloo, interj.
  (a cry formerly used in Scotland to warn pedestrians when slops were about to be thrown from an upstairs window.)
  [1760–70; Anglicized form of F gare (de) l'eau beware of the water]*
• heid-the-ba -- henchman? [p.189]
• keech -- shit? "They used to chuck all their keech out of the windows and onto the street ... the locals called it the Flowers of Edinburgh..." [p.190]
• blether -- talk, conversation [p.193]
• pulses -- beans? [p.241]
• fly-halfs [p.251]
• scoor-oot [p.263] -- a scattering, like throwing a handful of coins on the ground for children to scramble after -- search this page for "scoor-oot." Also, there's a rather expensive dictionary of Scottish words and phrases on Amazon.com with this word as its title.
• thrawn [p.321]
• teuchters [p.322]
• donnert [p.325]
• glaur -- mud? shit? [p. 333] 

*Thanks to my friend R.S. for these definitions

Another wonderful bit of color from the book: at one point, Rebus visits an elderly aunt that he hasn't seen since he was a child. She surprises him by grabbing his wrists and reciting the following grace before they eat:

     Some hae meat and cannae eat
     and some hae none that want it
     but we hae meat and we can eat
     so let the Lord be thankit

The Black Book is violent, funny, and beautifully written.

Rankin's favorite moments from his books, in The Guardian

Summary of The Black Book on Ian Rankin's website

Fives and Twenty-Fives, by Michael Pitre

I heard this author interviewed on NPR. One gets somewhat jaded to the tales of returning vets. Homeless, PTSD, misunderstood: my heart goes out to all of them, but there are so many, and it seems to be constantly in front of us, a horrible problem that won't go away. But there was something about Pitre when I heard him on the radio (Fresh Air?), and I managed to remember to get his book out of the Library.

NY Times Book Review

I found the book to be a non-stop read, the "can't put it down" type. The characters are excellently drawn and believable. Pitre's Marines have stayed with me, and I doubt I'll look at any service member quite the same having read this book.