Digging to America by Anne Tyler

This book offered a sweet story about fitting in. It tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the Donaldson-Dickersons and the Yazdans that develops after both families adopt daughters from Korea. Although the book was uneven at times (some parts felt like they developed awfully quickly), it was an enjoyable read, full of warmth and humor.

Akhnaton by Agatha Christie

This play brings up big questions of both religion and imperialism. In telling the story of the rise and fall of an Egyptian king who embraced monotheism and humane concepts such as ending slavery, war, and oppression, Christie draws parallels between that king's religion and the Christian faith, and between the British and Egyptian empires. She also investigates the relationship between art, culture, and war, and the relationship between a king, his country, and the people.

Sepulchre by Kate Mosse

This book follows a pattern established by Mosse's earlier Labyrinth and indeed, shares its location and several peripheral characters with the older book. In an investigation that eventually take a supernatural turn (and that makes the inevitable Grail reference), Meredith Martin comes to the south of France to find her family, and gets caught up in a mystery that's more than 100 years old. I read this book because it was heavily hyped, and I have to admit, at the end, there was more smoke than fire. Both the plot (in its structure) and the writing itself were full of clichés, and I'm not sure I buy the initial motivation of the 1890s murderer. This book is probably just the type of book I would write if I were a writer, but I suppose that's why I confine my literary activities to reading and criticism.

Small World by David Lodge

A summer of conference-going, a highly coveted UNESCO chair of making a ridiculous sum of money for no work, a helpful airport employee, a mysterious, yet brilliant, appearing-then-disappearing grad student, a street performance of The Wasteland and old favorites Phillip Swallow and Morris Zapp make this book an excellent read. In his highly literate, self-aware, and allusive send-up of the academic conference scene, David Lodge outdoes himself.

Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan

I read this book last night. I thought it was well-written, in terms of style, and it seemed to be very well-researched (although it's obvious the publisher conceived of the audience as non-academic: I would have loved some footnotes). I thought O'Nan did an excellent job capturing the human side of the tragedy, and also giving a fairly comprehensive picture of what happened and how it happened from before the fire (including a preliminary section on a Cleveland menagerie tent fire in 1942) until 1999. I had no idea that there had been a circus tent fire in Hartford in 1944, and now I feel like I have a very good sense of what generally happened. I cannot recommend this book quite as enthusiastically as I have his other works, however, because it's a very tough read emotionally. There's a bit of graphic detail about how people died (and how even those who didn't die in the fire suffered physically), there's at least one photograph of a dead body (it's not tasteless, and was published in newspapers as part of an attempt to identify the girl, known as Little Miss 1565, but still surprised me when I turned the page and found it), and there's a lot of human suffering in this book. I personally think that the stories of the courageous and not-so-courageous men and women who experienced the fire more than compensates for the disturbing, violent, and sad passages, but I wanted to be upfront about the fact that this book could be one of the most difficult I've read this year, emotionally, and let people decide for themselves whether they want to spend their time reading that kind of book, or sticking to the fiction (which has the advantage, even in cases of suffering as appalling as those in this book, of not being true if you're the type of person whom graphic or very sad stories upsets).

Endless Night by Agatha Christie

This mystery was one of those difficult ones where the nuts and bolts of the death does not happen until very near the end. Still, all the clues were there (and some of them even unsettled me as I was reading them the first time)--the difficult part is pinpointing what there is to be a mystery about. It also has a great portrait of a criminal's mind.

The Murder at Hazelmoor (The Sittaford Mystery) by Agatha Christie

I was sure I knew the solution to this mystery all the time I was reading it--and as it turns out, I was dead wrong. Christie doesn't use one of her usual detectives for this story, but instead mostly follows the work of the fiancée of the accused, Emily Trefusis. I thought this mystery was particularly well-done; I love mysteries that have all sorts of secondary and tertiary plots running through them as well.