READING: Depths by Henning Mankell

Miraleste Library Book Club selection for June 2009.

2006, The New York Press. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson. Set in 1914 in Sweden.

Mankell is the writer of Kurt Wallander mysteries (I have not read any of them yet) for a total of 37 novels and many plays.

I do not recommend this book - it is very dark, without being at all uplifting. ("...a dark immovable story that literally measures the depths where Fascist personalities grow." - from Expressen, Sweden).

LISTENING: Life Sentences by Laura Lippman

Read by Linda Emond.

An interesting story about a best seller writer of memoirs who returns to Baltimore seeking to discover more about a childhood friend who was sentenced for killing her baby, and in the process realizes that she did not quite capture the truth in her last book.

LISTENING: Remember the Sweet Things: One List, Two Lives, and Twenty Years of Marriage by Ellen Greene

Recorded Books Inc., 2009. Narrated by Barbara Caruso. "The author describes her struggles with divorce and single parenthood before meeting her husband, Marsh, whose many kindnesses she would jot down and make into a cause for thanks and celebration every Valentine's Day."

READING: I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler's List Survivor by Laura Hillman

Miraleste Library Book Club selection for May 2009.

From the book jacket: "Laura Hillman (nee Hannelore Wolff) was born in 1923 in Aurich, Germany, near the North Sea. She was the third of five children born to Karoline and Martin Wolff. Five years after Hitler came to power, Laura was separated from her town and family. The events Laura witnessed in the camps kept her from writing for many years, but she finally set out to write her memoir, facing for the first time the circumstances that led to her survival. Laura now lives in Los Alamitos, California, and devotes her time between talking in high schools and colleges about her experiences and being a docent at the Long Beach Museum of Art."

LISTENING: Unaccustomed Earth: Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri, read by Sarita Choudhury & Ajay Naidu

From Publishers Weekly

"The gulf that separates expatriate Bengali parents from their American-raised children—and that separates the children from India—remains Lahiri's subject for this follow-up to Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. In this set of eight stories, the results are again stunning."