Two for your TBR

At the bookstore, we often say you're not a “real” reader unless you have a fairly large “to be read” pile or list. This “TBR” looks a little different from reader to reader, but if you are one of these “real” readers, or know one well, then you know what I'm talking about. The tech-savvy may have the TBR saved in a phone, or at a website designed for this task. The TBR may be stored in a journal, either as cute little commercial book diary, or in spiral-bound notebooks of the reader's own making. People often ask us book advice, looking for suggestions for new books to add to their “TBR” list. Although I certainly have perennial favorites, a lot of the time what I end up mentioning first are the books that I just recently finished reading. Being a part of two book clubs means that my go-to recommendation is at least one of my two “required” books for the month.

For February, I got lucky: I thoroughly enjoyed the selections for both the teen and the adult book clubs, though they couldn't have been more different. The teens chose a survival-disaster novel set in a quite realistic scenario in the not-too-distant future. As the book opens, kids riding the morning school bus find themselves dealing with a sudden, giant hailstorm which causes terrible accidents all around them. Their bus driver, a tough older woman, keeps her head and saves their butts by pulling the bus into a “Greenway” (think: Walmart or Target) parking lot and then driving the bus right through the front windows. The kids who survive do not yet understand the cause of the freak, fatal storm, nor how far-reaching the issue is. They are stuck in the Greenway, in the small city of Monument, CO, while the bus driver goes for help, warning them not to leave, and not to let any strangers in. This is just the beginning of their ordeal. They are the Monument 14; thus the title of this exciting book by first-time author Emmy Laybourne. In an overcrowded field of post-apocalyptic, survival-adventure, and/or dystopian young adult books, Monument 14 definitely stands out, for plausibility of the situation, for character development, and for a microcosm which allows for a contemporary, perhaps more hopeful twist on The Lord of the Flies.

While the teen time machine was set on 2033, the adult book club traveled back for a look at life in New York City, circa 1938, in Amor Towles' literary debut, The Rules of Civility. This novel features beautiful prose, and fascinating insights into the layers of socioeconomic class in the Big Apple – and in America herself – at the time, as well as satisfying characters, and some surprising plot turns. Protagonist Katie Kontent, born and raised in Brooklyn, sees all her dreams about coming of age in the glamour of the jazz age go up with the smoke of her fifteenth birthday candles, as the Stock Market takes its infamous 1929 Crash. The daughter of a Russian immigrant whose family struggled for money anyway, the Great Depression doesn't necessarily change Katie's life that much, but it does change the city and the attitudes of the people who live and work there. Alone as a young woman, Katie lives in a boarding house with other girls of similar age and career status, working her days in a secretarial pool for a large law firm, spending her nights socializing mostly with the other boarders. Once in a while, the girls go out on the town, finding boys who will take them out for a dinner or a drink or two, in exchange for a kiss goodnight. Katie and her roommate, Evelyn, set specific rules for themselves about what they will and won't do to go out with a guy.

New Year's Eve 1937, however, finds the two girls in a second-class jazz bar, drinking cheap gin, when an obviously well-to-do young man sits at the table next to theirs. The three strike up a conversation, which leads to a friendship, which will change all three of their lives in far-reaching, life-changing, unimaginable ways. Through the complicated relationships of Katie, Evey, and the handsome and wealthy Tinker Grey, Towles offers pitch-perfect descriptions of the City and the era, which is simultaneously melting pot and blue-blood domain. Here, the easy wealth and entitled ways of the blue-blooded, the daily grind of the taxi drivers and the doormen, and the subtle and not-so-subtle actions of the ambitious drive plot tensions the reader may not have expected to find in such a lyrical novel.
Thanks to our book clubs, my recommendations this month span the gambit from action-packed, life-and-death situations to lovely descriptions of smoky jazz clubs and opulent hotel rooms. These two books do have a few elements in common, however: they are both first novels from writers who originally found success in other jobs; their characters deal with unexpected ethical dilemmas; and both books offer some plucky heroines and heroes, whose little idiosyncracies become surprisingly endearing. Whether served on silver trays or on paper plates from aisle 6, the stories here are good fare.