Monthly Archives: October 2006

Mostly this is a book about loving books.  Two boys are removed from their city lives to be  re-educated in the mountains during the Cultural Revolution in China.  They get into mischief and both fall in love with a seamstress, whom they woo with a secret stash of stolen Western novels.  This novel is moving [...]

I happened to choose a great follow-up book to the Birth of Venus.  This one follows a twenty-something American woman traveling to Florence to repair and preserve what remains of the great libraries after the 1960′s floods.  She escapes a boring life in Chicago, but struggles to figure out the alternative as she gets to [...]