I am just plugging away with the reading. It gets dark so early now, all I want to do is lay in bed and read!

After This by Alice McDermott

This was a nice piece of literature, depressing like most in the more literary form. It really makes you look at the mundane average life and really feel for those involved as they deal with life's inevitabilities.

Anytime an author looks at the complexities of life in the eyes of an average family, I feel that the message is more profound than a story that comes from a more polarized or exaggerated form of reality.

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. A master at capturing Irish-Catholic American suburban life, particularly in That Night (1987) and the National Book Award–winning Charming Billy (1998), McDermott returns for this sixth novel with the Keane family of Long Island, who get swept up in the wake of the Vietnam War. When John and Mary Keane marry shortly after WWII, she's on the verge of spinsterhood, and he's a vet haunted by the death of a young private in his platoon. Jacob, their first-born, is given the dead soldier's name, an omen that will haunt the family when Jacob is killed in Vietnam (hauntingly underplayed by McDermott). In vignette-like chapters, some of which are stunning set pieces, McDermott probes the remaining family's inner lives. Catholic faith and Irish heritage anchor John and Mary's feelings, but their children experience their generation's doubt, rebellion and loss of innocence: next eldest Michael, who had always dominated Jacob, drowns his guilt and regret in sex and drugs; Anne quits college and moves to London with a lover; Clare, a high school senior, gets pregnant. The story of '60s and '70s suburbia has been told before, and McDermott has little to say about the Vietnam War itself. But she flawlessly encapsulates an era in the private moments of one family's life.


The Foodtaster by (Ugo DiFonte) Peter Elbling

During the Medieval period royalty was the target of assisinations for control over the power. Poison was once of the most popular and stelthy form of these assasination attempts. Hence, the need for a food taster; a lucky individual who would taste all food for said royalty before it touched their precious pallet. This is a story of one of them.

If you like historical fiction thrown in with some humor, this is for you.

From Publishers WeeklyA 16th-century Italian peasant finds himself caught up in the culinary aspects of palace intrigue in this clever, cheeky debut novel (ostensibly Ugo DiFonte's memoir) by screenplay writer Elbling, who begins his first-person narrative when DiFonte is appointed the food taster for a corrupt duke. DiFonte quickly learns the subtleties of his new position and gains influence in the court, until his beautiful daughter, Miranda, comes of age and attracts the attentions of the duke's power-hungry cook, Tommaso. DiFonte is forced to promise Miranda to Tommaso in marriage to keep the cook from slandering his reputation, but all hell breaks loose when the volatile, piggish duke, Federico Basillione DiVincelli, turns his lascivious eye on Miranda and proposes to her after his previous paramour betrays him. Miranda's fickle nature keeps her waffling between her love for Tommaso and her desire to be a princess at the side of the duke. After she accepts the duke's offer, DiFonte desperately tries to play both ends against the middle (even during the wedding celebration) as Tommaso and Miranda continue their trysts and the food taster is accused of witchcraft by a visiting cardinal. Elbling overplots at several junctures, but that minor flaw is overshadowed by his entertaining cast of characters, most notably the hapless but charismatic DiFonte, who somehow manages to keep his head above water as he bumbles and stumbles from one palace conspiracy to the next. Throw in some wry, humorous scenes about the pitfalls and perils of his occupation, and the result is a light but enjoyable spin on the usual Renaissance comedy-of-manners formula.