Food: A Love Story

Most celebrity books have large type and wide margins, but Jim Gaffigan has produced an actual book of more than 300 pages (with a few photographs). Large sections of it seem lazy and dashed-off, but it helps to imagine it being read in the author's voice. 

Tanner's Twelve Swingers

Evan Tanner's intrigues continue, with the striking factor here that a Yugoslav defector whom Tanner must rescue has written a book that advocates splitting the country as a way to prevent war. Twenty-five years after the publication of Tanner's Twelve Swingers, the dissolution of Yugoslavia was instead the cause of wars.

Severina

A blurb on the back of this novel praising Rodrigo Rey Rosa's "surprising sobriety and economy of words" closed the deal. The Guatemalan author situates a love story in the context of a love of books: The woman of the title is a book thief; the man is the owner of a bookshop. The story, a quick 86 pages, is carried off with precision, polish, and an agreeable dash of ambiguousness.

The Canceled Czech

Lawrence Block's second book in the Evan Tanner series finds the agent behind the Iron Curtain looking to spring an aging Nazi from prison. The improbabilities multiply, but all in good fun.

The Two-Penny Bar

Maigret solves this one with some old-fashioned book work. And Pernod. 

The Blue Flower

A recommendation from William Nicholson, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald is a novel of sly wit. It is both a portrait of a time of intellectual ferment, with Goethe wandering in the margins, and a strange love story. Nicholson found it completely believable, the litmus test for any novel, but I see the author's winks and nods too often to be convinced. She writes, in any case, with a gorgeous style that reads like a combination of Evelyn Waugh and Anatole France.

Rich and Mad

Reading YA fiction past age 50 is a little silly, but this one is by William Nicholson, whose novels (and movies, like Shadowlands) I have enjoyed. There's no real suspense here about how things will end up between the main characters, but the journey is well done and includes a grocery list of adolescent challenges. Nicholson especially deserves credit for giving The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm a key role in the story. Young people could hardly do better than to consult that book on a subject that has unfortunately been deformed by culture and media into something trivial and, often, ugly.