Paris Trout and City of Thieves offer us a literary approach that will make you question your actions as well as our collective history. They will put you face to face with tragedy as well as the greater trait of humanity, its ability to survive. They are powerful masculine books that will leave you shaking with emotion, but a better human for the experience.

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Reading Downtown Owl is like getting into a car with a bunch of teenagers and remembering how good it feels to drive fast getting nowhere and not caring because everything you want as a reader is right in that car.

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Olive Kitteridge is a character you will not forget. She is worth the time you spend in Crosby, Maine while reading the connected short stories by Elizabeth Strout. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the book celebrates an elegant style of descriptive prose that makes it an enjoyable and fast experience. The strength and weakness of the book is the portrayal of the diverse characters and ages that are painted across the novel’s landscape. There is someone here you will connect with and that is a worthy accomplishment with the book being just over 250 pages. And yet somehow while reading, I felt that Olive could not make it an enjoyable experience because a gray day loomed over its pages as the author refused anyone to be happy. And perhaps, no doubt, that was the point.

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The Road is expected to be a big hit at the movie theaters this holiday season; a story that is about a father and son relationship. There are many writers that explore this family dynamic but few have done it well like Potok’s The Chosen or Hemingway’s “Up in Michigan”. Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (2003) examines this father and son relationship during and after WWII years in Finland and the woods that border Sweden. A book rich in natural description and stoic language, it overcomes its weaknesses of plot structure and characterization to reveal an important literary and metaphorical look at our haunting pasts and the relationships we regain in reconnecting with them.

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