This humorous book salutes reading. The Queen, while she can read necessary things, has never been interested in reading, which she considers a hobby and therefore better left to others. "It was in the nature of her job that she didn't have hobbies.  . . . Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself.  And besides, reading wasn't doing. She was a doer."  When the Queen discovers that she likes reading books, her staff is dismayed and her job suffers.  A quick and witty good read that may take you away from your work!

This author, best known for The Girl with the Pearl Earring, writes well researched historical fiction.  Set in Victorian London, this novel presents mourning and burial practices of the period. The angel monuments in one cemetery connect two daughters and their families in a story told by alternating family members.  Threads of the suffrage movement and a fated romance intertwine in multiple plots. 
Other Chevalier novels involve tapestry weaving in the 1490's, an 18th century family living next to William Blake, and a legacy of Huguenot history in a small French town. In each, the author plays with narrative structures.

This well researched historical novel focuses on the rebellious and idealistic affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney.  Having left their spouses and a total of nine children, they spend five years together with self-interest in conflict with family responsibilities. The novel's ending is well documented in the press of the time and is definitely explosive. I was engrossed for a few days with this book, and paper grading and conversations suffered.

I prefer this second book to Hosseini's Kite Runner. Set in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the Taliban rule, and post-Taliban rebuilding, this novel took me into the daily life of Kabul. An arranged marriage leads to unhappiness and abuse, while the women in the household engineer survival and foster love amid the rubble. I know that working with former TYP student Zuhra Abhar, who escaped from the Taliban, heightened my emotions for the reality of war-torn Afghanistan life.

Published in 1946, this book has touched my life several times, starting with my first year at Earlham College when it was required for the all-school reading program. We read A Separate Peace in Humanities and then experienced Kennedy's assassination; Frankl's book was helpful in our making meaning out of the world around us. I read the book thirty years later in a counseling psychology course at UMass and was struck again by its advocacy for choosing one's attitude in difficult circumstances. Dusting books this fall as I muttered about things that distressed me, I again found Frankl, the concentration camp inmate, who developed logotherapy as a method for finding freedom and meaning in difficulty.