The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk ✔✔✔

Pamuk is a Turkish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago - this is his first novel since winning the prize.

Kemal is a young Turkish man, about to become engaged to Sibel, when he meets Fusun, a long-lost relative, and the two fall madly in love. He tries to balance both women in his life, but finally, at his engagement party, Fusun leaves him and disappears. His broken heart, his inability to get on with his life, eventually affects Sibel, and the engagement is broken. But his love for Fusun has become obsessive - and the obsession reveals itself in the items he collects from their time together, a collection which grows and grows and includes items from Fusun's own home - cups she drank from, a cherry pit, a ceramic dog that sits on the TV.

Finally he finds Fusun, whose family has become "reduced in circumstance" and are living in a run-down area of Istanbul. For eight years, Kemal visits the family every night - this part gets a bit long - all the time lifting things from their home to place in what has become his museum to their love. His obsession almost seems to have become the collection, rather than the love it's supposed to commemorate.

This was an unusual book - rather lengthy, but a memorable exploration into romantic attachment, how people deal with loss, the social manners of Istanbul, especially as regards women's behaviour, and the allure of collecting.

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton ✔✔✔

I avidly read the first thirteen of these, and I didn't stop reading them because I didn't like them anymore, I just seemed to move on to other reading. I picked this one up at Wal-Mart to keep for one of those times when I didn't have anything good to read, and that happened yet again - two books on my ever-present list turned out to be disappointments, so I picked this one up and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kinsey has settled down a bit, but she's still a bit of a rebel, and I appreciate that in her.This time she's solving a murder that took place many years earlier.

I Am The Messenger - Marcus Zusak ✔✔✔

Before I comment on this book, I have to add here that I started Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, about which I had read some good reviews, but I got to page 136 before I decided I could find better stuff to read. Then I started - and twice got as far as page 11 ( of some 1081 pages of And Ladies Of The Club, which has always intrigued me because it was written over a period of 50 years by the author, Helen Hoover Santmyer, and was finally published when she was 88 years old and in a seniors' facility. Too slow by far - so many books, so little time - I regretfully set it aside.

So I found this one listed in Bookmarks magazine as noteworthy for young adult readers, and for two reasons I purchased it for my Kindle. One, Zusak's "The Book Thief" is one of my all-time favorite books, and two, at age 65, I am proud to call myself a young adult reader too!

So I found this review by a reader, and decided he had said it much better than me, so here goes:

Winner of the 2003 Children's Book Council of Australia's Book of the Year Award and nominated for best young adult book at the 2006 L.A. Times Festival of Books, I AM THE MESSENGER (or THE MESSENGER in Australia) tells the story of Ed Kennedy, nineteen-year-old taxi cab driver and all-around average guy. In fact, he's the epitome of average -- faithful friends, stinky dog, dead-end job, and girl who loves someone else.

That's why it's such a big deal for Ed, Marv, and Ritchie to get trapped in a bank during a stickup. One of the thieves gets spooked, drops his gun, and somehow Ed ends up with the weapon and the town's praise. That might be a winning hand for Ed if he doesn't receive the first mysterious playing card, the Ace of Diamonds in his mailbox. It's a card with a message for him to deliver. Or else.

Messages like Ed's will change a person, if he or she lets them. That's the beauty of Zusak's story. Ed discovers the changing power in simple, personalized messages of love, even if they're ones he's forced to deliver. While I could imagine a cynical reader calling Ed's 12 messages a tad forced, I would differ with them on every case. Ed's stories are simple proof that if a "guy like him can stand up and do what he did, then maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."

-- Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens