Can you imagine? Who would think to write a book where every sentence is a question? Have you read anything before by Padgett Powell? Do you find him as wickedly funny and remarkably clever as I do? Out of curiosity, have you paged through the author’s latest novel at a book store and decided not to buy it? In fact, can The Interrogative Mood even be considered a novel? Have you ever judged a book by its cover and been terribly mistaken?

Do you use exclamation points when you write letters? Do you find elegant the hypothetical question? Are you forever asking yourself how you are? And do you really care? Are you ever bored with your interior dialogue? Would you read a book that pushed your buttons like this? Or would it wear you down?

“George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.”
No mystery here. From the first line in Paul Harding’s Tinkers, you know how the story ends. But the journey is all in the telling, an elegy reminding us that we all are heroes in our own tale and we all die in the end.

This slim novel packs the power of a meditation: on life and death, on clockwork, healing and repair, on the wonders of nature, on leaving home and retuning, on illness and isolation, on the failings and triumph of love. Both breath-taking and life-affirming, the writing catches fire in passages. One of those rare books that invites you to pick it up again and reread.

Another heartbreaking work from the master of narrative nonfiction, Dave Egger’s Zeitoun reads like a suspense thriller set in the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. In the eye of the storm we meet Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American father of four, upstanding citizen, owner of a successful contracting business, married to Kathy of Southern Baptist roots. What happens to the Zeitoun family as they are swept from their home and separated, then profiled as terrorists and lost in a sea of red tape in a city gone mad is an infuriating portrait of America in its darkest hours. As events unfold, the story of Job may come to mind. A pitch-perfect cautionary tale, all the more remarkable for its fine detail and elegant restraint.

With praise from Barbara Kingsolver and the Bellwether Prize for fiction addressing social issues, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi Durrow is a coming-of-age story that builds great expectations, only to let down.

A compelling premise: our girl who falls is thrown off a rooftop with her Danish mother and younger sibs. The sole survivor of the “accident," the prettiest little girl with the “prettiest blue eyes,” and unruly hair, Rachel lands in Portland in the care of her straight-laced African American grandmother. Rachel’s G.I. dad never shows up. The story soldiers on through the voices of lost relatives, elusive witnesses, and would-be young lovers. A search for racial identity. Unfortunately, only skin-deep.

Little imagination is necessary to to take the bystander's journey through the summer of madness depicted in the memoir, Hurry Down Sunshine. In present tense, vivid and heart-wrenching detail, Michael Greenberg grabs and holds the reader in suspense and he recounts the events in the summer of 1996 when his 15-year old daughter Sally incomprehensibly "cracks-up" on the streets of Greenwich Village. Through layers of medication and therapy, Sally reemerges, self-knowing and watchful far beyond her years. In postscript we learn the utter truth about bipolar disorder, a firestorm of the brain - best to recognize when it's coming, "get out of the way or... drop to the ground [as if] caught in a crossfire of a shootout."

Take out your mixing bowls to read Jayne Anne Phillips' Lark and Termite. Cake batter inexplicably dominates page after page of the narrative until the story unfolds and begins to bake. Multi-voiced, layer upon layer, a confection brimming in torrents of words, and frosted to perfection, the tale may be slow going at first. But for readers with a high tolerance for its trippy passages filled with the music of memory and dreams, the book is worth the journey.

Sensual. Electrifying. Critically acclaimed. Seems there’s no shortage of praise for this “long-awaited” coming-of-age novel, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. Plenty of sound and fury, evocative of William Faulkner, himself, yet not quite the fire power.

It was the new World Trade Center then, still under construction in 1974, the talk of New York, when on that muggy morning in August, Philippe Petit took to the sky. Suspended on a wire between the Towers, 110 stories above the ground, suspending all disbelief, he walked, he ran, he skipped a beat, dancing between life and death.

“Those who saw him hushed.” From its opening line, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCullen holds us in rapt attention to life in the big city and its people living on the edge. In ten interrelated stories, McCann's characters - prostitutes, priests, mothers, artists, computer hackers - collide and crash, and touch one another in unexpected ways.

A heart-stopping, drop-dead gorgeous must-read.

Written a half century ago, John Updike's classic Rabbit, Run is an exasperating, infuriating read. Easy to imagine the titilation readers in the 60's found in its daring themes of marital, sexual, parental, religious and existential angst. The perils of the novel’s anti-hero, Harry Ansgtrom - the Rabbit in “mid-life” crisis at the tender age of 26 -only begin to suggest the writer’s genius. Updike’s graceful prose, acute observations and sly humor continue to unfold in the novel’s sequels - Rabbit Redux (in recovery), Rabbit is Rich (earning his lot selling Toyotas ) and finally Rabbit at Rest (troubled at heart, still looking for reasons to live.) Rabbit is Updike's running commentary on life in America - and what makes us run.

Luminous. That's the word that comes to mind in Dillard's prose. It shimmers off the page. Dazzles in the waves like a day at the beach. (Bring the sunblock.) A distilled and stark story of a long marriage, more of a meditation on love than of characters who actually live and breathe. The end satisfies the means, however, in the final chapters, where The Maytrees at long last have reconciled their lives together. You'll never a read a kinder, gentler death scene than Toby's passing. "Tomorrow is another day only up to a point."

A Therapist's Memoir of Madness. I picked up this book for a project I'm working on, and couldn't put it down. Astonishing. Unflinching. Six pained portraits of mental illness that read like a novel. With compassion for her patients, Slater brings to words the otherwise inaccessible states of schizophrenia, depression, catatonia, anxiety and bulimia. "We are one," she writes in her concluding sentences of the book, "As people we are always one."

By happenstance, stumbled upon this little volume online this morning -- must read! A book in verse written for young people. . . caught up in the metaphor, "Every child is like /A little world with ever changing weather/Nights and mornings/And somehow here we are/Spinning through the universe together.

In the line-up: Book Club reading for March. Short and savage.

An illusive snake in the garden dissolves a marriage. A night in a bowling alley leads to a string of unforgettable accidents. A fourteen year old with a hunting rifle never misses what she’s aiming for.

No words are wasted and every voice rings true in Bonnie Jo Campbell's collection of short told of broken bodies and broken souls. Born out of junk yards and scrap heaps, the Rust Belt debris of Michigan industry, battered on back roads, or blown in out of storms, her characters shock and surprise, shine light and ultimately find grace and redemption. Stunning and spare, American Salvage is story telling at its best: taut, nuanced, brutally honest and brave.

February's reading for book club.

Like a box of chocolates (and yes, there's a little Forest Gumplike thing going on) I gobbled up one story after another, not without pleasure. A novel "made for book clubs" - short and sweet in little bites, embracing all themes female, overweight, overwrought and aging, whereby Olive Kitteridge is either central or weirdly inserted for a cameo. Worth the ride and the read, the stories get better as they get going and a few are genuinely and completely hilarious. (Now come on, who doesn't love Olive?)

A sad, wistful character portrait of a woman oddly fulfilled and contented with so little.

Book Club selection for January: quick, gotta read.

What is it like to lose one's moorings, abandon a family? "What kind of person decides they can throw everything away and - reinvent themselves? As if you can just discard the parts of your life that you didn't want anymore. " (page. 198) This is the central and unrelenting question in Chaon's unsettling novel, Await Your Reply. Six characters in search of identity and each other, converge and merge in three separate stories, reflecting on the themes of loss, love and survival.

A quick, absorbing read. Eleven lovely stories about loss and love, mostly from the perspective of lost, divorced, angry or formerly angry women. One more selection from the Odyssey Bookshop's "First Edition Club."

A pleasure from the first line (parody of Camus? "Mother died today, or was it yesterday?") Funny, puerile at times, sweet and wise and a load of memorable characters. Seems written for easy transition to film-- now on Spielberg's List.