What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

This was an interesting and well-written book, witty and with some good musings on female relationships (even though the "main" relationship in the story is between a 14 year old boy and his art teacher)

I didn't know Zoe Heller before but she is certainly a British author. You can just tell sometimes, when you are reading a British female author (even though I hate to make generalizations.

I whizzed through the book and thoroughly enjoyed it!

I found out that this book was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003!

Here's a bit from the Reading Group Guide:

At the center of the scandal is the obviously named Bathsheba Hart, a naïve pottery teacher at St. George's Academy in London. Mobbed by undisciplined teenagers and cowed by teachers' lounge politics, Sheba befriends a fifteen-year-old remedial student named Steven Connolly. At first she is drawn to him because he is one of the few students who does not terrorize her. He has a talent for drawing, and in several after-school sessions she encourages his artistic tendencies, exposing him to the work of Degas and Manet. Soon, however, their relationship leads to trysts behind the pottery kiln and secret rendezvous in Hampstead Heath.
Their affair and the ensuing media frenzy it ignites are recounted by Barbara Covett, a lonely history teacher who craves Sheba's friendship. Barbara is a catty narrator, disdainful of her students and suspicious of her colleagues, and her observations and petty critiques of her surroundings are feisty, witty and endlessly entertaining.

Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig

I have always wanted to read something by this author and when this book (his last before he died) became available on Digital Content through the library, I grabbed it up.
I started off really loving the book but have to say that my interest waned as the story progressed.
It is very well written and the characters are alive and zany, but the content of the story did not keep my interest throughout.
Here is a part of the NYTimes review.....the review was very favorable

Donal, raised by his grandmother on a Montana ranch, finds himself packed off to relatives in Manitowoc, Wis., when Gram takes ill. The boy sets out the old-fashioned way: He’s a lone wolf riding the dog. “And here I was,” he recalls, “stepping up into what I thought of as the real bus, with GREYHOUND — THE FLEET WAY TO TRAVEL in red letters on its side and, to prove it, the silver streamlined dog of the breed emblematically running flat-out as if it couldn’t wait to get there.”

The journey passes pleasantly enough, thanks to the huge cast of characters hopping on and off. Nuns and drunk shepherds, cops and cons, Korea-bound soldiers, dreamy waitresses and burly Indians, “they all filled in the dizzying span of my thoughts like a private version of ‘Believe It or Not!’ ”

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I can certainly see why this book is on everyone's "BEST" list this year. Not only is it a great read, but it's so damn relevant!

The Fall Guy by James Lasdun

This thriller, suggested by a good friend, was a fast and fun read.  Here's what it says on Amazon:

It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun’s acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun’s most entertaining novel yet.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

This was a fascinating book that was a little hard to get used to at first. (My husband was reading it at the same time as I was - a little behind me actually - and he had the same issues at first.)
I didn't know that the story would jump around so much and I had to go back a bunch of time to figure out who was who and when everything was happening.

From the NYTimes:

Like “Bel Canto,” the best-known of Patchett’s six earlier novels, “Commonwealth” starts with an unexpected kiss at a party — in this case a kiss at the christening party for the infant Franny. Because the kiss in “Bel Canto” happens at the exact moment the party is overtaken by terrorists, it’s tempting to wonder if Patchett means to imply with “Commonwealth” that family is its own longer-term hostage situation: The embrace at the christening party between a man and woman married to other people leads soon enough to multiple divorces and remarriages. Patchett follows the two semi-connected families for the next 50 years, as the children become adults and the grown-ups become old.

After I read the book I listened to a podcast from KCRW (Bookworm) which changed my thinking about the book - but didn't change my enjoyment of it!

The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky

I'm not sure where I heard about/read about this little book, but I am sure glad that I learned about it. It was a short, little book, perfect after having just finished  The Nix.  I needed something short and sweet, but I am not sure that you can call The Red Car sweet. It packs a punch in those short 206 pages.  Here's a quote from Daniel Handler in the NY Times Book Review that says it well:

I slammed down “The Red Car,” Marcy Dermansky’s sharp and fiery new novel, in tense fits and jumpy starts, putting down the book to ponder it, but not pondering long because I had to know what happened next.

 I read this in two sittings and then went back and re-read some parts, because there really is a lot to digest in those 200 pages. I am going to look at Dermansky's other work!