Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin is a novel written as a series of wonderfully crafted and subtly linked stories. The common denominator running throughout the book is the true story of French acrobat Philippe Petit who walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in August 1974, not long after it was built.

The stories, though, are not about the acrobat but about the ordinary but extraordinary people 110 stories below, the people whose lives intersect whether through wars, telephone lines, wrecks, charity or simply family. These people are drug-addicted hookers, a Bronx mother who grieves her son who died in Vietnam, a Park Avenue woman who mourns her son who also didn't come home from the war. There is a wealthy judge hearing a series of routine criminal cases until he gets the acrobat's. And there are two very different Irish brothers. One devotes his life to helping prostitutes while the other tends a bar and cannot comprehend his brother's seemingly misguided charity.

McCann takes the reader back to a time when computers were in their infancy, before Richard Nixon had resigned, when the nation was as divided perhaps even more than today. He gives us a realistic glimpse of New York in the 1970s, from Park Avenue to the Bronx. And in so doing, he gives us a truly great work of literature.

Quick Reviews: Cooking a Wolf, Growing a Tomato, Rooting for ME

Rather than try to write more detailed reviews of books I read more than a month ago, I'm offering this quick rundown as a way to get caught up so to speak. Here goes:

How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher. I did not read the original edition, written during World War II when Americans were not free to waste a single stick of butter or a pricey cut of meat. Rather, I read an edition in which Fisher came back and updated her original book with a few after-thoughts, after times had improved. Fisher's sense of humor and helpful thoughts on food and cooking make for an informative and fun read.

Unlike Fisher, William Alexander, author of The $64 Tomato, wasn't looking for ways to save money on food when he set out to raise some homegrown tomatoes. And that's a good thing because this amateur gardener learned that those tomatoes cost a lot more than manpower and patience. They also cost money, big money by the time he bought the electrical fencing to ward off the groundhogs and a possum, paid for expensive gardening-design advice, fertilized, watered, added other plants and .... well, you name it. Alexander has a great self-effacing humor, and the book is a winner.

Anthem by Ayn Rand offers a quick way to get an introduction to Ayn Rand's writing and her beliefs, her obsession with individualism vs. the greater good as some might call it. Unlike some of her other novels, this one is slender. It's basically a novella.

Still to come: Kitchen and Gourmet Rhapsody, both wonderful books.

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger

I had not read a single graphic novel until I recently bought a copy of Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile. I read it in a few moments. Yet days later, I'm still thinking about it and recommending it to friends.

Niffenegger, who wrote the novels The Time Traveler's Wife and more recently Her Fearful Symmetry, is a gifted artist and writer with an imagination like no other author I've read.

In The Night Bookmobile, Niffenegger's main character is a young woman named Alexandra. She is a book lover who apparently lives on Chicago's North Side, Niffenegger's hometown, and who enjoys long walks in the middle of night. Once, in the predawn hours at the corner of Ravenswood and Belle Plaine, Alexandra happens on a battered Winnebago driven by a Mr. Openshaw who runs a most unusual library inside it. Readers do not check out books from this library. Rather, they find copies of books identical to those they have read since childhood, even their own diaries.

Years pass before before Alexandra, who becomes obsessed with books and the bookmobile, sees it and Mr. Openshaw again. By then, her boyfriend has left her, she has become a regular librarian and all the time been reading, reading, reading -- in a comfortable chair, with a flashlight at night, in the tub while she bathes. Ultimately, Alexandra's obsession takes a bizarre, tragic turn -- one that readers will far better understand if they read Niffenegger's "After Words" at the end of this short book whose the pages are appropriately black and the words are white.

Without giving away any spoilers, we learn in the "After Words" that Niffenegger not surprisingly has always loved books and that she based this graphic novel, the first of a series she plans, on an H.G. Wells' short story, "The Door in the Wall," and on a book-filled dream she had as a teenager. The Night Bookmobile, she writes, is ultimately "a cautionary tale" and one about "the claims that books place on their readers."

For me, though, books remain a pleasant alternative to television, the Internet and the like. Through a book club, they gave me a way to make friends in a new hometown. They've given me cause to think about other ways of life, other cultures and ideas. And they have allowed me to travel to places many times, places I might never get to go any other way.

Still, a cautionary note of my own: This is not a book for children. It is clearly for adults, not because of language or sexual content, but because of the theme and the tragedy that takes place within it.