Late last year I went to The Elliot Bay Book Company to listen to Nicole Krauss read from her new novel, Great House.
The story is told in four voices, and she read from the voice of a Jewish widower delivering a beautiful and yet harsh internal dialogue to his estranged son.

Krauss’s previous novel, The History of Love, had a few of my favorite characters in contemporary fiction, and it seemed that Great House – the story of a monstrous desk and the owners whose lives have circled around it – would have a few more.

Here’s the truth:

I’ve mentioned before that I have this expensive habit of buying a book based on the cover almost every time I go in a bookstore. The Book Thief is one that I’ve picked up several times over the last few years, but always found another sitting close by that I thought looked even better. It turns out none of them were.
One of the good things about working for a non-profit focused on literacy is that most of the volunteers have a big list of books to recommend, and when one …