Cheryl Mendelson

Morningside Heights is like a really good Woody Allen movie. Like Hannah and Her Sisters when he was still good. It's about fairly well off established academics/ musicians/artists living in Manhattan in a neighborhood near Columbia with a lot of similar like minded people. The tension of the book is the threat of one of the families potentially having to move to ---gasp---the suburbs because they just can't afford the city life any more, i.e. Rich People's problems. What saves this from being rather unsympathetic and unappealing is Mendelson's writing. She is a lovely clean writer with a ---dare I use so hackneyed a description?---a Jane Austen-like ability for observation of a certain type of people from a certain type of social class. I really loved this book.

Shakespeare Garden by Lore Segal

I picked this up at the book sale with no expectations but thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a book of interwoven short stories that had appeared in the New Yorker. They're about a Viennese woman, Ilka who grew up in America and goes to work at an artistic sort of think tank affiliated with a college. The characters are all poets and writers, all academics in each other's business bumbling along. Ilka is such a real, believable character who is always trying to say provocative things and be noticed. She is moving about in each story trying constantly to 'connect' as E.M. Forster says. She latches on to a very charismatic couple, the man, Leslie Shakespeare, is the director of the Institute, and clings for dear life. But somehow in her determination to 'make friends' and connect she is very endearing.

Segal says some very insightful things through her characters----when someone dies and everyone reacts in different ,mostly awkward,ways to the death one character remarks "Calamity is a foreign country. We don't know how to talk to the people who live there." Some of the stories aren't as effective but overall I was happy to have read this.

The Sibyl in her Grave

This is a very clever mystery written in the P.G. Woodehouse vein. Very arch and clever but almost exhaustingly so. I had a little trouble differentiating the characters but that didn't seem to matter much. So even though the plot was very ornate and the dialogue very arch, it was still a fun read.