I just finished Maggie Helwig's Where She Was Standing, which was fantastic. She's a Canadian novelist and poet, and sometime human rights activist. The novel concerns the (fictional) massacre of protestors in East Timor by the Indonesian military in the mid-1990s. A Canadian film student is caught up in the massacre, and the novel asks and answers questions about what happens to her, her film, her family, and the Timorese people she met while she was there.

The prose is brilliant, the story gripping and meaningful and very important. It's one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. It's also a love story of sorts, and a meditation on working in the public interest, and the cost that entails.

I really liked it a lot. Sadly, she's not really in print in the US and you have to order her stuff from Canada.

(And yes, former X-Philes: this is the Maggie Helwig you're thinking of.)

There's a brilliant biography called Parallel Lives which is all about Victorian visions of marriage. It's by a feminist scholar and has a chapter each on the Dickenses (early happy marriage decays, husband blames wife and sets up mistress), the Ruskins (husband won't consummate marriage because wife is somehow icky), George Eliot and her lovers...

It's vivid and immediate and provokes lots of thoughts about your own relationships.

because wife is somehow icky

I thought it was the pubic hair that flipped him out.

I actually *did* enjoy Curious Incident and thought the author did a great job capturing autistic savant-ness.

I thought it was the pubic hair that flipped him out.

That's one guess. Nobody knows for sure. All that's really known is that he pulled the nightgown from her shoulders and was put off. Effie's second husband reported no complaints, so the problem is clearly his rather than hers.

the problem is clearly his rather than hers

Or the second husband is a big old perv.

I also enjoyed Curious Incident a lot. I listened to it on tape, actually, and the narrator did a fabulous job with Christopher's voice.

I stopped by the Fall Festival in a nearby small town today, just as they were closing up (at 2pm!) and got 4 books for $2 at the Friends of the Library's table: Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver (love her), Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, and Norton's Anthology of English Literature (4th ed.)! Plus, cider doughnuts. I was quite pleased.

I thought it was the pubic hair that flipped him out.

[insert tacky, tasteless Michael Jackson joke here]

Or the second husband is a big old perv.

She had to be examined by medical doctors in order to prove virginity for the annulment; none of the doctors reported anything out of the way.

Here's a site that does book recommendations: [link]

You don't have to sign up to get a rec, but if you do you can add to their database and thus improve the recommendations. Otherwise, just enter an author/title of a book you like.