Books: A Gift Guide for the Bibliophile!

“The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying Onstage”
Laurence Senelick
Anthem Press
$35

Few lay readers will have author Senelick’s breadth and depth of theatrical knowledge. Still, they will nevertheless be drawn in through the many doors he opens onto the ways death has been displayed (or not) by actors on stage before audiences, from the Greek tragedians on through to modern times. Look back on those early tragedies and you’ll notice the dead expire offstage, not writhing before the audience. One may be shown the result, but not the process. Senelick deftly handles this great swathe of material so a reader may envision unknown actors dying onstage in unfamiliar roles, yet forming a sense of the specific stage death etiquette as it varies from culture to culture down through the centuries. Senelick’s sharp wit adds tang to your learning curve.

“The Tomb of the Dragons”
Katherine Addison
Tor
$28.99

Addison returns to consummate her Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy with a tale as fraught as the preceding “The Witness for the Dead” and “The Grief of Stones.”We follow Thara Celehar, once a Witness for the Dead, who’s lost his ability to communicate with the deceased.

His office as Witness has been filled by Velhiro Tomasaran, still learning and unhappy with Celehar’s treatment. Here Celehar deals with a municipal cemetery’s secrets compounded over 50 years and his vow to witness for the spirits of 192 dragons, slain in their mountain fastness by a powerful, greedy mining company. Would success bankrupt the kingdom? Are dragons “people”? They have language and reason. Old friends from Opera return to face new dangers.

“Falling in Love at the Movies: Rom-Coms from the Screwball Era to Today”
Esther Zuckerman
Running Press
$24

Zuckerman comes to “celebrate and elevate” the rom-com through this selective meander through the genre’s history and types with chapters like “The Man in Crisis.” Everyone wants at some point to see two souls realize they belong together. Many rom-coms have more muscle than one would assume: (On first viewing “The Philadelphia Story” — I sat through it twice.) And legs: In 1936, playwright Miklós László wrote “Parfumerie,” which Ernst Lubitsch crafted into 1940’s “The Shop Around the Corner”(James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan), in 1963 that became the musical, “She Loves Me”, continuing into “In the Good Old Summertime” with Garland, and finally to Joan Didion’s 1998 vehicle for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, “You’ve Got Mail.”Many illustrations, much information. Cerebral comfort food. Tasty!

“Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”
Salman Rushdie
Random House
$28

Salman Rushdie was at the Chautauqua Institution to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers from harm when a knife-wielding man clothed and masked in black, wielding a knife, charged the stage and began slashing the 75-year-old. Rushdie, who over 30 years ago had been put under fatwa for his “The Satanic Verses,” recalls thinking, “So it’s you. Here you are.” It was a horrific, bloody attack, but audience members rushed to his aid, he was airlifted and tended to continue life. Rushdie’s meditations are not simply recounting a heinous event, but an examination of the human factors involved (family, friends, medical team) and his inner resources and literary strengths that allowed him to “make sense of the unthinkable” and continue on.

“The Ghosts of Rome”
Joseph O’Connor
Europa
$28

Like its predecessor, O’Connor’s second volume of his Escape Line Trilogy, “My Father’s House,” follows The Choir, a group that spirited thousands of allied soldiers, POWs and Jews out of Nazi-occupied Rome. Although novelized, the Choir’s nucleus is based on a Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty. Working to destroy The Choir is SS Commander Paul Hauptmann, an amalgam of actual evil-doers. It’s February 1944, The Vatican is red-lined within Rome, no one crosses the line without permission. Into this maelstrom falls an unnamed airman; his existence threatens not only The Choir but Rome’s entire Escape Line. O’Connor’s characters, historical and fictional, resonate with all the villainy, heroics, indecisiveness, kindness and headstrong daredevilry that make up any group of humans from kindergarten on — but here, uniqueness can prove lethal.

“Andromeda”
Therese Bohman tr. Marlane Delargy
Other Press
$16.99

Our relationships are never as straightforward as we’d like to think. Sofie Andersson starts a ten-week internship at Rydéns, a prestigious Stockholm publishing house in the spring term of 2009. Editor-in-chief Gunnar Abrahamsson overhears Sophie’s astute critical comment concerning a manuscript and takes her under his wing mentoring Sophie’s also becoming an editor. Over the years they continue to bond, sharing twice-monthly meetings at a nearby bar. There’s no sudden revelation that the much older Gunnar has any nefarious intentions. He has a wife, they have a place in the country … but as must happen, time passes. Gunnar’s health problems dictate he retires; he becomes critical of Rydéns. The end of the story is a nuanced unfolding of the changes in time, culture and personal needs.

“The Grey Wolf”
Louise Penny
Minotaur Books
$30

During a late-summer morning, as Gamache and wife Reine-Marie enjoy coffee, he refuses a phone intrusion — and the game is on. Comes an alarm from their city condo, a puzzling note and list, a missing coat; all bits culminating in the hit-and-run murder of a young man Gamache is called to meet. Exceptionally tangled are the threads in Penny’s nineteenth novel, as is Gamache’s trust in the loyalties of those he once considered friends and of those thought enemies. Through all the fine mesh of this great read filters a threat all too real today in every reader’s daily life, a plot to contaminate a nation’s — thence Earth’s — life-giving elixir: water. In the end, Gamache has only son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir and second-in-command Inspector Isabelle Lacoste.

“Before We Forget Kindness”
Toshikazu Kawaguchi tr. Geoffrey Trousselot
Hanover Square Press
$21.99

“Kindness” is the fifth Kawaguchi fantasy-magic book. In a back-alley, century-old Tokyo café, you may go back in time, as long as you return before your coffee — poured as you sit in a particular chair — turns cold. You can’t change the past; the person you meet must also once have been in the café; you can’t leave the chair in the past. Too treacly? Too feelgood? Can you say you’ve never regretted withholding a kindness or needed to explain pain you’ve harbored, for decades? The complex rules — waiting until a ghost lady perpetually sitting, reading in the sole time-traveler chair to make a trip to the loo. They’re a prestidigitator’s wave to distract you until you are faced with the human problem. And it works.