Notable Books

William Zinsser, now in his 90s, has great experience teaching writing at Yale, reviewing movies for the New York Herald Tribune, and teaching a memoir-writing class at the New School in Manhattan. (Our World Journalism Institute has used one of his books, On Writing Well.) In this collection of columns from The American Scholar, Zinsser writes with warmth and frequent wisdom about travel, music, life in New York, and the craft of writing. In a column that encourages memoir writing, he concludes, “Most of those memoirs shouldn’t be published. They are too raw and ragged, too self-absorbed and poorly written. … But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write them.”

The Language of Houses

This book is for you if you’re building a home and want to give a “welcome” rather than a “stay away” impression. Alison Lurie writes about all kinds of houses—houses we live in, houses of worship, houses of confinement (nursing homes and prisons), and houses of hospitality (hotels and motels). She pays attention to what buildings communicate through their materials and design: “The stuff of which buildings are made [can be] compared to tones of voice in speech”—loud, soft, harsh, affectionate. She’s an excellent guide to the messages we convey and receive through architecture, and points out that “two houses of identical design will give a very different impression if one is made of smooth, polished stone and the other faced with cheap asbestos shingle.”

The Republic of Imagination

Writer and professor Azar Nafisi argues that literature (as opposed to advertising or cultural mores) is crucial in developing a heart able to stand up against conventional thinking. In critiquing three novels—Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—she argues for the importance of developing the imagination through reading books. Part memoir, part literary discussion, and part jeremiad, the book isn’t easy to categorize and wanders into unexpected topics: a discussion of the Common Core in the section on Babbitt, for instance. Christians won’t agree with Nafisi about the source of ultimate truth but will appreciate her antipathy to authoritarianism and her understanding that reading books through politically correct lenses is another form of it.

Elizabeth Is Missing

Maud is an old woman whose memory is gradually going. When her friend Elizabeth is never home and her house is empty, Maud thinks something has happened to her. In Maud’s mind, Elizabeth’s absence gets mixed up with a mystery from 70 years earlier—when Maud’s sister went missing and was never found. In this first novel, Healey shows how the slow disintegration of memory affects Maud and her daughter and granddaughter, who are in turns irritated, amused, and compassionate. The book is also a mystery about Maud’s missing sister. Readers will experience some of the same confusion Maud does as she mixes moments of clarity with complete befuddlement.

Spotlight

Stella Rimington, former director of Britain’s MI5, is back with another story involving British intelligence officer Liz Carlyle. In Close Call (Bloomsbury USA, 2014), Carlyle must work with American and French intelligence to discover who’s selling illicit weapons and where they are headed. This entry features more bureaucratic wrangling between agencies than action, but readers desiring a novel of international intrigue that leaves out the graphic sex and language may find this series appealing.

Fans of Alexander McCall Smith, will be happy to know he has a series of books for children featuring a young Precious Ramotswe, who grows up to be the detective featured in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency stories. In The Mystery of the Missing Lion (Vintage, 2014) she must locate a trained lion that goes missing from a movie set in Botswana. Smith sprinkles delightful details throughout these tales set in Africa. —S.O.