All I have learned, I learned from books.
Abraham Lincoln

There will never be anything more interesting than that American Civil War.
Gertrude Stein

My husband is a Civil War buff. In honor of Lincoln’s birthday, I just went through Jeff’s extensive collection of Civil War books, in search of a few that I’d also read and could recommend. This is what I learned:

• He owns about 75 books on the Civil War, and most of them would be of interest only to other diehard Civil War/Lincoln enthusiasts. For example: A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant’s Overlooked Genius; Terrible Swift Sword: The Life of General Philip H. Sheridan; and River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. I will not be reading these books.
• All serious Civil War history books have explanatory subtitles.
• These books are scattered throughout our house, not stored neatly together in a Civil War section. Our house is not a library.
• Wherever they are found, they are dusty. So are all the books surrounding them, and in fact, all of our bookshelves. I regret to say that I found not only dust but petrified bugs behind some of the books on the highest shelves.
• We should spend a few hours on a ladder and remove all the books from the shelves, dusting each book and cleaning the shelves. It’s unlikely that we will ever do that, unless some even more onerous task arises that makes bookshelf cleaning appear to be a better alternative.

I don’t want anyone to think that Jeff is some kind of Civil War nut — although he did name all his childhood cats (both male and female) after Civil War generals. He doesn’t dress in a Union Army uniform and participate in battle re-enactments — although we attended one of those many years ago, at the Lake County Forest Preserve in Wauconda, Illinois. I think it was an attempt to entertain our children on a Sunday afternoon. As I recall, one of our sons was fascinated with the surgical tools used in Civil War field hospitals. On family road trips, he’s forced us to stop at various battlefields (Chickamauga . . . Antietam . . . Bull Run), but we’ve never gone on a trip dedicated to touring Civil War sites. He’s never visited the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.

And until recently, he had never been to the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago. That’s right — there is an independent book store dedicated to Abraham Lincoln books and memorabilia. The shop, which was founded in 1938, “specializes in books, autographs, photos, artwork and memorabilia of U.S. political and military history, particularly Lincoln, the Civil War and the U.S. presidency.” Owner Daniel Weinberg told the Chicago Tribune that his favorite Lincoln biography is  A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White. (For the complete interview, click here.)

According to Paul Tetreault, director of Ford’s Theatre, more than 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln, “more than have been written about any person in world history, with the exception of Jesus Christ.” In 2011, Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership unveiled a 34-foot (three-story) tower of books about Abraham Lincoln, “symbolizing that the last word about this great man will never be written”.

In 2012, when Daniel Day-Lewis astonished us with his performance in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, readers rediscovered Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (the book on which the movie was partially based.) Unlike my husband, I don’t usually take my history straight up — I prefer a little fiction mixed in — but I thoroughly enjoyed Team of Rivals.

If you’re in a Civil War mood, here are my favorite recommendations — both fiction and nonfiction.

The Second Mrs. Hockaday (Epistolary novel about a young wife accused of infanticide while her Confederate Army officer husband leaves her to run the family farm) by Susan Rivers

Slaves in the Family (The author explores his family’s slave-owning past) by Edward Ball

The March (Novel about Sherman’s March) by E.L. Doctorow — not to be confused with

March (Fiction about the wartime experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Little Women) by Geraldine Brooks — who is married to the author of

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Ex-war correspondent Horwitz joins a band of Civil War reenactors — fascinating and hilarious) by Tony Horwitz

The Widow of the South (Novel based on the true story of Carrie McGavock, whose home became a field hospital) by Robert Hicks

I Shall Be Near to You (In this beautiful story of love and war, a headstrong young woman disguises herself as a man, enlists in the Union Army, and follows her new husband into battle) by Erin Lindsay McCabe

Liar Temptress Soldier Spy (Nonfiction that reads like fiction; a rollicking chronicle of the exploits of four female spies –two Union, two Confederate –during the Civil War) by Karen Abbott

My Name is Mary Sutter (Fiction about a midwife who passes herself off as a man to serve as a surgeon in a military hospital) by Robin Oliveira

Cold Mountain (National Book Award winner in 1997; a Confederate deserter walks through the war-torn South to reunite with his beloved) by Charles Frazier

And for children: Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt, which started it all for Jeff.

I haven’t read either The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (winner of the 2016 National Book Award for fiction) or Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, although both are universally acclaimed. For a glowing review of Lincoln in the Bardo, check out today’s New York Times Book Review.) One of my coworkers, whose opinions I always trust and whose taste I almost always share, loved Lincoln in the Bardo, and says it “will haunt me for some time (pun entirely intended) . . . It is not a straight forward narrative. It is a complex (yet, very entertaining) discussion of the manner in which we live and how that life will affect the manner in which we die and our afterlife.” (By the way, “bardo” is the Tibetan term for purgatory.) I’m sure both of these books are superb and well worth reading, but I have a problem with books that mix reality and fantasy. Usually, the minute a ghost appears in a novel I lose interest. Or, for that matter, when the “underground railroad” turns into an actual train. Does anyone else have that problem, or am I just lacking in imagination?

Happy birthday, Abe!

All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.
Charles M. Schulz

I think . . . if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I’ve never had strong feelings about Valentine’s Day. I always thought it was a nice little holiday, reminding people to take a little time to celebrate the loving relationships in their lives. Who doesn’t enjoy candy, heart-shaped cookies, flowers, special dinners, and cards (sweet, mushy, or funny . . . carefully chosen, or homemade)?

Apparently many people find Valentine’s Day offensive, and possibly even painful. Cara Paiuk wrote a long letter (reprinted in the Washington Post) detailing her many objections to school-mandated Valentine’s Day activities:

To my husband and I, Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday: a fabricated, hyper-commercialized event designed for retailers to peddle their wares and restaurants to fill seats. I also feel that it pressures couples to conform to a saccharine social norm while deprecating singledom, and I’ve seen people both in and out of relationships struggle with living up to the romantic expectations conjured by this collective cultural fantasy . . .Valentine’s Day is a cute and fun celebration of love to some, but it is a searing reminder of rejection, loneliness, and unrequited affection for many others.

If Paiuk had done a little research, she’d have learned that Valentine’s Day is far from a “Hallmark holiday”. The modern holiday is rooted in both ancient Roman traditions and early Christian history, and has been celebrated as St. Valentine’s Day since the 5th century A.D. Americans have been exchanging handmade valentines since the 18th century, and the first commercial valentines became available in the mid-19th century when Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts founded the New England Valentine Company.

Paiuk has come up with an alternative to making valentines out of construction paper, glitter, and lace doilies — she and her family will be making “gratitude bookmarks”. Bookmarks can’t possibly offend anyone, although I have to admit I’m one of those terrible people who usually ends up dog-earing the pages of my books.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering when I’m going to stop criticizing Cara Paiuk’s campaign for “change, one heart at a time”, and start talking about books. My original intention was to update the list of great love stories I posted three years ago, but I realized I didn’t have many love stories to add. Here are a few of my favorites from 2016 — I haven’t read anything in 2017 that could be described as a love story, although I am devouring The Passion of Dolssa by Julie Berry, a YA novel about friendship and religious belief that takes place in 13th century Provence.

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift
Downton Abbey fans will love this book, which NPR says “is one of those deceptively spare tales (like The Sense of an Ending) that punch well above their weight.” Jane Fairchild, now a successful author in her nineties, was a housemaid to an upper-class British family after World War I — and was involved in an affair with one of the family’s wealthy neighbors. How can you resist a novel that opens with this sentence: “Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars, before the male servants disappeared and they made do, at Upleigh and at Beechwood, with just a cook and a maid . . .”?

The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church
Church’s debut novel was inspired by the lives of her parents and their contemporaries. Meridian (Meri), a young biology student at the University of Chicago, marries her much older professor, Alden, and gives up her own dreams of becoming an ornithologist when her husband is sent to Los Alamos to help develop the atomic bomb. This lovely novel of love, sacrifice, and societal change spans 30 years in Meri and Alden’s flawed marriage.

When in French: Love in a Second Language by Lauren Collins
Lauren Collins decides to learn French to deepen her relationship with her French husband and his family. Along the way, she gains insight into herself, her marriage, linguistics, and cultural differences. This is a charming memoir, but more than that, it’s an examination of how language defines who we are.

If I Forget You by Thomas Christopher Greene
The author of The Headmaster’s Wife, one of my favorites of 2014, is back with a story of lost love. Henry Gold and Margot Fuller fall in love as students at a small college in upstate New York, only to be separated by forces beyond their control. Many years later, they meet again on a New York street and begin the painful process of reconnecting.

An amazing number of books have the word “heart” in the title. According to Edelweiss (a website for booksellers and librarians that aggregates publishers’ catalogs), more than 3,000 books with the word “heart” in the title were published last year. These included such gems as Cold-Hearted Rake, Depraved Heart, and Montana Hearts: Her Weekend Wrangler, as well as dozens of books about heart-healthy diets and lifestyles and countless books about journeys into the “heart” of nearly any locale you could imagine. Edelweiss doesn’t include the gazillion self-published books now available, such as A Thug Stole My Heart and Cupid Has a Heart-On.

I recently enjoyed Jennifer Weiner’s collection of personal essays, Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing. Weiner has a big chip on her shoulder, so she would hate to hear me say that I don’t love her novels because they are “chick lit”. However, I really liked her book of essays, and found myself underlining passages and turning down pages.

Looking at my own bookshelves, I saw many favorites, old and new, that you might not think of as Valentine’s Day books, but that have earned a special place in my heart:

Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans
A precocious 10-year-old orphan is evacuated from London during the Blitz — and is placed with a couple of marginally successful con artists. Darkly humorous yet touching, this book is Roald Dahl for grownups. An American edition of one of the author’s earlier books, Their Finest (about wartime propaganda) comes out on February 14, probably because the movie version releases in April.

Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott
I love everything Anne Lamott has ever written. Most people are more familiar with her nonfiction, but she’s written several terrific novels. Crooked Little Heart is a coming-of-age story about a young girl playing on the junior tennis circuit.

Heartburn by Nora Ephron
I’ve reread Heartburn several times, and it’s as funny and poignant today as it was when I first read it back in 1983. Nora Ephron exacted sweet revenge on her ex-husband, journalist Carl Bernstein, with this roman á clef about a pregnant cookbook writer and her philandering husband.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Another book I’ve read multiple times, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a Southern Gothic masterpiece. Published in 1940 when Carson McCullers was only 23, the novel hasn’t exactly been forgotten (it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2004), it’s been eclipsed by a similar book — To Kill a Mockingbird.

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
Winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2000, Philbrick’s account of the survivors of the Essex shipwreck in 1820 is absolutely enthralling. I guess I like books about maritime disasters (and cannibalism) more than I like love stories.

Heart and Soul in the Kitchen by Jacques Pépin
I like to cook, but I love reading cookbooks. This one is particularly fun to read, packed with anecdotes, essays, and cooking tips. The recipes are geared towards home cooks, not professional chefs, and there are great illustrations. Another favorite cookbook is John Besh’s Cooking From the Heart and Susan Branch’s The Heart of the Home (which is unfortunately out of print but available used.)

Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point by Elizabeth D. Samet
Elizabeth Samet has been an English professor at West Point since 1997, responsible for directing the introductory literature class for 1,100 freshmen (or “plebes”). Part memoir, part meditation on literature and its place in both civilian and military society, the book is a fascinating glimpse at West Point life and a powerful argument for literature as a way to understand the world.

Old Heart by Peter Ferry
When Peter Ferry taught high school English in Lake Forest, Illinois, one of his students was Dave Eggers. Eggers has high praise for his former teacher’s second novel:

Old Heart manages to weave together an astonishing array of themes and layers – the perils and freedoms of old age, the complexity of family ties, the liberation of travel, and finally, Ferry presents and proves the bold and needed idea that it’s never too late to re-open the past to recast the present.

Happy Valentine’s Day from the bottom of my heart!

Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They’re always with us
Lloyd Alexander

The booksellers at Lake Forest Book Store are not, on the surface, a diverse group. For one thing, we are all female. We are also all middle-aged, which is a horrible term, but one for which I can’t think of an appropriate euphemism. This doesn’t mean that we all like the same books. All of us are committed to reading widely, always mindful that our job is to recommend books to all kinds of readers. We have individual reading tastes, but we are all the same in that no one wants to squander time on a poorly written or boring book.

Often, holiday shoppers ask for very specific recommendations — a sports novel for an eight-year-old boy, a picture book for a toddler, a Civil War history book for a grandfather, a cookbook for a newlywed couple. But often, customers just want to give a friend, relative, or business associate a really good book.

I emailed our booksellers, asking them to name their favorite book(s) of 2016.  “This is so tough. DON’T MAKE ME PICK,” said one. She’s right; it’s hard to choose just a few titles from all the memorable books published this year. So here’s a list of books that our booksellers mentioned again and again as their favorites. These are books, fiction and nonfiction,  that almost any reader who appreciates a well-written story will enjoy.

Molly says that “our fiction wall is, and has been this fall, packed with goodness . . . I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows is one of my top choices. It’s a sparse telling of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family and their struggles. It reminded me of Steinbeck and Cather. And new to our paperback table is a mystery that a customer turned me onto, I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh. I could not put it down, and think it beats the pants off The Girl on the Train.”

Our buyer, Laura, said: “My favorite literary reads are The Nix (Nathan Hill), News of the World (Paulette Jiles), Mothering Sunday (Graham Swift) and Mischling (Affinity Konar). They are each so different (a sprawling contemporary story; a beautiful piece of historical fiction; a compact, compelling personal narrative and and a haunting World War II novel). My favorite heartwarming, simply lovely book is A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles).” (Mine too!)

Almost every staff member listed News of the World as a favorite. Beth mentioned the “heartwarming relationship between an older man and the young girl he is commissioned to return to her home”, and Kathy remarked that she was “drawn into the adventure immediately.” I thought the writing was dazzling, and it was a joy to encounter a protagonist who is a kind and honorable person with unwavering morals. We’re all jealous that Max, our store manager and early champion of the book, got to sit next to the author at an industry dinner. (For my complete review, click here.)

Laura went on to say that “2016 was an amazing year for children’s fiction: Salt to the Sea (Ruta Septys), Wolf Hollow (Lauren Wolk), and The Inquisitor’s Tale (Adam Gidwitz) are sure to become classics!” I agree — and I think that the definition of a classic book for children is one that has timeless and universal appeal. As C.S. Lewis said, “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”

Diane  commented that “This was such a strong year for fiction! I read so many fantastic books– these are not in a particular order but two of them may be in my top-ten lifetime list. For all of them, the characters were so strong and the writing drove these books even more than plot/pace: Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi) Behold the Dreamers (Imbolo Mbue), The Mothers (Brit Bennett), News of the World, Wolf Hollow. Diane and I lead a YA book group for adults, and Wolf Hollow was one of our group’s favorites.

Susan R. loved Homegoing, saying that “reading it felt like unwinding a beautiful braid.” NPR’s Maureen Corrigan listed Homegoing as her favorite debut novel of the year, and I’m with her. Along with A Gentleman in Moscow, it’s the book I’ve given most often as a gift. Susan also picked The Nix as a favorite, “probably because I could relate to every time period in the story, and it kept me reading way past my bedtime”.

Kathy paired Mischling (fiction) and Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 25,000 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto (Tilar J. Mazzeo; nonfiction): “They were fantastic reads and I couldn’t put either book down. Important books to read to remember the suffering of children at the hands of the Nazis but both offering hope and heroism.” Kathy  also mentioned Trevor Noah’s terrific memoir about growing up in South Africa, Born a Crime.

Eleanor chose Lilac Girls, Martha Hall Kelly’s debut novel, which I adored as well. Anyone who loved The Nightingale, Salt to the Sea, The Invisible Bridge, or All the Light We Cannot See will find this book both unforgettable and hard to put down. Historical fiction at its best, the novel tells the powerful story of female prisoners subjected to medical experimentation at the hands of the Nazis.

Eleanor also enjoyed The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis, by Elizabeth Letts. If you’re a fan of narrative nonfiction by Erik Larson and Laura Hillenbrand, you’ll love The Perfect Horse. The suspense is not whether the Lipizzaner stallions will be rescued, but how — and at what cost. The Christian Science Monitor calls the book a “perfect World War II rescue story”, and I agree.

Nancy’s favorite was The Summer Guest, by Alison Anderson. The “summer guest” in this elegantly constructed novel is Anton Chekhov, who develops a close friendship with Zinaida, a member of his host family. When Zinaida’s chronicle of their relationship surfaces more than 100 years later, it’s possible that literary history may be radically changed. (Read my complete review here.)

Susan P.’s pick was Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance: “It is the poignant, inspiring, and eminently readable story of a young man overcoming the many drawbacks and disadvantages of his youth. Incisive and articulate, a very thoughtful examination of the issues of systemic poverty.”

Ann P. chose The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson (author of the beloved Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.) It’s a kinder, gentler World War I book than most, focusing on a young woman who comes to an English village to teach Latin just as the war is breaking out. Charming and poignant, it’s perfect for anyone suffering from Downton Abbey withdrawal.

Beth picked Last Days of Night, by Graham Moore: “Intriguing, fast-reading historical fiction with ingenious yet familiar characters – Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla and J.P. Morgan. This book details the competition among the men to be the true inventor of the light bulb and amass the fortunes that follow.”

What are your favorite books from the past year?