Love always gets you in trouble

Linger in the season of love with an affair! You don't even have to be unfaithful to your spouse or significant other.

Just pick up a novel, one by a literary giant, and then converse about it with your bookclub. You're safe as an armchair detetective: no fuss, no stress, no lawyer bills. Just all the lust you can handle between the sheets (of paper).

There's even a recent Nobel Prize winner in this list, which includes some historical fiction as well as a novel about the cruelty of pre-teens. If you think the Inquisition was bad, check out the games being played in some middle school playgrounds.

 

The False Friend (2010)
Myra Goldberg

The most important relationship in Celia's life occurs when she is ten years old, and it is the most lethal and poisoning, not only for herself but her friend Djuna as well. Myra Goldberg, the author of the popular Bee Season, must have read Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, the definitive book on the cruelty of fifth grade girls. The seething rage inside these seemingly sweet creatures is truly frightening; and although Goldberg doesn't hold a candle to Atwood's novel, this story delivers a few believable characters immersed in emotions larger than themselves.

The False Friend unfolds after a thirty-something Celia, now a state auditor living in Chicago, experiences a sudden streetcorner flashback to her childhood outside Syracuse. She is usually more comfortable with numbers than emotions, having grown up in a kind, but distant family. Not the best book you will ever pick up -- its construction is a little weak -- but it could be a jump-off for conversation and memories in a book discussion.

The Lotus Eaters (2010)
Tatjana Soli

If you grew up in the 1960s and 70s, you might remember the hum like a helicopter that emanated from your childhood television set: the Vietnam War being fought each night in our living rooms. Tatjana Soli's first novel takes the images planted in our young psyches and brings us the small details from the war through the lives of three news photographers.

 

Soli is a talented enough writer to go into Vietnam with fresh eyes, conceiving characters with anti-heroic characteristics. Sam Darrow, the veteran Life journalist is a man twisted by the war, but feeling too much humanity to continue taking prize-winning shots of a people and country being destroyed. Helen Adams, a barely-twenty prom queen with some personal baggage around America's wars, comes searching for something but also becomes intoxicated with the job. Linh, a former soldier in both North and South Vietnamese armies now working for Life, is a spy, for both sides. Soli's characters watch each other falter through the war up to the fall of Saigon in 1975, and add a litle flesh and clarity.

 

The Bad Girl (2006)
Mario Vargas Llosa (tr. Edith Gossman)

Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel laureate, wrote The Bad Girl in tribute to Flaubert's Madame Bovary. This version, set in Lima and Paris, is more farce than serious study.  Madame Bovary was a romantic, an idealist and most of all a fool. The same can not be said of the calculating Lily, a whore and a chameleon, changing shape to suit her financial and social status.

 

The narrator, Ricardo Somocurcio, meets Lily in the 1950s as an orphan living with his aunt and again in Paris as an adult. Her masquerades mean nothing to Ricardo; he simply grows more in love with her in this playful novel. It's not as serious as Vargas' more famous books but you might want to get your feet wet with this one. Humorous, readable, shorter than most, and filled with some interesting historical tidbits. Hopelessly in love, Ricardo most of all wants to find himself -- and what better place to find yourself than in Paris with a bad girl?