Week 1: Noir New York In Ninety-Nine

A vacation to Hawaii was just what Lily Quinn needed. As another semester ends, she still doesn't have enough credits to graduate from City College and dreads another summer of waitressing at the diner. Now that she's been dumped by her boyfriend, her rent on the apartment she shares with best friend Amy seems even more out of her reach. Sure, Hawaii means staying with her parents, who haven't been getting along since they bought the timeshare, but at least she'll get a decent tan.

When she gets back to New York, an NYPD detective named Spencer Patrick O'Malley is waiting in her apartment. Amy has disappeared, and O'Malley thinks Lily knows where she is. But to find out what happened to Amy, Lily and the detective will have to go back into her past, to find out why she might have disappeared -- and with whom.

Paullina Simons' A GIRL IN TIMES SQUARE is not always a fun read, but I was glued to its nearly 600 pages the entire time. The novel spirals outward from the life of Lily to her immediate and extended family, and to the career of Spencer, a former traffic cop who can't seem to file Amy's case away with the other "MPs." I definitely recommend this book to people who like their detective stories with a side dish of families in crisis.

Ellen's List

Is there anything better than summer reading you don't have to do? Lying under a ceiling fan, whiling away the hours? Some of the books on my list (also posted to my personal journal, Wormbook) are fluffy, escapist books and some are harder things I've been dying to dig into this year but haven't yet. Is it June 1st yet?

1. Paullina Simons, THE GIRL IN TIMES SQUARE
2. Joan Acocella, TWENTY-EIGHT ARTISTS AND TWO SAINTS
3. J.P. Donleavy, THE GINGER MAN
4. Carole Cadwalladr, THE FAMILY TREE
5. William Styron, SOPHIE'S CHOICE
6. Iris Murdoch, UNDER THE NET
7. Pauls Toutonghi, RED WEATHER
8. Katharine Weber, TRIANGLE
9. David von Drehle, TRIANGLE (nonfic.)
10. Jeannette Walls, THE GLASS CASTLE
11. Jessica Cutler, THE WASHINGTONIENNE: A NOVEL
12. David Mamet, BAMBI VS. GODZILLA
13. David Gilbert, THE NORMALS
14. Adam Rapp, THE YEAR OF ENDLESS SORROWS
15. Henry James, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY