In Sunday books: On Patti Smith, Tolstoy and life in the marginalia

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What’s in a book? Ideas and language, of course, and, remarkably, Lynell George has been able to trace her mother’s life in the marginalia she left in many of her books. As George notes in her essay, ‘A Life in the Marginalia,’ that starts on the cover of this Sunday’s Arts & Books section, to open her mother’s books was ‘to reveal all manner of ephemera -- from transit passes to cards to notes in her mother’s elegant English teacher cursive -- and all marking chapters in a rich, full life. And, in a way, a gentle guidance.’ Just as her mother’s books and love of reading were a gift to her, George’s memoir reminds us of the gift of books in enhancing the fabric of a home.

Also Sunday, David Ulin checks in on Patti Smith’s ‘Woolgathering,’ a collection of prose poems that Ulin says speaks volumes about the broad diversity that makes up the life of Smith as a rocker, mother, poet, artist.

You can also listen here to an excerpt of Smith reading from her award-winning memoir ‘Just Kids,’ which has just been released as an audio book: Pattismithexcerpt

Daniel Handler, known more familiarly to some as Lemony Snicket, is back with his YA-debut ‘Why We Broke Up,’ which Susan Carpenter describes as ‘a brief but intense teen relationship gone wrong.’ Carpenter says that few of these ‘tragic trajectories have been written about as poignantly’ as in this book, which is illustrated by Maira Kalman.

Then there’s Tolstoy. Yes, the life of the count is detailed in Rosamund Bartlett’s ‘Tolstoy: A Russian Life.’ Reviewer Martin Rubin notes that Tolstoy was ‘a loner, a quintessential outsider and a generally awful and quarrelsome individual.’ So how was he able to ‘understand and evoke the glittering social whirl and intricacies of fashionable salons’ that made up much of his fiction?

Shari Roan reviews Mary Johnson’s ‘An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service and an Authentic Life,’ a memoir that will ‘fascinate not only Catholics but anyone who has wondered about the human capacity to vow lifelong celibacy, poverty and charity’ and gives us a fascinating portrait of Mother Teresa. Online at The Siren’s Call, Nick Owchar talks to novelist Richard Zimler about his recent visit to Poland to discuss the novel ‘The Warsaw Anagrams’ with Polish audiences.

And, of course, we have our Best-Sellers lists of what’s hot at Southern California stores.

Again, thanks for reading (and for listening).

-- Jon Thurber, book editor