If you love happy endings and total resolution in your reading matter, this one's for you. A wonderful story beginning in 1962 Italy and including Liz and Dick and the filming of Cleopatra. Wonderful characters, solid story. The chapter that is the beginning of a character's book is poignant. Try it, you'll be pleased.

4 olives

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, 337 pages; Harper, 2012.

For some strange reason I am always surprised by how much I like Cormac McCarthy's novels. He writes so beautifully about some of the harshest subjects. This is the story of John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins who leave home and travel south to Mexico where they hope to find work as cowboys. Along the way they meet up with a strange boy named Jimmy Blevins. The boys meet up with a ton of trouble and Cole manages to fall in love with the daughter of a man whose ranch he is working on. Blevins kills a man. The rancher at first protects Cole and Rawlins but turns them over to the police after finding out Cole and his daughter were having an affair. There is a line that keeps running through my head, "They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.” It's just one example of the most beautiful language coming out of a story full of bloodshed and meanness. -JM

4 olives

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, 302 pages; Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.