ANDOVER – The current issue of The New Yorker is all about humor; jokes are interwoven with real-life funny moments, and cartoonist/author Art Spiegelman draws a wonderful comic ode to Charles
Schulz. 

Peanuts ran for 50 years and, without question, my favorite character is Snoopy. I say “is” because It’s A Dog’s Life, Snoopy sits in the middle of my bookcase, always at hand. Long before Harry Potter’s magically expanding tent at the Quidditch Cup, Snoopy’s doghouse held a Picasso, a pool table, a dining room . . . and also served as the World War 1 flying ace’s Sopwith Camel.

Guess I’d better return the book to my sister, along with her copy of Braiding Sweetgrass. It’s the perfect book to open at random, read a chapter or two, and sit back and think about one’s place on this earth. I must buy my own copy!

I picked up The Spoiled Heart by Sanjeev Sahota simply because the story looked interesting. Challenging is more like it, as the narrator slips back and forth between his efforts to gather information for a new novel, and the events in the past that fill his friends’/would-be characters’ lives. So, yes, there’s movement between past and present, secrets revealed oh, so slowly, and
the effort to understand working class British vernacular. 

Set in the early 2000’s in the coal-mining and mill towns of the English’s Midlands (some former), the plot centers around Nayan, working-class, parents being Indian storekeepers, and Megha of the same background but with privileges, as they vie for the General Secretary position of Unify. Unify, fictitious, I believe, stands in for the largest labor union. It’s not a pretty fight to the finish, but it is worth reading, definitely.

I couldn’t end without sharing the discovery of yet another mystery series, and set again in the London of the 1940s. Ellie McDonald grew up in a family of thieves and safecrackers with a sort of Robin Hood philosophy. As espionage becomes a common facet of the War, she is recruited by an anonymous service to put her skills to good use. The interplay among Ellie, her household, and The Major is tons of fun to read. 

However, be warned that Ashley Weaver is an American living in Louisiana, who just doesn’t quite catch the cadence and slang of the characters. No matter; it’s fun-filled light reading, as is.