Old Mole Reading List

This is primarily a love story, a love triangle between two best friends and one girl loved by both. But it is an incredibly complex story full of lies and secrets. Stewart Goodman, known by all as Goody and Santamo Piccolo, known as Pick, are unlikely best friends. Goody is a quiet and reflective boy who ponders all the big questions, while Pick is brash, cynical and dismissive of all things spiritual. Laura is Pick’s girlfriend and the love of his life. The three become fast friends at the

It’s 1979, Olivia Murray, who is a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, has aspirations of becoming a photojournalist. Out of the blue, she has a chance to go to Iraq with her Kurdish boyfriend, ostensibly for a weeding of his cousin, but also because he needs to reunite with his family. And so begins this remarkable 2021 novel by Gian Sardar, Take What You Can Carry.In her acknowledgments at the end of the book, Sarder explains that "... Kurdistan is spread over four countries, so isolation has

Gabriela Garcia’s 2021 debut novel is really a collection of interconnected stories, spanning several generations of women. The first story is about women cigar rollers in pre-Castro Cuba.The air thickened. Maria Isabel had by then breathed so much tobacco dusts she developed regular nosebleeds, but the foreman didn’t permit workers to open the window slats more than a sliver—sunlight would dry the cigars. So she hid her cough. She was the only woman in the workshop. She didn’t want to appear weak.A

What Jess Walter shows us in his 2020 novel The Cold Millions is that he is a wonderful story-teller, a fine historian, and like one of his characters guilty of “first-degree aggravated empathy.”This lovely historical novel is on one hand simply a story of the love between two brothers, Gig and Rye Dolan who hop freight trains together, traveling from town to town and job to job. They are part of the cold millions, that is, the millions upon millions of workers who struggle day to day simply to

Easy Rawlins is a tough and hard-boiled as any detective in the mystery genre. He has been asked by a Viet Nam vet to look into a possible murder in a southern California orange grove.I would have turned him down out of hand if it weren’t for my understanding of the America I both love and loathe.In America everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two., Who you are, what you have, what you look like, where your people came from, and what god looked over their breed--these