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BOOKS
Weekend picks for book lovers

Weekend picks for book lovers

Compiled by Jocelyn McClurg
USA TODAY
'The Road to Little Dribbling' by Bill Bryson

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY’s picks for book lovers include Bill Bryson's irreverent new travel book about England, and Janice Y.K. Lee's novel The Expatriates.

The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson; Doubleday, 380 pp.; non-fiction

If you are among the many adoring fans who helped make Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island one of the all-time best-selling travel books, you’ll be delighted to know he’s back from numerous diversions over the two decades since, bent on writing about his beloved Britain.

But while Bryson is pretty much the same — still endearing, irreverent, insightful, self-deprecating and hilarious, even if 20 years older and considerably crankier — Britain, as he tells it, is not quite the same. “…Increasingly I find myself living in a country that I don’t altogether recognize,” he grumbles. “I am constantly at a loss in this new world.”

Trying not to retrace his steps from Notes, he devotes this new expedition to the “Bryson Line”— his self-calculated longest distance you can travel in a straight line in Britain without crossing saltwater. Extending from Bognor Regis on England’s sadly declining south coast to Cape Wrath in the barren Highlands of Scotland, it serves as the book’s hypothetical bearing. To his credit, he wanders far and wide from the route, looking for the best stories and funniest punch lines rather than Britain’s longest, straightest line.

USA TODAY says *** stars out of four. “Wonderfully engaging… Bryson is a keen observer of what’s amusing, ironic and absurd.”

Bill Bryson hails Britannia, irreverently

The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee; Viking, 330 pp.; fiction

The author of The Piano Teacher returns to Hong Kong; this time it’s the present day in the lives of three women in a community of privileged American expats.

USA TODAY says **** stars. “Irresistible…The first great book-club novel of 2016 has arrived.”

Roundup: Four new books by women novelists

The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America by Ethan Michaeli; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 536 pp.; non-fiction

The story of The Defender, launched in Chicago in 1905, “feels very much like reading the story of black America coming into its own during the 20th century.”

USA TODAY says **** stars. “Epic …a stirring history of Chicago’s iconic African-American newspaper.”

The historic legacy of a black newspaper

The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin; Delacorte, 341 pp.; fiction

Benjamin, author of The Aviator’s Wife,  resurrects writer Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and his circle of New York socialites known as the “Swans.”

USA TODAY says *** stars. “Shamelessly gossipy… a catty, juicy read.”

All hail 'Dictator,' last in Cicero trilogy

Dictator by Robert Harris; Knopf, 416 pp., fiction

The final volume in a historical trilogy focuses on the last 15 years in the life of exiled Cicero, Rome’s most famous senator, litigator and orator.

USA TODAY says   *** ½. “What a character Cicero is — or at least he is in Harris's skillful hands.”

Contributing reviewers: Don Oldenburg, Jocelyn McClurg, Gene Seymour, Robert Bianco

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