Winter in Maine is a time of short days, long shadows and quiet reads beside the wood stove. Book groups meet again after their holiday hiatus and customers here at BookMarc's Bookstore no longer ask for gift suggestions, now they want a good read. Well everyone's idea of a good read is different but here are some suggestions:

Last year's favorite for an old-fashioned good read was Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese. This year customers are talking about The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. A family memoir and detective story, the author uses the inheritance of a collection of small wood and ceramic carvings called netsuke as a pretext to trace his family back through a hundred years of European history. Sarah's Key by De Rosnay, The Help by Stockett, To the End of the Land by Grossman, and The Given Day by Lehane continue as book group favorites. Jo Nesbo writes dark Scandinavian mysteries that rival Mankell's while Louise Penny writes gentler but no less insightful mysteries featuring Chief Inspector Gamache and the Quebec/Eastern Township hamlet of Three Pines. Maine writer Paul Doiron's The Poacher's Son takes the reader on a tough, grim journey through the Maine wilderness as the game warden protagonist searches for clues to prove that his estranged and abusive father is not also a murderer.

For non-fiction we recommend anything by Simon Winchester, his latest in paperback is Atlantic, a biography of the ocean, no less; Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier and The Warmth of Other Suns by Wilkerson and Cleopatra by Schiff.

In the category of authors who deserve more renown we would like to give a shout out to Kentucky novelist, essayist and poet Wendell Berry. Books like Jayber Crow and Memory of Old Jack are not only good old-fashioned reads but have a quiet power that remains with the reader long after the book is placed back on the shelf.