Insider: The February Culture Curve
The Soothing
- Dress the kids in jammies and serve them cocoa at Bedtime Stories, a ReadBoston event at Hotel Commonwealth. 2/24–2/25
- Charlotte Silver’s memoir, Charlotte au Chocolat, proves there was more to growing up at the restaurant Upstairs at the Pudding than pink linens. $26, out 2/16
- Check out the Boston Public Library’s bimonthly book sale — a highbrow version of scavenging for cans on recycling day. 2/4
The Stimulating
- Some family secrets are better left alone. That couldn’t be more true than in Leslie Epstein’s novel, Liebestod, which has composer Gustav Mahler’s long-lost son trying to stage his father’s unfinished opera. $26, out 2/13
- At BC’s Lowell Humanities Series, Junot Díaz channels his inner obese Dominican science-fiction nerd in a reading from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. 2/15
The Startling
- The culture shock for two visitors to Africa is as real as the lions in Three Weeks in December, by Cambridge’s Audrey Schulman. $15, out 2/14
- Anthony Giardina’s Norumbega Park chronicles the social striving of a family that “just” moved to MetroWest 40 years ago. $26, out 2/7
- After compasses go awry and ships wreck in the harbor, MIT’s class of 1868 takes up the geek-as-crimefighter trope in Matthew Pearl’s thriller The Technologists. $26, out 2/21