#1. From NPR's book club suggestions
Available at Amazon
This novel is a riff on Alexis de Tocqueville's famous book Democracy in America, and, like its source, it is an insightful look at post-revolutionary America. But it is also a delightful romp with of two of contemporary fiction's most memorable characters. There's Olivier, a sickly and overprotected young aristocrat raised in the ever-threatening shadow of the French Revolution, and Parrot, the son of an itinerant British printer, who suffers an early tragedy that spins his life in unexpected directions. When the two become unlikely companions, they bicker and grumble their way through America until finally realizing that this new world really is entirely new and completely different. The aristocratic Olivier thinks he has found love. The plebeian Parrot wonders if this is a place where he can finally rest. For those who like to fall into a big, sprawling novel and get lost, this book is for you.
By Dolen Perkins-Valdez; hardcover, 304 pages; Amistad
Of the many inexplicable aspects of the institution of slavery, one of the hardest to fathom is the relationship between slave owners and the slaves they took as mistresses. It is this relationship that Dolen Perkins-Valdez explores in the novel Wench. She sets her story mostly in a resort in the free state of Ohio, revealing a little-known slice of slave life — the phenomenon of Southern slave owners vacationing with their mistresses. The false air of normalcy and the tantalizing proximity to freedom that results has a profound effect on four women whose lives are utterly dependent on the mercy and whims of their owners and lovers. For one of these women, the hint of freedom is also an invitation to escape, upending the carefully constructed lives of both owners and slaves. This is a fascinating and tragic story that is also a compulsive read.
By Tana French; hardcover, 416 pages; Viking Adult
In Faithful Place, Tana French takes readers into a corner of Dublin where families do their best to suffocate dreams and cops are to be avoided at all costs. Detective Frank Mackey escaped from there long ago, but the discovery of a body in an abandoned house brings him back to the old neighborhood. When the abandoned body turns out to be a girl Mackey thought had jilted him on the night he ran away years ago, he is forced to face his past and the family he hoped he had left behind forever. French has a way of creating characters whose own lives are as mysterious as the crimes they are involved in solving, a reason her books can be interesting even to readers who are not normally attracted to detective stories. Faithful Place is as much as study of the complexities of family relations as it is a crime novel, and as everybody knows, families are endlessly fascinating and always surprising.
By Tom Rachman; hardcover, 288 pages; The Dial Press
This kaleidoscopic look at a Rome-based English language newspaper is both hilarious and surprisingly moving. Through a series of interlocking stories, we glean the life of a newspaper from its heyday to its decline. From the young publisher who inherited his role and has no idea what to do with it to the obit writer who discovers his own ambition in the worst of possible ways to the avid reader who is years behind in keeping up with the news, we fall for this cast of characters and the paper that has sustained them over the years. If you still harbor a secret love for the days when news wasn't delivered instantaneously, and also accept the fact that the people who brought it to you were neither villains nor cardboard heroes (but merely flawed humans), then you may find a place in your heart for The Imperfectionists.
By Paul Auster; hardcover, 320 pages; Henry Holt
At a time when lawns are littered with for sale signs and lives are being devastated by foreclosures, it's noteworthy that a writer like Paul Auster would use the nation's housing crisis as a backdrop for his latest novel. As Sunset Park opens, its main character, Miles Heller, is working for a company that "trashes out" foreclosed homes, getting rid of the things families left behind in their haste to abandon what they once called home. Heller has been living in self-imposed exile from his own family in New York, but soon enough circumstances force him to return home. He takes up an offer to squat rent-free in a dilapidated house with a group of young people and is reunited with his estranged father, who has longed for his return. All this provides Auster with the material for a meditation on the meaning of home and the fragility of life with, or without, a safety net.
#2. Additional suggestions from NPR
More On 'Freedom':
By Jonathan Franzen, hardcover, 576 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux - Not yet availble in paperback (1/2011)
If you want to be in on the cultural must-read of the year, Freedom is your ticket. Jonathan Franzen's first novel since his wildly acclaimed National Book Award-winner The Corrections (2001) has been hyped, praised, debated, disdained and anointed by Oprah for real this time, although oddly passed over for a National Book Award nomination. Much of the heated discussion has been about whether it's really any good. Readers who don't love Franzen seem to love to hate him, but the answer is, yes, it's really good.Like The Corrections, Freedom dissects the vicissitudes of an unhappy, white, middle-American family, zeroing in on a destructive ongoing love triangle to illuminate problems in contemporary American culture. Personal moral lapses reverberate and spill over, until domestic, political, environmental and global issues all become intricately, impressively commingled.
For Franzen's characters, freedom means, in part, the liberty to make mistakes. But is there such a thing as too much freedom for one's own good, Franzen asks? How can we heed the engraved message his heroine notices during a college visit, "Use Well Thy Freedom"?
More On 'So Much For That':
By Lionel Shriver, hardcover, 448 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
If you want ripped-from-the-headlines relevance in your fiction, Lionel Shriver's outraged and occasionally outrageous ninth novel, So Much For That, nominated for the National Book Award, takes on our hurting health care system with a story that gives life to the issues. Shriver’s hero is about to quit his detested job and retire to a less expensive Third World country when his wife, an artist who works in metal, announces she has deadly mesothelioma and needs his health insurance. He hunkers down and dedicates himself to her care, but soon learns how inadequate their insurance is. At the same time, his father needs to be moved into a nursing home, and his best friend, whose teenage daughter suffers horribly from a rare degenerative disease, succumbs to a vanity procedure that goes wildly awry. Shriver's graphic descriptions of various grotesqueries rival for shock-and-guffaw value the memorable castration scene in John Irving's The World According to Garp.There's plenty to discuss here, beginning with penetrating questions about the value of a human life and government's role in health care. What is the ultimate merit of prohibitively expensive, misery-inducing procedures that barely prolong life? Is there such a thing as a better way to die?
More On 'Room':
By Emma Donoghue, hardcover, 336 pages, Little, Brown and Co.
Irish-born Emma Donoghue's gripping novel Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, may feel like it's been ripped from the headlines, but what's news here is what she does with her heart-stopping story of a kidnapped teenager held captive in a hidden, hermetically sealed garden shed for seven years.Narrated by the girl's 5-year-old son, whom she has resourcefully provided with a happy childhood while protecting him from her rapist, Room gives twisted new meaning to the notion of a sheltered childhood. Young Jack's skewed point of view and extreme disorientation in the world outside what he calls Room lead to a fresh look at our culture of glut and fascinating questions about childhood development.
More than just a prurient horror story, Donoghue's tour de force probes the intensity and many challenges of motherhood, including the difficult but essential need to carve individual space and identities for both mother and child — rooms of their own.
More On '36 Arguments':
By Rebecca Goldstein, hardcover, 416 pages, Pantheon
Rebecca Goldstein and I became friends in the early 1990s, when I interviewed her for an article about contemporary philosophy and we couldn't get off the phone. Happily, I wasn't alone in finding 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction one of the more fun, substantive reads of the year, further grist for the conversational mill. Not just ours, but everyone's. After several darker, less playful books, 36 Arguments recaptures the joyousness (and jokiness) of Goldstein's popular, equally brainy first novel, The Mind-Body Problem.
Her hero, a professor of the psychology of religion, has been dubbed "the atheist with a soul" after the runaway success of his twist on William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, called The Varieties of Religious Illusion. In lieu of religion, Cass Seltzer worships at the altar of various unworthies, including his first wife, an icy French poet; his risibly pompous academic mentor; and his current girlfriend, a cutthroat economist dubbed "the goddess of game theory." Filled with stunningly clear explanations of seemingly abstruse mathematical concepts and brilliant riffs on the clash between faith and reason, 36 Arguments is an academic satire that deftly mixes heft and hilarity. The 50-page appendix, which cogently spells out 36 arguments (and counterarguments) for the existence of God, is worth the price of the book, and will provide ammunition for endless debates.___________________________________________________________________________________
#3. The Tournament of Books 2009
From the Morning News http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/the_rooster/the_2009_tournament_of_books.php
The Morning News 2009 Tournament of Books Contenders
All book lonks go to Powells.comThe White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
2666, Roberto Bolano
A Partisan’s Daughter, Louis de Bernieres
The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher
The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon
My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart
Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen
The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris
A Mercy, Toni Morrison
Steer Towards Rock, Fae Myenne Ng
Netherland, Joseph O’Neill
City of Refuge, Tom Piazza
Home, Marilynne Robinson
Harry, Revised, Mark Sarvas
