F M585 Messud, Claire. The Emperor’s Children.
This superbly intelligent, keenly observed comedy of manners set amid the glitter of cultural Manhattan in 2001, also looks unsparingly, though sympathetically, at a privileged class unwittingly poised, in its insularity, for the catastrophe of 9/11. Messud gracefully intertwines the stories of three friends, attractive, entitled 30 ish Brown graduates “torn between Big Ideas and a party” but falling behind in the contest for public rewards and losing the struggle for personal contentment. The vibrant supporting cast includes a deliciously literary seducer (without question, a great man”) and two ambitious interlopers, teeming with malign energy, whose arrival on the scene propels the action forward.
362.19 P771 Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
“When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety,” Pollan writes in this supple and probing book. He gracefully navigates within these anxieties as he traces the origins of four meals – from a fast food dinner to a “hunter-gatherer” feast – and makes use with remarkable clarity, exactly how we eat affects our both our bodies and the planet. Pollan is the perfect tour guide: his prose is incisive and alive, and pointed without being tendentious.
915.81 S851 Stewart, Rory. The Places in Between.
“You are the first tourist in Afghanistan,” Stewart, a young Scotsman, was warned by an Afghan official before commencing the journey recounted in this splendid book. “It is mid-winter – there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. “You will die, I guarantee.” Stewart, thankfully, did not die, and his report on his adventures – walking across Afghanistan in January 2002, shortly after the fall of the Taliban – belongs with the masterpieces of travel genre. Stewart may be foolhardy, but on the page he is a terrific companion: smart, compassionate and human. His book cracks open a fascinating blasted world miles away from the newspaper headlines. NCS read-alikes include The Swallows of Kabul and The Kite Runner, if you want more.
F D44ii Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. (Winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize)
Set in India in a small Himalayan community along the border with Nepal, its center is the once grand, now decaying home of a melancholy retired judge, his valiant cook, and beloved dog. Sai, the judge's teenage granddaughter, has just moved in, and she finds herself enmeshed in a shadowy fairy tale-like life in a majestic landscape where nature is so rambunctious it threatens to overwhelm every human quest for order. Add violent political unrest fomented by poor young men enraged by the persistence of colonial-rooted prejudice, and this is a paradise under siege. Just as things grow desperate, the cook's son, who has been suffering the cruelties, accorded illegal aliens in the States, returns home. Desai is superbly insightful in her rendering of compelling characters and in her wisdom regarding the perverse dynamics of society. Like Salman Rushdie in Shalimar the Clown (2005), Desai imaginatively dramatizes the wonders and tragedies of Himalayan life and, by extension, the fragility of peace and elusiveness of justice, albeit with her own powerful blend of tenderness and wit.
B BRY Bryson, Bill. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. (Highly recommended for anyone over fifty)
The New York Times reviewer fell off his couch reading this hilarious memoir of Bryson’s 1950s, Midwestern childhood and I had to be escorted out of the University of Virginia law school for uncontrolled laughter. Bryson (author of A Walk in the Woods and other similar treks) was born in the 1950s into a truly functional family. These are the memoirs of that kid, whose earthly parents were not really half bad–a loving mother who didn't cook and was pathologically forgetful, but shared her love of movies with her youngest child, and a dad who was the greatest baseball writer that ever lived and took his son to dugouts and into clubhouses where he met such famous players as Stan Musial and Willie Mays. Simpler times are conveyed with exaggerated humor; the author recalls the middle of the last century in the middle of the country ( Des Moines, IA), when cigarettes were good for you, waxy candies were considered delicious, and kids were taught to read with Dick and Jane. Although you will marvel at the insular innocence described, even as the world moved toward nuclear weapons and civil unrest, I guarantee you that times like these did exist for many of us. Bryson describes country fairs and fantastic ploys to maneuver into the tent to see the lady stripper, playing hookey, paper routes, church suppers, and more.
759.94 W988 Wynne, Frank . I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Forger.
The police tracked down Han van Meegeren in 1945 after learning of his connection to a "Vermeer" stashed in the loot of Hermann Goring. He sat in a jail cell for six weeks deciding whether to be tried for treason and possibly hanged or confess and become a national hero for selling Goring a fake. Bursting with malevolent pride, van Meegeren made the astonishing admission that he, not Johannes Vermeer van Delft, was the painter--and one of the great art-world scandals was off and running. Wynne's account of van Meegeren's fraud, the first book-length account in English in four decades, contains insights into the mind of a forger as well as narrative verve about van Meegeren's methods of foisting his deceptions upon the Dutch art-history elite. Born in 1889, the youthful van Meegeren began a painting career and received accolades, but his Old Masters style was considered passe. Expert in seventeenth-century technique, Van Meegeren cunningly plotted vengeance by exploiting critics' belief that Christ-themed Vermeers awaited discovery; mirabile dictu, the theorized "Vermeers" turned up in the 1930s and 1940s. An astutely rendered and delicious tale of an infamous forger who, by the way, earned about 20 million dollars for his beautifully-rendered deceptions.
F A548p Anderson, M.T.The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Volume I: The Pox Party(2006 National Book Award winner for Young Adult Literature)
M. T. Anderson's books for young people reflect a remarkably broad mastery of genres, even as they defy neat classification. This genre-labeling game seems particularly pointless with Anderson's latest novel, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, an episodic, highly ambitious story, deeply rooted in eighteenth-century literary traditions, which examines, among many other things, pre-Revolutionary slavery in New England. The plot focuses on Octavian, a young black boy who recounts his youth in a Boston household of scientists and philosophers (The Novanglian College of Lucidity). The Collegians believe so thoroughly in the Age of Reason's principles that they address one another as numbers. Octavian soon learns that he and his mother are objects of one of the Collegians' experiments to learn whether Africans are "a separate and distinct species." Octavian receives an education "equal to any of the princes in Europe," until financial strains shatter Octavian's sheltered life of intellectual pursuits and the illusion that he is a free member of a utopian society. As political unrest in the colonies grows, Octavian experiences the increasing horrors of what it means to be a slave. The story's scope is immense, in both its technical challenges and underlying intellectual and moral questions--perhaps too immense to be contained in a traditional narrative (and, indeed, Anderson has already promised a second volume to continue the story). Highly recommended for adults too.
808 P966 Prose, Francine.Reading Like a Writer A Guide for People Who Like Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.
Life is precious, and much of that preciousness lies in the details: the sights, the sounds, the scents we too often ignore in our busy lives. Prose makes a superb application of that concept for readers of fiction. To know how the great writers create their magic, one needs to engage in a close reading of the masters, for that is precisely what successful writers have done for thousands of years. College programs in creative writing and summer workshops serve a purpose, but they can never replace a careful reading of the likes of Austen, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Salinger, Tolstoy, and Woolf. In this excellent guide, Prose explains exactly what she means by close reading, drawing attention to the brick and mortar of outstanding narratives: words, sentences, paragraphs, character, dialogue, details, and more. In the process, she does no less than escort readers to a heightened level of appreciation of great literature. I definitely wanted to go to the shelves to read again, or for the first time, the books she discusses. And to aid them, she thoughtfully appends a list at the end: Books to Be Read Immediately.
951 E92 Evans,Polly . Fried Eggs with Chopsticks .
Evans' third travel book finds the intrepid author making her way across China by any means possible: plane, train, bus, boat, or mule. Alternately funny and informative, the book focuses primarily on the people and places Evans encountered along the way, but you can't write a book about a nation as old as China without dipping into its history from time to time--exploring, for example, the Yungang Grottoes near the coal city of Datong, where there are 51,000 Buddhist carvings etched into the face of a cliff; or taking a boat trip up China's longest river, the Yangtze, where a controversial damming project has created quite the stir. Evans is a hands-on kind of travel writer. She likes to try new things and hang out with new people, and she writes travel lit at ground level: noisy, colorful, and entirely delightful. Comparisons to Bryson, Cahill, and Theroux, while obvious, would not be unwarranted.
613.2 G956 Guiliano, Mire.French Women for All Seasons.
Here, take part of the Guiliano’s quiz via Amazon.com and you’ll get the gist of this common-sense book about dieting, fashion, and general living. Are you ready? 1. Your idea of the ultimate chocolate fix is? a. A chocolate Entenmann's donut. b. A Hershey bar. c. Godiva truffles. d. One or two pieces of high-quality dark chocolate.2. How do you take your coffee? a. I don't drink coffee. b. Can't stand it without cream and three sugars. c. I add Equal and skim milk for low-cal pleasure. d. A small cup of freshly brewed coffee needs no lightening or sweetening. 3. What should the salespeople at the mall know about you? a. I don't wear prêt à porter! b. I'm a sucker for the latest trends for the season--I love being in fashion. c. I'll buy an amazing pair of shoes before I pay my rent. d. I find a few items to accompany the best pieces in my closet--I just want to refresh my wardrobe. Everything in moderation is this New York City–based Frenchwoman's secret to staying slim and bien dans sa peau (comfortable in one's skin). Always with a mind to portion control, she presents weekly menus and over a hundred recipes organized by season and sauced with casual, idyllic culinary reminiscences.
Bon Appetit my dear readers.
Annotation taken from various reviews.
K.Craver 1/2007