The Inheritance of Loss
By Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006)
This dazzling young writer captures, with her fresh wit and real human sympathy, how extraordinarily small and interconnected our world has become. A family in the Himalayas clings to a remembered idea of the British empire, cherishing Marks and Spencer underwear and the BBC. A Marxist Nepali insurgency forms in the nearby hills. In New York a cook’s son, an undocumented worker in the grizzly prep kitchens and basements of chic Manhattan restaurants, dreams only of returning to his impoverished father in India. This book reminds us there’s no “post” in colonialism. —Kathleen Ochshorn
The Tin Drum
By Günter Grass (Pantheon Books, 1959)
The Road
By Cormac McCarthy (Knopf, 2006)
My new-book reading was set back by coming across a free copy of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum at a library giveaway in Burnet, Texas, of all places. I had just read Grass’s controversial memoir in The New Yorker (about his being an S.S. member), and had missed the book its first time around — though I saw the movie. Anyway, it’s a sprawling, wonderful saga (600 pages) “told” by Oskar, humpbacked and stunted — the ultimate outsider — with powerful observations on war, guilt, love and life in the 20th century. Every page is filled with outrage, satire and sentiment; it took me forever to finish it, and I was sorry when I did. The best “new” book I read was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a terse and passionately apocalyptic view of the world we’re in now — a dark follow-up to The Tin Drum, seen through the eyes of a father trying to walk his son through a wrecked landscape to safety. —Peter Meinke
The Shipping News
By Annie Proulx (Scribner’s, 1992)
Dense and engrossing, this novel by the author of Brokeback Mountain follows a widower named Quoyle (the term means “a coil of rope”) who moves with his two young daughters and aunt to Newfoundland, where he finds work as a reporter for a local newspaper while he tries to reconcile conflicting memories of his late wife. Proulx brings the steel-gray landscape of Newfoundland to life, essentially rendering it as another character, and one that reflects Quoyle’s conflicted interior life. “Beyond the glass the seas lay pale as milk, pale the sky, scratched and scribbled with cloud welts. The empty bay, far shore creamed with fog.” It may take a while to get used to the poetic prose, but once you become do, The Shipping News is a richly rewarding read. —Anthony Salveggi
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
By Marisha Pessl (Viking Penguin, 2006)
Marisha Pessl’s debut novel — imagine Nabokov mixed with Gossip Girl, plus a dash of Nancy Drew and a twist of Donna Tartt — seemed a little self-consciously precocious to some readers. For one thing, the young narrator, Blue Van Meer, is a hyper-literate teenager who keeps footnoting her observations with book references. For another, the novel’s table of contents is labeled “Core Curriculum (Required Reading),” with each chapter borrowing its title from classic lit. But the compulsive over-achieving is part of the point. Knowledge (all those books) is not the same as knowing, Pessl suggests; as Blue recounts the events that surrounded the mysterious death of her charismatic teacher Hannah Schneider, we see that everything she once assumed about her life — about her brilliant professor father, about her classmates, about Hannah — may be wrong. A funny, exhilarating read that hurtles along to a suspenseful, and satisfyingly inconclusive, conclusion. —David Warner
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
By Michael Pollan (Penguin Press, 2006)
Most of us don’t know all that much about the food we eat. We go to the nearest Publix (or Rollin’ Oats, if you’re so inclined), fill our baskets with boxes of pasta and cans of soda, take the stuff home and eat it. How that food shows up in our grocery stores, though, remains a mystery to us. Michael Pollan’s book, which follows four different meals from their origins as plants and animals to the dinner table, begins to fill this huge gap in our knowledge with a hefty dose of agricultural history, science, business and politics. You’ll never look at the food on your plate in the same way again. —Caitlin Kuleci
The Almost Moon
By Alice Sebold (Little, Brown and Company, 2007)
“When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” The first line of The Almost Moon lays the groundwork for the doom that unfolds in Alice Sebold’s much-anticipated second novel. Sebold’s protagonist is Helen, an art-school nude model dealing with middle-age ennui. From the murder of Helen’s mother, the book winds itself through a 24-hour period of taboo-breaking — and the freedoms that can sometimes result. At its heart, The Almost Moon explores the mother-daughter bond, exposing aspects that many prefer to leave unspoken. Sebold is a master at shining the bright light of consciousness on the dark undercurrents of relationships; those who like their reading skin-deep should stay away. If, on the other hand, you enjoy probing the murkier side of the human condition, The Almost Moon will satisfy. —Brandi Gross
Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
By Michael Lewis (First published by Penguin, 1990)
Originally released in 1990, Liar’s Poker turned out to be a topical read in 2007. A memoir of the author’s rise from trainee to trader at Wall Street giant Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, Poker plays witness to the birth of the mortgage trading market — the same market currently melting down in the subprime mess. Fortunately, Lewis’ breezy prose and knack for sketching characters keeps the book from bogging down in the minutiae of quarter-point profits and loan bundles. The book ends before the big crash of ’87, sparing us the agony of investment defeat. Here’s hoping the current crisis does the same. —Joe Bardi
Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World
By Sid Schwarz and Ruth Messinger (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006)
Judaism and Justice states more persuasively than any other book I can think of the idea that anyone who honestly believes in God is therefore obligated — it’s not a matter of personal caprice — to commit him/herself to working for social justice on Earth. Rabbi Schwarz shows how repeatedly in Jewish texts from the Torah to the Talmud God calls upon believers to feed the hungry, raise up the bowed down, stand up for the oppressed and correct injustice. Eloquently, he points out that the central narrative in Torah — the exodus from Egypt — is about human rights and human liberation; and he goes on to remind us of Isaiah’s call “to open blind eyes, to release captives from prison and from the dungeon, those who sit in darkness.” If you’re wondering what’s the appropriate use of precious time — well, here you’ll find an answer. —Mark E. Leib
Dancing to “Almendra”: A Novel
By Mayra Montero, translated by Edith Grossman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007)
How can I describe a book that reads as if Gabriel Garcia Marquez channeled Raymond Chandler? Montero is largely unknown in the U.S., but in her sixth book she conjures up a mix of ingredients that should be red meat to an audience in the States: the Mafia, pre-Castro Havana and detective noir. The plot concerns, well: a 22-year-old journalist; a hippo murdered in the Havana zoo; a whispered clue; a mob turf war; a one-armed circus performer rumored to be Santo Trafficante’s lover; competing newspapers; competing criminals; a bisexual nightclub choreographer with leprosy; a love story; actor George Raft and mob financier Meyer Lansky. It’s a dizzying ride. The narrative voice switches back and forth; the location skips between Cuba and New York; the prose juxtaposes norteamericano noir staccato with ebbing Latin American cadences. But the Cuban-born author is masterful in revealing an island nation (on which we’ve turned our backs, thanks to a four-decade embargo) at a time of wonder, love and corruption. —Wayne Garcia
The Glass Castle
By Jeanette Walls (Scribner, 2006)
The best memoirs find humor in life’s greatest pathos; Jeanette Walls chronicles her life of poverty with amazing detail and deft observations about the human condition. Walls spent her childhood living on the run with her good-natured but delusional alcoholic father and aloof, failed-artist mother. Equal parts journalist and poet, she tells her tale without ever romanticizing the suffering or glorifying her rise from poor vagabond to successful Manhattanite. For those of us who gag at self-help books, snicker at scripture and view life through the lens of an incurable cynic, The Glass Castle serves as a rare, sweet reminder of hope. In a word, the book’s inspirational. It also does an excellent job of showing humans’ capacity for both kindness and cruelty, how a person can love a family one minute and then abandon them the next, how those ties that bind can nearly choke a talented and ambitious person like Walls. The most gripping book I read this year, Glass Castle ranks favorably with that other modern memoir classic, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. —Wade Tatangelo
Republican Like Me: Infiltrating Red-State, White-Ass, and Blue-Suit America
By Harmon Leon (Prometheus Books, 2005)
Do you miss those great investigative pieces of the 20th century in which journalists like Upton Sinclair would go undercover for firsthand accounts of their subjects? I thought these muckrakers were relics of a bygone era — until I read Harmon Leon. In Republican Like Me, the award-winning journalist (and standup comedian) infiltrates the natural habitats of the right-wing Republican underground (usually church basements or Applebee’s restaurants) with Tom Green-esque audacity. He joins a Christian ex-gays support group (“I decide to dress really gay. This will show how much help I actually need”); tags along on a militia group’s weekend retreat (“Entire families are dressed in camouflage fatigues. I didn’t know costumes were a part of this.”); and gathers petitions for an anti-immigrant group (“kind of like a moronic crime-fighting team from another dimension”). Republican Like Me may not inspire a change in government policy or win a Pulitzer, but it’s guaranteed to make you drool with laughter. —Alex Pickett
Seventy-nine Short Essays On Design
By Michael Bierut (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007)
Proust Was a Neuroscientist
By Jonah Lehrer (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
You’d expect someone who writes about art for a living to read books about art, too. But two of the best books I read this year were not merely about art. Instead, with persuasive and often surprising arguments, both suggested ways in which the creative thinking central to art and design processes has profound relevance to science, politics and society at large. In Seventy-nine Short Essays On Design, Michael Bierut — a highly regarded graphic designer, partner at Pentagram and co-founder of designobserver.com — offers a series of diverse meditations on design in short-attention-span friendly portions; topics range from how Vladimir Nabokov invented hypertext in Pale Fire to why political branding played a key role in India’s 2004 elections. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer describes how artists from a variety of disciplines — culinary pioneer Auguste Escoffier, literary giant Marcel Proust and post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne — anticipated the discoveries of modern neuroscience with intuitive ideas about how the brain integrates sensations and memory. A more laborious read than Bierut’s concise and conversational essays, but still essential. —Megan Voeller
Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1
By Neil Gaiman and various artists (Vertigo, 2006)
Every so often, amid the spandexed, adenoidal soap opera of the genre, someone cranks out a true piece of brilliant comic-book art like Sandman. Released in 1989 and written by Neil Gaiman, Sandman blended a brand new family of archetypal characters — “The Endless,” who personify things like dream, death and desire — with just plain stellar storytelling. Sandman ushered in a decade of alternative, but commercially mainstream, comic books and kicked off DC Comic’s Vertigo line with a bang. This massive hardcover volume, the first in a series of four, reprints issues 1-20 of the original Sandman series, including a massive supply of DVD-style extras. DC Comics also re-colored the first 18 issues, a vast improvement over the amateurish, muddy originals. —Brian Ries
The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book One)
By Philip Pullman (Knopf, 1996)
The first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series sets the stage for an epic, cross-dimensional adventure. The Golden Compass opens with an attempted murder, the motive unraveling amidst a vivid alternate universe where the soul manifests itself as a corporeal creature called a daemon, and the lines between science, theology and magic are blurred. The main character, Lyra, is an 11-year-old orphan who’s been reared among the scholars of an Oxford, England university. The bold young Lyra spends her days tormenting her peers and lying her way out of awkward situations until a chain of mysterious disappearances prompts her to embark on a dangerous journey to the North to uncover a secret. Filled with rich, complex characterization and set against a fantastic backdrop, The Golden Compass is profoundly moving, its unpleasant protagonist growing into a worthy heroine by the story’s conclusion. —Leilani Polk
Into the Wild
By Jon Krakauer (Anchor, 1997)
I swear I read Into the Wild before I knew it was being turned into a movie. The enigmatic character Christopher “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless thoroughly engrossed me. I loved and loathed him. I was also blown away by the way Krakauer retraced the long and labyrinthine footsteps of a young man who had long since died. —Eric Snider
This article appears in Dec 19-25, 2007.
