Comprehensive booklist

2010 Booklist

January 11, 2010 Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World, David Bodanis

David Bodanis weaves tales of romance, divine inspiration, and fraud through a lucid account of the invisible force that permeates our universe. In these pages the virtuoso scientists who plumbed the secrets of electricity come vividly to life, Thomas Edison; the visionary Michael Faraday, Samuel Morse, and Alan Turing. (pw)

February 15, 2010 Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips
And you thought Zeus, Apollo, Eros, et al were meddlesome back in the day. (jd)

March 15, 2010 The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, Margaret Atwood

“A fascinating and rather attractive version of this old, old story, a creation tale about the founding of our civilization meant to be heard over and over and over.”–Chicago Tribune (pw)

April 6, 2010 The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenidies

The first novel of the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex. I thought the movie made from Suicides was an atmospheric puzzler. The whole mystery of death, sex, love and desire all wrapped up and examined by the communal voice of adolescent boys. I am curious to see how this is conveyed in print. (243 pages) ag

May 10, 2010 The Lazarus Project, Alexander Hemon

I adore Hemon's writing anyway, but I've read this and keep thinking about it. Besides what's said in the review below, the book features an obsession with an incident from Chicago history, a road trip, and the unease that can accompany encounters with people from a past you thought you left behind. From the New York Times: “The gifted Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon has taken the formal structure of humor, the grammar of comedy, the rhythms and beats of a joke, and used them to reveal despair. His new novel, “The Lazarus Project,” is a remarkable, and remarkably entertaining, chronicle of loss and hopelessness and cruelty propelled by an eloquent, irritable existential unease. It is, against all odds, full of humor and full of jokes. It is, at the same time, inexpressibly sad.” (jd)

June 7, 2010 The Yiddish Policemen's Union , Michael Chabon

I would love to hear the discussion on this one. I found it entertaining in a very unnerving way.

From Publisher’s Weekly:"They are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews. Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel is a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller. The novel begins with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? (lt)

July 5, 2010 The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, David Grann

From Publisher’s Weekly: “In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn't stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction. By interweaving the great story of Fawcett with his own investigative escapades in South America and Britain , Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale.” 352 pages (gi)

August 2, 2010 The Accordionist's Son, Bernardo Atxaga (Al's house)
I haven't read this yet but it's on my list. Axtago is a Basque writer, and this book is framed by the Basque diaspora as well as the tenacious hold of the language, culture, and history on this tiny ethnicity and on the rest of Spain. Atxaga was named one of “21 top writers for the 21st century” (The Observer, U.K.) A plot summary from The Guardian: “On his horse ranch in California, David Imaz whiles away the time until his vital heart operation by looking back at his upbringing in the Basque country of the 1960s and 1970s. The bombing of Guernica and the Spanish Civil War reverberate through his memories as he tries to uncover whether the despotic father he detests has blood on his hands.” (jd)

September 13, 2010 The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry (lisa'a house)

"The main character is a one-hundred year old woman, Roseanne McNulty, who now resides in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital. Having been a patient for some fifty years or more, Roseanne decides to write an autobiography. She calls it "Roseanne's testimony of herself" and charts her life and that of her parents, living in Sligo at the turn of the 20th Century. She keeps her story hidden under the loose floorboard in her room, unsure as yet if she wants it to be found. The second narrative is the "commonplace book" of the current chief Psychiatrist of the hospital, Dr Grene. The hospital now faces imminent demolition. He must decide who of his patients are to be transferred, and who must be released into the community. He is particularly concerned about Rose, and begins tentatively to attempt to discover her history. It soon becomes apparent that both Roseanne and Dr Grene have differing stories as to her incarceration and her early life, but what is consistent in both narratives is that Roseanne fell victim to the religious and political upheavals in Ireland in the 1920s – 1930s." (Wikipedia) Short-listed for 2008 Booker Prize (lt)

October 2010 The Zero, Jess Walter (336 pages)

The story involves a cop who witnessed the attacks on 9/11 and how it affects his life afterwards. The reviews all stressed how this grim topic is handled with humor and irreverence which gets to the heart of the matter more effectively than a more somber treatment would. From the Wall Street Journal: "'The Zero' could end up as the 'Catch 22' of 9/11 (with) its brilliant ironies, its deadpan truths, its insider smarts and its everyguy hero ... (Walter) elevates 'The Zero' above mere satire to Kafkaesque parable." (ag)

November 2010 The Age of Grief, Jane Smiley (224 pages)
This is a book of short works: all of them very good-all first person meditations-by private and singular people-on being alone and being with others—and being alone while being with others. It is the novella at the end of the book, though, that really packs a punch. It is the narrative of a man who believes that his wife, with whom he has three daughters, has become disaffected with her life with him, and is having an affair. We can only touch the wife’s experience through the observations of her husband, which are loving, detailed, grounded in deep domestic familiarity, and the sharp fear of substantiating what he sees. Even though the narrator is an odd person, whose reactions are very unlike what mine would be, I felt like I was looking out of his eyes, and that his experience became part of my personal history. I think all of the stories form a cohesive whole, with the final novella as the centerpiece. (gi)

December 2010 The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley (189 pages)

When I was writing short stories and totally turned off by the Ann Beatty school of affectless literature, I came across the short stories of Grace Paley. Here were gorgeously written stories about people with personalities and the voices to convey them. They lived in places that weren’t a collection of Walmarts and fast food places. And they had real problems instead of unspecified ennui. A short but amazing collection. (ag)

January 2011 An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Brock Clarke
Opening lines: “I, Sam Pulsifer, am the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, and who in the process killed two people, for which I spent ten years in prison and, as letters from scholars of American literature tell me, for which I will continue to pay a high price long into the not-so-sweet hereafter. This story is locally well known, and so I won't go into it here. It's probably enough to say that in the Massachusetts Mt. Rushmore of big, gruesome tragedy, there are the Kennedys, and Lizzie Borden and her ax, and the burning witches at Salem, and then there's me.” (jd)

February 21, 2010

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