2012 Booklist
January 9, 2012 Dreaming in Chinese, Deborah Fallows (200 pages) Lisa's House
From Booklist: "Fallows manages to take the relatively dry subject of translation and create a warm and witty memoir. Dwelling less on her own feelings then on the intricacies of language mastery, she shares experiences after she and her husband moved to China that taught her just how complex Mandarin can be. Such as the fact that there are 400 syllables in Mandarin as opposed to 10 times that number in English, making tone crucial in conversation. Fallows makes all this fascinating by writing in a thoroughly engaging manner that not only invites readers into her experiences, but also delights them with her discoveries." (gi)
February 20, 2012 Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey (400 pages) Al's House
Here’s a quote from the starred review in Publishers Weekly: “The eminently talented Carey (Theft) has the gift of engaging ventriloquism, and having already channeled the voices of Dickens's Jack Maggs and the Australian folk hero/master thief Ned Kelly, he now inhabits Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur, a fictionalized version of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose noble parents are aghast at his involvement in the events surrounding Napoleon's return and the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X. To remove him from danger, they send him to America, where priggish snob Olivier inspires Carey's humor during his self-centered adventures in New York, New England, and Philadelphia. . . . this wonderful novel is picaresque and Dickensian, with humor and insight injected into an accurately rendered period of French and American history.” (jd)
March 19, 2012 Await your Reply, Dan Chaon (368 pages) Lisa's House
The book opens with a Northwestern University dropout named Ryan — one of three alienated main characters — shivering in the passenger seat of a car, his severed hand sitting next to him in a Styrofoam cooler. This is one of three taut narratives that Chaon has intermingled. This novel earned Mr. Chaon a National Book Award nomination, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letter." (ag)
2012 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot (400 pages)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? --Tom Nissley
2012 Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: a Tale of Love and Fallout, Lauren Redniss
I got really curious about this when it first came out and am very intrigued by the decision to make it a graphic novel. From the San Francisco Chronicle: "Radioactive is an imaginative mix of drawings, photo collages and text; the result is a tender and haunting tribute to the scientists who fell in love while conducting research that led to their discovery of radium and polonium...Most powerful, however, are the seemingly glowing images (the glow-in-the-dark cover is admittedly cool, too) that Redniss has created using cyanotype printing. (pw)
2012 The Children's Book, A. S. Byatt (896 page, 1.1 lbs)
From Publishers Weekly: "Byatt's overstuffed latest wanders from Victorian 1895 through the end of WWI, alighting on subjects as diverse as puppetry, socialism, women's suffrage and the Boer War, and suffers from an unaccountably large cast. The narrative centers on two deeply troubled families of the British artistic intelligentsia: the Fludds and the Wellwoods. Olive Wellwood, the matriarch, is an author of children's books, and their darkness hints at hidden family miseries. (lt)