 | State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
The wonder in the title carries over into the writing of this book. As fine a book as her previous title Run was, I feel this was even better. We have both been waiting months for this to come out, and as soon as Vicky was done, I started her up. I've finished now, and while I'm so much richer for the experience, I'm wish it wasn't over. Couldn't there be more pages to explore?
This is one of those delectable books that captures you from page one and keeps you involved through to the very last page. The cast of characters is a fine collection, and Patchett takes them and the reader into the dark jungles of Brazil. We're talking remote pharmaceutical research. We're not going the route of dangerous men with guns, as in The Constant Gardener by John le Carré, but there could be death at any time from the insects and wildlife of this Brazilian jungle...oh, and there are cannibals nearby. Put away any pulsing, death-defying adventure plot, and travel with the curious and apprehensive Marina Singh from an American lab, to the hidden research facility run by her former college professor. There, Dr. Swensen has been working in the jungle for many years, and the head of her company, Mr. Fox, wants to know how the research is coming - the research that he's paying the monstrous bills for. Swensen doesn't communicate with Fox, and the last person sent to check her progress, never returned. Once again, I'll tell you, this is not THAT kind of an adventure story. These are real, thinking, caring people, watching and studying the native tribes and foliage. What can they learn? What benefits for the rest of the world can be extracted from the depths of this distant site?
The story is clever, moral, and exciting, but the characters like Milton, Marina, Dr. Swensen, Anders, the other scientists there, and the deaf native boy Easter, MAKE the book. Another one of my favorite characters is the entire local tribe that they live with and study. How they communicate and learn about each other is fascinating.
I'm going to stop now, because you need to simply pick this book up and read. Don't read reviews. Don't ask questions of friends who've read it. Don't look for snippets and interviews online. This is such a good book, just read. Let Patchett's talent take you places. Isn't this why we read? Who wants to know what's around the bend when you could discover it for yourself and really experience it in your own way? |
 | The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes |  | A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I've just finished the book that has made it onto so many great lists of books. It's a very impressive accomplishment and I'm still out there reading all sorts of reviews and information about this book. She brings to life some interesting characters in the world of music. You do some major time tripping from back in the days when punk rock was fresh and rebellious, to these same rockers looking at their own humanity. |
 | Beginners by Raymond Carver
This is a British edition that I found at Pegasus in Berkeley, and these are the stories that were in his short story collection, What We Talk About when We Talk About Love, before they were edited down (some by 50%) by his editor Gordon Lish. I've read the first four or five and they are just wonderful. If only my original copy of What We Talk About wasn't packed away in a box in the far back of a storage unit, I would be able to compare, but for now it was just so good to be read them with all of Carver's words.
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 | Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
|  | American Boy by Larry Watson
Montana 1948 and Justice were both fine reads, so when I caught wind that Larry had a new book coming out...I had my eyes open for it...and grabbed it ASAP. This was a really fine coming-of-age story that was told in a very straight-forward and simple style, but one that pulled you in and got you involved quickly. On a superficial level—it has wonderful cover and all together is a great looking book!
Another beautiful printed book that will be reduced to cold electronic letters and sentences on some e-reader...for those inclined towards technology and cheapness, before art and pleasure. |
 | The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt
This is one VERY funny, VERY dark western. I loved it! The man can write with skill and has created a very strange plot that kept me quickly turning the pages. This is like no other western I've ever read. I'm still chuckling and have to wait till I stop before I can write more.
|  | This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes
I loved this book! I can't believe this hasn't been made into a movie - it would be perfect and hilarious. All the time I was reading it - I was thinking about some bizarre cocktail of Two and a Half Men and Californication.
Imagine a book with blurbs like:
"An absolute masterpiece...."
"Hilarious...Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and has the talent to pull it off."
"I think this brave story of a lost man's reconnections with the world become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The Monkey Wrench Gang, or Catcher in the Rye...And hey, maybe it will save somebody's life."
AND the killer blurb for me, the one that got me to the register buying:
"A scarily human, kind, and alarming epic of second chances.
If Oprah went insane, this might be her favorite book."
- John Waters |
| The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
It's a dream come true for any Beattie fan and I've been a big fan from when I meet her in my college days at UVM. |  | Swamplandia! by Karen Russell |
 | 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
This is a stunner of a read. It's a 900 page-plus international bestseller and it's got so much in it—I am still fitting parts together in my mind as I write it up in my journal. Oh please, let me ponder this so more...there is so much running around in my head. It one long, strange trip.
|  | Light Action in the Caribbean by Barry Lopez
I keep reading great collections of short stories, and this Barry Lopez collection is perfection. Vicky found this used copy on the shelves of that fine new and used bookstore, Spectator Books, on Oakland's Piedmont Avenue. Lopez does so many things right as a writer of nonfiction and fiction that it's impressive to think about, and a joy to read. The settings of the stories are a world tour in themselves, and the range of styles and feelings evoked are just as far-ranging. Sentimental looks at older relatives and the past, give way in another story to icy cold-blooded murder in the Caribbean. Love letters from the 12th century are found locked away in a desk, and then Lopez throws the reader in with a band of horse thieves. He knows how to keep it lively. It's one of the joys of reading good short stories, when you have no idea of what to expect from the next story...the next page.
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 | In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
I'm always ready to read a Larson book, one of the well-written nonfiction ones (Isaac's Storm and The Devil in the White City), not so much of the Gary Larson's boneless chicken ranch variety. This takes place in Berlin with the family of the brand new American ambassador, the former college professor, William E. Dodd. All the while, Hitler is consolidating his power and the evil of the regime is starting to make itself felt. Dodd's daughter Martha is "outgoing" and seems destined to have affairs all over the city, including with several high-ranking Nazi, Gestapo, and Soviet officials. While the "nonfiction plot" isn't as much of a page-turner as some of his other books, the consequences for the world are so much more vast in scale that this story is really sticking with me. He did an excellent job of portraying the rolling out the Nazi terror before a "civilized world" - a world that couldn't bring itself to believe that such cruelty was happening. The side stories of the daughter's affairs, and the ambassador's troubled relations with his fellow ambassadors and the State Department is fascinating, but the major story is the world's ever-accelerating falling towards world war. He portrayed the time and its extremely manned ways, its diplomacy, perfectly. The universal theme of evil in the world and how can other countries change the course of events is so profound and difficult to deal with...when has anyone handled it well? I'm a sucker for a good Nazi book, and this was a real treat...in a truly evil way. He portrays that period so very well tells that story
|  | Small Memories: A Memoir by Jose Saramago
In a review of this book, it was mentioned that his grandfather, when he knew his death was near, went into his yard and hugged the old trees that had given him shade, fruit, and comfort for years, thanking each one. This is just perfect. For me, things like this are what's so wonderful about reading. It's these odd little happenings that I read about, ones that instantly bring a smile to my face and warm my heart, that keep me always reaching for another book. My memory has never been outstanding, and I don't retain plotlines and character details for long, but the feel of something heartfelt, clever and unique, keeps me constantly reading. It is just so powerful IN THE MOMENT.
One way I might describe it, and I will do that now - is to say it's as though your own grandfather was in the room with you, looking back and describing his childhood, not getting it perfect in the details, maybe having to go back and add something to a previous story here and there, but giving you an intimate feeling for what his life was like at each of the moments recounted. It's informal and there's little ego involved. In his telling, memories aren't science, cold and factual, they're what a real person remembers. And some of it is in the HOW someone CHOOSES to remember a time, a person, an event. When writing about the death of his four-year-old brother, he says - "I don't really believe in so-called false memories, I think that the differences between those and the memories we consider certain and solid is merely a question of confidence, the confidence that we place in the incorrigible vagueness we call certainly. Is the one memory I have of Francisco false? Perhaps, but I have spent the last eighty-three years believing it to be true."
In several reviews of Small Memories, I've read of the possibility that it was his dementia causing him to retell and revise the events, but I discount that. He has written such a fabulous memoir of his childhood and adolescence in Azinhaga and Lisbon...and I want to give the writer in him full credit. There's an innocence operating here, it's as a child that he's retelling these events, these stories. It's not simply a very old man looking back across those many decades. There's a sweetness and a respect in his words. "Next to it, so close that its branches touched the topmost part, was the big fig tree, or, quite simply, The Fig Tree, because although there was another one, it never grew very large, either because it wasn't in its nature to do so or out of respect for its veteran companion." When as a very young boy racing through a cornfield with a friend, he picks an ear of corn out of his friend's row after his friend missed it, it weighs on him, and he writes of his own Judgment Day - "...when my good and bad actions are placed in the balance, it will be the weight of that ear of corn that sends me down to hell..."
His childhood was so utterly poor that his mother pawned the family blankets after the cold of winter passed. Come the cold nights of fall, she would then pay the interest to get them back. And, when that same cold weather was too much for the piglets his grandfather was raising, the simple solution was to wash them, and let them sleep between his grandparents in their bed. His grandparents, though they were illiterate, had lessons to teach him as a child.
Once the last page of text is gone, there's a whole series of photos in the back of the book that show Jose and his family. Make sure you read the captions. Saramago often writes with a sly humor and he didn't miss this opportunity. My favorite was one of him as an adolescent that reads - " By now, I had a girlfriend. You can tell by the look on my face." Another caption reads - "I'm not sure what to make of this gentleman. His face is that of my grandfather Jeronimo, but the suit isn't him at all."
This is a gem of a book! At 140 pages, it's a small book, and while $22 isn't cheap per page, to me it's well worth the cost. This little book is something special that won't get packed away, as I am sure I will want to return to again and again. Keep an eye out for Small Memories. |  | And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields
I knew that I could rely on Walden Pond Books to have the Vonnegut biography ON the release date. All it takes—is to find a great independent bookstore—and give them a simple phone call to hold something. They are a class act. I've just finished reading it and it's well put together, very complete, and paints a warts-and-all portrait of one of my favorite writers. In many ways he was a real SOB and so very different from the public persona that he created for himself. He was a one-time public relations man who sold America on the wonders of General Electric—and then sold that same public Kurt Vonnegut. |  | Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited by Jonathan Yardley
I really enjoyed theses excellent reviews. First I dove here and there for his thoughts on some of my favorite titles, and then I steamed through the entire book for the wonderful enthusiasm that Yardley, the famous Washington Post book critic, brought to these titles. This volume is a collection of reviews on books that he had previously read, enjoyed, and has returned to so as to remind people about these forgotten delights. (That's forgotten delights, NOT frozen delights...yet, a frozen delight sounds delightful right now.)
|  | Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution by Richard Beeman
Simply one of the very best books that I've read on the personalities and motivations of the beginnings of our country's government. As he states in the book's acknowledgement, he thought about this book for forty years and wrote it for four. Time well spent. Excellent! |  | Nixonland by Rick Perlstein |  | Just My Type by Simon Garfield Well, while there is plenty of humor in this book, it's of a different type. (sorry) This was a book we were both originally hoping to get an ARC copy of, but finding it at 50% off on a sale table, works just about as well AND it's a well-designed and attractive book. It's also a wonderful description of the world of fonts. There is a great deal of history included, and it's richly illustrated with people, photos and letters. When a different font is mentioned, they show some class...by always showing an example. The type designer's world has changed a great deal from the designing, carving, casting, printing days, to today's technology-driven world. It's rather amazing, once you become aware of how many fonts there are out there, that any new fonts are being created, and to still have people called font designers. Designers, and others in this world of font design, can be a very special breed of nerd/artist—but we are all the richer for it. If you have any interest in the subject, this is a must book to have. |  | A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
It took me several months to find a copy of this on a bookstore shelf. This is a sign of the times, the times of just-in-time minimal store inventories, and not much of any backlist on anyone's shelves. There are times when I feel that it isn't the right time to read a book if I can't find it without simply special ordering it. Then there are times when you run across a title - and NOW is the time.
This was such a great read! There is so much to be said for Hemingway's stripped-down style. I've gone into serious Hemingway jags several times in my life, and I've found myself loving the writing, but the macho bullshit just got to be too much...and some other writer calls me away. With this book, it was written earlier in his career (but released right around the time of his death) and he's writing about major figures: Stein, Joyce, Pound, Fitzgerald & the like. There are no testosterone-infused bullfights in Spain or safaris in Africa. He had just given up working as a journalist, and is living on very little and checking out the fabulous scene in Paris. It was a rich and heady time. I've always heard and read of people who love to return to this title to reread it time and time again. I've already dipped back in several times since finishing it a few days ago. |  | Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton
This is the second edition of a fine book on the use and abuse of type, on paper and online. It a joy to look at a book designed so clearly about design. I have been designing newsletters (paper & online) and advertising and marketing materials of all kinds for years, and this is one book that brings it all together excellently. |  | Revolutionaries by Jack Rakove
I'm a nut for those American revolutionaries. |
 New York Times Best Books of 2011Fiction The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach 11/22/63 by Stephen King Swamplandia! by Karen Russell Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht Nonfiction Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son by Ian Brown Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman _____ New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2011
Along a Long Road by Frank Viva
A Ball for Daisy by Chris Raschka
Brother Sun, Sister Moon: Saint Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Creatures
by Katherine Paterson (illustrated by Pamela Dalton)
Grandpa Green by Lane Smith
Ice by Arthur Geisert
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen
Me... Jane by Patrick McDonnell
Migrant by Maxine Trottier (illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault)
A Nation's Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis
by Matt de la Peña (illustrated by Kadir Nelson)
A New Year's Reunion by Yu Li-Qiong (illustrated by Zhu Cheng-Liang) _____
The NPR 10 Best Novels Of 2011
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Open City by Teju Cole
The Submission by Amy Waldman
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
The Pale King An Unfinished Novel by David Foster Wallace
_____
SALON's Best Books of 2011
FICTION
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pym by Mat Johnson
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
NONFICTION
Townie by Andre Dubus III
Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution by Mary Gabriel
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
Catherine the Great: The Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie
Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff
_____
Publishers Weekly Best Books 2011
The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
Bossypants by Tina Fey
Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
Catherine the Great by Robert Massie
After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
There but for the by Ali Smith
One Day I Will Write About This Place by Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina
_____
Top 10 from The San Francisco Chronicle
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Daughters of the Revolution by Carolyn Cooke
Swamplandia by Karen Russell
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
Arguably by Christopher Hitchens
The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund
Malcolm X by Manning Marable
Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman
Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie by Lauren Redniss
11 Best Books of 2011 from Huffinton Post
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
Press Here by Hervé Tullet
Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Bossypants by Tina Fey
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Missed Connections by Sophie Blackall
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
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