Books to read!
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
A debut book, which uncannily unites the trials of a postmodern upbringing with a murder mystery.
Eating Heaven - Jennie Shortridge
Nothing gets Eleanor Samuels's heart racing like a double scoop of mocha fudge chunk. Sure, the magazine writer may have some issues aside from food, but she isn't quite ready to face them. Then her beloved Uncle Benny falls ill, and what at first seems scary and daunting becomes a blessing in disguise. Because while she cooks and cares for him-and enjoys a delicious flirtation with a new chef in town-Eleanor begins to uncover some long-buried secrets about her emotionally frayed family and may finally get the chance to become the woman she's always wanted to be.
Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison >>>I want to read this for sure
This autobiographical novel about a young girl in the rural South facing abuse and betrayal won high critical acclaim and a National Book Award nomination upon its release in 1992. The power of Bastard Out of Carolina is simultaneously narrative, emotional, and political. "The novel is mean," Allison says, "meant to rip off all that facade of imagination and lies we place around sexual violence and children."
Love Walked In - Marisa de los Santos
When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever. But little does she know that her newfound love is only the harbinger of greater changes to come. Meanwhile, across town, Clare Hobbs—eleven years old and abandoned by her erratic mother—goes looking for her lost father. She crosses paths with Cornelia while meeting with him at the café, and the two women form an improbable friendship that carries them through the unpredictable currents of love and life.
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a “hired girl,” Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction’s finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton’s other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.
Felicia's Journey
Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia's delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell, even as it resonates with William Trevor's own "impeccable strength and piercing profundity"
The Khao San Road, Bangkok--first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach."
Eat, Pray, Love - One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Elizabeth Gilbert
This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls “Anne Lamott’s hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister”) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.
The Beach - Alex Garland
The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden.
Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck--the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man--and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents.
Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach is a look at a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.
High Fidelity
Rob is a pop music junkie who runs his own semi-failing record store. His girlfriend, Laura, has just left him for the guy upstairs, and Rob is both miserable and relieved. After all, could he have spent his life with someone who has a bad record collection? Rob seeks refuge in the company of the offbeat clerks at his store, who endlessly review their top five films (Reservoir Dogs...); top five Elvis Costello songs ("Alison"...); top five episodes of Cheers (the one where Woody sang his stupid song to Kelly...). Rob tries dating a singer whose rendition of "Baby, I Love Your Way" makes him cry. But maybe it's just that he's always wanted to sleep with someone who has a record contract. Then he sees Laura again. And Rob begins to think (awful as it sounds) that life as an episode of thirtysomething, with all the kids and marriages and barbecues and k.d. lang CD's that this implies, might not be so bad.
A Streetcar Named Desire- Tennessee Williams
One of the most remarkable plays of our time. It created an immortal woman in the character of Blanche DuBois, the haggard and fragile southern beauty whose pathetic last grasp at happiness is cruelly destroyed. It shot Marlon Brando to fame in the role of Stanley Kowalski, a sweat-shirted barbarian, the crudely sensual brother-in-law who precipitated Blanche's tragedy.
Produced across the world, translated into many languages, and recreated as a prize-winning film, A Streetcar Named Desire has attracted one of the widest audiences in contemporary literature.
London Is the Best City in America - Laura Dave
In mapping their struggles over one wild and emotional wedding weekend, Laura Dave gives us a brilliantly subtle and honest look at contemporary courtship, family tension, and the angst that we all experience when we have to make difficult choices.
Three years ago, Emmy Everett made the painful decision to call off her engagement and leave New York City behind. Since then she has been hiding out in Rhode Island working at a bait and tackle shop and haphazardly shooting a documentary about fishermen's wives. July 4th weekend has rolled around again and Emmy is mustering up the courage to return home to New York (the site of her own failed romance) to celebrate her brother Josh's wedding.
En route to his bachelor party, Emmy is shocked when her typically resolute brother confesses that he is having serious doubts about getting married – and he may even be in love with another woman. Emmy is determined to help her brother face up to this decision—the one she fled from herself. With less than twenty-four hours to go before the wedding, she takes Josh on a road trip to find this mystery woman. Along the way, Emmy embraces her own hard-earned lessons about romance, commitment and what happens when we refuse to let go of the past.
London is the Best City in America is a courageous, big-hearted portrait of love, loyalty, and heartbreak. Emmy is lively, wise and, ultimately, very brave as she tries to answer the universal question: how do we take that first step toward making our lives our own?
A Student of Living - Susan Richards Shreve
In the Washington, D.C., of a near future, a city of floods and frequent terrorist bombings, the tightly knit Frayn family has carved out its own comfortable, if eccentric, existence. Then, in the moment it takes Claire Frayn to dig into her book bag for her umbrella, her brother Steven is shot down next to her on the library steps.
His murder hits the family like a hurricane. Set adrift, Claire easily falls under the influence of Victor Duarte, an enigmatic stranger who claims to know her brother's killer. But as she corresponds with the supposed criminal mastermind, a composer at a conservatory in Michigan, she finds herself increasingly apprehensive about Victor and his plans for revenge, while she is ever more drawn to the musician.
Plotted like a thriller with a startling love story at its center, this is a pitch-perfect and painful rendering of the way a family grieves and of the way public violence seeps into every part of our lives. Much like Ian McEwan's Saturday, A Student of Living Things takes on the moral, political, and philosophical questions of our time with a very intimate story about the futility of revenge and the sheer miracle of forgiveness.
The Rug Merchant - Meg Mullins
Isolated and far from his native Iran, Ushman Khan has worked hard to build a wealthy, reliable clientele for his wares: exquisite hand-woven rugs from his home city of Tabriz. With perfect rectitude, he caters to clients like New York’s Upper East Side grand dame Mrs. Roberts, who plies him for stories about his exotic origins and culture to feed her own imagination. But like many immigrants, he’s living only half a life. He dreams of the day his beloved wife, Farak, will be able to join him in New York and complete his vision of the American dream. But when she tells him that she is leaving him for another man, Ushman is shattered. He begins to wander aimlessly through the terminals of JFK Airport, imagining a now-impossible reunion with Farak. Unexpectedly, he meets Stella, a Barnard College student who has just bade farewell to her parents en route for an Italian vacation. After Stella, isolated in her own way, finds herself at Ushman’s Manhattan store, they embark on an improbable and powerful romance. Together this American girl from the Deep South and the Iranian aesthete form a tender bond that awakens them both to the possibility of joy in a world full of tragedy.
The Rug Merchant is an inspiring, character-rich tale about shaking free from disappointment and finding connection and acceptance in whatever form they appear. And in a novel of many extraordinary pleasures, Ushman Khan stands as one of the great characters in recent fiction.
When photographer Paul Rayment loses his leg in a bicycle accident, his solitary life is irrevocably changed whether he likes it or not. Stubbornly refusing a prosthesis, Paul returns to his bachelor's apartment in Adelaide, Australia, uncomfortable with his new dependency on others. He is given to bouts of hopelessness and resignation as he looks back on his sixty years of life, but his spirits are lifted when he finds himself falling in love with Marijana, his practical, down-to-earth Croatian nurse who is struggling to raise her family in a foreign land. As Paul contemplates how to win her heart, he is visited by the mysterious writer Elizabeth Costello, who challenges Paul to take an active role in his own life.
Slow Man - J. M. Coetzee
In this new book, Coetzee offers a profound meditation on what makes us human, on what it means to grow older and reflect on how we have lived our lives. Like all great works of literature, Slow Man is a novel that asks questions but rarely provides answers; it is a portrait of a man in search of truth. Paul Rayment's accident changes his perspective on life, and as a result, he begins to address the kinds of universal concerns that define us all: What does it mean to do good? What in our lives is ultimately meaningful? Is it more important for one to feel loved or cared for? How do we define the place that we call “home”? In his clear and uncompromising voice, Coetzee struggles with these issues, and the result is a deeply moving story about love and mortality that dazzles the reader on every page.
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A debut book, which uncannily unites the trials of a postmodern upbringing with a murder mystery.
Eating Heaven - Jennie Shortridge
Nothing gets Eleanor Samuels's heart racing like a double scoop of mocha fudge chunk. Sure, the magazine writer may have some issues aside from food, but she isn't quite ready to face them. Then her beloved Uncle Benny falls ill, and what at first seems scary and daunting becomes a blessing in disguise. Because while she cooks and cares for him-and enjoys a delicious flirtation with a new chef in town-Eleanor begins to uncover some long-buried secrets about her emotionally frayed family and may finally get the chance to become the woman she's always wanted to be.
Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison >>>I want to read this for sure
This autobiographical novel about a young girl in the rural South facing abuse and betrayal won high critical acclaim and a National Book Award nomination upon its release in 1992. The power of Bastard Out of Carolina is simultaneously narrative, emotional, and political. "The novel is mean," Allison says, "meant to rip off all that facade of imagination and lies we place around sexual violence and children."
Love Walked In - Marisa de los Santos
When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever. But little does she know that her newfound love is only the harbinger of greater changes to come. Meanwhile, across town, Clare Hobbs—eleven years old and abandoned by her erratic mother—goes looking for her lost father. She crosses paths with Cornelia while meeting with him at the café, and the two women form an improbable friendship that carries them through the unpredictable currents of love and life.
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a “hired girl,” Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction’s finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton’s other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.
Felicia's Journey
Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia's delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell, even as it resonates with William Trevor's own "impeccable strength and piercing profundity"
The Khao San Road, Bangkok--first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach."
Eat, Pray, Love - One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Elizabeth Gilbert
This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls “Anne Lamott’s hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister”) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.
The Beach - Alex Garland
The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden.
Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck--the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man--and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents.
Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach is a look at a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.
High Fidelity
Rob is a pop music junkie who runs his own semi-failing record store. His girlfriend, Laura, has just left him for the guy upstairs, and Rob is both miserable and relieved. After all, could he have spent his life with someone who has a bad record collection? Rob seeks refuge in the company of the offbeat clerks at his store, who endlessly review their top five films (Reservoir Dogs...); top five Elvis Costello songs ("Alison"...); top five episodes of Cheers (the one where Woody sang his stupid song to Kelly...). Rob tries dating a singer whose rendition of "Baby, I Love Your Way" makes him cry. But maybe it's just that he's always wanted to sleep with someone who has a record contract. Then he sees Laura again. And Rob begins to think (awful as it sounds) that life as an episode of thirtysomething, with all the kids and marriages and barbecues and k.d. lang CD's that this implies, might not be so bad.
A Streetcar Named Desire- Tennessee Williams
One of the most remarkable plays of our time. It created an immortal woman in the character of Blanche DuBois, the haggard and fragile southern beauty whose pathetic last grasp at happiness is cruelly destroyed. It shot Marlon Brando to fame in the role of Stanley Kowalski, a sweat-shirted barbarian, the crudely sensual brother-in-law who precipitated Blanche's tragedy.
Produced across the world, translated into many languages, and recreated as a prize-winning film, A Streetcar Named Desire has attracted one of the widest audiences in contemporary literature.
London Is the Best City in America - Laura Dave
In mapping their struggles over one wild and emotional wedding weekend, Laura Dave gives us a brilliantly subtle and honest look at contemporary courtship, family tension, and the angst that we all experience when we have to make difficult choices.
Three years ago, Emmy Everett made the painful decision to call off her engagement and leave New York City behind. Since then she has been hiding out in Rhode Island working at a bait and tackle shop and haphazardly shooting a documentary about fishermen's wives. July 4th weekend has rolled around again and Emmy is mustering up the courage to return home to New York (the site of her own failed romance) to celebrate her brother Josh's wedding.
En route to his bachelor party, Emmy is shocked when her typically resolute brother confesses that he is having serious doubts about getting married – and he may even be in love with another woman. Emmy is determined to help her brother face up to this decision—the one she fled from herself. With less than twenty-four hours to go before the wedding, she takes Josh on a road trip to find this mystery woman. Along the way, Emmy embraces her own hard-earned lessons about romance, commitment and what happens when we refuse to let go of the past.
London is the Best City in America is a courageous, big-hearted portrait of love, loyalty, and heartbreak. Emmy is lively, wise and, ultimately, very brave as she tries to answer the universal question: how do we take that first step toward making our lives our own?
A Student of Living - Susan Richards Shreve
In the Washington, D.C., of a near future, a city of floods and frequent terrorist bombings, the tightly knit Frayn family has carved out its own comfortable, if eccentric, existence. Then, in the moment it takes Claire Frayn to dig into her book bag for her umbrella, her brother Steven is shot down next to her on the library steps.
His murder hits the family like a hurricane. Set adrift, Claire easily falls under the influence of Victor Duarte, an enigmatic stranger who claims to know her brother's killer. But as she corresponds with the supposed criminal mastermind, a composer at a conservatory in Michigan, she finds herself increasingly apprehensive about Victor and his plans for revenge, while she is ever more drawn to the musician.
Plotted like a thriller with a startling love story at its center, this is a pitch-perfect and painful rendering of the way a family grieves and of the way public violence seeps into every part of our lives. Much like Ian McEwan's Saturday, A Student of Living Things takes on the moral, political, and philosophical questions of our time with a very intimate story about the futility of revenge and the sheer miracle of forgiveness.
The Rug Merchant - Meg Mullins
Isolated and far from his native Iran, Ushman Khan has worked hard to build a wealthy, reliable clientele for his wares: exquisite hand-woven rugs from his home city of Tabriz. With perfect rectitude, he caters to clients like New York’s Upper East Side grand dame Mrs. Roberts, who plies him for stories about his exotic origins and culture to feed her own imagination. But like many immigrants, he’s living only half a life. He dreams of the day his beloved wife, Farak, will be able to join him in New York and complete his vision of the American dream. But when she tells him that she is leaving him for another man, Ushman is shattered. He begins to wander aimlessly through the terminals of JFK Airport, imagining a now-impossible reunion with Farak. Unexpectedly, he meets Stella, a Barnard College student who has just bade farewell to her parents en route for an Italian vacation. After Stella, isolated in her own way, finds herself at Ushman’s Manhattan store, they embark on an improbable and powerful romance. Together this American girl from the Deep South and the Iranian aesthete form a tender bond that awakens them both to the possibility of joy in a world full of tragedy.
The Rug Merchant is an inspiring, character-rich tale about shaking free from disappointment and finding connection and acceptance in whatever form they appear. And in a novel of many extraordinary pleasures, Ushman Khan stands as one of the great characters in recent fiction.
When photographer Paul Rayment loses his leg in a bicycle accident, his solitary life is irrevocably changed whether he likes it or not. Stubbornly refusing a prosthesis, Paul returns to his bachelor's apartment in Adelaide, Australia, uncomfortable with his new dependency on others. He is given to bouts of hopelessness and resignation as he looks back on his sixty years of life, but his spirits are lifted when he finds himself falling in love with Marijana, his practical, down-to-earth Croatian nurse who is struggling to raise her family in a foreign land. As Paul contemplates how to win her heart, he is visited by the mysterious writer Elizabeth Costello, who challenges Paul to take an active role in his own life.
Slow Man - J. M. Coetzee
In this new book, Coetzee offers a profound meditation on what makes us human, on what it means to grow older and reflect on how we have lived our lives. Like all great works of literature, Slow Man is a novel that asks questions but rarely provides answers; it is a portrait of a man in search of truth. Paul Rayment's accident changes his perspective on life, and as a result, he begins to address the kinds of universal concerns that define us all: What does it mean to do good? What in our lives is ultimately meaningful? Is it more important for one to feel loved or cared for? How do we define the place that we call “home”? In his clear and uncompromising voice, Coetzee struggles with these issues, and the result is a deeply moving story about love and mortality that dazzles the reader on every page.
Read full entry
