[bksvol-discuss] Re: New York Times 10 Best Books of 2008
- From: "Bob" <rwiley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 14:31:20 -0600
Many thanks Cindy.
I see much reading in my future.
Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: Cindy Reece
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2008 10:42 AM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] New York Times 10 Best Books of 2008
I love this time of year when all of the magazines, newspapers and tv tell us
the Top 10, 20 100 things of the year. I then figure out how many I've missed!
This will be published in the Sunday Books section of the NY Times. I've
noted which of the books are on Bookshare. I will also go through the 100
Notable Books of 2008 (I'm not sure the links will work.)
Cindy Reece
December 14, 2008
The 10 Best Books of 2008
The editors of the Book Review have selected these titles from the list of
100 Notable Books of 2008.
FICTION
DANGEROUS LAUGHTER
Thirteen Stories
By Steven Millhauser.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.
In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of
Poe and Nabokov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the
deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous
opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In
the title story, teenagers attend sinister “laugh parties”; in another, a
mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time
and again these parables revive the possibility that “under this world there is
another, waiting to be born.” (Excerpt)
(Bookshare) A MERCY
By Toni Morrison.
Alfred A. Knopf, $23.95.
The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive
novel — part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song — about orphaned women who
form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison’s farmers
and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native
Americans live side by side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe
American Eden that is both a haven and a prison — an emerging nation whose
identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites
and fears. (First Chapter)
NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill.
Pantheon Books, $23.95.
O’Neill’s seductive ode to New York — a city that even in bad times
stubbornly clings to its belief “in its salvific worth” — is narrated by a
Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended by the events
of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he
stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of
immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians,
including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations. (First Chapter)
2666
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.
Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has
posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the
summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004,
is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic
foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different
story with a cast of beguiling characters — European literary scholars, an
African-American journalist and more — whose lives converge in a Mexican border
town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered. (Excerpt)
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day
Bengali-Americans — many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous
suburbs who can’t quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta.
With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of
vivid characters — young and old, male and female, self-knowing and
self-deluding — in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of
domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord. (Excerpt)
NONFICTION
(Bookshare) THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
By Jane Mayer.
Doubleday, $27.50.
Mayer’s meticulously reported descent into the depths of President Bush’s
antiterrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic
maneuvering that gave us Guantánamo Bay, “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced”
interrogation methods, “black sites,” warrantless domestic surveillance and all
the rest. But Mayer also describes the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep
inside the administration, who risked their careers in the struggle to balance
the rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any other in the
nation’s history.
(Bookshare) THE FOREVER WAR
By Dexter Filkins.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from
Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade
of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing
jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols in Falluja or
visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins makes us see, with almost
hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the “war
on terror.” (First Chapter)
NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
By Julian Barnes.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95.
This absorbing memoir traces Barnes’s progress from atheism (at age 20) to
agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the
familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the
timeless questions of mortality and aging. Barnes distills his own experiences
— and those of his parents and brother — in polished and wise sentences that
recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the other French masters he
includes in his discussion. (First Chapter)
(Bookshare) THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING
Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust.
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.
In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard, explores the legacy,
or legacies, of the “harvest of death” sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the
space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number
as those lost in all the nation’s combined wars from the Revolution through
Korea. This doesn’t include the thousands of civilians killed in epidemics,
guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective trauma created “a newly
centralized nation-state,” Faust writes, but it also established “sacrifice and
its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately
reunite.” (First Chapter)
THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
By Patrick French.
Alfred A. Knopf, $30.
The most surprising word in this biography is “authorized.” Naipaul, the
greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated fully with French, opening up
a huge cache of private letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations
they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews. It was a brave, and wise,
decision. French, a first-rate biographer, has a novelist’s command of story
and character, and he patiently connects his subject’s brilliant oeuvre with
the disturbing facts of an unruly life.
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