nomadreader

The backstory: The Sellout  won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and has been longlisted for the 2016  Booker Prize . It was also a 2015 New York Times  Notable Book  (including being honored as one of the five best fiction titles of the year) and a contestant in the 2016 Tournament of Books . The basics:  "A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant."--publisher My thoughts: The first ten percent or so of this book had me thinking, "this may be the most provocative and brilliant thing I've ever read." I should remind myself when I get that excited about a book that early, it's nearly impossib...

The backstory: Nora Webster  was on the 2014 Folio Prize shortlist, a 2015 Carnegie Medal finalist, and a 2014 New York Times  Notable book. I previously liked The Testament of Mary  by Toibin. The basics: Nora Webster's husband dies, leaving her a young widow with four children, no job, and financial challenges in 1960's Ireland. My thoughts: It's the second book I've read by Toibin, and only in hindsight did I realize both feature strong, conflicted female narrators. Nora Webster is a fascinating woman. As I think about it, my mind is filled with cliches to describe it: quiet, haunting, evocative. It is all of those things. It's a book I appreciated perhaps more than I enjoyed. There's a timeless, classic quality to it. It's set mostly in the 1960's, and Toibin captures the essence of the time and place so beautifully one might think it was written at that time. Nora Webster  is a character-driven novel. It's one I enjoyed the time I spe...

The backstory: The Wallcreeper , Nell Zink's first novel, was named a 2014 New York Times  Notable book. The basics: The publisher uses this Keith Gessen blurb as the summary, so I will too: "Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn't. I don’t know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth that is as funny and as grown-up as anything I've read in years. And there are some jokes in here that a young Don DeLillo would kill to have written. I hope he doesn’t kill Nell Zink." My thoughts: The Wallcreeper  has one of the most memorable narrators I've encountered. Tiffany ...

The backstory: Family Life  won the 2015 Folio Prize and was named one of the 5 best books of 2014 by The New York Times . The basics:  "We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longin...

The backstory: All the Light We Cannot See  won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize , was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award , was named one of the top five books of 2014 by The New York Times , and won the 2015 Carnegie Medal . Update: It was also the 2015 runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize . The basics: Set during World War II, All the Light We Cannot See  tells the interwoven stories of Marie-Laure, a young Parisian girl going blind whose father works at the Museum of Natural History, and Werner, a young German teenager growing up in an orphanage, where he develops a fascination with radios. My thoughts: Over the years, I've grown weary of World War II tales. I find it a fascinating time in history, but I've read so many great novels about the time and so many good novels about the time that most new WWII novels have a hard time sticking out. Admittedly, if I read this one several years ago, I might have enjoyed it even more than I did. What makes All the ...

The backstory: The Moor's Account  is on the 2015 Booker Prize longlist, was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize , and was a 2014 New York Times  Notable book. The basics: The Moor's Account is "the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America—a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record. In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with a crew of six hundred men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and famous as Hernán Cortés." (from the publisher) My thoughts:  Lalami uses language to differentiate our narrator from his captors: "How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians—just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no...

The backstory: Veteran comic artist Roz Chast's graphic memoir was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award (non-fiction), one of the top 5 New York Times  nonfiction titles of 2014, and a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography.) The basics: Chast, an only child, recounts her struggles with her parents, who lived into their 90's, refusing to plan for their death. My thoughts: I've enjoyed Roz Chast's cartoons in The New Yorker  for a long time, which makes sense given the back of this book tells me she's been drawing them for the magazine since before I was born. Parts of this memoir resemble comic strips, but I was surprised to see some pages have exclusively text (handwritten.) Chast plays with format in interesting ways in this graphic memoir, but it's her more traditional images I found most entertaining. What I liked most about this memoir was Chast's ability to provide some levity to the darkness. She writes ...

The backstory: Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel  was a 2014 New York Times  Notable Book . The basics:   "After fifteen years of marriage, Lena Finkle embarks on a string of online dates and receives a brutally eye-opening education in love, sex, and loss while raising her two teenage daughters."--publisher My thoughts: I heard about this graphic novel when it was released last summer, but I was a million months pregnant and cranky. Then I forgot about it until it was named a 2014 New York Times  Notable Book. It's still a big deal for a graphic novel (or graphic memoir) to make the list, and I was curious to dive in. I managed to read this lengthy (by comics standards) book in a single afternoon (it would have been a single sitting, but as happy as Hawthorne is to play by himself, he still likes to play with me too.) As I read, I was struck by the rawness of Lena as a character. Although fictional, it reads like a memoir. I had to keep reminding myself that...

narrated by Yareli Arizmendi, Christine Avila, Jesse Corti, Gustavo Res, Ozzie Rodriguez and Gabriel Romero The backstory: The Book of Unknown Americans  was a 2014 New York Times Notable book . Update: it was also a finalist for the 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize . The basics: Centered on the stories of the Rivera family, who move from Mexico to Delaware at the beginning of this novel, and the Toro family, who emigrated from Panama many years ago, The Book of Unknown Americans  focuses on the budding romance between Maribel Rivera and Mayor Toro, while also providing a backdrop to show the varied Latin American immigrant tales in their Delaware neighborhood. My thoughts: I love the idea of this novel, and I was fascinated to hear about the large Latin American population in Delaware (and why it exists.) Henriquez grew up in Delaware, and her insight into the neighborhood was obvious. I appreciated the variety of viewpoints, but I soon found myself wishing for more e...

The backstory: Life After Life  was shortlisted for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction  (now Bailey's Prize) and was a 2013 New York Times   Notable Book  and named to its Top Ten of 2013. The basics: Life After Life  is the story of a young British woman born in 1910. Throughout the novel she dies many times, and each possible life serves as an exploration of how small moments have enormous impact on our lives and deaths. My thoughts: The opening scene of this novel is incredible: twenty-year-old Ursula kills Hitler in 1930 in a German cafe. She is promptly killed. Then the action goes back to Ursula's birth. In the next few scenes, various iterations of the doctor getting stuck in a snowstorm and making it to her birth or not play out, as do various causes of her death. Atkinson plays with life and death somewhat whimsically here, which I appreciated: "I hear the baby nearly died,” Mrs. Glover said. “Well…” Sylvie said. Such a fine line between living ...

narrated by Xe Sands and Simon Vance The backstory: The New York Times  named Euphoria a 2014  Notable Book, as well as one of the ten best books of the year . Euphoria  also won the 2014 Kirkus Prize . The basics: Set in 1933 New Guinea,  Euphoria  is the story of thee young anthropologists, Nell, Fen and Bankson. Nell and Fen, a married couple working together, seek the help of Bankson, an expert in the area, to identify a tribe worth studying. My thoughts:  Longtime readers of this blog know I'm a huge fan of fiction about real people, so when I heard  Euphoria  was inspired by the life of Margaret Mead, more specifically a 1933 New Guinea expedition Mead took with her second husband. On this expedition, they collaborated with the man who would become Mead's third husband. It's a trip that's ripe for fictional speculation, and King takes this tantalizing set up and explores its possibilities beautifully. I realized as I listene...

The backstory: 10:04, the second novel by poet Ben Lerner, is a 2014 New York Times  Notable Book . The basics: Told in five sections, 10:04  is an exploration of time and life through the eyes of our unnamed narrator, a poet and novelist living in Brooklyn. My thoughts: Ben Lerner grew up in Topeka, Kansas. He's one year older than I am, and we have a lot of mutual real-life Topeka friends. He then went on to Brown University, where a lot of my high school went to college. He now lives in Brooklyn, where a lot of my high school friends live. All of this is to say, this novel is somewhat autobiographical and straddles the lines between fiction and memoir. Some of my enjoyment of it can likely be traced to the descriptions of life in Topeka in the mid-1980's, when I too lived there. Even if I didn't share such experiences, however, I would love this novel. I adore the way Lerner writes. He has a poet's precision of language that is breathtaking. He writes with in...

The backstory: When Mystical Creatures Attack! won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and is 2014 New York Times Notable book . The basics:  "Told through high school class assignments, letters, emails, private journal entries, school literary magazine submissions, advice column blog posts, and psychiatric wellness reports, the 25 linked stories in this debut collection beautifully sketch the lives of residents of a small South Texas town."- Publishers Weekly My thoughts: First: whoever called this book a short story collection has a very, very narrow view of what a novel is. To me, linked stories may share characters and settings, either across some stories or all. When Mystical Creatures Attack! has three main characters, and one of each is the main character in each story (I would say chapter.) It's certainly not a traditional novel, as the description indicates. It doesn't unfold in a chronological narrative. But, to me, it's definitely a novel, even if man...

The backstory: Invisible Bridge  was one of Entertainment Weekly 's 10 Best Novels of 2010, a New York Times  Notable Book in 2010, and Julie Orringer is coming to Albany Thursday night as part of the New York State Writer's Institute Visiting Writers Series . (Update: The Invisible Bridge has been longlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize !) The basics: The novel opens with Andreas Levi, a young Jewish student in Hungary, as he is preparing to move to Paris, where he has an architecture scholarship but knows no one and very little French. He's asked to deliver a package and a mysterious letter by a wealthy family after a chance meeting. My thoughts: I hesitate to describe  Invisible Bridge  as a love story because that oversimplifies what is an accomplished massive, sweeping novel. Yes, romance is a major element of this novel, but no more so than it is in life. I was instantly fascinated with Andras and his fascinating journey from Hungary to Paris. The reader can ...