I chose two not so great books to bring with me to Boliva, along with one pretty good and one really great book. Trail of Crumbs by Kim Sunee had seemed so interesting—a Korean woman, abandoned by her mother at the market in Seoul, writes on never quite fitting into her life. Her adoptive American parents never quite understand her. She flees to Europe as soon as she can, where she flits from relationship to relationship, falling in love with the man who founded L’Occitane. This was supposed to be a biography about finding oneself and yet at the end I found it a flat portrait of a very unhappy woman, with some lovely descriptions of food.

I didn’t expect much from the next book either, Bar Flower by Lea Jacobson, her story of being a nightclub hostess in Tokyo. I didn’t learn more than I already knew about the hostess scene in Tokyo and the stories of Jacobson’s alcoholic mishaps grew tiresome.

I had brought Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam based on some good word of mouth buzz, and I was not disappointed by this debut story collection. The comparisons to the television show Grey’s Anatomy will be rampant, but that’s merely because all of the stories deal with medical personnel and their lives. Don’t let that dissuade you from reading this powerful collection.

The book I couldn’t put down, even while roaming around La Paz, turned out to be Stephen Carter’s mammoth novel New England White. Carter writes about the country’s most influential African-Americans and opens the novel with a murder. Lemaster Carlyle, the new president of a prestigious New England university, and his wife Julia, who serves as the dean of the divinity school, happen upon the corpse of the notorious economics profession Zellen Kant (who also happens to be Julia’s ex-lover) on a drive home one evening. This sets in motion a slew of events for the large cast of characters. This is more than a literary whodunit. This is a deft portrait of upper crust African-Americans, a sect of the US that goes largely unnoticed, and also an exploration of the complexities of human nature. Carter doesn’t let the plot get too out of control and ably fleshes out all of the characters, big and small, so well that I found myself digging this 550 page book out of my bag at every opportunity.

I complained recently about being in a reading slump. I’m glad to say that I finally dragged myself out of it. Or rather that several books got me through it. I’m hoping people will pick up this first book because of the awesomeness of the title—Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander. Perhaps they’ll read the back and the flap copy before flipping through the first few pages. Those lucky enough to get this far will find themselves in for a delectable treat. Auslander’s funny, bleak prose reminded me that there are still some fine writers out there. Go to Nextbook, do a search for Auslander, and you’ll get a great intro to his style. The New Yorker is also printing excerpts from this book. I’m hoping that he’ll come read at my store this Fall. I haven’t even mentioned what the book is about yet. It’s his memoir, of sorts. As he learns that his wife is pregnant, he reflects on his own childhood, growing up in an Orthodox community. His love/hate relationship with God begins at an early age. It sort of made me feel like my own dabblings with religion were just that, dabblings.

The second book that helped drag me back to the rich, literary landscape is Junot Diaz’s forthcoming novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Mao. I loved the stories in his impressive collection Drown and cheered whenever I saw a story of his in the New Yorker. Finally, we get a novel—a good, hefty one at that. Even though the title of the book says it’s about Oscar, a first generation Dominican-American, we also get the stories of his sister, mother, and grandfather, moving around in time and place. The narrator, a friend of the family, addresses the reader directly throughout the book, giving you the feeling that this story is being told to you over a long afternoon on a hot summer day (give me a break, I read it over several hot days). Diaz mixes in lots of Spanish phrases as well as sci-fi and literary references with no explanation. He does include a lot of footnotes, some tongue in cheek, about the reign of Trujillo over the Dominican Republic. If I can quote Matthew Sharpe, the author of one of my favorite books this year Jamestown, who said “this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Diaz.”