I’ve read a lot of books so far in 2012, but two of them, published this past month, stand out: Wild by Cheryl Strayed and City of Bohane by Kevin Barry.

Wild is Strayed’s memoir of hiking the Pacific Crest Trai in 1995l. Before you roll your eyes about another look-at-me-doing-something-unusual-and-getting-a-book-deal-out-of-it-memoir, this one is different. It’s raw and beautiful and if the horse scene doesn’t make you cry then I don’t know what will. I was at the car wash when I read this part. Imagine crying at the car wash. Sometimes she makes really dumb decisions, ones that make you cringe, but it’s her honesty and voice that make this book worth reading.

When you read City of Bohane, don’t expect to know what’s going on for the first twenty pages. Don’t give up! Imagine a sort of Gangs of New York in Ireland in the future. In a version of magical realism, the Irish city of Bohane sometime in the future, is run by a gang called the Fancy. Imagine descriptions of clothing that bring to mind Alexander McQueen except they’re worn by the gangsters of the Fancy. There’s a love story in there and some major violence and Barry’s lyrical language makes it all seem so alive.

Go and read both of these books! I’ll be back to mention some other things I’ve read and liked and some things I’ve cooked later this week.

At its very best, nonfiction is both stylistically beautiful and informative, and can make even the most mundane subjects fascinating. And, frankly, even when it’s imperfectly written it can still be really good. I’ve been thinking about fact that for awhile now, ever since the Times reviewed Tom Mueller’s Extra Virginity and said that that it was a “reminder of why subpar nonfiction is so much better than subpar fiction. With nonfiction at least you can learn something.”

Now, I loved Extra Virginity but I’ll concede that it may not have been a stylistic jewel. It didn’t really need to be: It had a coherent story and a good topic, and I definitely learned a great deal about olives, olive oil, industrial malfeasance, marketing, EU trade policy, the Mediterranean diet, antioxidants, and the history of fat consumption in Northern and Southern Europe. Plus, you know, I got a few looks from people on the train reading a book titled Extra Virginity which was good for a laugh.

There are, unfortunately, plenty of nonfiction books that manage to be merely subpar. The style overwhelms the content, or the content is so poorly organized, or the facts the author is trying to convey are so jumbled, that no matter how fascinating the subject might be at the start. I’m not sure what the problem is with Opium Nation but I’m about ready to give up on it. Even though Afghan heroin, terrorism, and child brides should be fundamentally more thrilling than counterfeit olive oil, Opium Nation manages to make it boring. The author is obviously deeply engaged in the subject, framing it with a narrative of returning to her native land after years of exile in the US. But the book winds up as a mishmash of personal details, a rushed political history, and the disappointment of a grown woman returning to her childhood home to find it rendered unrecognizable by a mixture of actual changes and a change in perspective.

More informative, in fact, are a pair of novels I’ve read recently, both of them (as far as I can tell) impeccably researched and beautifully styled. While the individuals in them are of course not historically accurate, they both illuminate moments in history in a way that is difficult to match in strictly factual writing. The first, River of Smoke, Amitav Ghosh’s sequel to Sea of Poppies is what inspired me to pick up the nonfiction book on opium. Megan has already reviewed it here, but I was impressed by how Ghosh studded the novel with an array of places and languages and cultures. That setting bewilders and enchants the characters in the novel, and it draws the reader along with them. If you want to know about the abuse of drugs and the abuse of imperial power, you could do worse than reading this novel, and better than reading a more dry history of, say, US backing of mujaheddin insurgencies in Afghanistan during the 1970s.

Similarly, The Orphan Master’s Son, despite being fiction, opens a window into North Korea’s totalitarian regime, and into questions of identity, love, redemption, survival, and power. Even if North Korea were not at a critical moment right now, I would recommend this book. Given Great Successor Kim Jong-Un’s still-tenuous grasp on the reins of power there, it’s practically mandatory. It’s definitely left me hungry for more. The next items on my list are likely to come from the Times’ North Korea reading list, which includes fiction (The Orphan Master’s Son and some detective novels set in Pyongyang), researched nonfiction (Nothing to Envy) and memoirs of defectors (This Is Paradise!).

—Mr. Bookdwarf

I’m not a big “jump on the bandwagon” kind of person generally, but this is one I’m leaping onto wholeheartedly. That’s the bandwagon forming for Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, coming on January 10, 2012.

The novel is set in North Korea and is like a hybrid dystopian-realist work of art. Part of why it works so well is the setting. North Korea  is obviously a real country, but the place Johnson describes sounds completely made up. He apparently spent a lot of time researching North Korea and made several trips there in an effort to get the details right, and it shows. The story of the country itself is reflected in the characters.

Pak Jun Do, the protagonist, is the son of a lost mother; his mournful father runs a work camp for orphans. Jun Do comes to the attention of his superiors after he’s trained in the arts of zero light combat, then as a professional kidnapper. Constantly forced to think on his feet, his story zigs and zags all over the place as he tries to stay alive. The story shifts after a daring prison break forces him into a new role,  as the rival to Kim Jong II.

Meanwhile, other regular North Koreans try to keep their heads down and avoid attracting attention; it’s in the interactions Jun Do has with his countrymen that shows the tenderness and beauty still alive and well in the hearts of people . Johnson’s elegant writing highlights the seemingly arbitrary rules and unfamiliar detail of an isolated nation, and makes North Korea come alive. This book is a one-two-three punch to the gut that leaves you reeling.

Culinary school is keeping me very busy! Taking evening classes can be a challenge, especially since I don’t get home until after midnight some nights and then have to wake up ready for work the next day. I’m not reading quite as much as I used to which feels strange but what I’m learning and the fun I have doing it makes the whole enterprise worth doing. If you check out my Flickr page, you can see some of the dishes I’ve been making.

Right now I’m rereading Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. I really want to read the second book in the trilogy River of Smoke but couldn’t remember enough of the characters’ trials and tribulations.  I’m loving it all over again. Ghosh brings such attention to detail I almost feel like I’m at sea when reading.

Hopefully I get used to this new schedule and can find some time to write more here. I’m not giving up!

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin

This wonderful novel takes the voiceless character of Lavinia from Virgil’s Aeneid and creates a whole story for her. Her mother, crazed by the deaths of her sons, fixates on marrying Lavinia to her nephew Turnus, king of Rutuli. Before long Aeneas and the fleeing Trojans arrive on the shores. Fulfilling an oracle, King Latinus decrees that his daughter will marry Aeneas which provokes a war between the Trojans and the Rutulians. Caught between all of this we hear Lavinia’s voice, trying to navigate her own destiny. Le Guin gives us glimpses of Aeneas the man rather than the hero from the treasured epic. It’s definitely one of the best novels based on the ancient epics I’ve read in a long time.

The Ghost Map by Steve Johnson:
This one’s been out for awhile, but it’s got everything to please a nonfiction reader: Titillating details about the filth and oddities of Victorian London, a real understanding of science and the history of science, and relevance to amateur or professional students of contemporary city life, epidemiology, public health, and even counterterrorism. It details how a doctor and a minister teamed up to figure out that cholera was spread by contaminated water, and how they convinced others of the fact with what is now an iconic map of deaths and proximity to one particular well. A word of warning: If you’re prone to hypochondria, don’t read this while you’re sick at home with a stomach bug.

King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher:
The new effort from Philip Hensher is not perfect, but it’s pretty close. Like his previous novel, it follows a circuitous path through the lives of small-town England. Unlike The Northern Clemency, which chronicled a family in a dying coal city in the seventies and eighties, this one is set in a small but prosperous community in contemporary Devon, with an even wider range of characters.

There’s hardly any point in outlining the plot of the book, which meanders the way the life of the town does: A young girl goes missing, and the town gossips and worries; a college professor fights with her department head; a couple of men plan an orgy; a couple of teenagers fall in love; the neighborhood watch requests additional closed-circuit cameras.

The real point of the book is the way that privacy, and personal lives, intersect and are interrupted. Some of these interruptions are invited, when people meet, and get to know each other, and become friends. Others are annoying but inevitable in a small town: The neighbors know a great deal about each other, so gossip spreads quickly, and for the most part, harmlessly. But Hensher focuses as well on the way that surveillance and suspicion tend to drive a wedge into the heart of communities. Importantly, he does it with a linguistic style that is unmatched for beauty and grace in contemporary writing.

While almost all of the characters–even the most horrible ones–are well-rounded, the Neighborhood Watch leader is disappointingly one-dimensional. The closing vignette of the novel, in which several characters share a convivial epiphany about closed-circuit cameras, also falls kind of flat. And, OK, there are a couple places where the style goes from baroque to overblown. I could imagine that Hemingway fans would not appreciate all the adjectives Hensher uses.

Still, this is handily the best novel I’ve read in a long time. Start reading. Don’t worry about the circuitous route the plot is taking. You’re in the hands of a master stylist, and you’re going to be shown beautifully rendered portraits of people, their town, and their nation at the beginning of the 21^st century.

—Aaron Weber

Long before he became well known as a writer and producer for the justly-acclaimed television series The Wire, George Pelecanos had been writing some fine mysteries. This August, with The Cut, he’s introducing his newest character, Spero Lucas. An Iraq war vet, Lucas has set up an unlicensed investigation business in D.C.. He specializes in retrieving stolen property, taking forty percent cut of what he recovers. A crime boss, currently in jail awaiting trial, hires him to find several stolen packages for him. It seems like an easy job until the bodies start piling up.

Lucas at first seems like an idealistic young man, but he has a tough edge, honed by his years overseas at war. His multi-racial family grounds him when he gets carried away with his work. Pelecanos’s has created a compelling sort-of-hero, one who gets the job done but maybe doesn’t get the girl in the end. The sex and violence keep the pages turning right to the end, and I’m already looking forward to more.

August has been relatively quiet here. I finished buying books for the Fall season. Now I finally get a chance to clean up my office which seems empty as many of my co-workers take vacations. Of course this doesn’t mean that I stopped reading of course. To the contrary, I have now finished some of Fall’s biggest books.

• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: I’ll just say this. This book is excellent. I don’t know that I’ve read a better coming of age novel in some time now. Eugenides eye for the inner lives of folks seems masterful in this one. I can’t wait to see how it’s reviewed.
• King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher: I followed one truly excellent with another. Hensher wowed me with his Booker nominated The Northern Clemency in 2008. He returns with another tour de force centered around the town of Hanmouth in the west of England. Here he explores the inner lives of the townspeople, what is public and what is so hidden that even those closest to them don’t know about. It’s a remarkable work.
• Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron: This novel follows Jean Patrick Nkuba, a talented Rwandan runner, as he navigates the tensions in his country that constantly threaten to explode–until they finally do. Since you know historically what happens, the amount of tension just keeps climbing as you read on and on. Though I found this novel a bit hyperbolic at times, I found it pretty engrossing.
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward: Why I followed one traumatic book with another is beyond me. This one is set during the twelve days before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf. It’s a rich novel about a poor family in Mississippi struggling to get by. Fourteen year old Esch finds out she’s pregnant while her brother Skeetah can’t seem to keep his pitbull puppies alive. Her older brother Randall tries to get money for basketball camp, while the youngest Junior suffers from the lack of their mother, who died giving birth to him. They’re devotion to one another can’t save them. It’s bleak but a wonderfully written debut novel.

The Chairs are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City by Mischa Glouberman and Sheila Heti

Misha Glouberman is basically a raconteur and this book is essentially composed of blog-length riffs about an incredibly wide variety of topics. Not a lot of writers can get away with a format like this, but this book is largely successful at doing what the author tries to do in classes and in life: Sparking ideas and then letting them wander off on their own in unexpected ways.

Still, while many parts of the book work as very short essays, some of them feel incomplete. For example, in a piece about neighborhood activism and negotiation, Glouberman relates how he got to know his neighbors, organize them, and bring up their mutual concerns with a city councilor, who helped build a win-win solution for their dispute with a nearby bar/restaurant.

But in the process of talking very convincingly about the importance of win-win “mutual gains” negotiation strategies, the nature of city governance, and zoning, he mentions the conflicts of gentrification and the dangers of overlooking people who live in the parts of the city where you go to play. And then he drops it and moves on to the next subject. So, the one restaurant got a patio if it promised to cut off the late-night DJ, but your blue-collar neighborhood is still full of drunk, belligerent, noisy yuppies on weekends? How is that a win-win?

Still, even while it falls short of completeness, The Chairs are Where the People Go is thought-provoking, and that’s what Glouberman is aiming for.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War  by Tony Horowitz

Now, at the war’s 150th anniversary, Tony Horwitz has a beautifully-researched biography of Brown, his time, and his movement. This book is not as lighthearted or amusing as Horwitz’ study of civil war buffs and re-enactors, “Confederates in the Attic,” but he’s still a fascinating and engaging writer.