When She Woke by Hilary Jordan: Whereas Mudbound explored forbidden love between races in the post World War II era, When She Woke imagines a love affair between a renowned religious leader and one of his followers in a dystopian world caught up in religious extremism. I liked the intensity through most of the book, though the plot loses course about two thirds of the way toward the end. A fine sophmore novel.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead: I wish I had more time to write about this incredibly written not-about-zombies zombie novel. In a world infected by a plague, the novel follows one man nicknamed Mark Spitz for three days in Manhattan as he and his crew clear out the more innocuous infected ones, the “stragglers”, transfixed by the earlier lives. Ultimately we have to ask ourselves if we’re already living in a zombie world. Mr. Bookdwarf also liked this one. He says it’s funnier than The Road, but the humor masks the fact that it’s even bleaker in some ways.

The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh: In preparation for reading the second book the trilogy after Sea of Poppies, I’m reading Ghosh’s backlist. Turns out he turned his hand to scifi and won an Arthur C. Clarke award his efforts in 1997. A computer programmer discovers an aged ID card of a long-lost acquaintance , which draws him into an adventure that brings us back and forth through time. The history of malaria never seemed so interesting, and it’s great to see where Ghosh came from while you’re waiting for your preorder of River of Smoke to ship.

Damascus by Joshua Mohr: A wacky cast of characters all who hang out at a bar called Damascus in the Mission District in San Francisco inhabit this novel. Mohr wants to explore feelings about the war in Iraq and uses this setting to get behind a variety of people, including the alcoholic bar-owner, his outspoken niece, her artist friend, and an veteran discharged for a non-combat injury. Though the narrator’s voiceover gets a little wearisome at times, the characters make this novel sparkle.

Pao by Kerry Young: I hadn’t realized that there was a large Chinese population in Jamaica, but this novel of a Chinese man’s coming of age is set there. Pao moves to the island with his mother and brother after the Chinese Civil War and rises to become the godfather  of Kingston’s Chinatown. Though the rackets are small, Pao possesses a sensitive temperament that makes him want to do right by people. We see Jamaica move from post-colonial rule all the way to the Rastafarian revolution. Amidst all of this, Chinatown’s residents must find their own role to play.

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam: I loved Anam’s debut novel A Golden Age back in 2008, about Rehana Haque and her children’s experiences during the Bangladeshi War for independence in 1971. In her follow-up, the children, Maya and her brother Sohail, must face the challenges of peace. Maya trains in medicine, devoting herself to the care of women raped and used during the war. Sohail, meanwhile, chooses a religious path that alienates both his sister and mother. Anam has written an thoughtful exploration of what it means to assimilate and to believe.

There have been many 9/11 novels in the past years approaching the tragedy from all kinds of contexts. Amy Waldman’s takes a direct approach with her forthcoming novel The Submission poking directly at the emotions stirred up by the rebuilding process.

Two years after the attack, a jury convenes to pick a winning design from hundreds of anonymous submissions for the memorial at Ground Zero. Although the jury is made up mostly of artists and critics, a wealthy chairman in it for the prestige leads the group. Also on the jury is widow Claire Burwell, whose husband died in the attacks.

As the representative for the victims’ families, Claire’s input carries significant weight and she champions a design called The Garden. Controversy arises when the anonymous winner is revealed to be  American Muslim Mohammed “Mo” Khan, an ambitious architect known for his minimalist style.

The resulting predictable firestorm threatens to tear apart the nation. Politicians, journalists, activists, and the victims’ families all push their own agendas; xenophobia rises against Muslims and others. Meanwhile Mo refuses to withdraw his design nor to explain its meaning, which allows muck-raking journalists to cast it as an Islamic garden of paradise.

No one looks good here, but that makes it all the more real. Waldman handles the inner conflict of her panorama of characters with aplomb, and I found myself deeply uncomfortable at times especially reading the naked anti-Islamic diatribes, coming from characters I also sympathize with at the same time.

Grief can change one’s perspective, and Waldman brilliantly illustrates how the grief of a nation can take on new form.

I’ve been trying to find the time to write a proper review of Amor Towles’s debut novel Rules of Civility because I think it highly deserves accolades. Sadly time is in short supply these days as I’m in the middle of the Fall buying season. I just wanted to give a short plug for this amazing novel.

It’s a wonderful portrait of late 1930s New York. I felt like I had stepped back in time. I was so inspired, I cut my hair short again! On the last night of 1937, Katey Konent and her roommate Eve end up at a Greenwich Village jazz bar where they meet Tinker Grey, a handsome well to do banker. The chance meeting sets up the rest of the novel. You see the wealthy and privileged, many who abuse their positions in society, and the young working class trying to eke out a living in the city. Towles brings an immense depth to his characters. I was sad to finish this remarkable book. The basic things to know about this novel: it’s fantastic, it’s set in the late 1930s in New York, I loved it.

How do you feel about rhyme? Personally, I don’t much like it. It throws me off, makes me think more about the fact that I’m reading a poem and less about what I’m reading. A slant rhyme, some alliteration, fine. But a straight-on rhyme of two words at the end of a line? No. Kay Ryan makes me reconsider that rejection. Read A Hundred Bolts of Satin, with its incredibly short lines and the rhyming of “back,” “track,” “unpack.” The words call out to you – not least because some of them are all alone on their own lines – but also because that’s about all the rhyme there is in the poem. Three words out of sixty-six line up like that and you have to think again. I’m still not going to start rhyming in my own poems. But Ryan’s got something going here that’s well worth examining. And Say Uncle costs less than six bucks, meaning those economical lines are also economically priced.

Charles Simic is obviously a master: More than 18 books of poems, poet laureate, all that. But read all of That Little Something and you’ll notice that he does seem to clench his fists a lot. He is an unsettled person, and his poems unnerve me.

Joseph Legaspi’s book, Imago, has a strong flavor of the author’s childhood in the Phillippines, and the cruelties and oddities of childhood anywhere in the world. You get a feel for the suffocating heat of a small rural hometown, for the way sibling rivalry and affection shade into violence, for a child’s realization that parents are fallible. Several poems focus on the Phillipine ritual of circumcision at puberty, which in its strangeness to a western audience forces the recognition that all the rituals of adolescence are strange and painful. I had to stop and shake my head after a lot of these poems, and it took me more than a week of train-rides to read them all, but they’re very good.

—Aaron W.

I’m just back from BEA-Book Expo America-held in New York each year, where publishers push their Fall books and booksellers and librarians wander the aisles like drunk sailors on shore leave. It’s always a good time. I meet up with old friends, eat some good food, and spend time looking at books.

One of the reasons I love this trip is the four hour train ride down from Boston. Nothing is more civilized than showing up 20 minutes before departure, picking up your ticket, and waiting for the lovely sign to click up your gate number. You board, pick a seat on the left side of the train so you can see the oceanside landscape once you hit the coast. And you get four hours of uninterrupted reading time. I chose The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt, a much hyped western from Ecco out this month.

Set against the California Gold Rush, the famed hitmen Eli and Charlie Sisters travel across the frontier from Oregon to San Francisco on a contract from a man known only as The Commodore. Their journey is a little like the Odyssey, as the brothers encounter a variety of startling people during their search. Things turn out differently when they finally find their target. Narrated by the younger brother Eli, the cowboy tropes fall away with often humorous asides. As you learn how the pair became killers, the illusion of the strong cowboy killer gives way to reveal men damaged by circumstances. Dewitt’s nuanced writing, in particular the cadence of the characters’ speech, make this a fantastic read.

When we got Lucy back in March, I never imagined it would impact my reading as much as it has. It started small. I brought home Cesar Millan’s How to Raise the Perfect Dog. We knew nothing about raising a puppy. Of course, it didn’t stop there; I found myself perusing Dog Training for Dummies, The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of Skete and 30 Days to a Well Mannered Dog by Tamar Geller. I even dipped my toe into the dog memoir well.

Much like parenting books, there are fads in the dog training world. In my parents day, you’d housebreak a dog by punishing mistakes. These days, Cesar Millan’s detractors contend that even his relatively milder negative reinforcements are too easily misapplied. The majority of the new training books focus on entirely or almost entirely positive reinforcement: Interrupting, ignoring or isolating a dog is generally as stern as it gets.  The idea for all of them is to understand the dog and its instincts, and use those to your advantage, instead of regarding dog training as a battle of wills.

If you want a basic dog training book, Dog Training for Dummies by Jack Volhard is your book. It was actually better written than I thought it would be, too. Lots of helpful advice, although it does make a place for the more negative training systems like choke chains and prong collars.

How to Raise the Perfect Dog: Through Puppyhood and Beyond by Cesar Millan: The Dog Whisperer’s guide actually follows raising four different puppies of different breeds. Millan, too, has some good advice about using your dog’s instincts to get the behaviors you want. However, he’s got his own set of drawbacks as well.

I didn’t realize it until I got a dog, but some of Millan’s advice has become controversial. I mentioned that many trainers criticize his correction techniques, but they also disagree with his entire explanation of pack dynamics. Research on dominance in dog packs, and the popular concept of the alpha dog, goes back to the 1940s, and was popularized by the Monks of Skete in the 1970s, but it was fundamentally flawed.

There are, in fact, a lot of misconceptions about dogs, what they think, how they see, and smell, and act, and why. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra  Horowitz researches, explains, and corrects, starting with the origins of dogs as domesticated wolves. That’s where I understood why Millan, despite his celebrity and apparent success, isn’t necessarily the guide you want to use for your own dog.

The original research on wolves was not conducted by studying wolves in their natural habitat and their native packs. Instead, researchers put a group of wolves from different packs together into a single enclosure and watched as conflict subsided into a sort of uneasy order. The observations from those studies led to training that advised humans to achieve dominance over their dogs with leash corrections and “alpha rolls.” But wolves are not dogs, and even if they were, a functional wolf pack is not a strict dominance hierarchy. More recent studies have found that a wolf pack is more like a family, and that with dogs, confrontational behavior can be disruptive rather than helpful.

Of course, there will be a million more dog books this year. Ever since Marley & Me, publishers keep trotting out the dog memoirs hoping for another bestseller. I did read one of the most recent entries: Bad Dog: A Love Story, Martin Kuhn’s tale of alcoholism and his recovery centered around his 95 pound out-of-control Bernese mountain dog. It was predictable but sweet. I’m not sure how many more of the memoirs I want to read, but I do like reading the training manuals. I hope someone finds this helpful.

How often do you read book you love and realize that the author lives in your neighborhood? Well, it’s happened to me! Molly Birnbaum’s terrific and smart memoir Season to Taste, about losing her sense of smell after being struck by a car, entranced me this week. Turns out she lives here in Cambridge.

Towards the end of her four years at Brown, Molly realized that she loved food more than anything else and applied to the Culinary Institute of America. The, shortly before leaving for school, a car struck her while she crossed the street. Her descriptions of the accident made me feel the intensity of the situation and the pain she felt. It wasn’t until months later during recovery, that she realized she couldn’t smell anything.

I learned a lot this week about our sense of smell. For example, serious depression is a common occurrence in those who have lost their sense of smell and vice versa. And although being unable to smell greatly reduces the ability to taste, the basic tastes like sweetness and saltiness are still preserved. It’s fascinating stuff. After what I would call a mourning period, Molly begins to explore the science of olfaction. And she begins to smell again.

What I loved about Season to Taste is Molly’s attitude. She never seems to feel sorry for herself and this is no indulgent look-at-my-life-isn’t-it-so-interesting memoir that seem to come across my desk so often these days. Instead she highlights something traumatic that happened to her and details in her warm, compassionate voice her journey through it all.

I’ve been quite the busy beaver this week. I finished reading two novels, one good, one really good.

The good one is Jennifer Egan’s highly praised A Visit from the Goon Squad. When it came out in hardcover, people exclaimed what a wonderful, astute, and remarkable collection of connected stories Egan had written. Or was it a novel? Or both? Accolades came as did the prizes. I’m not going to write a lengthy review here. I’ll just say that I thought it was good. It didn’t grab me the way it has other people I know who have read it, but I still liked it. I think it was me,  not the book and I’ll stop there.

The really good book I read is a debut novel coming from Ecco Press called Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson. It’s about two boys in Vermont: Jude who was adopted by two hippies at birth, and Teddy, the son of an alcoholic  mother and vanished father. They’re young punks in a small town who spend most of the time getting fucked up on anything they get their hands on. When Teddy overdoses one night, Jude moves to New York City to live with his pot-selling father where he becomes involved in the straight edge scene there. Jude becomes close to Johnny, Teddy’s older brother, a leading figure in the scene. With their new friend Eliza, Jude tried to amend the past with militant clean living, but problems arise of course. While the plot becomes more complex, the finely drawn characters keep you plugged into the book. She recreates not only a time-period but a smallish movement within it with such skill. I could quibble about the very last chapter of the book, but it didn’t detract enough for me to really care. This is a strong debut from a writer I’m going to keep my eye on.

P.S. Eleanor Henderson will be appearing at my store on June 21st. Yay!

Aaron, aka Mr. Bookdwarf wrote some notes on things he read on our vacation to Costa Rica and asked me to share them.

Siberian Education by Nicolin Lilin: This was the disappointment of the bunch. It wasn’t bad, but it definitely didn’t stand up as well compared to the others. Perhaps it was the translation – it’s written by a Siberian-Ossetian living in Italy, working as a tattoo artist. It’s definitely got some amazing details about what it’s like to grow up in a society that’s somewhere between a cult and a crime family. But the author is digressive, and lacks insight into anything other than his own specific experience. We see little of the neighboring crime families, all of whom apparently have different traditions, and there’s little to no understanding of the role women play in the organization. Still, I expect this book will interest anyone who has paged through the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, or wanted a little more detail about the racketeering shown in movies like Eastern Promises.

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson: Absolutely fantastic. If you ever thought your parents were weird, and I know you have, then you need to read this book. Annie and Buster are the adult children of two performance artists, a key part of their work. After something of a failure to launch, the two return home, looking for solace, only to find themselves roped into yet another eccentric performance. The Family Fang is a compelling story of growing up and distinguishing yourself from your parents, and finding your own voice as an artist. It’s also wildly hilarious. Everyone knows love makes you dumb, but when Annie gets a mash note in the form of a sestina with key words like “locomotive,” we feel acutely both the foolishness we go to for love, and the awkwardness of being loved without loving in return. Everyone can say someone doesn’t get much play, but “can count the number of times… on one hand, and still have fingers left over for elaborate shadow puppets” is prize-winning. Four of us read this book, and read enough of it out loud to each other that the fifth has a good feel for it as well.