I’ve been reading a lot of Spring galleys that I thought I would share with you. I’ve heard people who have been in the book business say that they thought this current season the best they’ve ever seen. This might be true. It’s certainly the best I’ve seen in my ten years, but what about the season that has to follow? I feel bad for the Spring books, forced to come on stage like the understudy. The Fall of 2009 is great, but let’s pretend for the Spring books that they won’t be compared. There are some gems, trust me!

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste is surely one of these gems. Set in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the cusp of the revolution, the novel follows one family’s tumultuous time. In 1973, a television program revealed the true effects of the drought and famine on the Wollo region of Ethiopia, destabilizing Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime. It also allowed growing popularity of the socialists. Hailu, a skilled doctor in the capital, must shepherd his family through this rough era. His older son Yonas, a university professor, feels impotent against the violence, trying to protect his wife and daughter. The younger son Dawit meanwhile feels the fiery convictions of the college age. When soldiers request Hailu treat an obvious torture victim–she must not die, he is told–he makes a decision that will change his family’s fate. Their tragic story makes Mengiste’s debut novel powerful and gripping.

I don’t think I was alone when I was surprised to see Joshua Ferris’ debut novel Then We Came to the End nominated for the National Book Award in 2007. I mean surprised in a pleasant, excited way. Here was a fresh new voice and it was being recognized. Ferris returns in January with a new novel, The Unnamed, which couldn’t be more different from his first book. Attorney Tim Farnsworth thought he had recovered from a mysterious illness that causes him to walk to the point of exhaustion, but it’s returned and not getting better. His wife Jane does everything she can think of to keep him safe. Packing backpacks with GPS for him so she can eventually find him. The illness affects his daughter Becka as she is forced to take care of him over time. Ferris keeps the suspense up. Is he getting better? Will he go home again? Plus there’s the tragedy of Tim and Jane’s marriage. They truly love one another, yet he can’t stop the constant walking. It’s heartbreaking.

The last book I’ll mention is by one of my favorite writers William Boyd called Ordinary Thunderstorms. Climatologist Adam Kindred is back in England looking for work. A small good deed puts hurls him into the world of assassination, conspiracy, and the underworld. It comes across at first like a straight forward thriller. Yet Boyd uses the plot to examine different aspects of English life. Boyd tells the story from various characters’ viewpoints, including the head of a multimillion dolllar pharmaceutical firm, a prostitute living in public housing, a hired killer, and of course Adam Kindred. It succeeds in certain areas, fails in others. I don’t think it’s Boyd’s best work, but even his less successful efforts are better than most.

It’s a very nasty day here in Cambridge, all billowy and cold, down to the bones cold. I’ve been quiet again. I’m just not reading much that excites me these days. Right now I’m reading Cleaving by Julie Powell. I’m not sure why though. Trust me to say that I’m not here to trash her or her book. There are plenty of other internet trolls to do that. I’ll just say that I’m not enjoying it. It’s pretty much a rip off of Elizbeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, but with a much less likable more self-involved author. It’s her memoir about her crappy life after Julie & Julia. She and her husband separate, get back together, she’s sleeping with someone else, she discovers she’s into bondage, she learns some butchering skills too. That’s the thread that’s supposed to tie it all together somehow. Also, she travels. See? Elizabeth Gilbert. So maybe I am trashing it after all.

I can’t stop reading it for some reason either. I think it’s because I want to know if it gets any better or if she has some sort of great breakthrough that makes her likable. I don’t know. I’m just hoping I can finish it tonight.

Also, Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss is totally worth reading by the way.  You might have read some of her essays in Harper’s. She’s got a few of her essays listed on her website. Check them out.

I read these two large books back to back: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. One of the few things they have in common is that they’re both shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. One is an exploration of Tudor politics through the eyes of one of the major players, Thomas Cromwell. The other follows a well-known writer and her family through the end of the 19th century into the 20th. Both novels involve a complex cast of characters.

I read Wolf Hall first. It took me a while to get into it, but once there, I couldn’t put it down. Even though we know what’s going to happen historically, the inner life of Thomas Cromwell drew me into the events in a way I never expected. Usually portrayed as a sympathetic figure, Mantel’s Thomas More seems more life like. He’s a pompous jerk. Mantel’s Cromwell, while always likeable, is a fully fleshed out character. His heartbreak over the loss of his family to disease was heart wrenching. Cromwell came to prominence through will-power, not family connections. He’s an outsider, constantly taunted by the noblemen for his shabby beginnings. I’m not sure what other novels to compare. Mantel has written something entirely different, historical, imaginative, and simply wonderful.

I dove right into The Children’s Book. It’s quite easy to do. Byatt recreates the years between 1895 and 1919 so passionately and with such detail, that a friend also reading this book, wrote out a cast of characters for us to make it easier. She weaves together the fictional people seamlessly with historical figures such as Oscar Wilde, Rupert Brooke, and Emma Goldman.We begin with Olive Wellwood and her husband Humphrey. She is a well-known children’s book writer, he a banker. As part of the Fabian society, they’re inclined toward equality for all, which includes treating their children as equals. There’s also Humphrey’s brother Basil and his wife Katharina, who don’t share their socialist beliefs, and their children. The social circle arcs out to include some writers, artists and radical academics. The entire novel brims with the arts–theater, pottery, the Arts & Craft movement, painting, poetry, etc. The last third of the novel deals with World War I, the rude awakening to the upper class English. Many of the people you’ve read about die. Byatt was quite ruthless with that, but she had to be I imagine.
I cannot compare these two magisterial novels. I urge people not to let their size intimidate them. They’re two of the best books I’ve read so far this year. With more time to reflect, I imagine they’ll take their place in my favorite top 20 books ever.

Due to the appendix nonsense, I’m very behind at work, which is why I haven’t been blogging. I want to take a minute to mention two great books, however, because they’re so fantastic: Brooklyn by Colm Toibin and Let the Great World Spin by Column McCann. Pretty much all they have to do with each other is that they’re set in New York. Brooklyn follows an Irish woman who reluctantly moves to the United States after World War II to look for work. It’s a quiet but beautifully written novel about the immigrant experience. McCann’s novel on the other hand has a central experience that ties together a series of stories. It’s a risky literary device, but he pulls it off. It’s the dark, gritty New York of the 70s. These might be two of the best books I’ve read so far in 2009.

I’m so very excited because Steve who runs the Used department here just gave me copies of not only The Epicure’s Lament by Kate Christensen, but her other two books, In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane, as well! I have a lot of reading to do. I suppose I always do.

I liked Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi so much that I picked up a copy of Yoga for People who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. It’s an odd but enjoyable book, hard to classify in a genre. There are some brilliant observations and wonderful sentences. Here is his description of a new friend who had the balcony opposite his:

Nick was from California and I wasted no time in letting him know that I was the author of several books, none of which was available from the English bookshop on Via del Moro. He was teaching English in Rome—but he was also working on a short story, possibly a series of short stories, linked in some way that was of no interest to me or anyone else.

Great stuff.

I had such good luck pulling the two year old Kate Christensen ARC off my shelves, I went back to look around for more hidden gems. I had almost forgotten about Socialism is Great by Lijia Zhang, which came from Atlas & Co in hardcover.

In Socialism is Great Zhang tells what it’s like to work at a missile factory in a job given to her by her mother. She hates her job and struggles under China’s stifling state system. At the time China was undergoing a transformation of its own, opening up its borders and making reforms. Each chapter is sort of a vignette. She details how people tattle on one another to gain favor with those higher up and how the younger generation discovers music and literature as a gateway. The whole thing makes me so glad we’re not communist or at least their version of Communism. All the piddling rules—hair must be a certain length, the standard outfits, etc–make me cringe. And how they expected people to believe the party line. It seems like such a stupid system, just nonsensical. I know it’s more complicated than this, but the whole things just makes me want to roll my eyes. Zhang works hard taking extra classes and learning languages to get out of her cookie cutter life. I’m not finished with the book but I like how she goes against the grain. She rebels against the status quo as much as possible. I’ll see how it all turns out in these last pages.

I recently finished reading The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, a young-ish Colombian writer. I had never heard of him before, but with the popularity of Bolano, publishers are looking to South America for more literature. The book follows Gabriel Santoro, a journalist living in Bogota, over several different periods in his life. First, he makes up with his famous father after years of not speaking. Santoro had written a book, A Life in Exile, about a family friend who emigrated from Germany right before the war. His father wrote a damning review which caused the breach. When his father has open heart surgery, he comes back to his father only to lose him several months later in a tragic car accident on . After his father’s death, he investigates his father’s last days finding hidden secrets going back 40 years. The entire book looks into the dark secrets of Colombian history.

Now, I have to admit here that I knew very little of Colombian history. I turned to the internet and read up on the colonization followed by independence led by Bolivar, the various civil conflicts including La Violencia, and especially what happened right before and during WWII. Apparently Austrian and Germans who opposed Hitler were treated the same as Nazi sympathizers, but once President Santos sided with the Allies, the Nazi sympathizers were interned and had their property confiscated. This plays a large role in the plot of The Informers. What’s also interesting about this book is how not just this piece of history but what happened after the war, Colombia’s years of violence between two political parties, also influences the story. Vasquez doesn’t tiptoe around it. He wants to explore how a country’s dark history influences its citizens.

I also found it embarrassing how little I knew about South American history. I knew nothing about Colombia until I read this book and though you don’t necessarily need to in order to read it, it certainly helps. The 1994 assassination of Andres Escobar in Medellin for example was mentioned in the novel as a huge event in their history, something that left everyone glued to their televisions for information. There are several theories about why he was killed but regardless this moment lives large in the Colombian mind, at least according to this book, and yet I knew nothing about it. It’s funny how a novel can make you follow these paths.