Don't Miss Lists and Other Reading Resources

January - March 2009

Aslam, Nadeem. THE WASTED VIGIL.

The main character in this novel is an elderly English doctor living in Afghanistan, whose Afghan wife was forced to cut off his hand and was then stoned to death for marrying him.

Auster, Paul. MAN IN THE DARK.

August Brill, an elderly retired book critic with insomnia, lies awake in his daughter's home, making up a story about Owen Brick, a magician who is transported to an alternate reality in which the United States is in the middle of a civil war; Brick's mission is to kill the man who started the war, August Brill.

Barnes, Kim. A COUNTRY CALLED HOME.

In this novel set in the 1960's, a poor young doctor and his upper class wife leave a comfortable life in Connecticut to buy a farm in Idaho; the farm is run down, the doctor has no skills to run it, and the wife becomes desperately lonely and unhappy.

Bynum, Sarah Shun-Lien. MS. HEMPEL CHRONICLES.

These eight linked stories reveal the life and personality of a young middle-school teacher who is just out of school herself.

Cain, Chelsea. SWEETHEART.

In this sequel to "Heartsick", a police detective, with a close relationship to a serial killer who had tortured him, tries to recapture her after she escapes from prison; meanwhile, a reporter investigates a U.S. Senator who had raped his teenage babysitter.

Clark, Martin. THE LEGAL LIMIT.

In this legal thriller, a man named Mason sees his brother Gates kill another man, and the two of them agree to keep silent; years later, Gates, convicted of a different crime, tries to save himself by accusing Mason, now a prestigious attorney, of committing the murder.

Davidson, Andrew. THE GARGOYLE.

A drug addicted pornographic film star, in the hospital recovering from serious burns suffered in a car crash, meets a fellow patient, a schizophrenic sculptress of gargoyles, who gradually convinces him they have been lovers in previous lives.

Fulton, Alice. THE NIGHTINGALES OF TROY: STORIES OF A FAMILY'S CENTURY.

Ten linked stories portray the lives of four generations of women in the Garrahan family throughout the 20th century.

Hogan, Linda. PEOPLE OF THE WHALE.

A member of a West Coast Indian tribe joins the Army, is sent to Vietnam, deserts, and lives as a rice farmer. Ten years later, he returns to his wife and the son he's never met, to take part in a supposedly traditional, but actually fraudulent, whale hunt.

Johnson, Diane. LULU IN MARRAKECH.

In this modern espionage novel and comedy of manners, Lulu Sawyer, a CIA agent, comes to Morocco to reconnect with her wealthy English boyfriend and to trace the flow of Western money to radical Islamic groups.

Kneale, Matthew. WHEN WE WERE ROMANS.

This story is told by a nine-year old boy, whose mother takes him and his little sister from their London home to Rome, where he mixes the details of her breakdown with his own versions of ancient Roman history.

Kureishi, Hanif. SOMETHING TO TELL YOU.

A successful middle-aged London psychoanalyst still longs for his high school girlfriend and carries a guilty secret about her, despite the importance of his ex-wife and 12 year old son in his life.

Neville, Katherine. THE FIRE: A NOVEL.

In this sequel to the mystical/historical thriller, "The Eight", a young woman who is a former chess prodigy seeks a legendary antique chess set, which when assembled spells out the secrets of immortality.

Petterson, Per. TO SIBERIA.

In this novel by a Norwegian author, a young woman describes her childhood and adolescence in a small Danish town in the 1930's. With her parents unresponsive and her beloved brother joining the underground in World War II, she dreams of escaping to Siberia, where she imagines she would be happy.

Piazza, Tom. CITY OF REFUGE.

This novel tells the story of two families in New Orleans whose lives are disrupted by Hurricane Katrina; the white family leaves town and eventually settles elsewhere, while the black family stays in New Orleans, and tries to cope with the disaster.

Prose, Francine. GOLDENGROVE.

A 13-year-old girl tries to come to terms with the drowning death of the older sister she had idolized; while her parents are distracted by their grief, she launches into a dangerous relationship with her sister's boyfriend.

Proulx. Annie. FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS: WYOMING STORIES 3.

This is the third volume of short stories the author has written about her adopted home, Wyoming, a state whose rugged landscape dwarfs the human beings in her stories.

Reyn, Irina. WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K.

In this modern, American retelling of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, a young Russian Jewish woman, who moved with her family to New York as a child, enters a loveless marriage with a wealthy man, becomes bored, and has a disastrous affair with another man.

Self, Will. THE BUTT: AN EXIT STRATEGY.

In this satirical farce, a tourist on an island vacation flicks a cigarette butt off his hotel balcony onto the head of another tourist, setting off a string of unfortunate and wild events.

Tinti, Hannah. THE GOOD THIEF: A NOVEL .

In this lively and blackly comic novel set in 19th century New England, a one-handed orphan, who is himself a natural thief, is adopted by a swindler and con-artist.

Wittenborn, Dirk. PHARMAKON.

A psychologist at Yale in the 1950's conducts laboratory experiments with a hallucinogen discovered in New Guinea, which leads to one of the student subjects committing violent murders.

Yun, Ch'oe. THERE A PETAL SILENTLY FALLS.

This is a collection of deeply felt and beautifully written short stories by a Korean author.

MORE FROM MADREADS: Book News and Reviews from Madison Public Library

Madison Public Library librarians review a new book every day on our blog, MADreads. Get ideas on new books to read, and share your thoughts with us.

Winter’s Bone

Daniel Woodrell writes dark, unflinching tales about the rural poor, in a style he calls “country noir”. Not the slightest bit kitschy or sentimental, Woodrell’s beautiful writing in this sad and violent book caught me completely off-guard. He has created one of the most memorable teenage characters I have ever discovered in fiction — and her story is spectacularly readable and rewardingly provocative.

Winter’s Bone, set in the Missouri Ozarks, is populated with modern hillbillies: jobless people who are desperately poor and living in rundown trailers and ramshackle houses, with methamphetamine labs replacing backwoods moonshine stills. The Dolly family has deep roots in the Rathlin Valley, and almost all of those roots are tangled up with the wrong side of the law.

The heroine, sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly, is searching for her father, Jessup, a crank cooker who jumped bail after posting the family house as part of his court bond. Ree has one week to track down her father or her family (Ree, her mentally ill mother, and her 8 and 10-year-old brothers) will be left homeless.

Ree’s beloved Mom, with “her mind broke and the parts scattered”, is rendered near-catatonic with morning medications and only slightly more lucid from evening ones. Two little brothers are hungry and needy and in danger of following the Dolly tradition of being “dead to wonder by age twelve.” The boys missed out on their parents’ better years, when they were still physically and mentally present enough to actually parent. Ree is the only parent the boys have ever known; teaching them to shoot, to hunt, to cook, to box, to wash their fragile mama’s hair. Survival skills both harsh and kind. She also shows them pictures, teaching them about the years back, when their mother was beautiful and vibrant, when their father was present.

This is a violent, dark, mean tale. There is no sugar-coating here: it almost all hurts but is redeemed by tiny moments of kindness, by the gentleness of the roughest characters. There are some laugh-aloud funny bits, that sweeten things up a bit, but it is not a book for the squeamish. Drugs are neither glorified nor vilified, they are part of the story. Bad people do good things, good folks do wrong. Messages are left for the reader to sort out.

Woodrell’s beautiful phrasing, his ear for the language of the Ozarks and for describing things most of us can barely fathom, let alone articulate, raises this brief novel up. It is a powerful book! Weird, rough and strangely poetic, this is a book that will give you a lot to think about. The Dolly clan also appears in Woodrell’s earlier book, Give Us a Kiss.

Barbara – Alicia Ashman