Reads
for 2014 (Quotes from LitLovers.com)
January
2014 - Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter, 2012 352 pp.
The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian
coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent
waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a
vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns,
an American starlet, and she is dying. And
the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man
shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he
last saw at his hotel decades earlier.
February 2014 - The
Cellist of Sarajevo
Steven Galloway, 2008 256 pp.
The story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme
fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in
their midst. One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people
as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow
where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the
twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the
only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact
that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and
worthwhile gives the cellist hope.
March
2014 - The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafron, Lucia
Graves (trans.), 2001 496 pp.
Barcelona, 1945—A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and
a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an
extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by
an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax's other books, it
begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has been systematically
destroying every copy of every book the man has ever written.
April
2014 - Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life,
Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo, 2012, 288 pp.
Based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global
change and inequality is made human.
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near
the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Abdul, a reflective and
enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the
recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable
wit and deep scars, has identified an alternate route to the middle class:
political corruption. Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believes
inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.” Pulitzer Prize
May 2014 - Caleb's Crossing
Geraldine Brooks, 2011 320 pp.
Once again, Geraldine Brooks takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it
to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first
Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual
scaffold, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and
adventure. The narrator of Caleb's
Crossing is Bethia Mayfield,
growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers
and Puritans.
June 2014 - The Echo Maker
Richard Powers, 2006 464 pp. Winner, 2006 National Book Award
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road,
27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older
sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse
Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted
coma, Mark believes that this woman—who looks, acts, and sounds just like his
sister—is really an identical impostor. Shattered by her brother’s refusal to
recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous
for his case histories describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain
disorder.
July 2014 - Silence of
Bonaventure Arrow
Rita Leganski, 2013 400 pp.
Bonaventure's remarkable gift of listening promises salvation to the
souls who love him: his beautiful young mother, Dancy, haunted by the death of
her husband; his Grand-mère Letice, plagued by grief and a long-buried guilt
she locks away in a chapel; and his father, William, whose roaming spirit must
fix the wreckage of the past. With the help of Trinidad Prefontaine, a Creole
housekeeper endowed with her own special gifts, Bonaventure will find the key
to long-buried mysteries and soothe a chorus of family secrets clamoring to be
healed.
August - The Cat's Table
Michael Ondaatje, 2011 288 pp.
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for
England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the
Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two
other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin.
As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into
the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all
over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one
man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world
of literature.
September 2014 - City of
Women
David R. Gillham,
2012, 400 pp.
Who do you trust, who do you love, and who can be saved? It is
1943—the height of the Second World War—and Berlin has essentially become a
city of women. Sigrid Schröder is, for all intents and purposes, the model
German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her
rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the
while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime. But behind this façade
is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former lover, now
lost in the chaos of the war. Her lover is a Jew.
October 2014 - The Warmth of Other
Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson, 2010 640pp
Winner, 2010 National Book
Critics Circle Award, Winner, 2010 Pulitzer Prize
In
this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel
Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the
decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and
western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of
almost six million people changed the face of America.
November 2014 - And the
Mountains Echoed
Khaled Hosseini, 2013 416 pp.
A novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the
choices we make resonate through generations. In
this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and
sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which
families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how
often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that
matter most.
December 2014 - Claude
& Camille
Stephanie Cowell, 2010 352 pp.
In the mid-nineteenth century, a young man named Claude Monet decided that he
would rather endure a difficult life painting landscapes than take over his
father’s nautical supplies business in a French seaside town. Against his father’s
will, and with nothing but a dream and an insatiable urge to create a new style
of art that repudiated the Classical Realism of the time, he set off for Paris.
But once there he is confronted with obstacles……. there were bright spots as
well…….. even more illuminating was his lifelong love, Camille Doncieux, a
beautiful, upper-class Parisian girl who threw away her privileged life to be
by the side of the defiant painter and embrace the lively Bohemian life of
their time.
