Anna Burns’ Little Constructions, Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat, and Max Hastings’ Operation Chastise all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Real Life by Brandon Taylor
5 Rave • 6 Positive
“Taylor unearths these layered struggles with tenderness and complexity, from the first gorgeous sentence of his book to its very last … Reading Real Life—which is equal parts captivating, erotic, smart and vivid—reminded me of experiences from my own history … Relationships between queer men and men who are straight—or at least who present as such—can be difficult to depict, when our culture is so rigid in its portrayal of sexuality and masculinity, but the ambiguity Taylor creates on the page between Wallace and Miller is devastatingly effective … Taylor’s book isn’t about overcoming trauma or the perils of academia or even just the experience of inhabiting a black body in a white space, even as Real Life does cover these subjects. Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and—more than anything—finding purpose … What makes it most special, though, is that Real Life is told from the perspective of Wallace, who, like so many other gay black men I know, understands how such a quest is further complicated by racism, poverty and homophobia … stunning.”
–Michael Arceneaux (TIME)
Read an essay by Brandon Taylor here
2. The Bear by Andrew Krivak
6 Rave • 3 Positive
“Krivak’s gorgeous descriptions suggest a world that has returned to its proper equilibrium and rightful inhabitants … shares with its predecessors a preoccupation with loss and endurance, themes explored here in a more mythic style still firmly grounded in physical reality. Any shadow of preciousness is quickly dispelled by the clarity of Krivak’s prose and the precision with which he delineates the girl’s struggles during a bitter winter when she is once again alone … Krivak reminds us of the extraordinary knowledge and discipline those skills require in detailed, virtually step-by-step accounts of tasks from making snowshoes to skinning a deer and harvesting its carcass for food. Depicting the drama of her daily efforts to survive, The Bear demonstrates its kinship with such classic coming-of-age-in-the-wild tales as My Side of the Mountain and Island of the Blue Dolphins … Krivak’s serene and contemplative novel invites us to consider a vision of time as circular, of existence as grand and eternal beyond the grasp of individuals—and of a world able to outlive human destructiveness.”
–Wendy Smith (The Washington Post)
Read an excerpt from The Bear here
3. Little Constructions by Anna Burns
6 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Anna Burns is either nuts—or quite something! In Little Constructions, her second novel, she tackles murder, rape, incest, child molestation, Kalashnikovs and something very like the IRA with indefatigable irony. She gets across her disgust for senseless, needless violence of the Bush/Blair/Northern Irish or merely familial kind, while being pretty damn funny about it at the same time … Burns…dares to say anything. The writing is energetic, convoluted and courageous. It has a gutsy nervousness that matches the subject matter, as if there is no way to write about violence and violation other than with comedy, digression, wordplay and other peculiarities. Her logic, verging on the insane, pinpoints the complexity of being human … Every word matters and the oddities are a joy.”
–Lucy Ellman (The Guardian)
4. Amnesty by Aravind Adiga
5 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed
“I like to read Adiga’s novels almost as much as the poet James Dickey liked to drink. He has more to say than most novelists, and about 50 more ways to say it … Adiga is a startlingly fine observer, and a complicator, in the manner of V.S. Naipaul … Adiga is valuable because he attends to how people think, rather than how they should think. No one in his novels is simple to understand. Adiga may not agree with everything that gets said or thought, but there is no gauze on his mental windshield. Nice people are often skewered, as if on kabobs. Reading him you get a sense of having your finger on the planet’s pulse … has a simmering plot … Adiga’s plot clicks the novel forward along its tracks, but it’s packed with small implausibilities. You come to this novel for other reasons, notably for its author’s authority, wit and feeling on the subject of immigrants’ lives … You can scoop Adiga’s smaller observations up like shrimp in a net.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
Read an excerpt from Amnesty here
5. And I Do Not Forgive You by Amber Sparks
5 Rave • 3 Positive
“Each story feels like it belongs here, but also like it stands alone so well you want to read it on repeat, and while the range of emotions evoked in the collection as a whole is broad, I found myself most often sitting with that indescribable ache that characterizes the bittersweet … It’s hard to overstate the unspeakable sorrow of friendship breakups to those who haven’t gone through one, but how incredible—and painful—it is to witness Sparks holding up such a clear mirror to it … many titles in this collection should win awards all by themselves … It’s a terrible thing to pick favorites among so many stories full of vivid language, compelling imagery, sharp wit, and an abiding tenderness, and so I won’t.”
–Ilana Masad (NPR)
Read Amber Sparks on reading books about the Middle Ages here
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1. The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes
1 Rave • 15 Positive
“… a wonderful demonstration of the sort of free-range intellectual curiosity Barnes feels has been stymied by the xenophobia and national chauvinism behind Brexit … expands into an erudite, entertaining, and beautifully illustrated disquisition on the period between 1870 and 1914, which actually bears some interesting parallels with our own times … Barnes flits through the sexual gossip, petulant duels, violent outbursts, medical advances, anti-English jibes, and lurid excesses of the Belle Epoque, seasoning it all with wry interjections on art and literature … Nothing glib about this delightful, consummately open-minded book.”
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
Read an excerpt from The Man in the Red Coat here
2. Operation Chastise: The RAF’s Most Brilliant Attack of WWII by Max Hastings
2 Rave • 6 Positive
“…the tale told by Max Hastings, a renowned military historian and journalist, is more complex and less celebratory than the book’s cover implies. His account of the events of May 16-17, 1943, will keep you on the edge of your seat, but his analysis of their causes and consequences is equally deserving of attention … Hastings writes movingly of the suffering inflicted on those who lived in the path of the floodwaters: It is possible that as many as 1,600 people died, many of them non-German forced laborers. He does not dismiss the attack’s economic impact as comprehensively as some have done, even if it did not have the decisive effect that had been hoped for. But he sticks to his view, first articulated over 40 years ago, that the costs of the wider bomber offensive outstripped its results.”
–Richard Toye (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty
2 Rave • 5 Positive
“While Dougherty provides plenty of macro-level research about housing across the nation—and especially in San Francisco—the major strength of the narrative occurs at the micro level. The author located individual players on various sides of housing debates, and he compares and contrasts their advocacy from diverse perspectives … The narrative will be especially poignant and thought-provoking for readers who rely on nannies, home health aides, construction workers, landscapers, and other low-paid occupations—where will they reside? A readable, eye-opening exploration of ‘what is fast becoming a national housing crisis.’”
Check out “America’s Housing Crisis: A Reading List” by Conor Dougherty here
4. Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America by Fergus M. Bordewich
2 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Historian Bordewich delves deeply into Radical Republicans’ determination to outlaw slavery and establish Congress as the most powerful government branch in this packed political history of the Civil War … carefully documented … Bordewich offers a unique and colorful perspective on the Civil War, and regularly manages to make congressional minutiae entertaining. Readers seeking fresh insight into the era will be satisfied.”
5. Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene
3 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Our knowledge of our impermanence, Mr. Greene stresses, might just be what lures us to search for the eternal … Mr. Greene explores this claim beautifully in the book by placing our ‘pervasive need for coherence and value and meaning’ into the broadest possible cosmic context … Mr. Greene tackles these profound questions with great skill. He weaves personal stories, scientific ideas, concepts and facts into a delightful tapestry that showcases the multiple points of view on these questions. Until the End of Timeis organized into 11 thematic chapters that build up the argument deftly and deliberately … What is remarkable about Mr. Greene’s book is how he has delved into deep questions that not only have no simple answers but may never be settled at all … The crux of the issue lies in whether science as we know it can integrate subjective experience into its framework of objective reality. It is this grand unification that Mr. Greene has attempted in this ambitious and utterly readable book.”
–Priyamvada Natarajan (The Wall Street Journal)
