1. The Book of Dust Vol. 1: La Belle Savage by Philip Pullman
(7 Rave, 4 Positive)
“I am confident in pronouncing that people will love the first volume of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, The Book of Dust, with the same helpless vehemence that stole over them when The Golden Compass came out in the mid-’90s, or even when they first met their partners or held their newborn children … The sheer polyphony of his sourcing is audacious, and it shouldn’t work, but it does; reading this novel is like standing in a room in which suddenly all of the windows have blown open at once.”
–Katy Waldman (Slate)
Read an interview with Philip Pullman here
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2. Righteous by Joe Ide
(7 Rave, 1 Positive)
“As good as IQ was — and it was terrific — Righteous takes a deeper look at Isaiah, delving into what has shaped this young African-American man and allowing the character to mature … Ide keeps Righteous on a righteous path of compelling storytelling, allowing his characters to flourish while exploring the worst of human nature. Never once does Righteous go over the top as Ide keeps each plot point chillingly realistic … Ide’s debut IQshowed what a skillful writer he is. Righteous elevates the author — and his characters — to a new level.”
–Oline H. Cogdill (The Associated Press)
Read a profile of Joe Ide here
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3. Catapult by Emily Fridlund
(4 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Fridlund’s penchant for scrawling a sudden offbeat scene is met with a bewildering profundity that makes the reader question what they thought to be true about life … instances of exactitude in characterizing the human condition are a stunning constant. Each one is a humbling reminder that humankind’s understanding of itself is still merely surface-level. With each passing page, Fridlund conjures up the unsettling notion that we know nothing. She whisper-shouts intimations that suggest a reworking of the truisms we’ve come to live by—as her stories reveal, nothing about humanity is sacred.”
–Neyat Yohannes (The Chicago Review of Books)
Read an excerpt form Catapult here
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4. theMystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh
(1 Rave, 4 Positive)
“…for all the novel’s self-awareness, its questioning of form and content, theMystery.dochas larger concerns. Here we are, back to post-postmodern, since McIntosh is not trying to be ironic but rather seeks a disarming vulnerability. It may seem strange to call a 1,660-page novel intimate, and yet this is what McIntosh is after, to mine the depths of a particular set of points of view. If narrative is all we have, our source of meaning, what happens when it is not enough?”
–David L. Ulin (4Columns)
Read the opening sections of theMystery.doc here, here, and here
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5. The Rooster Bar by John Grisham
(2 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“The Rooster Bar highlights the appalling way that many for-profit law schools ruin many of their students. In the author’s note, Grisham writes that his book was influenced by an article in the Atlantic called ‘The Law-School Scam,’ a lengthy investigation of for-profit law schools. Bravo to him for using his star power to shine another spotlight on an all-too-real problem in this gratifying and all-too-real book.”
–Carrie Dunsmore (The Washington Post)
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1. Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry
(8 Rave, 2 Positive)
“It is, as it should be, painful to read. All the same, every time I think of it, I’m filled with wonderment (and, I suppose, professional envy). Lloyd Parry is such a good reporter: discreet yet unsentimental; ever-present, but able also swiftly to absent himself from the page. He never overwrites. His capacity for intimacy with relative strangers is a kind of gift … It is hard to imagine a more insightful account of mass grief and its terrible processes. This book is a future classic of disaster journalism, up there with John Hersey’s Hiroshima.”
–Rachel Cooke (The Guardian)
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2. The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
(5 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Sacks’s love of the natural world as well as the human one is contagious. The breadth of his interests encourages his readers to expand their own horizons. ‘I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other forms of life. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of cultural meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world.’ His curiosity and erudition, and his joy in both intellectual and physical life are in full bloom on these pages … A brilliant, beautiful and funny collection of essays.”
–Sara Catterall (Shelf Awareness)
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3. Sticky Fingers by Joe Hagan
(4 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Hagan has delivered a supple, confident, dispassionately reported and deeply well-written biography. It’s a big book, one that no one will wish longer, but its chapters move past like a crunching collection of singles and not a thumb-sucking double album. It’s a joy to read and feels built to last. Hagan is among those relatively rare biographers who keeps macro and micro in yin-yang balance … Sticky Fingers is about promises and promises betrayed, and about how Wenner’s life — his increasing obsession with fame and a plutocratic lifestyle — reflected both.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
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4. The Secret Life by Andrew O’Hagan
(4 Rave, 2 Positive)
“The chapter that’s bound to cause the greatest stir is ‘Ghosting,’ his stinging account of being a ghostwriter for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the two other episodes, in which O’Hagan tries to pin down who exactly invented Bitcoin or sees how far he can go in creating an online life for a fabricated character, are just as dizzying and gripping … Throughout the book, O’Hagan suggests that the digital era has brought ‘a change not just in the technological basis of our lives but in the narrative strategies now available to us.’ The Secret Life cunningly alights on ways that cyber-deceptions and flawed personalities can collide and combust.”
–Michael Upchurch (The Chicago Tribune)
Read an essay by Andrew O’Hagan here
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5. The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, selected by Darryl Pinckney
(4 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Hardwick could do more in six words than any Hemingway type, including Hemingway. Her feats of compression were exactly that, special, not habitual, because she was not really laconic and liked words better than she liked choosing between them … It was because she could traipse and trip up and take a second to recover, then seem only to have feinted and come arcing unusually back, that her performances on the page are so captivating. She wrote more best sentences than can possibly be good for the ego … her writing still elicits the jitter and awe of watching a favorite figure skater take to the ice, too quickly, with a new routine.”
–Sarah Nicole Prickett (Bookforum)
Read an essay from The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick here
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