Jane Smiley’s Lucky, Judi Dench’s Shakespeare, and Justin Taylor’s Reboot all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Reboot by Justin Taylor
(Pantheon)
2 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Justin Taylor here
“Reboot is an anxious book … Taylor’s gently comic tone and kinetic prose make this hard-going travel easier, as do his many clever reinventions … A performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure, which is just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused … The book seems caught between an honest reckoning with dread and an impulse to reassure. There will be blood, but it’s not as devastating as it deserves to be.”
–Joshua Ferris (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Lucky by Jane Smiley
(Knopf)
2 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Lucky here
“Lucky is framed as a rock ’n’ roll novel, but it’s a tricky and surprising one. Smiley seems determined to upend the conventions of the genre … Lucky, much like Smiley’s epic the Last Hundred Years trilogy, operates at a deliberately low boil. Life and death flow in and out, and Smiley observes it clearly but empathetically.”
–Mark Athitakis (The Los Angeles Times)
3. Your Presence is Necessary by Sasha Vasilyuk
(Bloomsbury)
1 Rave • 3 Positive
“While the author doesn’t shy away from naturalistic descriptions of violence and death, she doesn’t linger over horrors unnecessarily, either. Her tone is matter-of-fact and unflinching … Through meticulous attention to specifics and empathetic, searching characterization, Vasilyuk achieves a sense of historical and emotional authenticity—thereby offering her readers a compelling exploration of both the distant past and more recent events.”
–Svetlana Satchkova (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
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1. Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench
(St. Martin’s)
9 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Shakespeare here
“Mischievous and convivial, Dench delights in sending up O’Hea whenever his questions become too probing or pretentious … Dench is famous for her reluctance to pontificate on the mechanics of her craft, preferring to work from instinct; yet it is precisely this quality that saves the book from becoming too dense and academic … it’s a mark of Dench’s impish genius and O’Hea’s deftness that it genuinely feels like you’re sitting at her kitchen table with her. It’s companionable and compelling.”
–Michael Simkins (The Guardian)
2. The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters by Susan Page
(Simon & Schuster)
6 Rave • 2 Postive
“Entertaining and well-considered … The Rulebreaker shows that icons don’t sparkle all the time, but reminds us that’s sometimes OK, that judgments can be made on the overwhelming balance of a life’s work rather than by questioning every single move.”
–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)
3. Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do about Animals by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
(Knopf)
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“Our Kindred Creatures, a superb blend of science, cultural history and essayistic grace, returns us to a time when advocacy for animals became a moral imperative. As Mr. Wasik and Ms. Murphy remind us in their poignant conclusion, we are still indebted to the work of reformers like Henry Bergh.”
–Christoph Irmscher (The Wall Street Journal)
