Recommended Summer Reading for Upper School Students

Award Winners

2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner: Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout
“The handsome minister Tyler Caskey, of West Annett, Maine, is beloved by his parishioners because he really does think they’re all God’s children. But in the bleak autumn of 1959, more than a year after the death of his wife, Tyler is still awash in grief. The man who once held them rapt from the pulpit now appears ridiculous up there—”like a big tractor being driven by a teenage kid, slipping in and out of gear”—and his daughter has started screaming and spitting in kindergarten. How can he lead them if he himself is lost? Just as she did in her first novel, “Amy and Isabelle,” Strout has created an absorbing world peopled by characters who argue the merits of canned cranberry sauce and using one’s turn signal; meanwhile, dark fears about Freud and Khrushchev run beneath the surface of their lives like water under ice. With superlative skill, Strout challenges us to examine what makes a good story—and what makes a good life.”
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Winner of the Booker Prize: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
“In this darkly comic début novel set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a “social entrepreneur.” In a series of letters to the Premier of China, in anticipation of the leader’s upcoming visit to Balram’s homeland, the chauffeur recounts his transformation from an honest, hardworking boy growing up in “the Darkness”—those areas of rural India where education and electricity are equally scarce, and where villagers banter about local elections “like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra”—to a determined killer. He places the blame for his rage squarely on the avarice of the Indian élite, among whom bribes are commonplace, and who perpetuate a system in which many are sacrificed to the whims of a few. Adiga’s message isn’t subtle or novel, but Balram’s appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling.”
Copyright ©2008 The New Yorker

THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS 2008
Fiction: Peter Matthiessen
Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed
Young People’s Literature:  Judy Blundell
Poetry: Mark Doty
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Maxine Hong Kingston

National Book Critics Circle Awards
Fiction: Roberto Bolaño, “2666″
Biography: Patrick French, “The World Is What It IS The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul”
Autobiography: Ariel Sabar, “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq”
Nonfiction: Dexter Filkins, “The Forever War”
Poetry: August Kleinzahler, “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City” and Juan Felipe Herrera, “Half the World in Light”

Nobel Prize for Literature
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

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Fiction

Unaccustomed Earth: Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
“[Lahiri’s] stories are quiet, deliberate, setting one foot down in front of the other, then exploding with a secret, an encounter, a clash. Quietly, then, they lay back down, leaving the reader astir in their unnerving calm. Lahiri’s [work], however, is rife with characters that are larger than the Bengali immigration experience, experiences larger than mere discontent. She’s an artist of the family portrait. If one felt like a fortunate fly on the wall in previous stories, now the effect is to sit in between the beats of her characters’ heartaches.” —Leonora Todaro, The Village Voice

Water Dogs by Lewis Robinson
“Lewis Robinson writes with authority and grace about the complications of sibling love: jealousies, disappointments, old hurts, and blind devotion. The siblings in Water Dogs, despite their unusual circumstances, are thoroughly convincing, with an underlying sweetness that betrays the author’s big, beautiful heart.”–Monica Wood, author of Any Bitter Thing (Excerpt from the book)

A Mercy by Toni Morrison
“I really wanted to get to a place before slavery was equated with race,” says Morrison. “Whether they were black or white was less important than what they owned and what their power was.”
One reviewer says: “A Mercy is a short novel, and can be appreciated best when read in one or a couple sittings. Indeed, the simple story is told in several voices, but reading these voices in succession weaves a tapestry that tells a larger story about America’s history of slavery and the extermination of Native Americans. A Mercy is not plot or character driven — it is about the voice of the past and what it means to be human.” (Amazon.com)

The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
“Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. Born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.
Written as a series of letters, the authors illuminate the remarkable correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, Juliet sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.” Book description from Amazon.com

Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
“This clever and inventive tale works on three levels: as an intriguing science fiction concept, a realistic character study and a touching love story. Henry De Tamble is a Chicago librarian with “Chrono Displacement” disorder; at random times, he suddenly disappears without warning and finds himself in the past or future, usually at a time or place of importance in his life. This leads to some wonderful paradoxes. From his point of view, he first met his wife, Clare, when he was 28 and she was 20. She ran up to him exclaiming that she’d known him all her life. He, however, had never seen her before. But when he reaches his 40s, already married to Clare, he suddenly finds himself time travelling to Clare’s childhood and meeting her as a 6-year-old. The book alternates between Henry and Clare’s points of view, and so does the narration. Reed ably expresses the longing of the one always left behind, the frustrations of their unusual lifestyle, and above all, her overriding love for Henry. Likewise, Burns evokes the fear of a man who never knows where or when he’ll turn up, and his gratitude at having Clare, whose love is his anchor.” From Publishers Weekly, Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
“Vonnegut’s ongoing puppet show. . .the fabulous is reborn.”–John Updike, The New Yorker
“Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the United States, King of Manhattan, and one-half (along with his sister, Eliza) of the most powerful intelligence since Einstein, is penning his autobiography. He occupies the first floor of a ruined Empire State Building and lives like a royal scavenger with his illiterate granddaughter and her beau. Surviving two lethal diseases, the Green Death and the Albanian Flu, Dr. Daffodil-11, muses on war, man’s hubris, and the awful, crippling loneliness humans are freighted with–but, miraculously, the book still manages to delight and amuse. Absurd, knowing, never depressing, Slapstick kindles hope–for the possibility of wisdom, perhaps; for human resiliency, surely.” -Amazon.com

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Joseph O’Neill

Question: President Obama mentioned in a New York Times Magazine profile that he’s reading Netherland. How do you feel about the President reading your book?
Joseph O’Neill: I’m very honored, of course.
Question: How is the world of Netherland particular to the United States after 9/11?

Joseph O’Neill: The story takes place in the aftermath of 9/11. One of the things it does is try to evoke the disorientation and darkness of that time, which we only emerged from with the election of President Obama.
Question: What is the importance of the sport of cricket in this book? Do you play?

Joseph O’Neill: I love sport and play cricket and golf myself. Sport is a wonderful way to bring together people who would otherwise have no connection to each other.
Question: One of your reviewers calls Netherland an answer to The Great Gatsby. Were you influenced by Fitzgerald’s book, and was your book written with that book in mind?

Joseph O’Neill: Halfway through the book I realized with a slightly sinking feeling that the plot of Netherland was eerily reminiscent of the Gatsby plot: dreamer drowns, bystander remembers. But there are only about 5 plots in existence, so I didn’t let it bother me too much. Fitzgerald thankfully steered clear of cricket.
Question: Many reviewers have commented on the “voice” of this novel. How it is more a novel of voice than of plot? Do you agree with this?

Joseph O’Neill: Yes, I would agree with that comment. This is not a novel of eventful twists and turns. It is more like a long-form international cricket match (which can last for 5 days without a winner emerging), about nuance and ambiguity and small slippages of insight. And about language, of course.
http://www.amazon.com/Netherland-Novel-Joseph-ONeill/dp/0307377040
(Amazon, 2009)

I, Claudius : From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 by Robert Graves
“Historical novel set in 1st-century-AD Rome by Robert Graves, published in 1934. The book is written as an autobiographical memoir by Roman emperor Claudius. Physically weak, afflicted with stammering, and inclined to drool, Claudius is an embarrassment to his family and is shunted to the background of imperial affairs. The benefits of his seeming ineffectuality are twofold: he becomes a scholar and historian, and he is spared the worst cruelties inflicted on the imperial family by its own members during the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula. Palace intrigues and murders surround him. Claudius’ informal narration serves to emphasize the banality of the imperial family’s endless greed and lust. The story concludes with Claudius ascending to the imperial throne. A sequel, Claudius, the God and His Wife Messalina (1935), covers Claudius’ years as Roman emperor.”

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel by David Wroblewski
Praise from Stephen King: “I flat-out loved The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and spent twelve happy evenings immersed in the world David Wroblewski has created. As I neared the end, I kept finding excuses to put the book aside for a little, not because I didn’t like it, but because I liked it too much; I didn’t want it to end. Dog-lovers in particular will find themselves riveted by this story, because the canine world has never been explored with such imagination and emotional resonance. Yet in the end, this isn’t a novel about dogs or heartland America–although it is a deeply American work of literature. It’s a novel about the human heart, and the mysteries that live there, understood but impossible to articulate. Yet in the person of Edgar Sawtelle, a mute boy who takes three of his dogs on a brave and dangerous odyssey, Wroblewski does articulate them, and splendidly. I closed the book with that regret readers feel only after experiencing the best stories: It’s over, you think, and I won’t read another one this good for a long, long time.
In truth, there’s never been a book quite like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I thought of Hamlet when I was reading it, and Watership Down, and The Night of the Hunter, and The Life of Pi–but halfway through, I put all comparisons aside and let it just be itself.
I’m pretty sure this book is going to be a bestseller, but unlike some, it deserves to be. It’s also going to be the subject of a great many reading groups, and when the members take up Edgar, I think they will be apt to stick to the book and forget the neighborhood gossip.
Wonderful, mysterious, long and satisfying: readers who pick up this novel are going to enter a richer world. I envy them the trip. I don’t re-read many books, because life is too short. I will be re-reading this one.” Amazon.com

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
“Reading Geraldine Brooks’s remarkable debut novel, Year of Wonders, or more recently March, which won the Pulitzer Prize, it would be easy to forget that she grew up in Australia and worked as a journalist. Now in her dazzling new novel, People of the Book, Brooks allows both her native land and current events to play a larger role while still continuing to mine the historical material that speaks so ardently to her imagination. Late one night in the city of Sydney, Hanna Heath, a rare book conservator, gets a phone call. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which disappeared during the siege in 1992, has been found, and Hanna has been invited by the U.N. to report on its condition. Missing documents and art works (as Dan Brown and Lev Grossman, among others, have demonstrated) are endlessly appealing, and from this inviting premise Brooks spins her story in two directions. In the present, we follow the resolutely independent Hanna through her thrilling first encounter with the beautifully illustrated codex and her discovery of the tiny signs-a white hair, an insect wing, missing clasps, a drop of salt, a wine stain-that will help her to discover its provenance. Along with the book she also meets its savior, a Muslim librarian named Karaman. Their romance offers both predictable pleasures and genuine surprises, as does the other main relationship in Hanna’s life: her fraught connection with her mother. In the other strand of the narrative we learn, moving backward through time, how the codex came to be lost and found, and made. From the opening section, set in Sarajevo in 1940, to the final section, set in Seville in 1480, these narratives show Brooks writing at her very best. With equal authority she depicts the struggles of a young girl to escape the Nazis, a duel of wits between an inquisitor and a rabbi living in the Venice ghetto, and a girl’s passionate relationship with her mistress in a harem. Like the illustrations in the Haggadah, each of these sections transports the reader to a fully realized, vividly peopled world. And each gives a glimpse of both the long history of anti-Semitism and of the struggle of women toward the independence that Hanna, despite her mother’s lectures, tends to take for granted. Brooks is too good a novelist to belabor her political messages, but her depiction of the Haggadah bringing together Jews, Christians and Muslims could not be more timely. Her gift for storytelling, happily, is timeless.” Copyright 2007 Publishers Weekly.

Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
“The life of Spokane Indian Thomas Builds-the-Fire irrevocably changes when blues legend Robert Johnson miraculously appears on his reservation and passes the misfit storyteller his enchanted guitar. Inspired by this gift, Thomas forms Coyote Springs, an all-Indian Catholic band who find themselves on a magical tour that leads from reservation bars to Seattle and New York–and deep within their own souls.” Publishers Weekly

So Brave, Young and Handsome by Leif Enger
“An inviting voice guides readers through this expansive saga of redemption in the early 20th-century West and gives a teeming vitality to a period often represented with stock phrases and stock characters. Novelist Monte Becket isn’t a terribly distinguished figure; his first and only published work hit five years before the story’s start and he is about to reclaim his job at a smalltown Minnesota post office when he meets Glendon Hale, a former outlaw who is traveling to Mexico to find his estranged wife. He persuades Becket to join him, and the two set off on a long journey peopled with sharply carved characters (among them a Pinkerton thug tracking down Glendon) and splendid surprises. As Monte’s narration continues, the tale veers away from Monte’s artistic struggle and becomes an adventure story. The progress has its listless moments, but Enger crafts scenes so rich you can smell the spilled whiskey and feel the grit. From Publishers Weekly Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Plague of Doves: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
“Erdrich’s 13th novel, a multigenerational tour de force of sin, redemption, murder and vengeance, finds its roots in the 1911 slaughter of a farming family near Pluto, N.Dak. The family’s infant daughter is spared, and a posse forms, incorrectly blames three Indians and lynches them. One, Mooshum Milk, miraculously survives. Over the next century, descendants of both the hanged men and the lynch mob develop relationships that become deeply entangled, and their disparate stories are held together via principal narrator Evelina, Mooshum Milk’s granddaughter, who comes of age on an Indian reservation near Pluto in the 1960s and ’70s and forms two fateful adolescent crushes: one on bad-boy schoolmate Corwin Peace and one on a nun. Though Evelina doesn’t know it, both are descendants of lynch mob members. The plot splinters as Evelina enrolls in college and finds work at a mental asylum; Corwin spirals into a life of crime; and a long-lost violin (its backstory is another beautiful piece of the mosaic) takes on massive significance. Erdrich plays individual narratives off one another, dropping apparently insignificant clues that build to head-slapping revelations as fates intertwine and the person responsible for the 1911 killing is identified.” From Publishers Weeky, Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
“Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend’s mom with a baseball and believes–accurately–that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving’s novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O’Connor’s work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen’s orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school’s marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it’s all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, “fun with a purpose.” When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn’t cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book’s countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy–from Vietnam to the Contras.” Amazon.com

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall
“With Dickensian flair and mastery, Udall gives readers an underdog child protagonist, surrounds him with a cast of half-funny and half-tragic characters, and immerses them all in a plot full of staggering setbacks and occasional, hard-won moments of peace. When his head is crushed by a mail truck at age seven, Edgar is left for dead by his alcoholic, disinterested mother, who doesn’t stick around to learn that he is later “brought back” by a shady doctor and whisked away to a hospital to recuperate. Some months and several delightfully cantankerous roommates later, Edgar regains all functions but the ability to write, which is more than solved when a fellow patient gets him a typewriter. Typing soothes the boy and becomes necessary therapy when he is released to an Indian school where other students punish him horrifically for being a “half-breed” (Apache and white). He is saved, literally and figuratively, by a pair of missionaries who recruit and place him with a Mormon family in a Utah suburb. Now that he feels relatively safe, the protagonist finds himself with a new purpose: to track down the devastated mailman who feels responsible for his death and let him know that he’s alive and fine. Yet his sense of safety remains merely relative, as the disbarred doctor surfaces repeatedly in his life, full of menacing, disturbing love and determined to raise Edgar as his own son. This novel is a wonderful, wise debut, with a strong story told in language that teens will find easy to embrace.” School Library Journal

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami
“Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits tells the story of two men and two women who are brought together and separated under extraordinary circumstances. As the book opens, they’re on the sea in a flimsy inflatable boat, which they hope will carry them across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain. What has driven them to leave their country and risk their lives? And will the rewards prove to be worth the danger? The answers unfold as we bear witness to the turning points in their lives, when they make the decisions that will forever seal their fates.” “There’s Murad, a gentle, educated man who’s been reduced to hustling tourists around Tangier; Halima, who’s fleeing her drunken husband and the slums of Casablanca; Aziz, who must leave behind his devoted wife in hope of work in Spain; and Faten, a student and religious fanatic whose faith is at odds with an influential man determined to destroy her future.” BOOK JACKET.

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
“British journalist Hornby has fashioned a disarming, rueful and sometimes quite funny first novel that is not quite as hip as it wishes to be. The book dramatizes the romantic struggle of Rob Fleming, owner of a vintage record store in London. After his girlfriend, Laura, leaves him for another man, he realizes that he pines not for sexual ecstasy (epitomized by a “bonkus mirabilis” in his past) but for the monogamy this cynic has come to think of as a crime. He takes comfort in the company of the clerks at the store, whose bantering compilations of top-five lists (e.g., top five Elvis Costello songs; top-five films) typify the novel’s ingratiating saturation in pop culture. Sometimes this can pall: readers may find that Rob’s ruminations about listening to the Smiths and the Lemonheads?pop music helps him fall in love, he tells us?are more interesting than his list of five favorite episodes of Cheers. Rob takes comfort as well in the company of a touring singer, Marie La Salle, who is unpretentious and “pretty in that nearly cross-eyed American way”?but life becomes more complicated when he encounters Laura again. Hornby has earned his own place on the London bestseller lists, and this on-the-edge tale of musical addiction just may climb the charts here. First serial to Esquire.” Publishers Weekly

A Virgin’s Guide to Mexico by Eric Martin
“Martin’s earnestly beat novel tracks homely, studious Alma Price—resigned to being forgettable—as she disappears from her affluent Austin, Tex., home to trace her Mexican roots. Alma deferred her freshman year at Harvard hoping to go to Spain, only to have her parents insist that if she doesn’t go off to Harvard, she enroll at the University of Texas. Instead, Alma is determined to figure out how her chilly, beautiful Mexican mother, Hermelinda, managed to transform herself from a maid’s daughter into a rich dot-com wife. Armed with a year of Spanish, a lot of moxie and a cache of letters sent to her mother by her grandfather from Mexico City, Alma chops off her hair, assumes the moniker “The Kid” and joins a gang of young American men headed for the border whorehouses. Alma’s perspective emerges in a winning torrent of observations, and though a transvestite prostitute discovers her secret, she makes a pretty good boy. Alternate chapters clarify Hermelinda’s motivations for leaving Mexico and her secret tenderness for her troubled daughter, as Hermelinda and her husband (and Alma’s father), Truitt, trace Alma’s route to Mexico City with a detective’s help. Part bildungs-road novel, part family saga and part identity lit, Martin’s third novel is all heart.” Publishers Weekly, Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
List of more fiction you may enjoy

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Fantasy

The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce
“The award-winning author of Requiem returns with a blackly comic, disturbingly erotic tale of an ordinary boy named Sam – and the unearthly being only he can see. Is she real – or is she just a figment of his turbulent imagination? All Sam knows, as he grows from childhood to adolescence, is that she is never very far away.” Kirkus Review

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
“Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. He must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, if he is ever to return to the London that he knew.” Amazon.com

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin
“When The Left Hand of Darkness first appeared in 1969, the original jacket copy read, “Once in a long while a whole new world is created for us. Such worlds are Middle Earth, Dune – and such a world is Winter.” Twenty-five years and a Hugo and Nebula Award later, these words remain true. In Winter, or Gethen, Ursula K. Le Guin has created a fully realized planet and people. But Gethen society is more than merely a fascinating creation. The concept of a society existing totally without sexual prejudices is even more relevant today than it was in 1969. This special 25th anniversary edition of The Left Hand of Darkness contains not only the complete, unaltered text of the landmark original but also a thought-provoking new afterword and four new appendixes by Ms. Le Guin.” “When the human ambassador Genly Ai is sent to Gethen, the planet known as Winter by those outsiders who have experienced its arctic climate, he thinks that his mission will be a standard one of making peace between warring factions. Instead the ambassador finds himself wildly unprepared. For Gethen is inhabited by a society with a rich, ancient culture full of strange beauty and deadly intrigue – a society of people who are both male and female in one, and neither. This lack of fixed gender, and the resulting lack of gender-based discrimination, is the very cornerstone of Gethen life. But Genly is all too human. Unless he can overcome his ingrained prejudices about the significance of “male” and “female,” he may destroy both his mission and himself.” BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Autobiography

West with the Night by Beryl Markham
“West with the Night appeared on 13 bestseller lists on first publication in 1942. It tells the spellbinding story of Beryl Markham — aviator, racehorse trainer, fascinating beauty -and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and 30s. Markham was taken to Kenya at the age of four. As an adult she was befriended by Denys Finch-Hatton, the big-game hunter of OUT OF AFRICA fame, who took her flying in his airplane. Thrilled by the experience, Markham went on to become the first woman in Kenya to receive a commercial pilot’s license. In 1936 she determined to fly solo across the Atlantic — without stopping. When Charles Lindbergh did the same, he had the wind behind him. Markham, by contrast, had a strong headwind against her and a plane that only flew up to 163 mph. On 4 September, she took off …Several days later, she crash-landed in Nova Scotia and became an instant celebrity.” Amazon.com

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat
“In a single day in 2004, Danticat (Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones) learns that she’s pregnant and that her father, André, is dying—a stirring constellation of events that frames this Haitian immigrant family’s story, rife with premature departures and painful silences. When Danticat was two, André left Haiti for the U.S., and her mother followed when Danticat was four. The author and her brother could not join their parents for eight years, during which André’s brother Joseph raised them. When Danticat was nine, Joseph—a pastor and gifted orator—lost his voice to throat cancer, making their eventual separation that much harder, as he wouldn’t be able to talk with the children on the phone. Both André and Joseph maintained a certain emotional distance through these transitions. Danticat writes of a Haitian adage, Â ‘When you bathe other people’s children, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty.’ I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people’s children not to give over their whole hearts. In the end, as Danticat prepares to lose her ailing father and give birth to her daughter, Joseph is threatened by a volatile sociopolitical clash and forced to flee Haiti. He’s then detained by U.S. Customs and neglected for days. He unexpectedly dies a prisoner while loved ones await news of his release. Poignant and never sentimental, this elegant memoir recalls how a family adapted and reorganized itself over and over, enduring and succeeding to remain kindred in spite of living apart.” Publishers Weekly

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Non-fiction

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
“The story of two men’s obsessions with the Chicago World’s Fair, one its architect, the other a murderer. “The Devil in the White City” draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others.” Publishers Weekly

My Old Man and the Sea by David and Daniel Hays
“As a child, David Hays regarded sailing around Cape Horn as the ultimate adventure. Now, in middle age, he makes the voyage with his 24-year-old son, hoping to regain a youthful perspective on life. Daniel, just out of college, wanted time to think about commitment to a career. Together, they built a 25-foot sloop, Sparrow, and set out across the Caribbean, navigating by compass and sextant. Sparrow carried neither motor nor radar, only a two-way, short-range radio. Father and son take turns giving their accounts of the 17,000-mile voyage. Their course was through the Panama Canal, then south by way of the Galapagos and Easter Islands. On day 179, they passed the Horn, having made 230 miles in 36 hours without being able to search the sky for sights because of the weather; in return for that feat of navigation, Dan became the captain. It is an engaging adventure, and a remarkable story of a father-son relationship.” Publishers Weekly

Fish Food by Ralph Cutter
“A fantastic book. Cutter covers the bases in a humorous fashion, with a trouts-eye-view that leaves you looking at a familiar stream a bit differently.” Amazon.com

Revolt in the Desert by T. E. Lawrence
“Lawrence of Arabia-needs no introduction. His renowned work about his experiences with King Feisal’s Arab army as it fought its campaign to Damascus-The Seven Pillars of Wisdom-has become a classic of twentieth century English literature. Revolt in the Desert is not a work of literature, or even a history of the campaign. It is an account of the experiences of one remarkable British officer’s war from his own perspective. This linear narrative of the campaign-is nevertheless a work of finely crafted penmanship which is a delight to read not only for military historians, but for everyone who appreciates great writing.” Amazon.com

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
“Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse’s unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town’s first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson’s efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers’ hearts.” Publishers Weekly

In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
“Winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Non-Fiction! The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth. In 1819, the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with twenty crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale. The crew drifted for more than ninety days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival. Nathaniel Philbrick uses little-known documents-including a long-lost account written by the ship’s cabin boy-and penetrating details about whaling and the Nantucket community to reveal the chilling events surrounding this epic maritime disaster. An intense and mesmerizing read, In the Heart of the Sea is a monumental work of history forever placing the Essex tragedy in the American historical canon.” Publishers Weekly

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Poetry

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Poet Laureate Kay Ryan
“When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.” By PATRICIA COHEN, July 17, 2008, New York Times (more about Kay Ryan)

Selected Poems by Mark Strand
“Strand’s a painter of words. Mark Strand’s poetry speaks volumes even in this thin-ish book of selected poems. It’s my favorite of poetry books by living English-speaking writers. His early work reflects influences from Latin Surrealists like Octavio Paz. He moves later to the personal…autobiographical, beautiful elegies, and words on that basic thread that ties together the human experience…love.” McSweeney’s
August 28, 2001
Favorite lines:
“Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going.”
“Lines for Winter”
“She slept without the usual concerns, the troubling dreams–the pets moving through the museum, the carved monsters, the candles giving themselves up to darkness. She slept without caring what she looked like, without considering the woman who would come or the men who would leave or the mirrors or the basin of cold water.”

Ballistics: Poems by Billy Collins
Notable collection of verse from the U.S. Poet Laureate, expressing love, joy, and death in his inimitable
language.

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Drama

Fences by August Wilson
Troy Maxon, a strong, hard man who has learned to Black and proud in the 1950’s, finds the changing time of the 1960’s difficult. This is one in the Pulitzer Prize winning series The August Wilson Century Series.

Fool for Love by Sam Shepard
“Sam Shepard is phenomenal…the best practicing American playwright.” —The New Republic
“Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage.” —Marsha Norman
“The most ruthlessly experimental and uncompromising of today’s young writers.” —John Lahr
“Sam Shepard fills the role of professional playwright as a good ballet dancer or acrobat fulfills his role in performance. That is, he always delivers, he executes feats of dexterity and technical difficulty that an untrained person could not, and makes them seem easy.” —Michael Feingold, The Village Voice
“One of the most original, prolific, and gifted dramatists at work today.” —The New Yorker
“Sam Shepard is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than forty-five plays. He was a finalist for the W. H. Smith Literary Award for his story collection Great Dream of Heaven, and he has also written the story collection Cruising Paradise, two collections of prose pieces, Motel Chronicles and Hawk Moon, and Rolling Thunder Logbook, a diary of Bob Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Review tour. As an actor he has appeared in more than thirty films, and he received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for his performance in The Right Stuff. His screenplay for Paris, Texas won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, and he wrote and directed the film Far North in 1988. Shepard’s plays, eleven of which have won Obie Awards, include Buried Child, The Late Henry Moss, Simpatico, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind, which won a New York Drama Desk Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shepard received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992, and in 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame.”

Marsha Norman Vol. 1 Collected Works by Marsha Norman
“Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for ‘Night Mother and Tony Award winner for her Broadway musical The Secret Garden, Norman is a master at creating dialog and dramatic scenes that ring true to our ears and senses. Included in this collection of seven plays are Getting Out, Third & Oak, Circus Valentine, and The Holdup. Three speeches made to drama groups appear at the end. Her characters, whether they be performers in a struggling two-bit circus, women in an all-night landromat, or a Western outlaw, are ones we can easily identify with and understand. Each play may represent a different time and place, but all speak universal truths about the human condition. Highly recommended for all modern drama collections.” Howard E. Miller, St. Louis Science Ctr., School Library Journal

Still hungry for more? Click here for a list of even more titles that we think you will enjoy.

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