Booklist

I am very late in my book updates. I read at least one book a month for book group, and quite a few this year have been wonderful. I also added a “Currently Reading” notification on the sidebar.

Here are a few recommended books with brief notes. I’ll work on expanding them in subsequent entries soon.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

This book may be my favorite book of all time. I’ll have to give it a year to see how well it sticks for me. I’m always much too attached to a book right after reading it to give a proper life-list rating. But this book is wonderful. It’s heartbreaking, but in a beautiful way.

Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell

It sounds so cliché to call something a “literary masterpiece”, but I’m going to anyway. This book has an experimental structure – it’s as if you opened six books, stacked them on top of each other and read up one side and down the other – and for me the experiment pays off handsomely. The stories have a few interwoven elements, but they are elusive. The genres and themes Mitchell covers in this book are expansive, but not too far-reaching. I felt the book held together nicely.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

This is a wonderful book. It’s quite long, and doesn’t really get going until about page 75, but it’s well worth it. The best test I know to help you decide whether you’d like it is this: do you like Dickens? If yes, you’ll love this book. If you hate Dickens, you’ll probably hate this book. The author meanders along and the footnotes (which often go on for pages at a time) read like their own set of interwoven stories. If you can sit back and enjoy the ride, I think you’ll enjoy all the little places the writer takes you.

*Whew, the HTML learning curve is still a bit high! If anyone knows the right code to use to have my text wrap around the book images, instead of putting it on separate lines, I’d love to know!*

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 8:49 PM and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.