Thursday, December 6, 2012

Library Notes - Week of December 3


The latest New York Times Book Review had a list of the 100 notable books of 2012.  I am pleased to say we have a good percentage of them.  Here are a few of from that list.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper looks out over the waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. A roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives.

Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie. Included here are some of Alexie’s most esteemed tales, including “What You Pawn I Will Redeem," “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” “The Toughest Indian in the World,” and “War Dances.” Alexie’s new stories are fresh and quintessential—about donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, the reservation, marriage, and all species of contemporary American warriors. An indispensable collection of new and classic stories.    

The Round House by Louis Erdrich. One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared. While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own.

NW by Zadie Smith. Zadie Smith’s new novel follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan – as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their London is a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end.

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