It’s easy to get behind, and easy to miss great reads that appeared over the holidays. Our catch-up list isn’t a good choice for those looking for a spring-break beach read, but these books are innovative, thought-provoking tomes worth a read.
And in the reality-upending spirit of some of these selections: Hey, who said you couldn’t put a challenging book in your beach bag, anyway?
Fiction
Human Acts
By Han Kang
(Hogarth)
South Korea’s Gwangju Uprising, an unfamiliar subject matter for many American readers, forms the backbone of Kang’s slim yet brutal tome. The Man Booker Prize winner doesn’t aim to be definitive about the bloody crackdown on government protesters in 1980. Rather, she paints a stylized, visceral account of the impact of that violence. Each chapter is told from a different perspective — a tortured prisoner, a woman fighting censorship, a mother in mourning, even a soul still attached to a rotting corpse that soldiers dumped in a remote area. It’s a young boy who dies tragically, though, that ties all their stories together.
— Emilie Rusch
Lincoln in the Bardo
By George Saunders
(Random House)
If Saunders’ creative genius wowed in his previous work, just wait. “Lincoln in the Bardo” drops into a dark moment in our nation’s history, and that of our 16th president — his son, Willie, dies at the White House as the Civil War rages. In his grief, Lincoln visits the cemetery under the cloak of night. He isn’t alone. A host of ghosts, self-trapped in the bardo, or in-between space after death but before the soul has moved on, populates the cemetery, including young Willie. If the topic wasn’t an odd enough choice, the novel (is it a novel? It is) follows a format closer to oral history than narrative. Itap weirdly wonderful, and it should be the next book you read.
— Jenn Fields
4321
By Paul Auster
(Henry Holt)
Auster’s first novel in seven years — coming in just shy of 900 pages — is a powerful look at life’s What Ifs. The life of Archie Ferguson is told four different times, each with different outcomes depending on both external, seemingly trivial forces — like who wins a baseball game and who his aunt marries — to internal determinations: what books he decides to read and who his first love is. With the social and political tumult of the 1960s as a backdrop, these Archies grow up in an absorbing, painstakingly detailed world. “4321” veers into occasional tedium, but the prose and concept are downright arresting.
— Alison Borden
The Sleepwalker
By Chris Bohjalian
(Doubleday)
In Chris Bohjalian’s latest mystery, Annalee Ahlberg (a sleep walker and sleep sexer) vanishes in the night. The only sign is a strip of her blue sleep shirt found clinging to a tree branch near the river. Searchers and her family fear the worst, that she wandered into the river while sleeping and drowned. Annalee’s oldest daughter — 21-year-old Lianna — serves as the novel’s primary narrator. She decides to stay home rather than return to college so she can care for her father and 12-year-old sister. She also embarks on a secret romance with the young detective who not only is investigating her mother’s disappearance, but who also suffers from the same affliction and formed a bond with her mother while both were being treated at the same sleep disorder clinic. How their relationship develops and the surprising twist that reveals Annalee’s fate blend to create an extremely satisfying read. Just don’t read this one before bed. Doing so could create some intriguing and disturbing dreams.
— Sara B. Hansen
Shadowbahn: A Novel
By Steve Erickson
(Blue Rider Press)
Erickson conjures a world in which the twin World Trade Center towers apparate in the Bandlands of South Dakota 20 years after they fell, in which Elvis Presley was the stillborn twin, not his brother Jesse Garon Presley, and Adlai Stevenson — not John F. Kennedy Jr. — was elected president. To summarize: Everything is changed, and not for the better. It’s an imaginative but tough novel that requires deep understanding of American history and music and the nuance of their intersection. Read it in ebook form so you can quickly assemble a Spotify playlist of the 104 songs that are the main character’s legacy to his children.
— Dana Coffield
A Piece of the World
By Christina Baker Kline
(William Morrow)
There’s a famous painting by Andrew Wyeth that shows a frail woman sitting in tall yellow grass, looking up at a lonely house on a hill. The way her withered arms reach ahead, her body leaning uphill, begs the question: What’s her story? Kline (author of the 2013 best seller “Orphan Train”) wondered as well. Christina Olson was a disabled woman living with her brother on a farm in Maine and was introduced to Wyeth by his soon-to-be wife, Betsy, in the 1940s. Kline creates a fictionalized page-turner based on the few facts known about this artist’s muse, and draws us into both Wyeth’s and “Christina’s World.”
— Barbara Ellis
Dust Bowl Girls
By Lydia Reeder
(Thorndike Press)
Denver author Lydia Reeder tells the story of her great-uncle, Sam Babb, the basketball coach of Oklahoma Presbyterian College who lead a women’s team to glory during the Great Depression. Well researched and strung together with individual tales of growing up in the barren farmland of southern Oklahoma during the most difficult of times, and bolstered by the stories of surviving OPC Cardinals players, Reeder succeeds in creating a heartwarming tale of underdogs overcoming poverty and geography. And readers are noticing: “Dust Bowl Girls” was recently on the Tattered Cover’s nonfiction best seller list. <
— B.E
Nonfiction
The Blood of Emmett Till
By Timothy B. Tyson
(Simon & Schuster)
An interview with Carolyn Bryant, the woman who testified at a murder trial that 14-year-old Emmett Till grabbed her by the waist and boasted about having sex with white women, serves as a starting point for this history lesson. Bryant’s accusations led her husband and another man to kidnap and lynch the 14-year-old Till, who was visiting the Mississippi Delta from Chicago in August 1955. The boy’s horrific death and the acquittal of his killers galvanized the nation’s civil rights movement. Tyson’s clear writing style makes the book easy to digest, but Till’s brutal death and the violence and oppression of black people in these pages does not make this light reading. Rather, the book is a must-read for understanding the dark history of racism in America, and how the country still struggles to overcome it.
— Noelle Phillips
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
By Trevor Noah
(Spiegel & Grau)
Noah was a relative unknown when he took over “The Daily Show” in 2015, but the South African comic ought not stay that way. His “Born a Crime” isn’t your typical celebrity-memoir fluff — it’s a compelling, sometimes funny, sometimes devastating portrait of growing up in South Africa under the final days of apartheid, born to a black mother and white father at a time when their union was against the law. His fearless, deeply religious mother and the story of her no-less-than-miraculous survival from a gunshot wound to the head will stay with you well after the final page.
— E.R.
Letters to a Young Muslim
By Omar Saif Ghobash
(Picador)
Ghobash grew up in a multitude of worlds: He grew up in the United Arab Emirates, where he attended an English-speaking school but spoke Russian at home; he spent a summer in a madrassa memorizing the Koran; he’s lived in New York and London and is now UAE’s ambassador to Russia. In this collection of letters to his son, his lens on his faith telescopes back and forth: As a global citizen, he can take a distant look at how the Arab and Western worlds see one another, or he can zoom in to the cultural impact of the Sunni-Shia divide, or relate the religious fervor he felt as a young man out of his element during his university days. His letters have themes, and the one showing his son how a young Muslim man might go down the disastrous path of extremism might be the most poignant, sad and powerful in this collection — and the most difficult to put down.
— J.F.
