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Cryptonomicon
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You don't have to follow every kink in the Byzantine plot of Stephenson's tour de force novel (thank God) to enjoy it thoroughly. "Cryptonomicon" juxtaposes a handful of eccentric mathematical geniuses enlisted as cryptographers in World War II with a band of contemporary high-tech entrepreneurs trying to set up a "data haven" in a remote jungle island near the Philippines. And while the book's primary concern (beyond the allure of secrecy) seems to be the elaborately artful rituals of deceit that both war and business necessitate, Stephenson's novel is also both a the-way-we-live-now portrait of the new information economy and a ripping World War II adventure that includes a grueling trek through the jungle and a riveting expedition to salvage a sinking submarine. It's a hell of a ride that throws in, among other delights, theories of cryptography, mathematical charts of the sexual appetite and various famous figures from the birth of computing for good measure.
It's a mystery with a solution that won't surprise anybody, but months after you've read it what you remember is not the outcome but the endearing central character, Lionel "Freakshow" Essrog, a would-be private eye with Tourette's syndrome. Lionel's feverish brain sends the standard obscenities spewing out of his helpless mouth, but what fascinates Lethem about Tourette's is its obsessive-
An abused wife who's lost her faith; a brilliant self-help guru addicted to violent porn: Although "Original Bliss" is, deep down, a conventional love story, you never get the feeling that you've been there before. In this funny, brutal and wonderfully touching book, Glaswegian novelist A.L. Kennedy doesn't shy away from the big questions, but under her hard intelligence beats a heart of cotton candy. The book is a page-turner that teases you until the very end with the question: Can these two people, so wildly unlike and so clearly made for each other, escape their demons, spiritual and sexual, in each other's damaged arms?
A schoolteacher's wife leaves him, and their sons (9 and 10) have to learn how to get along with her gone. A pregnant teenager, thrown out of her house, takes refuge with two ornery old bachelor ranchers, whose initial distress gives way in time to helpless, comical love. If Kent Haruf's profoundly simple and sentimental novel about a few decent people in an unremarkable High Plains town had hit a single false note, the whole delicate structure would have crumbled. But not the least of the book's miracles is the matter-of-fact lightness with which it sustains its melancholy sweetness; the greatest may be the ease (or seeming ease) with which it reconciles the all but irreconcilable legacies of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Stewart O'Nan's short novel takes place some years after the Civil War, in the bucolic town of Friendship, Wis., which with little warning finds itself quarantined during a catastrophic diphtheria epidemic and simultaneously threatened by an advancing fire. The narrator and Job-like hero -- Friendship's sheriff, preacher and undertaker all in one -- has to make bitter choices, sealing off the town (and, thus, escape) as he watches his friends and loved ones die. And then he is left to learn that even the hardest choices can still be the wrong ones. The beauty and the horror are inextricably, almost obscenely joined; few novelists have gazed as unblinkingly on that union as O'Nan does in this great and shattering book.
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