Two outsiders to the world of Shakespeare criticism have penned “Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine,” a slim volume on that well-known dark prince of Danes. Laura Miller deems it as "such a treat:"

The authors — a philosophy professor and a psychoanalyst who are married to each other — claim no special expertise and argue no ironclad theory. They investigate, speculate and propose. “We are outsiders to the world of Shakespeare criticism,” they write, and the thinkers they have chosen to respond to (Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hegel, Freud, Jacques Lacan and Nietzsche) are (arguably) peripheral to the field as well. The result is a slim volume on “Hamlet” that this reader found more invigorating than many a more rigorous work. All you need to engage with it is a modest acquaintance with the play and an open mind. Each of the short chapters in “Stay, Illusion!” is a springy diving board poised over a deep pool of thought. Find one you like the looks of, bounce a bit, then plunge in.

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Neil Gaiman's novels are covers between which mythical creatures and beleaguered protagonists live and interact amid supernatural plots often dealing with youth and struggle. The fairy tale-esque character of his modern adult fantasies lightly masks "the intelligible message that can be derived from it," writes Laura Miller.

Gaiman’s first novel for adults in eight years, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” would seem to follow this pattern; most of the action, recounted in the first person, describes the experiences of a nameless 7-year-old boy. But “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” does feel different, and not only because of its framing device. The novel begins and ends with the narrator, now an adult, returning to the English village where he grew up, for a family funeral. (The deceased is never identified, but there are hints it is the man’s father.) We learn that he’s been married and separated, that he is a working artist, that he has grown children. When he looks back on the strange events of his childhood, it is through the mellowed and slightly melancholy lens of middle-age. What the story sacrifices of the sweet, glassy purity of a child’s view, it compensates for with the complex sepia of maturity; it’s the difference between a bright young white wine and a well-aged burgundy.

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Following the trail of the coquettish Lillian Leitzel, the "World’s Most Marvelous Gymnast,” and her gravity-defying partner, Alfredo Codona, "Queen of the Air" is an irresistible romantic biography of the Brad and Angelina of the Big Top, writes Laura Miller.

Jensen knows how to tell this story, with just the right degree of old-timey melodrama. Here’s how he describes an argument during the long years when Codona drove himself to perfect the Triple: His father and brother “begged him to abandon his quest for the feat before it killed him or, worse, left him such a pathetic cripple that he would be belted into a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Codona could not be persuaded.” In counterpoint, he pulls back the curtains concealing the brutality of the performer’s lot: celebrated and fawned over one year, forced by an accident to work as an auto mechanic the next. Leitzel was surrounded by admirers and showered with gifts, but before going to bed every night she injected caffeine into her shoulder socket to tame the “pulsating, and some nights, hammering pain.” Unlike even the most battered professional athletes, she performed twice a day, every day during the circus’ season, and on off-season gigs in Europe.

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Rachel Kushner has simultaneously stunned and scared male critics with her "virtuosic" new novel about a young woman named Reno navigating the 1970s New York art scene. "The Flamethrowers" is a bold contender for the Great American Novel, writes Laura Miller:

But the boldness of this novel has more to do with its voice than its subject matter; you get a heaping serving of Kushner’s virtuosity in the opening chapters, which describe Reno’s journey back west by motorcycle, as part of a nebulous art project. I could present samples of her writing here, but better yet, just see James Wood’s nearly gobstruck review of “The Flamethrowers” in the New Yorker; he is the maestro of the representative quote, after all. He does a good job of what may be an impossible task. It is fiendishly hard to nail down and demonstrate the quality that most distinguishes the work of a remarkable author — that is, her authority. Kushner has authority in spades, seemingly without reaching for it, as if she were just born that way.

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Laura Miller explains that like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Paul Collins’ “Duel With the Devil” offers deep insight into society through its handling of a grisly crime, offering a window into New York's political and social climate in the 1800s:

That’s how Paul Collins uses the famous real-life murder mystery at the center of “Duel With the Devil.” This sensational crime took place in Manhattan in December, 1799, on the very brink of a new century (or not quite, if you’re the sort of pedant who insists that the millennium didn’t really turn until New Year’s 1801 — and yes, those people were around back then, too!). The body of a young Quaker woman, Elma Sands, was found at the bottom of a well in Lispenard Meadows, a swath of marshy, undeveloped land that separated New York City proper from Greenwich Village, approximately where the neighborhood of Soho stands today. The guy almost everyone liked for the killer was Levi Weeks, a carpenter who lived in the same boarding house as Sands, an establishment run by Sands’ cousin, Catharine Ring, and her husband, Elias.

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New Yorker writer George Packer's “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America" is a journalistic marvel, examining 35 years worth of history to reveal the slow transformation of American institutions. Laura Miller writes:

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Laura Miller was captivated by the story of journalist Emma Brockes' mother, Pauline, who as a young woman worked to get her father arrested for incest:

It took less than a chapter of “She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me” for me to fall for Emma Brockes’ mother, Pauline. First and foremost, there’s Pauline’s tart, post-colonial sangfroid. An émigré from South Africa, where she spent the first 28 years of her life, she wound up raising her only child in Britain, in what Brockes, a journalist, describes as “a gentle kind of place, leafy and green, with the customary features of a nice English village.” Pauline was unimpressed. “The English,” she was fond of pronouncing, “are a people who cook their fruit.” She regaled her daughter with tales of growing up in what was then Zululand, where even snakes and scorpions were nothing to fuss about. “Whining was not permissible. Undervaluing oneself was not permissible,” Brockes writes of her mother’s attitude toward life. Another tenet: “Look lively, or die.”

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The American Psychiatric Association gears up to deliver the new DSM-5, the manual that serves as the mental health industry's bible, but with "The Book of Woe," psychotherapist Gary Greenberg cautions Americans to question the authority of a guide that is largely "built on fiction." Laura Miller writes:

“Psychiatric diagnosis is built on fiction and sold to the public as fact.” So writes psychotherapist Gary Greenberg in “The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry.” That’s an explosive assertion but also one that doesn’t quite mean what most of you are probably thinking. Scientologists, settle down: Greenberg is not on your side. And talk-therapy pooh-poohers, spare us all those chortles of vindicated scorn; he doesn’t agree with you, either.

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Told through the self-aware but not entirely reliable voice of Nora Eldridge, Laura Miller calls Claire Messud’s main character in “The Woman Upstairs” the counterpart to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man:

As Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Claire Messud’s claustrophobically hypnotic new novel would have it, we are all of us surrounded by reservoirs of invisible rage. “The Woman Upstairs” purports to be the story of one of the ragers, although Nora both does and doesn’t wish to be identified with the archetypal figure in the novel’s title. The counterpart to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, the Woman Upstairs, in Nora’s formulation, is a recessive, barely noticed neighbor, “whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound.” Her “day’s great excitement is the arrival of the Garnet Hill catalog.” She strives not to cause any inconvenience and is resigned to always coming second (or third) in other people’s lives.

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Laura Miller, who generally does not have “patience for the touchstones of foodie literature,” was pleasantly surprised by Michael Pollan’s “Cooked,” written from the perspective of a journalist and gardener rather than a celebrity chef:

His effort to deepen his understanding of the process of turning food into meals is the subject of his latest book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.” I wish I could say “Cooked” is entirely free of moments of flabby philosophizing (“Isn’t it always precisely when we are most at risk of floating away on the sea of our own inventions and conceits that we seem to row our way back to the firm shore that is nature?”), but they are rare. Admittedly, the book’s thematic structure is also a shade precious. It’s divided into four sections according to what the ancients perceived to be the four elements — fire, water, air and earth — each attributed to a different cooking method — grilling, braising and other forms of cooking in liquids, baking and fermentation. As ever, Pollan makes each of these themes the occasion for real thought as well as some energetic reporting.

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Laura Miller recommends the memoir of Alexandra Aldrich, a descendent of the prominent Astor family, which provides a glimpse into a less privileged, less happy childhood than one would expect:

In premise alone, “The Astor Orphan” sounds like some delicious children’s novel, the kind of thing you’d gobble a dozen times over by the age of 8. In reality it’s a mournful, curious tale of an anxious child’s longing for security. Aldrich, who kept a diary from an early age, apparently sticks closely to it; her book has a halting, episodic rhythm. It lacks the fluency of truly accomplished storytelling, but the story it tells is so extraordinary, and Aldrich’s tone is so baldly honest, that the reader’s attention will not flag.

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Laura Miller was transfixed by Wendy Moore’s “How to Create the Perfect Wife,” which exlores the hidden life of 18th century abolitionist Thomas Day. Day would have been considered a catch during his time -- except that he didn't believe in love, and surreptitiously groomed a wife:

Throughout history, men convinced that women exist solely to serve their needs have been flummoxed to discover that women see things otherwise. Day, however, believed that he had reason and Rousseau on his side. If he could not find an already-grown woman who possessed every quality he required in a spouse, why not make one to order? In 1769, he visited a foundling home and, pretending to be seeking maidservant apprentices for a married friend, secured two girls, aged 12 and 11. His aim: educating and training them to meet his precise specifications in a wife, then marrying the one who best suited him. He even renamed his experimental subjects: Sabrina and Lucretia.

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Laura Miller was impressed by Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life," in which protagonist Ursula Todd "lives any number of lives in the course of the book," à la Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day":

As a result, “Life After Life” runs through several courses of Ursula’s story until each comes to its terminus, then the novel starts over with a different one. Perhaps this sounds monotonous, like some hellish video game in which you’ve got to repeat a level again and again to make it to the next. That’s not the case. “Life After Life” is a hypnotic dance of causality and chance, in which Ursula makes genuine progress. We see how a meek Ursula’s life plays out when one of her boorish older brother’s friends casually rapes her in the back stairway, and then we get the version in which she’s seized with a powerful urge to clock him the minute he gets fresh. Each iteration shows her to be more self-possessed, more in charge of her own life (as the cliché goes) — but that doesn’t necessarily lead to a “better” outcome. Meanwhile, Ursula moves toward that inevitable time-traveler imperative, the one that gave its name to a “Doctor Who” episode: “Let’s Kill Hitler.”

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For anyone interested in epic adventure tales, Laura Miller recommends “Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm,” a study of Paul du Chaillu, an explorer whose remarkable journey is part Charles Darwin, part Indiana Jones:

"This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world."

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Laura Miller, a Yankee, was enlightened by former newspaper reporter Tracy Thompson's deeply personal account of the transformation of Georgia, titled "The New Mind of the South":

Thompson gives "The New Mind of the South" a muscular tension that a merely nostalgic memoir or a self-effacing work of reportage could never achieve. She vividly recalls the embracing evangelical church life of her 1960s youth, when the religion was "otherworldly and apolitical" and therefore a marked contrast to the activist fundamentalism that arose in the 1970s or the show-bizzy extravaganza of a megachurch she visits in suburban Atlanta. Yet the latter, an outpost of the "prosperity gospel," turns out to be more multiracial and feminist than she expected. Such churches can’t provide her with the comfort she once found in the small church where her family used to worship, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing some good.

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Laura Miller bites into "Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live," by evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk, who debunks the myth of the caveman diet:

Why are we so intent on establishing how paleolithic people ate, exercised, coupled up and raised their kids? That’s a question Zuk considers only in passing, but she hits the nail pretty solidly on the head … Even if we wanted to live like cavemen, Zuk points out (noting that the desire to do so somehow never seems to extend to moving into mud huts), we couldn’t. In reality, we don’t have their bodies, and don’t live in their world. Even the animals and plants we eat have changed beyond recognition from their paleolithic ancestors. It turns out we’re stuck being us.

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The most striking thing about all this reading  and listening is how few of these books and audiobooks have taken up any kind of long-term residence in my mind and in my life – how few have troubled me so that I think about them months and years after I thought I had finished my time with them, and how few have brought pleasure or solace of the sort that cause me to want to reread them.

If I tried to categorize what it is that gives these books their special staying power, the first thing I might do is make a list of the qualities that — surprisingly — aren’t sources of this power. It’s not the subject or the content, although subject and content that is inherently interesting or dramatic can go a long way toward helping a book be interesting or dramatic.  It’s not timeliness, although I’m always happy to spend time with a book that has something to say to the present moment. And it’s not the events the book offers, although I’m drawn to a book that offers a series of interesting events.

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Born a solicitor's daughter in the West Midlands of England in 1913, educated at Oxford, serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II and working for much of the rest of her life at the International African Institute in London, Pym was a quintessential middle-class Englishwoman, much like her idol, Jane Austen. Like Austen, Pym wrote comedies of manners about the members of her own class, modeling the characters on people she knew. Her novels are populated by vicar's wives, dotty unmarried sisters living in rural villages, holders of mid-level office jobs in sleepy London concerns and assorted anthropologists (based on the ones she met at the institute).

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Laura Miller was deeply moved by  Sonali Deraniyagal's incredible, spare memoir, “Wave,” about losing her parents, husband and children in the 2004 tsunami during a family vacation:

Deraniyagala’s account of this nightmare, but the tsunami itself only takes up a handful of this spare, radiant book’s pages. The rest is what came after, months in that darkened room contemplating suicide, then a period of getting drunk every day and conducting a demented campaign of harassment against the Dutch family to whom her brother rented her parents’ house. Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, had been living with Steve and the boys in London, but she wasn’t able to set foot in their English house for two years.

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