Salon.com > Recommended books http://www.salon.com Sun, 19 May 2013 23:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The best books of the decade http://www.salon.com/2009/12/10/best_books_decade/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/10/best_books_decade/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:10:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2009/12/09/best_books_decade We'll spare you the overly ambitious sweeping statements. This has been a rocky decade, to say the least, and as many writers showed us just after the Sept. 11 attacks, we often can't formulate our best thoughts about traumatic events until much, much later. If anything, looking back over the past 10 years of Salon's books coverage, what's most striking is the durability of fiction and memoir; the novels and autobiographies we were talking about in 2000 still feel important today, while the bloom tends to fade faster from the nonfiction of the moment.

For that reason, the nonfiction on this list steers away from the most avidly trend-setting treatises (Malcolm Gladwell, we're looking at you!) in favor of definitive accounts of current events, penetrating histories and explorations of perennial human concerns. As for fiction, the most exciting thing to emerge in the 2000s has been the integration of genre elements into literary fiction: You no longer have to choose between good writing and good storytelling. But if the preceding two decades have seen the dismantling of the tyranny of rigorous realism, there are still masters (like Mary Gaitskill) working in that vein, and following it into rich new territory. The following lists are presented in chronological order.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/10/best_books_decade/feed/ 28 Radio discussion of 2009′s best books http://www.salon.com/2009/12/09/on_point_best_books/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/09/on_point_best_books/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:11:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2009/12/09/on_point_best_books Salon readers who'd like to hear me talking about my favorite books of 2009 should check out this episode of the NPR call-in show, "On Point." Even better, you'll get recommendations from David Ulin, the editor of the Los Angeles Times' books section, and Carol Besse, co-owner of Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the show's impressively well-read readers. A particularly nice touch was having Carol and I read short excerpts from some of our choices.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/09/on_point_best_books/feed/ 0 The best fiction of 2009 http://www.salon.com/2009/12/09/best_fiction/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/09/best_fiction/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:09:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2009/12/08/best_fiction All best-books lists are pretty subjective, none more so than a list of the year's best fiction. For example, I probably experienced the most unadulterated readerly bliss this year while buried in the pages of Lev Grossman's "The Magicians," but then the quirky theme of Grossman's novel -- how a child steeped in literary fantasy like the Chronicles of Narnia comes to terms with the ambiguous nature of adulthood -- is virtually the same as that of my own nonfiction book. They even have almost the same title! And the author is a good friend. If that's not too many caveats for you, dear reader, then you can consider this a strong recommendation.

The truth is, there's enough great fiction out there that it makes sense to reach for a certain breadth, balance and variety. This year's Booker Prize short list was so good, it's tempting to simply reproduce it, but an all-Brit list would be as cockeyed as, say, an all-male one. In the end, we've kept the Booker crowd down to just two. Hillary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" was neck and neck with A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book," but a shade more celebrated, which tipped the balance in favor of Dame Antonia.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/09/best_fiction/feed/ 10 Introducing: What to Read http://www.salon.com/2009/12/07/what_to_read_intro/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/07/what_to_read_intro/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2009/12/06/what_to_read_intro Books have been important to Salon from the very beginning -- that would be 1995, when I joined a team of disaffected newspaper staffers cooking up a new kind of publication for the fledgling medium of the World Wide Web. We've reinvented ourselves a few times since then, but telling our readers about enlightening, thought-provoking, amusing and moving new books has always remained central to Salon's editorial mission.

That hasn't changed, although how we do it is about to. If you're a longtime reader of Salon's books coverage, rest assured that you'll still be seeing the interviews, commentary and excerpts you've come to expect -- even more of them, in fact. Over the next week, for example, we'll be rolling out our lists of the best books of the year and of the decade.

Beginning on Dec. 14, look for the resurrection of one of our readers' favorite features, What to Read, in a new format. Every Monday, I'll present a book selected from an assortment of related new titles, tell you why I found this book exceptional and, when warranted, explain why others didn't make the cut. What to Read will regularly recommend a book we think you'll really love.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/07/what_to_read_intro/feed/ 36 Christmas insanity unwrapped http://www.salon.com/2009/11/23/tinsel/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/23/tinsel/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/11/22/tinsel Every year, Christmas is directly responsible for some of the worst books to cross a reviewer's desk: stale, overfrosted sugar cookies loaded with the literary equivalent of artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup. But now all is forgiven because the season has inspired Hank Stuever to write "Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present," a portrait of the holiday as it's celebrated in the booming Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. A delicately calibrated combination of rigorous reporting, observational humor and old-fashioned empathy, "Tinsel" is the book that saved Christmas for this curmudgeon. The first two sentences alone, with their vivid evocation of big-box America and the promise of more crackerjack prose to come, did the trick:

Before the Black Friday dawn, the sky is still a mix of dark blue and the sick sodium-vapor saffron of the suburban night. I park by the Beijing Chinese Super Buffet and walk across the lot to Best Buy, where hundreds of people -- some in their twelfth or thirteenth hour of standing in line -- await the day-after-Thanksgiving doorbuster sale.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/23/tinsel/feed/ 24 How memoirs took over the literary world http://www.salon.com/2009/11/16/memoir_4/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/16/memoir_4/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/11/15/memoir Has the memoir become the "central form" of our culture, as Ben Yagoda insists in his breezy new consideration of the form, "Memoir: A History"? Do I detect hackles rising from coast to coast at the mere suggestion? Today, autobiography is both very popular and widely reviled, for reasons that aren't always clear. People complain that the modern memoir is narcissistic, formulaic, pretentious and often falsified -- all true on occasion, though when pressed the accusers can usually list a few contemporary memoirs that they do admire. What is it about the memoir in its current form that makes it simultaneously so irresistible and so annoying?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/16/memoir_4/feed/ 36 Investigating his father’s murder http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/evening_s_empire/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/evening_s_empire/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/11/08/evening_s_empire In 1975, Ed Lazar was shot in a Phoenix parking garage stairwell by two men he'd never met. Thirty years later, Lazar's son, Zachary, an acclaimed novelist ("Sway"), began to investigate the murder in preparation for writing "Evening's Empire," a book he had been contemplating for as long as he could remember. No "solution" was called for in any conventional sense of that word: Authorities have known who killed Ed Lazar (two hit men affiliated with the Chicago mafia) and why (they were paid to do it by Ed's former business partner, Ned Warren) for years. But for Zachary, his father's death remained a mystery. How did a quiet, respectable suburban CPA like Ed Lazar, a man whose friends could make no sense of his violent end, wind up dying in what Walter Cronkite described on the CBS Evening News as "a gangland-style murder"?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/evening_s_empire/feed/ 6 Archaeologists behaving badly http://www.salon.com/2009/11/02/the_hidden/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/02/the_hidden/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/11/01/the_hidden During the early fall, publishers release the highest concentration of books by established writers -- many of which, incidentally, turn out to be disappointing, like this year's offerings from John Irving and Philip Roth. As a result, it's easy to miss fine novels by relative newcomers (who are also less tempted than the big names to phone it in). Tobias Hill's impressive "The Hidden," published last month as a paperback original, is a case in point. Hill, a British poet, novelist and short story writer, likes to take subjects conventionally associated with airport thrillers -- murder mysteries, quests for ancient treasure, conspiracies -- and crack them open to probe for more succulent literary meat. "The Hidden," set on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Sparta, circles around the suspicious activities of some of the dig's team while dissecting the broken inner life of a young man who wants nothing more than to be let in on their secret.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/02/the_hidden/feed/ 6 Memo to grammar cops: Back off! http://www.salon.com/2009/10/26/lexicographers_dilemma/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/26/lexicographers_dilemma/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:24:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/10/25/lexicographers_dilemma "Passions run hot when the discussion turns to language," writes Rutgers English professor Jack Lynch in his sprightly new history of the notion of "proper" English, "The Lexicographer's Dilemma." "Friends who can discuss politics, religion and sex with perfect civility are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique." Ain't it the truth? My favorite call-in radio program regularly invites "word maven" Patricia T. O'Conner to come on and talk about new and old figures of speech. O'Conner clearly prefers to marvel over the language's diversity, but the half-hour is inevitably eaten up by people kvetching about their pet peeves, more often than not some barely detectable error or non-infraction that makes the caller apoplectic -- such as the phrase "gone missing," which is "perfectly standard," according to Lynch. But who am I to mock? I, who have gnashed my teeth countless times over the dangling participles that abound on NPR!

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/26/lexicographers_dilemma/feed/ 90 “Chronic” overachiever: Interview with Jonathan Lethem http://www.salon.com/2009/10/23/lethem_6/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/23/lethem_6/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:24:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/10/23/lethem As Jonathan Lethem grew into what critics like to call one of our most important novelists, he became increasingly difficult to pigeonhole; fluid across genres, Lethem's biggest books ("Motherless Brooklyn," "Fortress of Solitude") can feel like sparkling new works from a new author rather than someone you've enjoyed before. His latest, "Chronic City," with its flashes of pot-fueled magic realism and ripped-from-the-tabloid-headline riffs again reads as something completely different from Lethem, but no less enthralling.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/23/lethem_6/feed/ 13 The amazing adventures of an aspiring grown-up http://www.salon.com/2009/10/21/michael_chabon_manhood/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/21/michael_chabon_manhood/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:21:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/critics_picks/2009/10/20/michael_chabon_manhood Though Michael Chabon's fixation with DC comics, bisexuality and pink Polo shirts is not exactly "manly," his life -- as evidenced by an endearing new collection of short essays -- has been a picture of modern American manhood. Whereas his last book, "Maps and Legends," mounted a scholarly defense of the genre fiction that formed his literary tastes, "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son" charts the landscapes of his childhood and adulthood in a frank, visceral style. To read it is to understand the open line of communication Chabon keeps with his younger self; he seems to recall exactly what it was like to be a kid. Yet, as a father of four and the husband of novelist Ayelet Waldman (a former columnist for Salon), Chabon displays a deep investment in his role as a family man. He has an instinct for good old-fashioned moral righteousness in the face of trouble and temptation.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/21/michael_chabon_manhood/feed/ 27 Elizabeth Taylor: How to Be a Movie Star http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/elizabeth_taylor/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/elizabeth_taylor/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:15:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/10/19/elizabeth_taylor "Elizabeth Taylor" was one of the answers during a high-speed round of the party game Celebrities I played recently. The player had seconds to get his team to guess her name, and the first thing that popped out of his mouth was, "She twittered her heart surgery." The clue worked, but afterward we clucked over it: Not "National Velvet," not "Cleopatra," not "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" but Twitter? Poor Elizabeth Taylor. We were ashamed of ourselves.

According to William J. Mann, Taylor's latest biographer, we probably shouldn't have been. "How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood," argues that, despite Taylor's half-dozen or so legendary on-screen roles -- including her Oscar-winning portrayal of a posh call girl in "Butterfield 8" -- the instrument she truly mastered was celebrity itself. That she's nabbed a few more headlines by communicating directly with her fans using the latest technology only demonstrates that she hasn't lost her touch.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/elizabeth_taylor/feed/ 25 Why the Berlin Wall fell http://www.salon.com/2009/10/14/uncivil_society/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/14/uncivil_society/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:06:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/10/14/uncivil_society When the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this November, it seemed, from the outside, to have simply melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West after a good dousing. Like the witch, the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc had appeared to be an implacable and wily adversary, an aspect of modern life as inevitable as death and taxes. But Dorothy's astonishment at discovering that a mere pailful of dirty water had foiled her nemesis was nothing compared to that of the average Westerner upon seeing the Wall crumble for, it seemed, no reason at all. Suddenly, television was filled with images of mobs of East Germans dancing on the concrete monolith that, a few weeks earlier, they couldn't even approach without being gunned down. Not a drop of blood had been shed. How did that happen?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/14/uncivil_society/feed/ 50 Girl, you’ll be a bloodthirsty gladiator soon http://www.salon.com/2009/10/08/lise_haines/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/08/lise_haines/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:06:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/10/08/lise_haines "Girl in the Arena" is like nothing you’ve ever read. Lise Haines’ new novel is about the rise of a modern gladiator culture in America, in which fights to the death have become a hugely profitable televised sport. The book is both a good old-fashioned page-turner -- it tracks the exploits of Lyn, a teenage girl who steps into the ring to avenge the death of her stepfather -- and a blistering indictment of our addiction to violence. And here’s the kicker: The book is being marketed as a young adult title. Really.

Haines’ previous novels -- "In My Sister’s Country" (2002) and "Small Acts of Sex and Electricity" -- were decidedly adult affairs. Both dealt with feminine desire and its discontents. Neither featured extended scenes of bloodshed. As a longtime fan, I was curious to ask Haines why she’d decided to write a book that is almost sure to be tagged as the female teen answer to "Fight Club."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/08/lise_haines/feed/ 27 The murder she didn’t commit http://www.salon.com/2009/10/05/blame/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/05/blame/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/10/05/blame The first glimpse that Michelle Huneven offers of the main character in her new novel, "Blame," comes through the eyes of a dazzled child. Patsy MacLemoore is a blonde with long, tan legs and a perfect smile, and she's dating 12-year-old Joey's dashing uncle, Brice, scion of one of the grand families in the Southern California town of Altadena. She's also a newly minted history professor at a local college. On the surface, Patsy looks great, but in the course of an evening spent with Joey and Brice, she gets drunker and drunker -- also, more desperate: clinging to the elusive Brice and quizzing Joey about her uncle's "other girlfriends." Somewhere in there, she offers to pierce Joey's ears, but the result is lopsided, one hole higher than the other. "Just cock your head to one side," Patsy tells the girl, "and no one will ever notice."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/05/blame/feed/ 8 The elegance of the gourmand http://www.salon.com/2009/09/11/gourmet_rhapsody/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/11/gourmet_rhapsody/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:11:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/critics_picks/2009/09/11/gourmet_rhapsody Muriel Barbery’s last book, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” was a massive bestseller both in France and in America. But while the story of a depressed concierge and an angsty teen girl had moments of lyricism, I found its near-constant literary and philosophical allusions pretentious, and its characters unlikable. Thankfully, Barbery's new book (or old book, technically, as it was written first), "Gourmet Rhapsody," manages to transform these weaknesses into strengths.

“Rhapsody” is the tale of the masterly food critic Pierre Arthens, who lies on his deathbed struggling to remember the one flavor that he believes has defined his life. Every other chapter is narrated by Arthens and centers around a single food item, such as "Toast" or "Mayonnaise," moving in the manner of a detective story toward the mystery flavor. The other chapters each feature a different narrator who has known Arthens in some capacity. Everyone from his granddaughter to his cat to the statuette of Venus in his study gets a chance to weigh in.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/09/11/gourmet_rhapsody/feed/ 5 Critics’ Picks: Magic for grown-ups http://www.salon.com/2009/08/12/magicians/ http://www.salon.com/2009/08/12/magicians/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:18:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/critics_picks/2009/08/12/magicians Even if its author, Lev Grossman, weren't a colleague and friend, I'd be fervently recommending "The Magicians" to any reader who fell under the spell of Narnia or Harry Potter as a child and looks back on it all with an adult's ambivalence.

It's the story of Quentin Coldwater, a glum teenage Brooklynite preparing for his first year of university, who finds himself enrolled instead in a secret college of magic. Like most of the other students at Brakebills, Quentin grew up on a series of children's novels about a magical land called Fillory, emblem of all the wonder he longs for but that seems forever out of reach. Could his long-denied dreams finally be coming true?

"The Magicians" is a grown-up's book, one that reflects on the sort of questions you never think to ask about fantasy narratives as a kid, such as: Is it such a good idea to meddle in the politics of a strange country you barely understand? Wouldn't magical powers drain much of the challenge -- and therefore the purpose -- out of life? If animals and trees could really talk, would they have anything especially interesting to say?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/08/12/magicians/feed/ 2 The beauty and terror of science http://www.salon.com/2009/08/10/age_of_wonder/ http://www.salon.com/2009/08/10/age_of_wonder/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/08/10/age_of_wonder It's always fascinating to read about science before the big three discoveries: evolution by natural selection, the theory of general relativity and the DNA molecule. Swept back in time by a sensational writer like Richard Holmes, we see driven men and women chasing the light of nature's fundamental laws, like explorers crossing night seas toward treasured shores. But that's what makes their stories compelling. With their magnificent questions and ingenious inventions, they slowly pushed science forward. Was the night sky fixed in place by a divine creator? How could it be? Astronomers with powerful new telescopes in the 18th century revealed the universe was in constant motion -- stars were busy being born or busy dying.

A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of that journey is that science is not just a process but is the men and women performing it. In his radiant new book, "The Age of Wonder," Holmes treats us to the amazing lives of the pioneering sailors and balloonists, astronomers and chemists of the Romantic era. Making good on the book's subtitle, he takes us on a dazzling tour of their chaotic British observatories and fatal explorations in African jungles, showing us "how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/08/10/age_of_wonder/feed/ 34 Pynchon lights up http://www.salon.com/2009/07/31/pynchon_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/31/pynchon_2/#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/31/pynchon Hard-boiled detective fiction may not seem like the ideal vehicle for the often cryptic style and subject matter of Thomas Pynchon, but his newest novel proves otherwise. An account of the adventures of a hippie private eye pursuing assorted nonlucrative commissions in a Southern California beach town around 1970, "Inherent Vice" is a sun-struck, pot-addled shaggy dog story that fuses the sulky skepticism of Raymond Chandler with the good-natured scrappiness of "The Big Lebowski." It's an inspired formula; the mystery plot supplies the novel with a minimum of structure (as well as confidence that there's some point to the enterprise) and the genre provides ample cover for Pynchon's literary weaknesses.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/31/pynchon_2/feed/ 33 Must read: “Glover’s Mistake” http://www.salon.com/2009/07/23/nick_laird/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/23/nick_laird/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/07/23/nick_laird It's easy to underestimate Nick Laird's new novel, "Glover's Mistake," if you only dip your toe into the book. For the first couple of chapters it might be the literary equivalent of one of those early Hugh Grant movies, where the stammering hero trips over his own feet a few times before kissing the girl against a background of quirky, candied pop songs. It's the story of David Pinner, a lovelorn London schoolteacher in his 30s and a never-was artist who vents his frustrated intellect in an anonymous blog he calls (perfectly) the Damp Review. He critiques everything from films to "takeaways," but he finds it easiest "to write on disappointments. Hatreds, easier still."

One day, while leafing through Time Out magazine, David spots a photo of Ruth Marks, an American artist and one of his former instructors, in town for a residency. He attends her opening and diligently engineers a renewed friendship. She's older, talented, charismatic, an emissary from a world of privilege and bohemian glamour who inspires rustling in David's bedraggled romantic hopes.

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