Seriously though, feel free to buy me any one of these
I will take B&N Nook credit as my shoulders are now too weak to carry real books.
(On a side note, looking at all of these and then looking at my currently unfinished book list has really emphasized how little time I actually have to read. :( The last time I finished a book was waiting in line at the UK visa office in China. I wonder if whatever job I get after this masters will give me more downtime, or if I won’t get another chance to really read until I retire.)
All selections from the New York Times’ Notable 100 for 2011:
THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES. By Héctor Tobar. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A big, insightful novel about social and ethnic conflict in contemporary Los Angeles.
BIG QUESTIONS. Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway? Written and illustrated by Anders Brekhus Nilsen. (Drawn & Quarterly, cloth, $69.95; paper, $44.95.) In this capacious, metaphysically inclined graphic novel, a flock of finches act out Nilsen’s unsettling comic vision about the food chain, fate and death.
THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC. By Julie Otsuka. (Knopf, $22.) Through a chorus of narrators, Otsuka unfurls the stories of Japanese women who came to America in the early 1900s to marry men they’d never met.
THE LAST WEREWOLF. By Glen Duncan. (Knopf, $25.95.) A wry, world-weary and hyper-articulate werewolf, morally as well as physically ambiguous, is tortured by the spirits of his victims and ready to surrender to his pursuers.
THE LONDON TRAIN. By Tessa Hadley. (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Hadley’s artfully constructed, socially realistic novel is split between two characters who react in opposite ways to their old affair.
1Q84. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. (Knopf, $30.50.) This voluminous novel, set in 1984, is simultaneously a mystery, a love story and a dystopian fantasy that raises questions of psychology and ethics.
THE PALE KING: An Unfinished Novel. By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Unfolding on an epic scale, this coherent, if uncompleted, portrayal of our age is a grand parable of “late capitalism,” set in the innards of the Internal Revenue Service.
THE TIGER’S WIFE. By Téa Obreht. (Random House, $25.) In her first novel, Obreht uses fable and allegory to illustrate the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing the region’s patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence.
THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY: Explanations That Transform the World. By David Deutsch. (Viking, $30.) Deutsch’s inexhaustibly curious exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge pivots on the European Enlightenment.
THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker. (Viking, $40.) Are humans essentially good or bad? Has the past century seen moral progress or moral collapse? Pinker addresses these questions and more.
CATHERINE THE GREAT: Portrait of a Woman. By Robert K. Massie. (Random House, $35.) Massie provides a sweeping narrative about the impressive minor German princess who became empress of Russia.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. By Charles C. Mann. (Knopf, $30.50.) This follow-up to “1491” argues that ecological encounters since Columbus have shaped much of subsequent human history.
HARLEM IS NOWHERE: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) A Harlem transplant documents her own and others’ experiences there, working not to define the neighborhood, but to revise received ideas.
THE INFORMATION: A History. A Theory. A Flood. By James Gleick. (Pantheon, $29.95.) Gleick argues that information is more than just the contents of our libraries and Web servers: human consciousness, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.
MOBY-DUCK: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. By Donovan Hohn. (Viking, $27.95.) Where those rubber toys came from, where they drifted, and why.
THE QUEST: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. By Daniel Yergin. (Penguin Press, $37.95.) This comprehensive study makes clear that energy policy is not on the right course anywhere.
A TRAIN IN WINTER: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. By Caroline Moorehead. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Moorehead meticulously traces the fates of 230 Frenchwomen sent to Auschwitz as political prisoners of the Reich.
-
plasticlain posted this
