The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

Since I started working on the B&N Review, I get asked a lot what I am reading, and what I like. It's frustrating to a point, because I frequently don't finish books that come through my cube, in my haste to keep up with everything. And while I'm at peace with my fragmentary reading habits, I don't like recommending books I've only read, say, the first third of.

So, here is a list that contains books that (a) were published either in hardcover or in paperback since I started my current position, (b) I read all the way through and (c) I unequivocally recommend to you. This list doesn't include rereads, or older books/classics I read for the first time (unless they are underappreciated gems getting a fresh pub this year for the first time -- see the several NYRB classics titles below). And the absence of lots of well-regarded books from this last year shouldn't be construed as anything other than the fact that I was too busy, lazy, or stupid to read them -- yet.

Currently available in paperback:

FICTION

The Yiddish Policeman's Union
Yes, it's Michael Chabon and it may be in a sense overpraised. But it may also be my favorite thing he ever did. Noir and alternate-history pastiche in a Jewish Alaska, carried off with heart and brio.)

Then We Came to the End/Personal Days
Two weirdly synchronistically similar (same odd use of first-person-plural narration) novels about the cubicle world. Oddly enough, both wind up quite satisfying.

The Ministry of Special Cases
A story of a family in Buenos Aires in 1976, when people with the wrong friends or books on their shelves were starting to get Disappeared. Riveting.

Spook Country
William Gibson's latest came out last year, and I finally got to it in its paperback form. Fragmentary remnants of the cold-war-era espionage world chasing a mysterious container collide with denizens of the digital art world. Probably his best work since Count Zero (although I liked Pattern Recognition almost as much).

Inverted World
Christopher Priest (the author of The Prestige) wrote this Twilight Zone-y conceptual dystopia back in the 1970s, and the awesome NYRB classics just brought it back to life in the U.S. Hyperbolas have never been so creepy; but if I tell you more it might ruin it.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale
This is an engrossing serio-comic family saga by the enormously talented Banks, who writes everything from space opera to psychological horror. The fact that he wrote this too fascinates me.

Rogue Male By Geoffrey Household
This is a taut little tale of suspense (in the resourceful-man-on-the-run-from-implacable-enemies mode) also brought back to life by NYRB classics. Best devoured in one gulp, with drink in the other hand, perhaps on an airplane.

Grifter's Game
First published in 1961, this is a nastily pleasurable little hard-boiled distraction by Lawrence Block, with a particularly powerful sting in the end. Charles Ardai's Hard Case Crime imprint does some great stuff, most of which I haven't had the leisure to explore.

NONFICTION

Born Standing Up : A Comic's Life (paperback is coming on September 2)
Steve Martin's memoir -- no surprise that it's entertaining, I guess, but it's worth saying: this is relevatory about the craft of comedy and performance, and equally so about a lost world of vaudeville types that Martin managed to connect with as a teenager.

The Gift: Art, Imagination, and the Power of the Creative Spirit
Lewis Hyde's classic (an oddball anthropological/philosophical/polemical tour de force on art and commerce and why our whole social order is pretty much backwards) sneaks in because a new paperback edition came out.

Names on the Land
Another classic revived by NYBR (can they do no wrong?)...George R. Stewart's look at the origin of American place-names, and the many weird and fascinating misunderstandings that produced most of them.

Hardcover titles -- not yet out in paperback

FICTION

Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
Each of Stephen Millhauser's stories has a deliciously haunting quality, something eerie even when the sun is shining.

Lush Life
The latest from the incomparable Price, something between a police procedural and a Balzac-ian anatomizing of the hyper-rapid gentrification of the Lower East Side.


The Spies of Warsaw
Another from the best espionage writer living. Furst grounds all of his novels in the run-up to World War II. In this one, the French military attache in Poland on the eve of war is trying to do what he can to get the understanding of Nazi plans through to his superiors. No puppetmasters, no hokey conspiracies – but the question of survival (for the hero, for anyone) lends the story all the urgency it needs.

Nazi Literature in the Americas
I have Bolaño's The Savage Detectives on my desk, and I hope to read it soon. This came out from New Directions in the Spring – it's more compact than that book, which everyone says is great. This is a good one for you die-hard Borges fans; it's a compendium of brief, fictional biographies of crazy right-wing writers scattered througout Latin America. Somewhere between historical-political satire and dark meditation on the banality of evil; with a vertiginous sense that something terribly specific and devastating looms over all. I don't claim to understand what he was up to, but it's fascinating.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation
I don't have a lot to say here except that I really, really enjoyed it. If you're in the mood for some Middle English literature in a compelling new translation – Simon Armitage has taken care of it for you.

NONFICTION

The Discovery of France
I wrote about Graham Robb's wonderful book a bit (see the link), already, so I won't repeat myself. But look, just get it and read it. You'll learn a lot about the history of a big part of Europe and have a great time doing it.

Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters
I confess I didn't read all of the text in here about the director and studio that brought us Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, Ultraman, and that flying turtle one that makes friends with the boy. But the pictures are so worth it.

Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World (in paperback Sept. 30)
I also wrote on this one. I can't say this was exactly a pleasure to read, but the author was vastly informative about the way our bodies and our microbial buddies have evolved together. It won't make you stop taking antibiotics, but you'll think very differently about them.

Rapture Ready
This is cheating, because I know the author a little, but Daniel Radosh's book gets into the enormous and surprisingly varied world of Christian popular culture in a way that is both diverting and illuminating. And he has an attitude about it that doesn't leave you feeling icky, which I think is hard to pull off in a subject like this.

Mother on Fire (goes on sale next week)
Another one that's cheating, because Sandra Tsing Loh is making my life easier by agreeing to appear in a feature for us at work, so who knows how objective I am? But that's preposterous...because this book is more than worth your time – really funny and deadly insightful about the torturous neurotic process our culture's entitled 5% undergo when thinking about their children's education. Rambling and intense, but so is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and how many times have you read that?

These are not yet published – so I won't write about them yet, but when I do it will be to recommend:
Nick Harkway, The Gone-Away World
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, The Ms. Hempl Chronicles
Amitv Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

And on my table to read next, with high hopes, are
Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle