New Non-Fiction

The Ongoing Moment
by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Dyer opens with a confession of naiveté regarding the practice and history of photography, teasing the novice into a weary state. It's a tease because from there on, the reader is enticed into the mind of a pure and original genius, delivering a thoughtful and delightfully off-the-wall survey of American photography. This will go down as a classic, on par with Susan Sontag's On Photography, but different because of its power to engage even those who are just slightly interested. -A.C. Jennings

Time Bites
by Doris Lessing (HarperColins)

While on your way to a dinner party, do you always hope that you’ll sit next to the wittiest, most opinionated, and worldly person at the table? Reading Time Bites makes it seem as if you’ve done exactly that, with Doris Lessing defending Jane Austen’s characters during the soup course and spouting tales of being a young communist while the entrée is being served. The short pieces, which make you feel as if Ms. Lessing has pulled you aside to tell you what it’s like to grow old and offer her opinion of cats, upgrade this delightful collection to a book you must read. -M. Helsel

Two Lives
by Vikram Seth (HarperCollins)

No two books that Vikram Seth has written, from a travel memoir to a novel in verse to the subcontinentally sized A Suitable Boy, have been alike. He works new ground again in this family memoir, telling the very personal stories of an Indian uncle and his German-Jewish wife who live in London, and the whirls and torments of the world that brought them there. Most markedly, those travails are World War II, Nazi Germany's genocide of Jews, and India’s independence and violent partition. Seth draws on correspondence, archival materials, and his own decade-long quest to make this captivating account. -R. Simonson

Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels through the Great Subcontinent
by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan)

Eating is a fabulous reason to travel, and the best souvenirs brought back from exotic trips are often recipes. Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid have made a career of collecting recipes from the countries they visit and publishing them with their photographs and stories. Their books are wonderful blends of cookbook, travel literature, and photo essay that are as fun to read as they are to cook from.

Their new book, encompassing India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, has mouthwatering recipes and wonderful stories, telling how to make everything from naan to the tandoori oven that will bake it. -J. Brown

My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front
by Jonathan Raban (New York Review of Books)

Seattle resident Jonathan Raban writes about terrorism, the U.S. presidential election, Islam, and the misguided war in Iraq among other things in this new collection of political essays. Raban’s essays have both the outsider's perspective (he's English), and a distinctly Pacific Northwest—specifically Seattle—viewpoint, since he makes this his home. The essays in this volume cover 2002 through early 2005. Raban's analysis captures the mood of those of us who live on this island of so-called progressiveness, and our relationship to the greater part of the U.S. -G. Berry

Every Book Its Reader
by Nicholas A. Basbanes (HarperCollins)

In his newest book, extreme bibliophile Basbanes explores further our relationship to books. Every generation, he points out, approaches the classics with new perceptions and new questions. This book examines writings that have "made things happen" and profiles great writers of our time—David McCullough, Elaine Pagels, Robert Coles, to name a few—not as authors, but as readers, putting into words the importance of the interaction between reader and book. With its heady and resonant text, filled with delightful literary minutiae and heartfelt, memorable quotes on beloved books, this is a book for every reader. –H. Myers

The Last Gentleman Adventurer: Coming of Age in the Arctic
by Edward Beauclerk Maurice (Houghton Mifflin)

In this straightforward narrative, recollected from his journals more than seventy years later, Edward Beauclerk Maurice details how, at seventeen years of age, he joined the Hudson Bay Company and set off on what he thought was an Arctic adventure. The description of his time spent manning trading posts on the Labrador Coast makes clear that the Inuit people who taught Maurice to survive Arctic winters came to rely on him for support in turn. Maurice was both an onlooker and a participant in their lives, who wrote this memoir in the same spirit of witness. -T. Hayes

Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches
by Jill Fredston (Harcourt)

The forces of nature—not least the destructive indifference of avalanches—constantly remind us of our relative insignificance. As an acknowledged expert, Jill Fredston has devoted her life to the prevention of and emergency response to these torrents of white death. With Snowstruck, she transports the reader into the treacherous snowpack, where the complex nature and calculated prevention of avalanches are elucidated with taut and gripping prose. Catastrophic slides and spectacular rescues are recounted with such adrenalized and emotive power that one feels part of the nightmare. -J. Reiner

Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life
by Julia Briggs (Harcourt)

This is a reader's biography—geared to those who love the art: passionate readers of Woolf's prose. Briggs begins with the neglected The Voyage Out (1915) and concludes with the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941). Devoting a chapter to each book, she explores the influences, activities, obstacles and achievements that culminated in each volume, with a brief postscript on the reception and legacy of each.

Here's a great way to spend the next year: Read a chapter of Briggs, followed by its subject book. Proceed through to the end, with increasing insight, wonder, and appreciation for Woolf's accomplishment, courage, and artistry.

Then begin again. -P. Aaron

Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager's Story
by Said Hyder Akbar and Susan Burton (Bloomsbury)

In the minds of many Americans, Afghanistan conjures a vague collage of images ranging from the piercing gaze of Sharbat Gula, on the cover of National Geographic, to bearded Mujahedeen rebels wearing Pakol hats, or maybe even Osama Bin Laden lurking menacingly in a cave. Akbar, a California teenager and the son of Afghani immigrants, journeys to his family's homeland when his father is appointed to a government post. His wide-eyed teenage enthusiasm and American upbringing, combined with the Afghani traditions instilled by his parents, make him uniquely qualified to capture a yet-unseen essence of Afghanistan and its people. -J. Zaidi

Shakespeare: The Biography
by Peter Ackroyd (Doubleday)

Among the plethora of exciting recent books about the life and times of Shakespeare—some factual, others speculative—certainly one to consider reading is this comprehensive new biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Writing with a skillful, scholarly style and incorporating unparalleled research and detail, Ackroyd paints an intimate, complex portrait of not only the man who was Shakespeare, but also his world and surroundings—letting us observe one of the greatest figures of the English language as if we were alongside the playwright and his entourage in Elizabethan England. -D. Hsieh

Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy
by Kent Nerburn (HarperSanFrancisco)

History is seldom written with a judicious dose of truth, and the tragedy of the Nez Perce is no exception. Here is a commanding work that paints the legend of this misrepresented chief with fresh and startling brushstrokes. Kent Nerburn has succeeded in rendering Chief Joseph not merely in the vulgar colors of a skilled military mind, but in the more subtle and lasting hues of a noble leader, one who sacrificed all to protect his people and make their plight known. This rich and nuanced canvas will serve to foment the true legend of this great chief. -J. Reiner

On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica
by Gretchen Legler (Milkweed)

Hired by the U.S. National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program, Gretchen Legler came to Antarctica with a poet’s eye, an adventurer's spirit, and a need to explore her "internal worlds." She describes the beauty of this frozen world, the history of past explorers, the eccentrics who are drawn there now, and the love that she discovers for another woman while living on "Antarctic time."

Legler shows her readers the rainbows that live within the ice, the strange glory of "nacreous clouds" and the quick recognition of affinity that can occur while surrounded by air that is 100 degrees below zero. -J. Brown

The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World
by John Ralston Saul (Viking)

The triumph of globalism has been treated as if it were inevitable, unstoppable, and as if it were God's will, Saul writes in this book. It has been argued that globalism is the cure for all human ills. This has proven to be idolatry and those predictions made by economists, corporate interests, and governments have not played out as foretold. The nation-state will not so easily disappear. Saul is a champion of the "public good" and humanist principles, while globalism, as it has been promoted, is amoral and couched in impersonal self-interest. -G. Berry

New Fiction

Ordinary Heroes
by Scott Turow (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Scott Turow, best known for his courtroom novels, trades in his briefcase for a rifle and crafts an excellent World War II thriller. Narrated by Stewart Dubinsky, of Presumed Innocent, and by his father, David, the story begins with Stewart's discovery of a manuscript among David's papers after his death. The manuscript tells of his father's exploits during World War II; through it, the son begins to know his father in death, whom he never knew in life. Turow makes an effortless transition from courtroom skirmishes to battlefield action. -M. Voss

Get a Life
by Nadine Gordimer (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Most of us live our lives assuming the ground beneath us will hold steady. But when the inconceivable happens and the ground shifts, what choices will we make? Paul Brennerman, a South African ecologist, has been forced into quarantine as the result of a radioactive treatment for thyroid cancer. When he is taken into his childhood home to avoid exposure to others, Paul’s illness and isolation force profound questions for himself and every member of his family. Gordimer examines the heart’s ability to reconstruct itself after disaster and the complexity and resilience of the ecosystem in a novel that will stay with you long after you turn the last page. -L. Paus

The Time in Between
by David Bergen (Random House)

Vietnam veteran Charles Boatman vanishes on a trip back to Vietnam and two of his children, Ada and Jon, go to find him. Ada, in particular, discovers more than she possibly could have imagined, both about herself and her father. Bergen does a fine job of shifting time and place between the Pacific Northwest and Vietnam while revealing the story about the Boatmans. There are scenes of extreme beauty and shocking reality, all rendered with sympathy and graceful humaneness. -G. Berry

The Reasons I Won't Be Coming
by Elliot Perlman (Riverhead)

In the title story of this collection, the central character, a lawyer, as well as a husband and father, faces the loss of his daughter and then his wife through his stilted filter of probate legalese. The opening story, "Good Morning, Again," captures perfectly the awkward morning rituals following a one-night stand too soon after a significant love affair. The novella-length "A Tale in Two Cities" caps the collection as it charts the limits of resilient Rose, who has moved from her native Russia to Australia. A keenly observant author with an ear for dialogue, Perlman is an exciting new talent. -H. Myers

The Art of Uncontrolled Flight
by Kim Ponders (HarperCollins)

Kim Ponders presents a remarkable novel about the complex reality of honoring every part of ourselves, the beloved and the despised. This is achieved as she portrays the life of a woman who has grown up emotionally isolated from her troubled parents. The only tangible passion she carries into adulthood is her love of flight, when she finds herself confronted with the bitterness and glorified perception of war and life in the military. This is a wonderfully crafted story about a journey toward self-acceptance and personal dignity. -J. Wells

Cold Skin
by Albert Sánchez Piñol
trans. by Cheryl Leah Morgan (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Several years after World War I, a young man journeys to an island in the Antarctic. He is the lone inhabitant of the frozen rock and will spend his days gathering weather data. All this imagery of cold desolation and self-imposed exile seems to point to a gritty, bleak, introspective European narrative in which the main character reexamines past failures and bemoans the state of humanity (remember this is post–World War I). Then, night falls...

In mid-sentence Piñol's story grabs you by the ear and, amidst fluttering pages, drags you down the shadowy corridors of the human psyche. -J. Zaidi

Sex Wars
by Marge Piercy (Willaim Morrow)

New York City after the Civil War is the primary setting for Marge Piercy’s historical novel of lovers, dreamers, and activists, including a pair of spiritualist financial advisors, a fervent anti-vice crusader, patrician champions of women's suffrage, and a Russian immigrant whose "gent's protection" business funds her search for her sister. The political battles of Sex Wars (sexual freedom, women's reproductive rights, and women’s participation as political actors) continue today, while Piercy's lively characters (many based on actual people) and rich historical details (down to the four irons needed to properly "do" laundry) make fascinating reading. -K.M. Allman

Where Three Roads Meet
by John Barth (Houghton Mifflin)

There are those who will go to great lengths for a bargain, searching through sale bins for hours for that one special find. Here, John Barth offers his own version of a cerebral bargain, a collection of three novellas...a literary three for one. Each novella is delectably different in form and theme, each stamped with Barth's patent acidic wit and intellectual prose. The reader should pay close attention to the third of the collection, in which a group of aging sisterly muses gathers around a tape recorder to lay down an oral history that would delight even the most lascivious of souls. -C. Joyner

Beasts of No Nation
by Uzodinma Iweala (HarperCollins)

Many books on child soldiers have appeared recently, but in Beasts of No Nation, the policy debates disappear and the voice of a child comes to the fore. In it, we follow the narration of Agu, a child soldier, as he recounts his days of fighting and the horrors that he sees. We watch as war and violence consume his mind, until he can barely remember his previous life. The inherent power of the story is underlined by a bare, accented prose style that is at once visceral and childlike. Be grateful that war has never hit us with the pain and power of this book. -M. Helsel

Total Chaos
by Jean-Claude Izzo
trans. by Howard Curtis (Europa)

In this first volume of his Marseilles trilogy, Izzo introduces Fabio Montale, a police detective with a penchant for scotch, fishing, and prostitutes. When a childhood friend is gunned down, Montale must feel his way through a fog of detachment and caustic animosity to find the mastermind behind his friend’s murder. Through smoke-filled bars; damp, dingy alleyways; and dilapidated tenements, this crime noir swirls with the pungent odor of marred possibilities. With racial tensions overflowing, Marseilles seems a melting pot built for greatness but rotted by corrupt ambition. In such a place, justice is subjective. -J. Zaidi

The Truth of the Matter
by Robb Forman Dew (Little, Brown)

There is little worse than becoming aware that one is merely a bit player in one’s own life, daily carrying out actions that seem predetermined, conversations that are devoid of meaning, watching one’s life from the front row of the theater. Such is the life of Agnes, widowed and seemingly alone until, as World War II ends, her family makes its way back home to her. National Book Award–winner Dew creates a wonderfully full-dimensional cast, achingly real family tension, and Agnes’s hope of becoming a participant in life again. -C. Joyner

The Whale Caller
by Zakes Mda (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, this enchanting novel traces the life of a man who has the unique ability to call whales by using a special kelp horn. One particular whale, Sharisha, responds especially well to his songs, and the Whale Caller’s life assumes the rhythm of her yearly migrations. This changes forever when the town drunk becomes infatuated with the Whale Caller and turns his world upside down. Zakes Mda's poignant love story of woman, man, and whale has a lyrical quality that leaves the reader with the impression of having had a particularly vivid and colorful dream. -K. Markowitz

The House of Paper
by Carlos Maria Dominguez
trans. by Nick Caistor
illus. by Peter Sis (Harcourt)

Unfortunately for Bluma Lennon, she doesn’t make it past the first sentence of this enchanting confection of a novel before getting run down by a car. Yet, that might be the way she would have wanted it. If she hadn’t been so busy reading Emily Dickinson, she would have seen and avoided her executioner. Thus it is revealed: "Books change people’s destinies." Indeed, in the following weeks, Bluma's colleague at Cambridge University will also have his fate changed, with the arrival of a mysterious package. The House of Paper is a charming homage to books and our lives with them. -J. Zaidi

The Owner's Corner

by Peter Aaron

How book leads to book, writer to writer.
As in life. As if Fate.

Several weeks ago I finally pulled a copy of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (Vintage) off the shelf. It had last caught my eye when I reached for Philip Roth’s recent The Plot Against America. My time for the elder Roth's masterpiece had come. I immersed, and lost myself in the world of New York's lower east side in the early years of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive and sensitive eight-year-old boy, one of the millions recently arrived from eastern Europe and crammed within the tenements of Manhattan. This is the archetypal immigrant's tale—of straddling two worlds, belonging to neither; the conflict of mother tongue spoken at home (in this case Yiddish)—the parents' desperate landline back to the security of an abandoned life and culture—and the new rowdy, disfigured patois of the streets—the child's ladder to the mysteries of the new world; the child's desperate drive to find foothold, to stride into the mainstream—and his concomitant guilt at abandoning his increasingly stranded parents.

Then along comes a new biography—Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth by Steven G. Kellman (Norton). Here, compellingly and compassionately told, is the story of the life of a remarkable American artist. Though the publication in 1934 of the brash twenty-eight-year-old Roth's first novel met with favorable critical response and brisk sales, it quickly faded from sight, going out of print within a few years. Here followed one of the most monumental cases of writer's block on record. Roth began a second novel immediately after Sleep, sold it, receiving a 10,000 dollar advance (huge at the time) based on the first hundred pages of manuscript, but threw the piece away in disgust and stopped writing. Biographer Kellman meticulously and eloquently compiles an account of the torments that contributed to and resulted from the subsequent sixty-year silence—through the rediscovery of Call It Sleep in 1964 in paperback republication, which became a best seller—all the way to 1994 and the publication of Roth's second novel A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, the first of the four-volume epic Mercy of a Rude Stream, which Roth struggled heroically to complete before his death on October 13, 1995.

Redemption sent me back to the shelves to begin burrowing into the tetralogy, only to find it unavailable. Good news, however: perhaps to coordinate with the biography, the first three volumes—Mt. Morris, plus A Diving Rock on the Hudson and From Bondage—have been reissued by Picador in handsome trade paperback editions.

And then: throughout my reading about Roth I kept coming across Delmore Schwartz—a name I vaguely recognized—author of a poem or two I'd read in various anthologies. So next...Well, I'd better save that for next time.

Poetry

Monologue of a Dog
by Wislawa Szymborska
trans. by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak (Harcourt)

Polish Nobel laureate Szymborska is that rarest of creatures: a poet anyone can read, from the most desiccated didact to the complete poetry virgin, and can fall in love with. This latest bilingual collection, ably translated by Cavanaugh and Baranczak, is a wonderful opportunity to continue, or begin, the love affair. Look:

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.

-P. Aaron

New and Selected Poems: Volume Two
by Mary Oliver (Beacon)

Mary Oliver is one of those rare poets whose words manage to describe the ubiquitous human experience of nature, its power and beauty, without leaving a saccharine trace on the tongue or a ringing falsity in the ear. Her poems open space for the reader to enter, and in her description of the day-to-day we recognize ourselves. In this anthology of forty-two new poems and sixty-nine culled from her last eight books, Oliver meditates on work ("Happiness…is good work ongoing"), the limits of knowledge ("our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching and loving"), and what the natural world can teach. -T. Hayes

Children's & Young Adult Books

A is for Artist
photography by Ella Doran
design and illus. by Silence (Tate)

Childhood should be about wonder and joy and discovery, and this magnificent new alphabet book embodies all these qualities. Exuberant black-and-white and color photographs are collaged to explore the letters of the alphabet. "B" is an open book with pictures of balloons and blocks; "R" is a rainbow over a road, "W" is hidden in a wet forest of webs and wolves, and that cantankerous "X" is a rainbow-colored xylophone with staffs of music flowing from it. What could be more magical than to explore the world and the alphabet through this vibrant book? -H. Myers

Winter's Tale
by Robert Sabuda (Little Simon)

This original story by paper-craft master Robert Sabuda is his most spectacular pop-up book yet. The shimmery white of winter snow is the backdrop as we wander the forest watching the creatures of the wild, dressed in their winter coats, forage and find shelter. We see an owl as it flies across the forest, a bear as it tires to fish near a waterfall, deer as they leap through a meadow, until at last we arrive at our cozy cabin that twinkles with festive lights. This is a magical book full of extraordinary paper-engineering effects. -H. Myers

Beasty Bath
by Robert Neubecker (Scholastic)

Bath time and bedtime will never again be an ordeal, thanks to this adorable rhyming text about a beast scrubbing clean. With soap and bubbles and a little scrubbing, scales and horns disappear, fangs are brushed, and a mane is tamed, all in time to snuggle under the covers, ready for sleep. The beasty illustrations are reminiscent of Maurice Sendak's famous monsters and it is tremendous fun to read aloud. The only hindrance to baths or bedtime this enchanting book may cause comes as we cry, "Read it again, please!" -H. Myers

Picturescape
by Elisa Gutierrez (Simply Read)

A young boy wakes and checks the calendar. Today is a visit to the art gallery. His journey through the city is uneventful, but upon reaching the gallery something magical happens. As the boy is looking at a painting of a raven, he steps into the artwork. He rides the raven back from the lush green rainforest of the painting into another painting of golden prairie. This magnificent, wordless picture book celebrates the landscape through the work of some of Canada's best-known artisst. A celebration of art and imagination, this is a special treat—and don't miss the endpapers! -H. Myers

Our Favorite Books of 2005

Fiction

Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam (Knopf)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin)
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon)
With No One as Witness by Elizabeth George (HarperCollins)
Lost Stories by Dashiell Hammett (Vince Emery)
Paradise by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf)
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (Norton)
Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapchareonsap (Grove)
The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch (Bloomsbury)
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann, trans. by John E. Woods (Everyman's Library)
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (Knopf)
My Jim by Nancy Rawles (Crown)
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (Random House)
The Every Boy by Dana Shapiro (Houghton Mifflin)
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter (HarperCollins)
The Turning by Tim Winton (Scribner)
I'll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward (Norton)

Non-Fiction

The Truth Book by Joy Castro (Arcade)
Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Knopf)
The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)
Theatre of Fish by John Gimlette (Knopf)
Pagan Christ by Tom Harpur (Walker)
Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy (Pantheon)
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion)
Trawler by Redmond O'Hanlon (Knopf)
Julie and Julia by Julie Powell (Little Brown)
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson (Simon & Schuster)
The Commitment by Dan Savage (Dutton)
A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage (Walker)
The Elements of Style by E. B. White and William Strunk, illustrated by Maira Kalman (Penguin Press)
Lucky Child by Loung Ung (HarperCollins)

Poetry

Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon (Graywolf)
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera by Anne Carson (Knopf)
Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert (Knopf)

Children's and Young Adult

I, Coriander by Sally Gardner (Dial)
Blood Red Horse by K. M. Grant (Walker)
Big Sister, Little Sister by Leuyen Pham (Hyperion)
While Mama Had a Quick Little Chat by Amy Reichert (Chronicle)
And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson (Simon & Schuster)
Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson (Putnam)