The fall (and start-of-winter) book season is just about upon
us. Here are some of the titles you'll want to get in on early.
By Jenna Schnuer
While I'm not one for rushing the lovely laziness of summer off
the calendar (after all, summer provides plenty of time to sit and
read), I'll admit that around mid-August, I start to get a bit
giddy over the thought of fall. And it isn't about the leaves
changing colors in New England. No - fall is the biggest new-book
season of them all. It's when the publishers deluge bookstores with
tons of new titles from their heavy-hitter authors as well as from
their we-think-they'll-be-big up-and-comers for readers to
(hopefully) enjoy - or learn from, or get peeved about, or whatever
the book is supposed to do. In anticipation of the approaching
reading season, I wandered the aisles of the book industry's
biggest show, BookExpo America, chatted up publicists aplenty,
pawed through early editions of books by the bundle, and tore
through the publisher catalogs to see what the publishers are
betting their fortunes on. (See how much I go through for you?)
Along the way, I discovered a bunch of books that, for sure,
everybody is going to be talking about, along with a pack of other
titles that everybody should consider talking about. So load up
your online bookstore shopping cart or pay your friendly
neighborhood store a visit and preorder these suckers. You'll be
glad you did. I hope.
The Year of Living Biblically
By A.J. Jacobs
Simon & Schuster, October, $25
If author A.J. Jacobs were just a drop less funny or a drop less
smart, he'd come off as truly annoying. But he is that funny and
smart, so … all is forgiven - especially since his latest book,
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble
Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, offers
an accessible way to think about religion in modern life. Yes,
studying religion can be fun. Wander the path with Jacobs as he
grows a freakishly unruly beard, tends sheep in the Negev Desert,
and figures out where religion fits into the life of a guy who grew
up in an ever-so-secular home. The book, which has caused quite the
buzz, is the author's follow-up to 2004's The
Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person
in the World (see, even the title would be annoying if it
weren't so funny).
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
By David Michaelis
HarperCollins, October, $35
We all think we know Charles Schulz. After all, Snoopy, Charlie
Brown, and the lot have played at least some role in the life of,
well, everybody in America. Anybody who claims that he or she has
never read a Peanuts strip or seen
A Charlie Brown Christmas has been living
under a mighty big rock. Mighty big. But we don't really know
Schulz - he wasn't the most openmouthed about his own life. It was
the life of his characters that he was most interested in sharing
with all of us. Now Michaelis offers an authorized look at Schulz
himself - along with, of course, a look at Schulz's favorite bunch
of artfully drawn kids.
The Used World: A Novel
By Haven Kimmel
Free Press, September, $25
Haven Kimmel, one of the best author names around, is most well
known for her memoirs, A Girl Named Zippy
and She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic
Acts from Mooreland, Indiana. These days, though, she's all
about the fiction - and the reading world is a better place for it.
The Used World gives us Hazel, Claudia, and
Rebekah, the women who run an Indiana antiques shop called (and
this might sound familiar from the title) Hazel Hunnicut's Used
World Emporium. They are characters worth knowing. This is one of
those books that people will keep handy on a shelf, ready for them
to read again every few years or so.
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
By Steve Martin
Scribner, November, $23
I admit it: I still love The Jerk. But
that's not why I picked this one. Martin has had one of the most
interesting careers of anybody in entertainment these days, yet
he's remained such a mystery. He doesn't even seem to give up very
much about himself in interviews. And that's made me even more
curious. So now I want to see what he's going to give up about
himself. Everybody I mentioned the book to responded with, "Oh, I
want to read that!" So I figured you would as well.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean
War
By David Halberstam
Hyperion, September, $35
When it comes to historical narratives, there aren't many writers
who do it better than David Halberstam did. He set the standard -
and set it high - with The Best and the
Brightest, his 1972 account of the Vietnam War. In
The Coldest Winter, his latest and last, as
he was killed in a car accident earlier this year, Halberstam
turned his narrative strengths and incredible reporting skills
(he's been a Yoda to generations of journalism-school students) on
the Korean War. This is sure to be the - and we mean
the - history book of the season.
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures:
Stories
By Vincent Lam
Weinstein Books, September, $24
It's Grey's Anatomy for the literary set.
Lam's debut work, which won Canada's prestigious Giller Prize for
fiction, goes inside the world of what it takes to become a doctor.
It's a world Lam knows well - he's an emergency physician at East
General Hospital in Toronto. His characters deal with trauma and
drama as they wend their way through the early years of their life
in medicine. Folks with a fear of needles, be forewarned: This may
not be the one for you.
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New
England: A Novel
By Brock Clarke
Algonquin Books, September, $24
Brock Clarke's latest novel has been getting some dandy reviews.
And, though it's a mystery, lit lovers of all stripes will find
something in it that they'll love - after all, the mystery is about
figuring out who's burning down the homes of some of America's most
famous writers, from Edith Wharton's to Herman Melville's. And the
writing? Darn good stuff.
Signed, Mata Hari: A Novel
By Yannick Murphy
Little, Brown and Company, November, $24
This one will certainly deserve a wider audience than it will get -
at first. But there's something about the elegance of the writing
that makes me believe that it will slowly but surely end up with a
big fan base. A fictional telling of the life of Mata Hari,
Murphy's rather sexy novel takes readers deep into the life of a
very intriguing character.
I Am America (And So Can You!)
By Stephen Colbert
Grand Central Publishing, October, $26
If you don't find Comedy Central's The Colbert
Report funny, don't buy the book. If you do find it funny,
buy the book. It's that simple. This is the TV show brought to dead
trees. And the snippet I read of it? Darn funny. And now you know
what I watch on TV too.
Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking,
and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever
By Susan Warren
Bloomsbury USA, September, $25
Who doesn't love a good giant-vegetable story? No, really. I mean,
giant vegetables are funny. But for some truly dedicated growers,
they're serious business. Every year, authors offer us a look into
a variety of quirky subcultures - I'm still hooked on Stefan
Fatsis's competitive-Scrabble book, Word
Freak - and this season, Susan Warren gives us one of the
most interesting peeks with this book about her journey into the
world of competitive veggie growing. It'll be fun to see how
Warren, a Wall Street Journal editor,
builds the narrative; after all, it's not the easiest task in the
world to turn a tale of watching a pumpkin grow into high
drama.
Forgive Me
By Amanda Eyre Ward
(Random House, $24)
Nadine Morgan is a fictional journalist created by Amanda Eyre Ward
for her novel Forgive Me. Thousands of
novels feature a journalist as their protagonist. Many of these
fictional scribes are forgettable - they serve as the engine that
drives the plot, but they never seem alive, let alone realistic.
Ward's Morgan, however, seems very much alive and, for the most
part, realistic. In her mid-30s, she travels the world as a
freelance writer for newspapers and magazines, seeking out
dangerous stories in dangerous places, from Mexico to Haiti to
India to South Africa.
Morgan lost her mother at a young age and has minimal contact with
her father, who is employed at a fish market on Cape Cod,
Massachusetts. It seems she is always running toward stories while
simultaneously running away from family, friends, and the
possibility of any romance that could lead to marriage and
children. In South Africa, when she was a young journalist, Morgan
fell in love with a photographer. But when he died on assignment,
she became even more peripatetic, even more wary of personal
commitments.
Forgive Me opens in Mexico, where Morgan is
beaten almost to death while on assignment. Against her will, she
ends up back in Massachusetts, under the care of her father and his
well-intentioned but overbearing female friend. The doctor caring
for Morgan is a pleasant person who falls in love with his
temporary patient. Though Morgan feels comfortable with him, she
bolts for South Africa without telling him when she learns about an
unfinished story there that she wants to write.
The majority of the novel is set in South Africa during the racial
violence of the 1980s and during the start of the nation's healing
in the 1990s. A couple of subplots are difficult to follow because
of an irregularly recurring diary device used by Ward, an Austin
writer who has published two previous novels. But the novel's
positives far outweigh its negatives. Not the least of those
positives is the refreshingly accurate portrayal of a journalist. -
Steve Weinberg
Everyman
By Philip Roth
(Vintage, $13)
Many people say they'd like to die peacefully in their sleep. No
one adds the further hypothetical condition, simply and obviously,
that the death they'd desire would be before the years of
degeneration and, in truth, decomposition that accompany old age.
While you may exercise, eat right, and feel great, your body is
slowly killing you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
If Philip Roth's latest, a compact tale titled Everyman, has a thesis, it's this: You're going to die,
and it's not going to be a barrel of laughs. As you age, one
medical problem will snowball into more and more problems; your
visits to the hospital will be as frequent as those to the toilet;
and, of course, all your friends and acquaintances will die before
you, so you'll be alone, cold and bitter. You'll learn that fancy
doctors these days can take a vein out of your leg and stick it in
your heart, as if you were some lonesome, miserable Rubik's Cube.
You'll learn that a stent can be inserted to expand your coronary
arteries in order to diminish high blood pressure. You'll learn
that your bones have the consistency of Funyuns. What, then, is the
purpose of a lifetime of healthy living?
The protagonist of Everyman, whose
namelessness draws a plentitude of reader-supplied monikers (mine
was Olden Coughfield - feel free to use it), is himself dead. The
book opens at his funeral, takes a leap back in time to the
beginnings of his medical problems, and then worms its way back to
his corpse. If this smacks of familiarity, recall Leo Tolstoy's
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which opens at
Ivan's funeral, takes a leap back in time to the beginnings of his
medical problems, and then worms its way back to his corpse. The
major difference here is that purely Rothian secular morality and
sugarless wit. One of the great lines in the book occurs when
Coughfield, who teaches a painting class at the nursing home,
explains to one eager student, "Amateurs look for inspiration; the
rest of us just get up and go to work." Is Everyman an exposition on The
Unbearable Lightness of Being's evil grin, or is it a
182-page argument for assisted suicide? We'll leave you to decide.
The big question, though, is: Will you go out with some dignity? -
J.D. Reid
And when you're done with those
…
There are an awful lot of books published each fall. Since we
couldn't give the full treatment to all the ones we're excited
about, here is a list of 10 more, with no explanations attached.
Just trust us - they're all worthy additions to any reader's
bedside table.
Tomorrow
By Graham Swift
Knopf, September, $24
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
By Diane Ackerman
W.W. Norton, September, $24
The Art Thief: A Novel
By Noah Charney
Atria, September, $25
Hack: How I Stopped Worrying about What to Do with
My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab
By Melissa Plaut
Villard, September, $14
Ghost: A Novel
By Alan Lightman
Pantheon, October, $23
Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a
Parody
By Fake Steve Jobs
Da Capo Press, October, $23
Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an
Eavesdropping Waiter
By Phoebe Damrosch
William Morrow, October, $25
The New Kings of Nonfiction
Compiled by Ira Glass
Riverhead Trade, October, $15
The Almost Moon: A Novel
By Alice Sebold
Little, Brown and Company, October, $25
Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue
Travel Writer
By Chuck Thompson
Holt Paperbacks, November, $14