Recommended Reading Guide   Tags: book_reviews, books, fiction, literature, nonfiction, recommended_reading  

This upbeat account of raising poultry, rabbits, pigs and bees in the middle of a rundown neighborhood in Oakland, Calif., will make listeners either run out to reclaim some vacant lots or cringe at the thought that they might one day live next door to and downwind from such a menagerie. Karen White vividly individualizes the colorful locals, including Bobby (who lives in abandoned cars), the Buddhist monks across the way, the skeptical neighbors, the Chinese landlord and the random foragers who help themselves to Carpenter's bounty. Narrated with cheerful verve, White's performance will charm even those readers without the slightest inclination to get up close and personal with their future meals. --Publisher's Weekly

A haunting postmodern fable, Big Questions is the magnum opus of Anders Nilsen, one of the brightest and most talented young cartoonists working today. This beautiful minimalist story, collected here for the first time, is the culmination of ten years and more than six hundred pages of work that details the metaphysical quandaries of the occupants of an endless plain, existing somewhere between a dream and a Russian steppe. A downed plane is thought to be a bird and the unexploded bomb that came from it is mistaken for a giant egg by the group of birds whose lives the story follows. The indifferent, stranded pilot is of great interest to the birds—some doggedly seek his approval, while others do quite the opposite, leading to tensions in the group. Nilsen seamlessly moves from humor to heartbreak. His distinctive, detailed line work is paired with plentiful white space and large, often frameless panels, conveying an ineffable sense of vulnerability and openness. --Publisher

Lauren Redniss’s brilliant biography-in-collage is an astounding portrait of Marie and Pierre Curie, the husband-and-wife team who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. Broken into seven chapters (introduced with scientific terms that hint at the stories to come), Radioactive fuses quotes from the scientists themselves with ones from the Curies’ own granddaughter, engineering and weapons experts, and even atomic bomb survivors that form a most interesting and informative narrative. Redniss’s styling doesn’t end with the way she tells the story: Radioactive is as visually stunning as it is factually rich. She jumps from black-and-white sketches to vibrantly colored depictions of the young couple’s courtship, collaborations, and eventually Pierre’s unexpected death. Within the stark pages of the chapter titled “Isolation,” the reader feels Marie’s loss; then in “Exposure” we watch as she falls in love again--this time under more controversial circumstances. Despite personal challenges, Marie continued to be ambitious and eventually became the first female professor at the Sorbonne, winning a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In Radioactive, Redniss shows a similar determination. Through her moody, evocative collages, she captures the drama of the Curies’ lives and their contributions to science and medicine, sending the reader on a one-of-a-kind historical and biographical journey that any curious mind will appreciate. --Jessica Schein, Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2010.

Bonnie Nadzam's debut, Lamb, satisfies a reader on so many levels. For one, it reads like a thriller, and there's a tense and compelling drive to the prose that turns the pages. What will happen to this older man and this girl on the cusp of adolescence as they head into the American West? How unsettled will I be? But then there's no easy answer or moment to make it into an easy-to-dismiss kind of thriller--Nadzam makes sure to keep all the novel's territory in a delicate, complex and unsettling moral territory. I found myself wanting to have easier answers than were offered to me, and I truly appreciated being thwarted so expertly in this way. And Nadzam's prose is just gorgeous--she writes about people and skies and mountains and landscapes with incredible precision and appreciation of beauty. A reader can swim in these sentences and soak up the landscape via the prose with great pleasure. Nadzam's operating on these three levels and excelling over and over in all three--her language is fine-tuned, she's keenly aware of plot and tension, and most of all, she refuses to compromise in terms of letting us, the readers, off the hook morally.

This is a remarkable debut, by a writer to watch. Both Tommy and Lamb are characters who linger with the reader, and I found myself caring deeply for Tommy, whose eagerness and vulnerability soar off the page. What helps us grow and stretches us? What goes too far? Who are our teachers and who hurts us? Can a person be both, and how? What are the stories we tell ourselves? All these kinds of questions hover in the air long after the last page turns. --Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition.

Philip Pullman's trilogy is a masterpiece that transcends genre and appeals to readers of all ages. His heroine, Lyra, is an orphan living in a parallel universe in which science, theology, and magic are entwined. The epic story that takes us through the three novels is not only a spellbinding adventure featuring armored polar bears, magical devices, witches, and daemons, it is also an audacious and profound reimagining of Milton's Paradise Lost that has already inspired a number of serious books of literary criticism. Like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis before him, Pullman has invented a richly detailed and marvelously imagined world, complex and thought-provoking enough to enthrall adults as well as younger readers. An utterly entrancing blend of metaphysical speculation and bravura storytelling, His Dark Materials is a monumental and enduring achievement.

Hodgman, "resident expert" on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and a New York Times Magazine contributor, prides himself as a leading authority in the realm of informative false world knowledge. In adapting his collection of fake trivia to audio, Hodgman couples sketch comedy showmanship and cerebral literary parody. Musician Jonathan Coulton enlivens Hodgman's more lengthy—sometimes plodding—narrative passages. Coulton's musical interludes during Hodgman's profiles of "Our 51 States" prove especially entertaining. Paul Rudd provides an "uncredited cameo" as the guest reader for "Jokes That Have Never Produced Laughter." The audio edition also includes a special bonus "700 Hobo Names" CD, an addendum to Hodgman's "Things You Did Not Know About Hoboes" chapter. Hodgman's distinct brand of offbeat humor somehow manages to spoof—yet ultimately embrace—an intellectual thirst for the esoteric. Admittedly, Hodgman can sometimes become mired in the long-winded details of his obscure falsehoods. Yet, connoisseurs of the Schott's Miscellany titles and the Onion will still find more than enough deliciously absurd faux facts to make for a worthwhile listening experience. --Publisher's Weekly

“Justin Halpern’s dad is up there with Aristotle and Winston F*cking Churchill. He’s brilliant, and his son’s book is absolutely hilarious.” (A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Know-It-All )

“Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching—and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book.” (Laurie Notaro, New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club )

Recommended by Dr. Vincent Sherry, Department of English Chair

Epic poem that was published between 1590 and 1609 by Edmund Spenser. It is the central poem of the Elizabethan period and is one of the great long poems in the English language. A celebration of Protestant nationalism, it represents infidels and papists as villains, King Arthur as the hero, and married chastity as its central value. The form of The Faerie Queene fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic epic. The plan was for 12 books (of which six were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth I herself. Arthur, in quest of Gloriana's love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knight's adventures and loves build into a complex, multi-leveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and Spenser's archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled sensuousness. The first installment of the poem (Books I-III) was published in 1590; the second, which contained Books I-III and Books IV-VI, in 1596. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

In her latest historical novel, Allende imaginatively creates, in the words of the narrator, "the origins of the legend"--the legend being none other than Zorro, the famous Robin Hood of eighteenth-century colonial California. The novel's conceit is that the testimony offered here is a bird's-eye view of the provenance of Zorro as recorded by someone who knew him well, but the identity of that person is not revealed until the novel's end. Allende's complete familiarity with setting includes not only the "custom of the country" in Southern California when still in Spanish hands but also the complicated political atmosphere of Spain itself during the Napoleonic era, to which Diego de la Vega is dispatched as a teenager for his formal education. It is in Spain where the physical disguise of Zorro and the social-reform mentality that motivates him first bear adult fruit. (Diego is one-quarter Native American and thus understands the downtrodden.) Allende's mesmerizing narrative voice never loses timbre or flags in either tension or entertainment value. To describe her as a clever novelist is to signify that she is both inventive and intelligent. --Booklist, Brad Hooper

Still reeling from the deaths of her fairy cousin, Claudine, and many others in 2009's Dead and Gone, Sookie Stackhouse struggles with paranormal politics in her entertaining if slow-moving 10th outing. When Claudine's triplet, Claude, appears at her doorstep, Sookie reluctantly allows him to move in. The government threatens two-natures with mandatory registration, and tensions run high in the local Were pack. Then Eric's maker, a Roman named Appius Livius Ocella, arrives without warning, bringing along Alexei Romanov, whom he rescued from the Bolsheviks and turned into a vampire. Though the action often builds too slowly, the exploration of family in its many human and undead variations is intriguing, and Harris delivers her usual mix of eccentric characters and engaging subplots.

Massive sums spent on biotechnology, 24 Cray supercomputers sent to a fog-shrouded island off Costa Rica, and expert advice bought from paleontologists have combined to produce the most incredible amusement park of all time. Jurassic Park is inhabited by real dinosaurs, over 200 of them, all cloned from snippets of ancient DNA. Crichton is a master at blending technology with fiction, creating a tale all the more terrifying because it could happen. And the terror is heightened when dinosaurs escape from their barricaded area on the island, an event occasioned by the foolhardiness of relying on technology to control their range. Readers can just imagine being caught in the open with these dinosaurs after there's been a massive power outage on the island. Suspense, excitement, and good adventure pervade this book--and few YAs will be able to resist it.
- Pam Spencer, School Library Journal