Olivia Munn: Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek
A conversational tone in a personal memoir can be a great thing, but sometimes it's good to let one's co-author and editors iron out the verbal tics and mannerisms that make for distracting reading in book form. On the other hand, it's Munn's personality that will draw readers to her book in the first place, and she doesn't hold back. She's a certified geek woman in a pin-up girl's body, which is part of what has made Olivia Munn a case-study in self-driven brand-building success. It's shorter than its 288 listed pages suggests, and is perfect fodder for a short flight. (**)

E.L. Doctorow: Homer & Langley: A Novel
Behind the darkened windows of a 5th Avenue mansion in uptown Manhattan, two brothers--Homer and Langley Collyer--have retreated from the 20th Century and the world at large. The younger brother Homer is secluded due to the onset of blindness as a young man. His older brother Langley retreats within the walls of his home after returning from WWI, scarred physically and mentally by mustard gas and the horrors of trench warfare. The brothers live their entire lives within their domestic redoubt, which becomes ever more crowded and cluttered with detritus. Their "Collyers Mansion", as any junk-filled home would soon become synonymous with, would eventually become their tomb. Doctorow excels. (***)

Philip Kerr: The One From the Other
Kerr continues on after his superlative Berlin Noir trilogy with this Bernie Gunther novel set in post-WWII Germany. As the nation struggles to get on its feet, so does protagonist and former cop, private eye, and SS member Bernie Gunther. Occasionally, Kerr's tough guy prose falls a little clunkily from his protagonist's hardboiled mouth, but Kerr continues to paint a vivid picture of pre-, at-, and post-war Germany as seen through the eyes of a sympathetic detective caught up in the Third Reich. (** 1/2)

Ben Macintyre: Operation Mincemeat
A detailed account of the WWII plot to deceive the Third Reich's war machine with a pseudonymous corpse slipped into the sea carrying some mail, two ticket stubs, and a love letter. "Web of spies" has never been so appropriate a term, as dozens of people and disinformation were woven from whole cloth in order to deceive the Nazis. (** 1/2)

Joseph Wallace: Diamond Ruby
Early 20th Century NY and Brooklyn is the central figure of Wallace's novel about a young girl who loses the adult figures in her life to tragedies during the first decades of NYC in the 1900s. Ruby knows she must take charge of what remains of her family, and that means exploiting her strong arm--first at a Coney Island sideshow, and then pitching for a minor league Brooklyn ball club. Along the way she befriends Babe Ruth, and Jack Dempsey, and makes enemies of bootleggers, gamblers, and the Commissioner of Baseball. A good summer read. (***)

David Gordon: The Serialist
Gordon breaks down the fourth wall of crime fiction by casting the author of the book as the protagonist who stumbles into a grisly series of mutilation-killings, sexual entanglement, and literary career opportunity. It's an, ahem, novel approach that ultimately only half-delivered on its potential. And a repeated mind-boggling mis-perception of New York's geography drove me to distraction. (** 1/2)

Rebecca Cantrell: A Trace of Smoke
Imagine what one would include when writing a murder mystery set in Wiemar Germany right before the Nazis rise to power, and Cantrell's got it. Sadist homosexual Nazis--check. Sadist heterosexual military men--check. Murdered cross-dressing MacGuffin--check. Prostitutes--check. Plucky child in danger--check. Heroine who wants romantic love and plucky child--check. Cast of supporting resourceful Jewish characters who ably help the protagonist without imagining their heavily foreshadowed impending doom--check. Oh yeah! Priceless jewel--check. (** 1/2)

Max Brooks: World War Z
I am arriving at the cultural zombie party not fashionably late, but a week after the party ended; awkwardly dressed as an undead ghoul on the hosts' doorstep and freaking out their babysitter because they've already gone out for the night. Brooks' "Oral History of the Zombie War" is a good way to play catch-up on the trend that's spawned parodies like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Jane Slayre. Brooks' collection of fictional first-person accounts is told straight, however, and with an eye towards how modern societies around the world would react to the dead rising and walking the earth. (*** 1/2)

Nick Schuyler: Not Without Hope
I hate to write this about Schuyler's true tale of summoning unimaginable strength to survive at sea while unsuccessfully attempting to save three of his friends, but his story is a little thin. I know! I know! That sounds terrible. The truth of the matter is that it would have made a great long magazine article; but the book feels padded. I admire Schuyler and don't underestimate his ordeal. The book just isn't that good. (**)

Sebastian Junger: WAR
The U.S. military fights wars on physical terrain and human terrain--the latter being the social aspect of war. Similarly, author Sebastian Junger has written a book about a combat unit in Afghanistan that examines the physical: the nuts and bolts of blood and guts, the physiology of combat stress, the logistics of close combat; and the human: the psychology of courage, the sociology of unit cohesion, and the mental wear imprinted on young men inexorably seared and forged in the practice of killing other men. (*** 1/2)

Tom Rachman: The Imperfectionists
Author Tom Rachman weaves together a skein of stories centered around an English-language daily newspaper with all the skill of an old-school layout editor composing a front page. Rachman's debut effort as a novelist has been widely heralded, and rightly so. His depiction of newsroom inhabitants rings true. The Imperfectionists is a funny novel, but tinged with the sadness of personal, professional, and organizational entropy. (***)

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
McCarthy could have called his narrative set in the late-19th century North American southwest, Unsettling the West. As Civil War vet "the kid" makes his way westward across the U.S. and in and out of Mexico, he is never far from a Grand Guignol landscape of lawlessness that makes the dystopian Australia of Mad Max look like Oz. A novel that deserves close reading, but makes the reader want to turn one's eyes from the horrors it reveals. (**)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night
The story of Dick and Nicole Diver is one of two lives entwined by love but propelling each other in opposite directions. Richard Diver is a brilliant psychologist who falls in love with the mentally broken millionairess Nicole. As the latter grows stronger in their marriage and under his care, Dick finds himself dissipated by desuetude and ultimately ruined by the foreign milieu of the idle rich abroad. (***)

Jeannette Walls: Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
Winding the clock back two generations before her memoir of growing up brutally poor, Jeanette Walls has written a novelized account of the life of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Born at the start of the 20th century, Lily Smith is a hardscrabble daughter of the West. As she grows, she will become a horse breaker, an elementary school teacher, a bootlegger, a rancher, a mother, and eventually a grandmother to the woman who's writing her story. Walls' follow-up to The Glass Castle is easier to read than the former, because it lacks the brutal infliction of poverty on children by wayward parents. There are tough times, but they are endured and overcome with grit and determination. (***)

Sarah Vowell: The Wordy Shipmates
Who were those Pilgrims anyway--who went from breaking bread with the Indians to massacring the Pequot tribe in cold self-justifying blood just a few years later? Author Sarah Vowell writes an entertaining tale of the Puritans, their political and religious development, and their personal squabbles writ indelibly in the history of America. (***)

Cormac McCarthy: The Road
Following a holocaust of unspoken origins, the physical world descends into dark grey lifelessness, with humanity following closely behind in moral entropy. It is the setting for a man and a boy to trudge forward on a road of survival with a planned destination of blind hope. (***)

David Carr: Night of the Gun
Acknowledging that he is not a reliable enough eyewitness, New York Times reporter/columnist David Carr investigates his own past as a train-wreck coke addict and alcoholic by interviewing people who witnessed it. Carr's book could have been an automythology involving fall, courage, and redemption, but neither he nor the people who were there are willing to gloss over the very ugly truth. (***)

Joseph Kanon: Stardust
Ben Kohler is summoned home from post-WWII Germany, where he is documenting the Holocaust, to Hollywood, where his brother lies near death after what is being publicized as an attempted suicide. Paranoia, secrets, and betrayal have not been left behind in Germany for the large population of German Jewish emigres who managed to flee the Holocaust and find refuge in America's movie industry. And post-war Hollywood is not the haven it first appeared, as anti-Communist forces regenerate the climate of paranoia and persecution at the start of a new, cold war. (***)

David Foster Wallace: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Don't be afraid to pick and choose or abandon any of Wallace's essays, which cover a wide variety of subjects with varying degrees of reconditeness. An exegesis on the state of literary analysis circa 1994 may not be your thing, whereas a detailed travel diary of a trip to the Illinois State Fair is right up your alley. DFW manages to blend erudition with an irreverant sense of humor; no small feat. But he endangers his narrative momentum and rhythm with footnotes that threaten to crowd all other prose off the page. They aren't footnotes so much as lengthy discursions that warrant their own sub-chapters or endnotes. (** 1/2*)

Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude
Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude meet as young boys on Brooklyn's Dean St. in Boerum Hill. Lacking mothers--Dylan's mother abandons him and his father at an early age and Mingus is essentially sold into the custody of his father by his own mother--the pair spend their young lives navigating the perils of young men adrift in the lawless city that is youth. All of the characters are chasing an elusive peace: "Utopia the show which always closed on opening night." (***)

S.L Price: Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America
The true story of two talented ballplayers, Mike Coolbaugh and Tino Sanchez Jr., whose lives and careers collide on a minor league team playing in a small park next to a small river running between two small cities. When Sanchez hits an errant foul ball that strikes his first base coach Coolbaugh at the base of his skull, the latter's instantaneous death seems to encapsulate the cruel twists of fate that mark the lives of minor league baseball players. Aside from Coolbaugh, Sanchez, and their families, Price's book is about the Sisyphean struggle young men undertake to get a crack at the big leagues, or to eke out a living as a minor league lifer. (***)

Nick Hornby: Juliet, Naked
When a 40-something British woman named Annie realizes that she's wasted 15 years of her life co-habitating with a man of inaction as a bulwark against the boredom of living in a provincial northern seaside town in England, she tweaks her boyfriend by writing a contrarian album review on a musician's fansite. It's not just any musician, however, but Tucker Crowe, a man whose music and life her boyfriend has been scrutinizing for decades. When Crowe emerges from his J.D. Salinger-like reclusiveness to respond positively to Annie's review, Hornby's novel about jump starting one's life after years of wasted time gains momentum that rarely falters. (***)

Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
Author Jon Krakauer obviously had extraordinary access to NFL star-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman's family. His book includes long and numerous excerpts from Tillman's private journals. Tillman was almost an anachronism in the 21st Century, who believed in honor, virtue, duty, and personal integrity. His values were only rivaled by the utter mendacity of the Army and Bush administration personnel who concealed the facts of his fratricidal death for political gain. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, but even I was shocked at how little respect could be paid to a man who gave his life for his country. (*** 1/2*)

Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet
Either I am too old or Lethem wrote his main character Lucinda--a 29-year-old female bassist in a struggling band--as too young. Maybe it's because Lethem moved his setting from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, but all of the characters in "You Don't Love Me Yet" come across as one dimensional caricatures and none of them seem worth identifying with. (**)

Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men
The novel that spawned the Best Picture Oscar-winning movie No Country For Old Men is a story as meditative as it is violent. Sheriff Bell follows a trail of brutal death and mayhem while contemplating a nation that he feels has become unmoored. Anton Chigurh is a psychopath with a well thought out code of justice based on the inevitability of the moment, and where everything ends with him. I don't know Texas; but I get the impression that McCarthy knows it, very well. (***)

Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn
Lionel Essrog is one of the four Minna Men, who small-time crook Frank Minna "adopted" as teens after they'd been relinquished to the St. Vincent's Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn as children. When Frank Minna is murdered right under Lionel's nose, he feels compelled to find out who was responsible. Compelled because Lionel lives with Tourette's Syndrome, making him a detective given to bouts of physical tics and verbal outbursts that don't exactly lower his profile, but cause people to underestimate him all the same. He is a "free human freakshow," and Lethem has created one of the most original whodunnits of the genre. (****)

Paula Uruburu: American Eve
Stanford White: hedonist, brilliant architect, and seducer of young girls. Harry Thaw: sadist, scion to a Pittsburgh family whose fortune only fueled his insanity, and self-proclaimed protector of young women he felt were morally imperiled by men like White. Trapped between the two is Evelyn Nesbit, one of the original American "It Girls," whose beauty made her both famous and infamous. Uruburu's account of a true story of seduction, rape, and murder is overly florid at times, but entertaining nonetheless. (***)

Joseph Mitchell: My Ears Are Bent
From his days at The Herald Tribune, Mitchell shows how a little curiosity and the ability to poke one's nose where it wasn't invited can result in a superb story, told with skill. (****)

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories
Three separate mysteries are, if not solved, moved to some sort of resolution by British private investigator Jackson Brodie, a divorced former cop whose mind is already halfway to his dream retirement cottage in France . (***)

Nick Hornby: Slam
Hornby mastered the art of ex-romantic reflection in "High Fidelity." His latest novel involves looking forward, as a young teenage boy who finds himself thrust into adulthood with an unexpected pregnancy. Cameo advice provided intermittently by a Tony Hawk poster. (***)

Paul Auster: The Brooklyn Follies
Divorced, retired, and recovering from cancer, Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood to die. While waiting, he discovers that he's got more life in him yet. (***)

Paul Auster: Man In The Dark
Auster's quick-read novel follows the narrative structure and merits the predictable interest of an elderly man's stream of thoughts during a night plagued by insomnia. (**)

Jerome Charyn: Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of The American Revolution
New York City during the American Revolution: a port city of treachery, spies, armies, officers, and whores. Johnny One-Eye drifts among them all, in a unique fictionalized take on the formative chapter of U.S. history. (***)

Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
An immigrant story of a gene that wends its way through generations of a Greek-American family in 20th Century Detroit before manifesting itself in the phenotype of a young woman named Callie. (***)

J.R. Moerhringer: The Tender Bar
The true story of a boy-turned-young-man who found shelter, avuncular attention, and a sense of belonging at a local tavern in the commuter town of Manhasset, Long Island. (****)

Paul Bacon: Bad Cop
Swept up with a desire to do something after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Bacon decided that he would sign up with the NYPD. Less saving the world than writing quality-of-life infraction tickets and racking up collars for outstanding warrants, a rookie cop discovers what real police work is all about. Hilarious and illuminating. You’ll never look at a cop on the corner the same way again. (***)

Gregory David Roberts: Shantaram
A sweeping autobiographical tale of an escaped convict from Australia who finds refuge from the law, his past, and his own demons in the slums of Mumbai, India, where he operates a free clinic and becomes a mob bagman. Roberts’ prose tends towards the purple, but the scope of his story merits some allowances. (***)

Ben Karlin, ed. : Things I’ve Learned From the Women Who’ve Dumped Me
A collection of humorous essays organized as life lessons gleaned from the disintegration of prior relationships. Funny despite occasional repetition of themes, e.g. early romance is akward and fraught with painful embarrassment. To paraphrase Dan Savage: all relationships are destined for failure, until you’re in the one that isn’t. (***)

Bernard Cornwell: Rebel
First in a series of historic novels following the adventures of Nathaniel Starbuck, who rebels not against his famous abolitionist preacher father, but his northern upbringing as he chooses to fight for the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. The novel’s plot line leaves many strands dangling—to be expected in the introductory volume of a multi-part series. (** 1/2)

Richard Price: Lush Life
Author Richard Price moves his fictional setting from the housing projects of New Jersey to those of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where PJs border block after block of tenements, occupied by poor immigrants, long-time residents, and an increasing number of slumming bohemians looking for a taste of what they think is the "real" NYC before it becomes completely gentrified. Loosely inspired by the real-life murder of a bartender working at a more upscale bar in the same neighborhood. Price continues to capture the essence of social friction in urban society, and the potentially spirit-breaking milieu of a neighborhood where faded dreams are always in sharp relief with the bright eyes of a never ending stream of newcomers. (***)

James Swanson: Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer
Shortly after the end of an unpopular and costly war, a famous young actor puts a gun to the President's head and pulls the trigger, mortally wounding him in front of a crowd of people. The dashing assassin flees, assisted by co-conspirators, as a grieving nation quickly mobilizes a massive manhunt for Lincoln's killer. ()

George Orwell: Down And Out In Paris And London
Heavily autobiographical, George Orwell's first novel is an auto-roman a clef in which his protagonist becomes intimately familiar with what it's like to be broke and hungry in a modern urban environment. (***)

Michael Patrick MacDonald: Easter Rising: An Irish-American Coming Up From Under
MacDonald's followup to his childhood memoir All Souls, MacDonald is a young man eager to escape the South Boston neighborhood that claimed so many of his siblings. ()

Jonathan Mahler: Ladies and Gentlement: The Bronx Is Burning
Highly entertaining look at NYC 30 years ago, when neighborhoods burned, blackout NYers looted, iconic politicians battled for the mayoralty, and Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson and the rest of the Yankees butted heads while improbably writing baseball history. (***1/2)

William Langewiesche: Cutting for Sign
Neither a diatrabe nor a recommendation. Langewiesche takes a clear-eyed look at the cartographical fault line dividing the U.S. and Mexico and discovers less of a division and more of a metaphysical conundrum of what it means to attempt to divide two peoples in one world. (***1/2)

Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa: The Leopard (Il Gattopardo)
Originally considered unpublishable; a novel of Italy's 19th century Risorgimento, when principalities gave way to a nation state and principles of aristocracy gave way to a less cultured way of existence. (***)

Augusten Burroughs: Running With Scissors: A Memoir.
One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at Burroughs's memoir of his helter-skelter upbringing. With an alcoholic father who wanted nothing to do with him and a severely disturbed mother with delusions of literary grandeur, young Augusten finds himself deposited in the home of his mother's psychiatrist, surrounded by filth, pedophilia, and a cast of real people whose personal problems almost beggar belief. (***)

William Styron: Lie Down In Darkness.
This Southern Gothic novel--Styron's debut--flashes back through the lives of the Loftis family members, painting a portrait of personal failures, emnity, and bitterness that leads to the suicide of youngest daughter Peyton. A sure holiday pick me up! ()

Mark Helprin: Freddy and Fredericka.
As if channeling Mark Twain in his novel Roughing It, Mark Helprin perceives modern America with fresh eyes via two exiled royals reminiscent of Charles and Diana who are sent to the U.S. to re-earn their royal status. A ridiculously funny farce. (***)

Nick Hornby: A Long Way Down.
Four strangers meet on New Year's Eve atop a London highrise, each with an individual plan to kill themselves. Sometimes, however, the best reason to live is the company of three suicidal strangers one just met. Hornby continues his streak of making life's bleakest moments also its funniest. (****)

Sarah Vowell: Assassination Vacation.
Vowell misses no opportunity to relate every historical tidbit to how bad G.W. Bush sucks as a President, but otherwise has written an incredibly entertaining travelogue of her research into three Presidential assassinations that includes an enormous amount of info on history, personality, architecture, and context that makes the past come alive. Should be required reading for high schoolers. (***)

Augusten Burroughs: Magical Thinking.
Good for fans of David Sedaris, who enjoy their personal memoirs with a bit of self-deprecating bite and large dose of personal tragedy, swallowed with eventual deliverance from personal hell. (***)

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee: The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail: A Play.
Written in 1970, this play is supposed to be an allegory to a man willing to speak out against an unjust war. For Thoreau, it was the U.S. intrusion into Mexico in the 1840s. For the playwrights, it was Vietnam. I expect a theatrical revival of this work almost immediately as a protest against our current war. A good idea, but the work itself is insufferably earnest and heavy handed. Should appeal to and light a fire in the bellies of socially conscious 13-year-olds. (*)

Anthony Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.
Bourdain is now a big star with his own TV show, or basically the type of celeb chef he reviles in the book that made him famous. I occasionally socialize with the kitchen crew of a famous Manhattan eatery and can attest that the pirate lifestyle of the pro chef Bourdain describes persists to this day. (***)

Patrick Suskind: Perfume, The Story of a Murderer.
Suskind's historical novel of an olfactory "Rain Man" serial killer was acclaimed in the '80s, but now reads like a writer stricken with graphorrhea. Translated from German, Suskind is the Teutonic Bret Easton Ellis, with neverending paragraphs indicating his thesaurus should have been burned. (**)

Fredrick Exley: A Fan's Notes
Talent is no guarantee of recognition or success. Frederick Exley's fictionalized memoir is a sad and occasionally hilarious recount of a life wasted in a haze of alcohol and unspent ambition. (****)

Mako Tanako: Thirty Years at The Broome Street Bar
In the 1970s, downtown Manhattan was a wasteland. SOHO was a bereft industrial no-go area of town and Cass Gilbert's Custom's House [see BLIZZARD '06, 2/14/06] had been vacant for a decade and developers wanted to tear it down. During those last transformative 30 years, artist Mako Tanako [an incredibly gracious individual] has been exhibiting his art on the chalkboard at Kenn's Broome Street Bar. He erases his pieces every month. Fortunately, someone was prescient enough to capture them on film and they are collected in this book. Art can be as short-lived as talent and inspiration. (***)

James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss
A snapshot of the seedier side of America in the already seedy and downtrodden earth tone 1970s. C.W. Sughrue is a functioning alcoholic private investigator on the trail of a non-functioning alcoholic novelist at the request of the latter's ex-wife. As he criss-crosses the mid- south- and pacific north-west, Sughrue finds himself bound to an ugly and pathetic intersection of skin flicks, family, missing persons, and deception that only murder and blackmail can resolve amicably. The most fun you'll have reading about others' misery. (***)

Natsuo Kirino: Out
Belying the image of Japan as a halcyon society of high-tech gadgets and unlimited prosperity, Kirino's hard-boiled novel plumbs the depths of the lives of four actually desperate housewives. Their lives interconnect on the night shift they've taken to earn a few extra dollars an hour to keep their families out of poverty and become bonded when one kills her husband in a fit of frustration and rage. How do four women cope as they sink into a world of murder, yakuza, loan sharks, and despair? ()

Mark Helprin: Memoir From Antproof Case
A sprawling and epic autobiography written by an old man sitting on a park bench in a garden in Rio de Janeiro. The fictional protagonist relates the passage of his life as a young man, inmate of a lunatic asylum, investment banker, fighter pilot, spouse of a billionairess, murderer, master thief, and life-long hater of coffee. Reminiscent of William Boyd's Any Human Heart, but funny instead of tragic. ()

Haruki Murakami: Dance Dance Dance
A reasonably well off freelance writer takes a break from "shoveling cultural snow" to look into the disappearance of a call girl that he'd previously dated and who now cries for him in his dreams. His journey brings him to a hotel they once shared, a successful actor he went to grade school with, and a 13-year-old girl with pathologically bad parents [one of whom is a simulacrum of the author]. A piercing examination of the skeletons in Japan's then-economically-booming closet of consciousness. "What was that all about?" indeed. (****)

Haruki Murakami: South of the Border, West of the Sun
Lacking the supernatural touches of his other novels, Murakami paints a picture of a man who by all rights should be satisified with his life: successful, independent, happily married. The reintroduction of a childhood love into his life, however, is cause for reflection on the elusiveness of happiness, or even its meaning. South of the Border is a real and imperfect place. West of the Sun is a fleetingly perfect dreamland. (****)

Michael Patrick MacDonald: All Souls: A Family Story From Southie
MacDonald [a personable guy, but incredibly softspoken for a writer and in comparison to his verbose younger brother] violates his hometown's insular code of silence by revealing the corrosive culture of crime, poverty, and substance abuse that make South Boston one of the poorest ethnic communities in the U.S. Yet the Irish-Americans that live there are fiercely proud of the enclave they call their own. It is ultimately the memory of his four dead brothers that drives MacDonald to reflect on the paradox that is South Boston. (****)

Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
Japanese house-husband Toru Okado has lost his cat. A few weeks later he loses his wife. Then he starts receiving strange phone calls. And thus begins a novel that ranges from sublime beauty to scenes of the stark horrors of war. So far, incredible. (****)

Haruki Murakami: Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End of The World
Murakami convincingly captures the voice of the Western hard-boiled loner transplanted to a Japanese context, except he's a neurologically/cybernetically gifted operative who finds himself in the middle of a dangerous game of info-espionage. Alternating chapters are devoted to a related story that is a stunning meditation on the nature of consciousness, being, and the immortal soul. Absolutely beautiful. (**** 1/2)

J.G. Farrell: The Singapore Grip
Farrell concludes his end-of-empire trilogy in Singapore during the month before the city-state falls to the Japanese in WWII. Oblivious to the mortal danger approaching, Walter Blackett and his family swirl about in an existence of colonial farce. The story is weighed down by ponderous exposition on the Marxist view of colonialism, but is an entertaining read nonetheless. (***)

J.G. Farrell: Troubles
Shell-shocked Major Brendan Archer returns from WWI--via a recuperative stay in a hospital for mental invalids--to London, then Ireland to meet his erstwhile fiancee in the resort town of Kilnalough. Her widower father is the owner of The Majestic Hotel, whose rapidly deteriorating structure is symbolic of the disintegrating British Empire, especially in Ireland, where Anglo-Irish rule is succumbing to the Troubles of 1919-21. (***)

William Gibson: Pattern Recognition
Cayce Pollard is a professional "cool hunter", using her intuition to help marketers determine what will and won't be accepted as hot by the global marketplace. Her hobby is the examination of mysterious footage that is disseminated over the Internet. Her work and hobby collide as she criss-crosses the globe from London to Tokyo to Moscow in an effort to find out who's behind the footage, while personally reconciling the disappearance of her father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Is Pollard engaging in pattern recognition or the apophenia her father warned her against? (***1/2)

J.G. Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur
The second book in Farrell's trilogy of historical novels depicting the unraveling of the British Empire. Farrell addresses the Muslim uprising against their colonial masters in 1857 India with black comedy. (***)

Clifford Odets: Waiting For Lefty and Other Plays
Odet's unapologetic pro-communist plays about the plight of downtrodden men and women in the 1930s would resonate more if he weren't such a stooge for the Soviets, who were busy massacring their countrymen while Odets and friends put on their plays. (**)

Stendahl: The Red and the Black
Stendahl's classic novel follows protagonist Julien Sorel in post-Napoleanic, early-19th-century France. ()

Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Imagine if Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and their band of "Jackasses" drove around the country and, in addition to filming their antics, heralded themselves as the vanguard of a legitimate psycho-spiritual-societal revolution. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters did in the 60s--and a lot of people fell for it. Were they fooling themselves as well? (**1/2)

Jon Krakauer: Under The Banner of Heaven
In a sparsely populated, mountainous region few people have ever visited, a collection of religious fanatics has built a theocratic society centered on the subjugation of women and that brooks no dissent. And when God instructs them to kill, they obey. Welcome to fundamentalist Mormon country in North America. (***1/2)

David Sedaris: Holidays On Ice
Sedaris' short collection of holiday-themed stories are as much a Christmas tradition to me as anything by Clement C. Moore. Non-fiction like "The SantaLand Diaries" and "Dinah, The Christmas Whore" share space with a hilarious fictional family Christmas letter and more. (*****)

Richard Price: Samaritan
The author of Clockers returns to the New Jersey housing projects with a story of a man and his misguided sense of everyday altruism, who refuses to identify the person that bludgeoned him nearly to death. (**1/2)

John O'Hara: A Rage to Live
John O'Hara chronicles the changing times of fictional Fort Penn, PA as the town and its people circle around golden girl Grace Caldwell Tate. (****)

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy's tale of Jude Fawley, Sue Bridehead and their ill-fated love in 19th Century England. Aspires to tragedy, but unintentionally succeeds as a comedy of excessive bathos. (**1/2)