I wonder. Did you think I’d forgotten about our online bookclub?
Shame. You did! And there I was, looking up solid, compelling book options for our inaugural meeting.
I’ve been scouring various “Best of 2010” lists. Quite a few titles are new to me, and honestly, I wouldn’t mind reading them all, but I wanted to put on our ballot the ones I think will interest this group most.
So. Let’s take a vote. This is a literary democracy, after all.
1) Man In The Woods
By Scott Spencer, hardcover, 320 pages, Ecco, list price: $24.99
[Review] Publishers Weekly (via Amazon.com):
Spencer, a deft explorer of obsessive love and violence, confronts the consequences of doing wrong for all the right reasons in his exquisite latest. Paul Phillips, a master carpenter, is living in bucolic upstate New York with Kate Ellis, the woman Spencer first introduced, along with her beguiling daughter, Ruby, in A Ship Made of Paper. But Paul’s life begins to implode after a chance encounter results in an irrevocable act that no one witnesses, save a mixed-breed dog he renames Shep. Paul suffers the burden of his terrible secret: the fear of discovery and punishment and the equally disturbing fear of getting away with his crime. The incident and its fallout color his just-about-perfect life with lover Kate, now a recovered alcoholic turned famous inspirational writer, and particularly affects nine-year-old Ruby. As always, Spencer creates complex and genuine characters, the most marvelous character being Shep, the hapless rescue dog who endures abuse and becomes Ruby’s pet. Spencer portrays the dog’s life minus the sentimentality and anthropomorphism forced upon animals in fiction, and ingeniously uses Shep in this compelling story’s dénouement–which underscores how even the most loving relationship might not be able to redeem a deadly act.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
2) Wench <– Official Selection
By Dolen Perkins-Valdez; hardcover, 304 pages; Amistad, list price: $24.99
[Review] Publishers Weekly (via Amazon.com):
In her debut, Perkins-Valdez eloquently plunges into a dark period of American history, chronicling the lives of four slave women—Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu—who are their masters’ mistresses. The women meet when their owners vacation at the same summer resort in Ohio. There, they see free blacks for the first time and hear rumors of abolition, sparking their own desires to be free. For everyone but Lizzie, that is, who believes she is really in love with her master, and he with her. An extended flashback in the middle of the novel delves into Lizzie’s life and vividly explores the complicated psychological dynamic between master and slave. Jumping back to the final summer in Ohio, the women all have a decision to make—will they run? Heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful, this novel showcases Perkins-Valdez’s ability to bring the unfortunate past to life. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
3) 20 Under 40: Stories From The New Yorker
Edited by Deborah Treisman, hardcover, 448 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $16
[Review] via Amazon.com:
In June 2010, the editors of The New Yorker announced to widespread media coverage their selection of “20 Under 40”—the young fiction writers who are, or will be, central to their generation. The magazine published twenty stories by this stellar group of writers over the course of the summer. They are now collected for the first time in one volume.
The range of voices is extraordinary. There is the lyrical realism of Nell Freudenberger, Philipp Meyer, C. E. Morgan, and Salvatore Scibona; the satirical comedy of Joshua Ferris and Gary Shteyngart; and the genre-bending tales of Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Téa Obreht. David Bezmozgis and Dinaw Mengestu offer clear-eyed portraits of immigration and identity; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, ZZ Packer, and Wells Tower offer voice-driven, idiosyncratic narratives. Then there are the haunting sociopolitical stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Alarcón, and Yiyun Li, and the metaphysical fantasies of Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Karen Russell.
4) Cleopatra: A Life
By Stacy Schiff, hardcover, 384 pages, Little, Brown and Company, list price: $29.99
[Review] via Amazon.com:
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra’s supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff ‘s is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
5) The Road
By Cormac McCarthy, hardcover, 256 pages, Publisher, List price: $24.95
(What? I haven’t read it yet, ok? It’s been high on my list since it hit the literary scene in 2006. But when I walk into Barnes & Noble, and that pretty scent of new and uncracked fiction distracts me, I forget about Cormac and his trademark despair. I need to start writing things down.)
[Review] Publishers Weekly (via Amazon.com):
Violence, in McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a “long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man’s wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are “good guys,” but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization’s slow death after the power goes out.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Logistics and Other Details <– Updated
The polls closed at 10PM ET December 16, and Wench is the clear victor with 54% of the vote.
Come back every day, of course, but plan to discuss the book on [updated date] January 31. (For the procrastinators in the house: This month, you get six weeks to read your book, rather than the traditional four. My gift to you.) I’ll have a series of discussion questions waiting, and perhaps a delicious cyber tiramisu. In the meantime, I’ll do some research about how discussion boards work on WordPress.
In February, my partner in crime Harsha can take over by hosting at her place (blog: H is for Happiness)—assuming I can talk her into it. 
Agreed? Let’s crack some books.
P.S. Should we pick a name for this group? Do you have suggestions? That’s what the Comments section is for.
