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(Photo: Hannah Whitaker/New York Magazine)
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Could this be the summer we finally bury the notion that a beach read must be mindless to be fun? We find ourselves particularly drawn this season to nonfiction and a few realistic novels. Below, some of our top picks through July. Save August for Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice—“part noir, part psychedelic romp”—a mere 400 pages.
The Girl who played with fire
The Girl who played with fire
by Steig Larsson
Dozens of authors and thousands of readers will converge on Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center on May 16 and 17 for the National Black Book Festival.
Featured authors will include Roland S. Martin (Speak Brother! A Black Man's View of America), Mary B. Morrison (Noire, Single Husbands) and Persia Walker (Harlem Redux, Darkness and the Devil Behind Me)
Anathem
by Neal Stephenson
Anathem, the latest invention by the New York Times bestselling author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle, is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world. ... more
If there is one person who personifies selflessness, un-wavering love and caring the first to come to mind should be your mother. She cradled you for your fist nine months and held your hand though all the challenges life could throw at you. Like with all true heroes books are littered with examples of hundreds of miracle moms from the classic Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter, who taught her daughter it's not shameful to have pride in one’s self, to the more contemporary Mrs. Weasley the super poor super mom who took in Harry Potter like he was her own son.
However not all the mothers in literature come out smelling like roses. Abandonment, abuse, and adultery are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the bottom of the barrel of fictional mothers. To help you forget that time your mom forgot your birthday BookFinder.com has compiled a list of the 10 worst mothers in fiction.
I have been so disappointed in the last two books that I have read that I don't want to spend any more time thinking about them - even the time to write a blog post. So I am going to alert you to a new tool that I discovered that may help you answer the perennial question: "What should I read next?"
What happens when you combine artificial intelligence with social networking (don't stop reading - I promise that you won't have to participate in any network)? The result is www.gnooks.com.
Memoirs are the new novels. True or not, artfully or artlessly enhanced autobiography now commands the kind of front-list attention usually reserved for heavyweight novelists. Why not, then, take a memoir to the beach or backwoods this summer along with the usual fiction? As this fourth Short Takes of 50 titles reveals, summer's offerings boast all the traits of a blockbuster movie. more
All that happened at Number 26
by Denise Scott
With Denise's trademark candour, this is part memoir, part stand-up and completely beguiling. Showing exactly what it takes to hold it all together when you want to follow your career dreams, maintain the love in a marriage, bring up kids who will get up off the couch, and look after an aging parent, while remaining humorously sane.
Buy from Amazon
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them.
Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way.
As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls.
Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers' hearts.
Available from Amazon
Watchmen
Alan Moore (Author)
Dave Gibbons (Illustrator)
Has any comic been as acclaimed as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but Watchmen remains the critics' favourite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to gather praise since. It is one of the most influential graphic novels of all time and a perennial bestseller. Now it is attracting a lot of new attention, thanks to the feature film adaptation which opened on March 6. This is the graphic novel that director Terry Gilliam once declared “un-filmable”
Watchmen is a murder mystery, a political thriller and a deconstructionist superhero tale for adults, among other things. It examines a world where superheroes are real, and imagines the political and social consequences of this world. In an Earth slightly parallel to ours, masked heroes are forced either to retire or work for the government. Someone has been killing former heroes, prompting wanted vigilante Rorschach to track down the old team. Aging, arms races, corporate power struggles, human relationships and even the narrative structure of one’s own life are examined through the conventions of superhero comics.
... more about the book, the movie, the author and the illustrator
