The Silent Duchess by
A handicapped woman makes something of herself in 18th century Sicily. Deaf and dumb Marianna Ucria is married to an aging uncle at thirteen. When he dies she takes over management of their estate, is successful and finds true love.
Dexterity: a Novel by 
Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition by
This book describes and explains the institution of capital punishment in the United States, and discusses its relationship to American society. For many Europeans, the persistence of America's death penalty is a stark reminder of American otherness. The practice of state killing is an archaic relic, a hollow symbol that accomplishes nothing but reflects a puritanical, punitive culture, bloodthirsty in its pursuit of retribution.
The Report: A Novel by
London, 1943 : Tube stations across London have been converted into bomb shelters. Night after night, while sirens wail in Bethnal Green, immigrants and East Enders alike sleep on the tracks and wait. But on March 3, as the crowd hurries down the staircase, something goes wrong, and 173 adults and children lose their lives in a deadly crush. When the devastated neighborhood demands an inquiry, the job falls to the young magistrate Laurence Dunne
The Secret World of Doing Nothing by
In this insightful and pathbreaking reflection on 'doing nothing', Billy Ehn and Orvar Lofgren take us on a fascinating tour of what is happening when, to all appearances, absolutely nothing is happening. Sifting through a wide range of examples drawn from literature, published ethnographies, and firsthand research, they probe the unobserved moments in our daily lives -- waiting for a bus, daydreaming by the window, performing a routine task -- and illuminate these 'empty' times as full of significance.
The Idea of Justice by
Presents an analysis of what justice is, the transcendental theory of justice and its drawbacks, and a persuasive argument for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives.
Joseph Fouché, the Portrait of a Politician by 
Spiral Jetta: a road trip through the land art of the American West by
Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless-steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes.
Freedom by
This novel follows several members of an American family, the Berglunds, as well as their close friends and lovers, as complex and troubled relationships unfold over many years. The book follows them through the last decades of the twentieth century and concludes near the beginning of the Obama administration.
Changing My Mind by
eading. Their eyes were watching God : what does soulful mean? ; E.M. Forster, middle manager ; Middlemarch and everybody ; Rereading Barthes and Nabokov ; F. Kafka, Everyman ; Two directions for the novel -- Being. That crafty feeling ; One week in Liberia ; Speaking in tongues -- Seeing. Hepburn and Garbo ; Notes on Visconti's Bellissima ; At the Multiplex, 2006 ; Ten notes on Oscar weekend -- Feeling. Smith family Christmas ; Accidental hero ; Dead man laughing -- Remembering. Brief interviews with hideous men : the difficult gifts of David Foster Wallace
A Week at the Airport by
A wittily intriguing exploration of the strange "non-place" that he believes is the imaginative center of our civilization.
George Steiner at the New Yorker by
History & politics. "The cleric of treason" : on Anthony Blunt ; "Wien, Wien, nur du allein" : on Webern & Vienna ; "De profundis" : on Solzhenitsyn's gulag ; "God's spies" : on Graham Greene ; "From the House of the Dead" : on Albert Speer ; "De mortuis" : on Aries & new French history -- Writers and writing. "One thousand years of solitude" : on Salvatore Satta ; and more.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by 
The Whale by
Soundings -- The passage out -- The sperm whale -- A filthy enactment -- Far away land -- Sealed orders -- The divine magnet -- Very like a whale - The correct use of whales -- The whiteness of the whale -- The melancholy whale -- A cold war for the whale -- The whale watch -- The ends of the Earth -- The chase.
On Late Style by
In his fascinating last book, Edward Said looks at a selection of essays, poems, novels, films, and operas to determine what late style may explain about the evolution of the creative life. He discusses how the approaching death of an artist can make its way “with anachronism and anomaly” into his work, as was the case in the late work of Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, Jean Genet, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and C. P. Cavafy. Said examines Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Genet’s Le captif amoureux and Les paravents, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Visconti’s film of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, among other works. He points out that one can also find an “unearthly serenity,” in last works, for example, in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach, and Wagner, which, as Said puts it, “crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor.” But in On Late Style he concentrates on artistic lateness as “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” He also writes about Theodor Adorno and about Glenn Gould, who chose to stop performing, thereby creating his own form of lateness. Said makes clear that most of the works discussed are rife with deep conflict and an almost impenetrable complexity. In fact, he feels that lateness is often “a form of exile.” These works frequently stood in direct contrast to what was popular at the time, but they were forerunners of what was to come in each artist’s particular discipline—works of true genius. Eloquent and impassioned, brilliantly reasoned and revelatory, On Late Style is Edward Said’s own great last work.
Punished by Rewards: the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A's, praise, and other bribes by 
The Loss of el Dorado: A Colonial History by 
A Short History of Women by
Inspired by a suffragist ancestor who starved herself to promote the integration of Cambridge University, Evie refuses to marry and Dorothy defies a ban on photographing the bodies of her dead Iraq War soldier sons, a choice that embarrasses Dorothy's daughters.
Out Stealing Horses by
Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.
The Solitude of Prime Numbers by 
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by
With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers. It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun. The brilliant writing that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov is everywhere apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times about Wonder Boys-and here he has created, in Joe Kavalier, a hero for the century.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by 
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories by 
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by
A volume of linked stories describes the intertwined lives of landowners and their retainers on the Gurmani family farm in Pakistan, in a collection that explores such themes as culture, class power, and desire.
Paris Stories by
A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker for close to fifty years who has, in the words of The New York Times, "radically reshaped the short story for decade after decade." Michael Ondaatje's new selection of Gallant's work gathers some of the most memorable of her stories set in Europe and Paris, where Gallant has long lived. Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.
Hotel du Lac by
Edith Hope, a successful mature novelist, has made a fool of herself over love and is sent by her friends to a Swiss hotel to come to her senses. Instead of writing a new romance novel, she finds herself preoccupied with her fellow guests.
Anil's Ghost by
It is the mid-1980s, and a civil war is raging on the tiny island nation of Sri Lanka. Each day, fresh corpses inundate emergency medical clinics-many of them so mutilated that they are unidentifiable and can only be classified as "disappearances." Anil Tissera, a 33-year-old forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka and educated abroad, returns to the island as part of a United Nations human rights campaign to prove that mass murders are taking place.
I found it compelling: rich and complex and true. Lovely.
Family Night by
Three people set out in search of an absent father.
Criminals by
In London, a man picks up an abandoned baby in a bus station and gives it to his childless sister. It's illegal, but she decides to keep it. What they don't realize is that the baby is bait in a scheme to extort money.
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by
Written from the 1940s through the 1960s, these stories represent the major short works of fiction by one of the most distinctively American stylists of her day. Jean Stafford wrote of men and, especially, women alone and adrift in New York City in such stories as "Children Are Bored on Sunday"; of children surrounded by the harshness of rural Colorado and of the adults around them in "In the Zoo"; and of a young woman from Nashville bewildered and then angered by her first experience of petty French society in "Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience."
Role Models by
Here, from the incomparable John Waters, is a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich--and happily horrify readers everywhere. This book is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities--some famous, some unknown, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road.
Monica Haller: Riley and His Story by
This artists' book provides a first-hand account of the military action in the Middle-East by using the discussion, editing and arrangement of photographs made by Riley, a nurse in Abu Ghraib prison, while on tours of duty. The photographs are arranged by artist Monical Haller and bypass the glamorous, photojournalistic styling of the broadcast and print media depictions of war. Stripped of this theatre, the images take on both a more sinister and more recognisable air.
Cut/Film As Found Object in Contemporary Video by
Cutting through history : found footage in avant-garde filmmaking / Rob Yeo -- The editor / Stefano Basilico -- The failures of fair use and the future of free culture / Lawrence Lessig -- Candice Breitz -- Omer Fast -- Douglas Gordon -- Michael Joaquin Grey -- Pierre Huyghe -- Christian Marclay -- Jennifer and Kevin McCoy -- Paul Pfeiffer.
The Pivot of the World by
The Pivot of the World looks at an exceptional effort to work out that geopolitical tension by cultural means as developed in three hugely ambitious photographic projects: The Family of Man exhibition that opened in 1955 and traveled the world for the next decade; Robert Frank's influential book The Americans, photographed in 1955-1956 and first published in 1958; and Bernd and Hilla Becher's typological record of industrial architecture, begun in 1957 and continuing today.
Trevor Paglen: Invisible by 
Olive Kitteridge by
At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her.
A classic comic novel
A classic of diplomacy theory
Fermat's Enigma: the quest to solve the world's greatest mathematical problem by 
The Turk: the life and times of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing machine by 
Making the Scene: a history of stage design and technology in Europe and the United States by 
Never Let Me Go by
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now. A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.
The Dower House by 
The Land Where the Blues Began by 
The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by
New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance. The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’s first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti.
Out Stealing Horses by
Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.
Two classics for me will always be...
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by 
Ender's Game by
Child-hero Ender Wiggin must fight a desperate battle against a deadly alien race if mankind is to survive.
In the line of the recent zombie trend, I could also recommend...
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by
A guide to surviving an attack by hordes of the predatory undead explains zombie physiology and behavior, the most effective weaponry and defense strategies, how to outfit one's home for a long siege, and how to survive in any terrain.
Paul Is Undead: the British zombie invasion by
Can the Beatles sublimate their hunger for gray matter, remain on top of the charts, and stay together for all eternity? After all, three of the Fab Four "are" zombies, and zombies live forever ...
Mishima Yukio's tetralogy: The Sea of Fertility If you do not want to do the four books, the first one Spring Snow is beautiful, and probably most successful and provocative --- would stand its own. Although the four reincarnations of the main character depicted through the tetralogy is interesting to go through because you follow the era and social construct between 1912 and 1975, the characters are diverse as aristocrat to extremist nationalist to Thai princess to orphan. Each titles of the tetralogy is:
Spring Snow by
Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family - members of the waning aristocracy - but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko, observed from the sidelines by his devoted friend Honda. When Satoko is engaged to a royal prince, Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion.
Runaway Horses by
gain we encounter Shigekuni Honda, who narrates this epic tale of what he believes are the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae. In 1932, Shigekuni Honda has become a judge in Osaka. Convinced that a young rightist revolutionary, Isao, is the reincarnation of his friend Kiyoaki, Honda commits himself to saving the youth from an untimely death.
The Temple of Dawn by
A young man expends his spirit in the obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and a passionate search for mystical enlightenment.
The Decay of the Angel by
During the last years of his life, Honda adopts an orphaned boy and teaches him about Japanese society and tradition.
Miles from Nowhere by
Fleeing her 1980s Bronx family home in the wake of her unfaithful father's abandonment and her mother's mental illness, Korean teen Joon struggles through an adolescence marked by homeless shelters, addiction, and demeaning jobs.
The Air We Breathe by
Detached from the rest of the country on the eve of World War I, the tuberculosis-stricken residents of an Adirondack lakeside sanatorium are housed in accordance with their economic status and languish in their isolation before an enterprising patient initiates a weekly discussion group.
All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories by 
Raymond Pettibon: A Reader by 
Sweetness in the Belly by 
The White Tiger by 
The So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg: an Interpretation by 
The Eighth Day by Never Let Me Go by
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now. A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.
The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy by
Posner steps back to take a longer view of the continuing crisis of democratic capitalism as the American and world economies crawl gradually back from the depths to which they had fallen in the autumn of 2008 and the winter of 2009. By means of a lucid narrative of the crisis and a series of analytical chapters pinpointing critical issues of economic collapse and gradual recovery, Posner helps non-technical readers understand business-cycle and financial economics, and financial and governmental institutions, practices, and transactions, while maintaining a neutrality impossible for persons professionally committed to one theory or another.
Hitch-22: A Memior by
A memoir written by author and journalist Christopher Hitchen
Parliament of Whores: : a Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government by 
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by
Even bad code can function. But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by
This book deals with the theory and practice in the design of data graphics and makes the point that the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers is to look at pictures of those numbers, through the use of statistical graphics, charts, and tables. It includes 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis.
Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by
In this lively, carefully argued, and well-documented book, Hyde brings the past to bear on present matters, shedding fresh light on everything from the Human Genome Project to Bob Dylan's musical root, revealing a vision of how to reclaim the commonwealth of art and ideas that we were meant to inherit
If you can't get enough Melville:
Melville: His World and Work by
Chronicles the life and career of American author Herman Melville, uncovering autobiographical elements in his diverse works, discussing the historical and cultural implications of his writing, and assessing his accomplishments as a writer.
Redburn by
In the novel Redburn, Melville sharply contrasts the refined sensibilities of the title character, an upper-class American youth, with the coarse manners of his Liverpudlian shipmates. The novel is notable for its finely drawn characters and piercing social criticism.
The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 by If you want more Shakespeare:
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by
In this work, the author attempts to provide a vivid and plausible version of the undocumented areas of Shakespeare's life.
Top favorite book I have read in this past year
People of the Book by and one of my other recent favorites
A Peculiar Grace by
Hewitt Pearce lives alone in his family home, producing custom ironwork and safeguarding a small collection of art his late father left behind. When Jessica, a troubled young vagabond, washes up in his backwoods one morning, Hewitt's hermetic existence is challenged. As he gradually uncovers Jessica's secrets and reestablishes contact with a woman he thought he had lost twenty years before, Hewitt must confront his own dark history and rediscover how much he craves human connection.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by So the only new and wonderful thing that I've read recently is a book that I've read several times before. And I adore it. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco This is just a deep, rich, beautiful, and erudite book about the library. Plus, it's set in the fourteenth century. How can you lose?
The Name of the Rose by 
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by 
City of Thieves by 
A Gate at the Stairs by 
Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by 
Reinventing the Sacred: a new view of science, reason and religion by 
The Brothers Karamazov by
The text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, a pronunciation and explanation key for the novel's main characters, and greatly revised and expanded explanatory annotations."Contexts" presents a wealth of background and source materials relating to The Brothers Karamazov, to Dostoevsky's own experiences, to current events, and to observations on a changing society. Included are the correspondence of influential literary and social critic Vissarion Grigorievich Belinksy and the author's letters spanning three decades as well as a selection from Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer in which readers may trace the origins of this novel."Criticism" offers a wide range of scholarly commentary on The Brothers Karamazov from American, Russian, and European authors, eleven of them new to the Second Edition and two of them appearing in English for the first time. Contributors include Ralph Matlaw, Valentina Vetlovskaia, Seamas O'Driscoll, William Mills Todd, Vladimir Kantor, Edward Wasiolek, Nathan Rosen, Roger B. Anderson, Robin Feuer Miller, Horst-J#65533;rgen Gerigk, Vladimir Golstein, Robert L. Belknap, Ulrich Schmid, and Gary Saul Morson.A Chronology of Dostoevsky's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.
Angels and Ages: a short book about Darwin, Lincoln, and modern life by I recommend The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies:
