I LOVE to read. But of course, y'all already knew that! So, what is on my reading list for 2012? I'm so glad you asked! I keep a moleskin book full of books that I would like to read - and I just go through and pick one out. But, I tend to get a little sidetracked and pick up a book not on my list every once in a while. For this post, I've picked 12 books I'm going to read this year - one for every month. Of course, I'll read more, but this will be a good start - and will attempt to keep me focused! I'm not promising to read them in this order, but here they are...(Descriptions from Amazon)
To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It's where he was born,
it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his
Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep
when Old Nick visits.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the
prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love
for her son, she has created a life for him in this
eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building
alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either
much longer.
Room is a tale at once shocking,
riveting, exhilarating--a story of unconquerable love in harrowing
circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her
child.
Unlike his sprawling masterpiece, Underworld, DeLillo's 13th novel is
short and tightly focused, indeed almost claustrophobic. Most of the
action takes place inside a "prousted" (cork-lined) stretch limo, as
the reclusive financial wizard Eric Packer is chauffeured across
Manhattan for a haircut. Thanks to a presidential visit,
antiglobalization demonstrations, and a celebrity funeral, this journey
takes up most of the day. Stuck in traffic, Packer anxiously monitors
the value of the yen on the limo's computer. Using the car as his
office, he summons advisors from nearby shops and restaurants.
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at
Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in
the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s
indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father
withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the
Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park
called The World of Darkness. As Ava sets out on a mission through the
magical swamps to save them all, we are drawn into a lush and bravely
imagined debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.
In 1940, Iris James is the postmistress in coastal Franklin,
Massachusetts. Iris knows more about the townspeople than she will ever
say, and believes her job is to deliver secrets. Yet one day she does
the unthinkable: slips a letter into her pocket, reads it, and doesn't
deliver it.
Meanwhile, Frankie Bard broadcasts from overseas
with Edward R. Murrow. Her dispatches beg listeners to pay heed as the
Nazis bomb London nightly. Most of the townspeople of Franklin think the
war can't touch them. But both Iris and Frankie know better...
The Postmistress
is a tale of two worlds-one shattered by violence, the other willfully
naïve-and of two women whose job is to deliver the news, yet who find
themselves unable to do so. Through their eyes, and the eyes of everyday
people caught in history's tide, it examines how stories are told, and
how the fact of war is borne even through everyday life.
A dangerous, homeless drifter who grew up picking cotton in virtual
slavery. An upscale art dealer accustomed to the world of Armani and
Chanel. A gutsy woman with a stubborn dream. A story so incredible no
novelist would dare dream it.
It begins outside a
burning plantation hut in Louisiana . . . and an East Texas honky-tonk .
. . and, without a doubt, in the heart of God. It unfolds in a
Hollywood hacienda . . . an upscale New York gallery . . . a downtown
dumpster . . . a Texas ranch.
Gritty with pain and betrayal and brutality, this true story also shines with an unexpected, life-changing lov
Roxanne Reeves defines her life by the committees she heads and the
social status she cultivates. But she is keeping secrets that make her
an outsider in her own town, always in search of acceptance. And when
she is given a job none of the other white women want-researching the
town's African-American history for a tour of local sites-she feels she
can't say no.
Elderly Grace Clark, a retired black
schoolteacher, reluctantly agrees to become Roxanne's guide. Grace takes
Roxanne to Catfish Alley, whose undistinguished structures are
nonetheless sacred places to the black community because of what
happened there. As Roxanne listens to Grace's stories, and meets her
friends, she begins to see differently. She is transported back to the
past, especially to 1931, when a racist's hatred for Grace's brother
leads to events that continue to change lives decades later. And as
Roxanne gains an appreciation of the dreams, courage, and endurance of
those she had so easily dismissed, her own life opens up in new and
unexpected ways.
When Nina Revskaya puts her remarkable
jewelry collection up for auction, the former Bolshoi Ballet star finds
herself overwhelmed by memories of her homeland, and of the events, both
glorious and heartbreaking, that changed her life half a century
earlier. It was in Russia that she discovered the magic of dance and
fell in love, and where, faced with Stalinist aggression, a terrible
discovery incited a deadly act of betrayal—and an ingenious escape to
the West.
Nina has kept her secrets for half a lifetime. But
now Drew Brooks, an inquisitive associate at a Boston auction house, and
Grigori Solodin, a professor who believes Nina's jewels hold the key to
unlocking his past, begin to unravel her story—setting in motion a
series of revelations that will have life-altering consequences for them
all.
Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered—and shadowed—by
tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he searches for something to sustain him
and finds it among a tightly knit group of high school outsiders.
Surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken
longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as
Charleston, South Carolina’s dark legacy of racism and class divisions,
these friends will endure until a final test forces them to face
something none of them are prepared for.
Spanning two turbulent
decades, South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest: a masterpiece from a
great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no
bounds.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a
poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave
ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the
most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown
in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for
more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a
scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a
hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the
polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom
bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro
fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold
by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
The Emperor of All Maladies is a
magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first
documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles
in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical
new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and
award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a
cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a
biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent
chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more
than five thousand years.
The story of cancer is a story of
human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris,
paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of
discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of
his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely
resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be
easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads
like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.
From the
Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased
breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and
chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is
about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens
in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic
disease.
Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides
a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an
illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to
demystify cancer.
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other
times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores
the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at
large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her:
a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has
lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by
her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his
loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.
As the
townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought
to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully,
but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound
insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys,
and the endurance it requires.
It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life
after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the
wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But
Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on
Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies
at the heart of the greatest English novels.
As Madeleine
tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like
Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of
her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade,
who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real
life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard
Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland
boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds
herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with
him. At the same time, her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been
reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces,
obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.
Over
the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing,
spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world,
events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school.
Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but
can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly
inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around
the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face
with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God,
and the true nature of love.
What's on your to-read list for 2012????
