The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter

These stories are like icebergs: they're deeper than they first appear on the surface. For example, "Old Mortality" seems like a bildungsroman about Miranda growing up, but as we look deeper at the stories she's told, we see the destructive way the family has used romance and fiction to replace history and lived experience: stories about Aunt Amy (a tragic belle figure who died young) crowd out memories of the Civil War. I also really enjoyed "Noon Wine"--when the mysterious hired hand's past catches up with him, Mr. Thompson realizes both the extent to which he can be moved to act and the extent to which his motivations may be mistrusted by his community. Many of the stories feature great character development--a strong collection.

Red, White, and Blood by Christopher Farnsworth

This book is easily the best so far in the President's Vampire series. Although the name of the villain (the Boogeyman) is laughable, his murders are not. At times the descriptions in the book are over the top, but the story was well-plotted and kept me guessing at every turn (especially the last, which sets up a great starting point for the next volume in the series). I thought the campaign trail was a great place to set the series of murders and the book balanced introducing a new villain with the return of old foes nicely. I listened to the audiobook version of this title, and the narrator did a nice job with different voices for the characters.

The Spindlers by Lauren Oliver

What this book lacks in originality, it makes up for in heart. The story of a child protagonist traveling to a secret, underground world filled with fantastical creatures is nothing new (see, for example, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Un Lun Dun, and Neverwhere), but Oliver has populated her world with memorable creatures (for example, the Spindlers themselves--soul-stealing creatures that seem like spiders) and does a beautiful job capturing the anxieties and fears of childhood (do my parents care? why is my little brother such a bother? does my beloved babysitter who went away to college still remember me?). This book would be a delight to read out loud to small children.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

This book is about the improbable romance between the son of a dissenting minister and an Australian heiress who invests in a glass factory. Oscar Hopkins believes in gambling of a certain type--but won't allow himself to profit from it--at a very young age. Indeed, he uses a game of chance to determine that his father is incorrect on certain religious tenets and therefore becomes an Anglican minister. Lucinda Leplastrier is also a gambler of a sort--she invests half of her inheritance in a glass factory despite no background in the industry. They meet while traveling from England to Australia, and together concoct a plan to construct a glass church in the heart of the Outback. I really enjoyed this book--I thought the character development was superb--both Oscar and Lucinda are quirky, flawed individuals. Despite the improbabilities of the plot, Carey has constructed two characters who feel human. Winner of the 1988 Booker Prize.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

This book tells the intertwining stories of Sai, an orphan, who lives with her grandfather, a retired judge, in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains and Biju, the son of their cook, who is trying to make it as an illegal immigrant in the restaurants of New York City. There are beautiful scenes here, and the book is very attentive to the problems of colonialism, but the plot was a little meandering for my tastes--it took a long time for me to figure out quite where it was going. Winner of the Booker Prize, 2006.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

This book portrays the extreme poverty of the Lester family in a story that might be compared to a train wreck: you know you shouldn't be looking (and in this case laughing), but you can't look away either. The book relies neither on sentimentality nor on a proletarian call to action, but rather by turning the readers' reactions back on them: instead of a moral or a plan, Caldwell interrogates why we respond to this family with humor, contempt, and perhaps pity. The failure of the land to produce crops is equated with the family's inability to reproduce within social norms (the Lesters have had seventeen children, but only two still live at home, for example, and the ones who have left want nothing to do with the family). While Jeeter Lester (the head of the family) instinctively knows that his fate is tied to the land and that he wants no part of industrialization (symbolized by the possibility of a mill job in Augusta), the family is completely unable to cope with modernity: they treat their new car as if it were almost human--and in so doing manage to almost destroy it in a few short days. Finally, this book is about rural poverty in the South in the same way that Moby Dick is about whales--certainly it's a relevant topic, but Tobacco Road raises bigger and more pressing questions: What does it mean to be human? and What are the costs of living in a society that allows some of its members to become so abject?

The Truth by Terry Pratchett

This book spoofs the publishing industry as Ankh-Morpork gets its first newspaper just as the Watch uncovers a plot to unseat the Patrician. This book was definitely one of the more humorous and well-conceived entries in the Discworld series: it works! The plot hangs clearly together and I found the humor especially well done (Gaspode, the talking dog, is one of the newspaper's first sources, but he speaks to the newspaper anonymously as Deep Bone, for example).