City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte

I liked this book more by its end than I thought I might at its beginning. It tells the story of Sarah Weston, a grad student in musicology, who receives a mysterious invitation to work at a Prague museum over the summer, cataloguing scores and papers relating to Beethoven, her musical hero. But even before she arrives at the castle, she realizes that all is not well. Most of the story was really clever and inventive. But there were a number of moments when I found myself rolling my eyes--many of the characters seemed to lack clear motivation, especially at first. I'm intrigued to see where the story goes next.

NW by Zadie Smith

I suspect I missed some of the formal playfulness of this novel because I listened to the audiobook version (which had two excellent narrators). The story is as much about life in northwest London generally as it is about the three protagonists: Leah Hanwell, her childhood friend Natalie (then known as Keisha), and Felix Cooper, whose presence in the book both demonstrates how tightly-knit the community is and how wide the gulfs between its people are. While the end of the book culminates in an engaging and satisfying plot, the story meanders on its way there--it's as much about exploring the characters and their relationships, their aspirations and their limitations as it is about telling a specific story. I found the book beautiful and lyric.

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

This book is a bildungsroman of sorts of Nick Guest, a young gay man who spends the 1980s living in London at the wealthy, conservative, and political active family of a college friend of his. The book is a comedy of manners that exposes the emptiness not only of Nick's life but also of his friends and the people in his social milieu. As personal and political disaster close in on Nick and his household, he's left with the memory of the various lines of beauty (of someone's body, architectural, or even lines of cocaine) that he's experienced, but not much hope for the future. I found this book to be an extremely compelling read: the plot moves forward organically and the prose is beautifully styled. Winner of the 2004 Booker Prize.

Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron

I enjoyed the plot of this mystery, but I found the narrator/protagonist extremely frustrating. I understand why the flawed, noirish detective exists, but you have to have sympathy with the detective on some level, and in this book, I really found Mike's stupid behavior (in relation to how he related to one of the accused criminal's family members) frustrating. Not only should he know better, but he was mucking up the potential for good police work. The insights he brought to the cases as a detective weren't things that would cancel out such bad behavior.

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

This book is not Harry Potter. Rowling's skill at managing a large cast of characters and connecting widely diverging elements of the plot is still present, and she presents some scenes really well, with dark humor coming through. Whether recounting the disappointments of a dinner party or a mid-life infatuation with the lead singer of a boy band, she seems especially sharp on both life's little disappointments and the struggle of putting up a good face in spite of them. The story's sharply plotted and entertaining--Rowling takes the occasion of the sudden death of a parish councilor in the small town of Pagford to air the town's hypocrisy and deep-seated divisions. The novel's point-of-view jumps rapidly from character to character, and the many connections between characters from all walks of life (and between the people who live in Pagford village proper and the Fields, a low-income housing development which many Pagfordians are trying to annex to the neighboring town of Yarvil) belie the idea that the Fields are not properly part of Pagford. Rowling also investigates the motivations of charity and social work (many characters who are professionally involved with helping the poor ignore huge problems within their own families). The book defiantly sets itself apart from the Harry Potter series with plenty of drug use, sex, violence, and rough language. This roughness does not, in and of itself, make the book a bad book (although it does make it inappropriate for many of Rowling's younger readers). Still, my biggest disappointment with this book is that it has lost the magic that imbued the Harry Potter books. I'm not talking about actual magic here, obviously, but the magic of a story with epic scope--even if the Harry Potter books didn't always live up to their potential, they started with the idea that we can be our best selves; The Casual Vacancy proposes that, despite our best intentions, we rarely escape our worst selves.

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

This book is beautifully written; it requires the reader to relax into the narrative--looking for immediate answers and immediate clarity as to how everything fits in only frustrated me. I really enjoyed following the development of the characters and the sense of place (mostly Bombay in the 1970s, with a diversion into China)--the plot was secondary to me. Shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize.

Scourge by Jeff Grubb

This book is about characters who are on the margins of the Star Wars universe--a Jedi archivist who enters field service when his former apprentice is killed, some smugglers, and a Hutt crime syndicate. I enjoyed the story, which included a fair amount of double-crossing and some action, and I liked the new characters, but it's no Zahn novel either.

The House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe

This book was an enjoyable piece of historical fiction, with a speculative side. It starts as fairly straight historical fiction about a rich Boston family struggling to cope with the deaths of its mother and sister on the Titanic (a slightly implausible premise anyway because only four of the women in first class died; most made it to life boats). But as the story moves back towards the father's experiences shipping in China and forward to the other daughter's interests in spiritualism, it gradually becomes apparent that there's more going on than at first appeared. I found the twist disorienting, and while I liked the Salem connection (which seems, at least, to put this book in the same universe as The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane), I think I would have liked a bit more payoff on the Titanic angle.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

I found this book interesting because while it starts with an historical realism (it sounds like the bildungsroman of a boy growing up in a hippy commune in the seventies), it moves forward in time to a future world, made increasingly uninhabitable by global warming and spreading epidemic disease. Or you could say that it moves from one distopia (we see the dream of a commune crumbling, crushed by the pressures of too many people, outward society--the police, and not enough money) to another (an apocalyptic vision of our future). Indeed, the second distopia is more disturbing than the first; for the realism of the first part of the book implies that we are headed for the second with little hope of reprieve. Despite the problems the world faces in the second part of the book, however, and looming personal problems for our protagonist (his wife has disappeared, his teenage daughter is a teenager, and his mother suffers from a slowly debilitating disease), we see the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity. I didn't like this book as well as Monsters of Templeton, but it did give me a lot to think about.

Flashback by Dan Simmons

For the most part, I enjoyed this book, which is a noir-style detective story set in the dystopic future. The technology is awesome, the drug flashback (that lets you relive your past) intriguing, and even the family drama is handled pretty well. I also found the mystery really compelling. What was less exciting was the book's political stance--not necessarily its side, but its extremism and its desire for screed instead of thoughtful consideration of the topics. I thought the politics took away from the book as a whole.

Low Town by Daniel Polansky

This book throws a lot of balls in the air but manages them well. I found myself surprised by several twists. It took a little bit of time to figure out how the imaginary world of the novel works, and how the main character fits into that world, but I ended up really liking the main character, who fits into the noir mold of a detective struggling to do what's right in spite of his troubled past. I'm hoping there's more to come from this story!

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

This book is epic, on the scale of something like Moby Dick or War and Peace or Ulysses. Various sub-plots, which involve the Ennet Drug Recovery House and the Enfield Tennis Academy (whose founder, James O. Incandenza, but known to his family as Himself, committed suicide by sticking his head in a microwave oven, after completing an entertainment known as Infinite Jest so compelling that it causes viewers to stop thinking about anything else while they view it), proliferate throughout the book. The version of the near future presented in the book is fun to entangle, bit by bit, so I'll avoid saying too much about the plot. I think it is fair to say that the novel presses on the conjunction of entertainment, pleasure, and communication, and examines how we connect with those around us. It's a bit of a challenge to get all the way through, but it repays the effort put into it.

Amexica: War Along the Borderline by Ed Vulliamy

This book looks at the violence currently raging in the cities along Mexico's border with the United States. Vulliamy doesn't shy away from portraying the corruption, violence, and shattered lives present in these cities, but he doesn't blame only the narcocartels, either. Instead, he insists that the reader understand that the money which fuels the destructive cycles comes from the United States's seemingly insatiable appetite for drugs, and from its willingness to sell guns south. The book is clear and well-researched, and I appreciated Vulliamy's obvious respect for the borderlands and most of the people trying to make their lives there.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

This book, which spoils itself both in its title and in its first six pages, is actually a meticulously-plotted, sweeping, and engaging account of the tragedies, cons, and even triumphs of an Irish boys' school. The characters were round and human, yet engaging, and despite knowing Skippy's fate, there were plenty of twists and turns in the plot--Murray forces the reader to move beyond common assumptions in his nuanced plot. It's quite a long book, but it repays its reader in kind.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

This book shows the radiating effects of one event: a man slaps another couple's child at a barbecue. Told from eight different points of view, and extending in time far past the initial slap, this book refuses to make any one of its characters into a villain, but shows them all as human, just as you think they couldn't possibly behave any worse (or that they couldn't possibly have been more wronged). I don't know that I'd care to hang out with this circle of people--mostly because there's a lot of what strikes me as gratuitous drug use--but the characters are well-realized, and the book works.

The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner

This book tells the story of five Scottish girls and one's English roommate who get stuck in an airport while trying to go on a cheap holiday together. While the girls themselves aren't the type you'd necessarily want to hang out with (they love drinking and buying clothes), Warner does a great job of capturing six individual personalities--they seem vivid and real. Furthermore, the girls are clearly trapped by their surroundings, life in a small town, and poverty and dealing with it (or not) as best they know how (or can). It's a grim book, with a grimmer twist at the end, but all-in-all well done.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

While this book seems at first focused on the fate of a briefcase of money that Llewellyn Moss discovers at the scene of a massive heroin deal gone bad, by the end, I came to the consider the really moving story that of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who matches himself against Anton Chigurh, in an attempt to save Moss and to redeem himself from the errors he made as a young soldier. I found the book really moving and surprisingly (to me at least) exciting. It did a great job balancing action and moral consequence. McCarthy handles both his characters and the Southwest landscape really well.