The Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee

This book is a testament to the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity. It tells the story of Michael K, who was born with a cleft palate and made a living as a gardener until civil war in South Africa makes life untenable for Michael and his mother Anna. Then he tries to take her to the farm she remembers from her childhood. Nothing comes easily for Michael, and he's continually faced with setbacks. But he perseveres despite it all. Winner of the 1983 Booker prize.

Feeding the Ghosts by Fred D'Aguiar

This book is a historicization of the Zong disaster. While its perspective shifts among several of the participations, the most memorable character is Mintah, the woman who climbs back aboard the ship after being thrown over. The book explores what happens when we commodify the human body--the abuses and indignities that humans are willing to perpetrate on one another in the name of getting a good return on an investment. It also explores the role of literacy and the power it confers.

Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear

This book features a weak, and ultimately forgettable, mystery that allows Maisie to dither about her future. I had assumed that she had decided against marrying James Compton based on the previous book, but she's still considering it, and frankly I hardly understand why she cares either way. The time period is still fascinating, but I don't think Ms. Winspear uses it as well as she used to. I wonder if this series has been over extended.

A History of American Higher Education by John R. Thelin

This book gives a broad overview of the history of higher education in the United States from its colonial beginnings until 2000. It does a really nice job teasing out some of the nuances, especially in terms of the relationship between state and federal governments and institutions of higher education--what does it mean to be a public institution? what were the results of the Morrill Land Grant act? It also incorporates the history of women and people of color in education into its history, rather than isolating these groups in short, separate chapters. Thelin always has his eye on two goals: present an honest history that really looks at the changes in higher education (rather than single-mindedly valorizing the past as better and bemoaning the present) and show how we can learn from the past (successes and mistakes) to make higher education serve the country more successfully than ever. At times Thelin repeats the same anecdote, and the book aims at a big-picture rather than an in-depth account, but this is a great introduction to the history of higher education in the United States.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

This book begins when a troubled young boy, Simon, breaks into Kerewin Holmes's tower. Kerewin, a loner, gradually becomes closer to Simon and his adoptive father Joe. But as Kerewin learns more about the family, including Simon's traumatic past, she begins to realize that there are still real troubles plaguing this family. There are no simple or easy answers here. Simon's past is something of a mystery--and it always remains mysterious. All of the characters are damaged, and engage in morally questionable behaviors. While the majority of the book is written in English, it's littered with Maori phrases (translated in the back) and it eschews conventions--inner monologues are set off almost as if they are block quotations, for example. These stylistic differences required attention, but were easy to get used to. In the end this book is lyrical and haunting. Winner of the 1985 Booker Prize.

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

This book is much more than the biography of General Alex Dumas (today best known as the father of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, among many other novels). It provides a lot of context for General Dumas's life and times--including the French colony of St. Domingue, the French Revolution, and the rise of Napoleon. The book makes two arguments: that General Alex Dumas achieved remarkable success, especially given the prejudices and hardships he had to overcome--and so should be more widely remembered; and that Alexandre Dumas, the novelist, based several of his literary works, including The Count of Monte Cristo, on his father's life. I found both claims well substantiated in the biography. I enjoyed the tone, which not only detailed the general's life and helped readers with the history surrounding that time and place, but also gave a personal account of researching the biography and teasing out the relevant details (including an incident of sanctioned safe breaking!). The narrator of the audiobook had a clear and enjoyable voice. All in all, a great book to listen to.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

This book tells the story of a woman's life through the viewpoints of her children--starting with the twins who died young, and ending with a granddaughter. I loved the way each viewpoint expanded the story, so we could see Hattie's many different sides and her struggle to determine her identity in the face of the demands of her family. The book was lyrical and well-plotted. I look forward to Ms. Mathis's next book.

Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger

This collection of essays examines the role of the vampire in contemporary literature. Its essays are grouped into four categories: the development of the vampire metaphor in an historical continuum, on writing vampire fictions, the role of disease and disease metaphors in writing contemporary vampire fictions (especially AIDS), and the vampire as an other (especially related to sexuality). I found some of the essays in the collection stronger than others ("Consuming Youth: The Lost Boys Cruise Mallworld" by Rob Latham on the ways in which the film The Lost Boys enacts the capitalist/vampire metaphor in our contemporary economy was particularly good), but all of the essays do better with reading a given text or set of texts than theorizing in new and exciting ways.

The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons by Colin Dayan

This book examines the ways that the law has been used to manipulate the boundaries of the human--especially in the case of enslaved persons and prisoners. Dayan posits that forms such as zombies, ghosts, and dogs appear in literature and culture in response to the ways that the law can be deployed to take away someone's humanity. The book covers a broad time period (dealing with cases in US law from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first) and it combines sources and techniques from a variety of fields, including the law, history, and literature, to end in a stunning indictment of legal systems that take away people's humanity and an exposé of how the cruelest forms of punishment may be written off as administrative conveniences. All in all, a persuasive and useful monograph, and a model for a radical, engaged form of criticism.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

This book focuses on the friendship between two families whose lives are on the brink of change: the husbands run a record business about to go under to the threat of a corporate store planned just a few blocks away, the wives' midwifery practice is under siege when a home birth goes wrong, a baby is about to be born (just as the father's illegitimate son reappears), and a teenage boy falls in love for the first time. Despite all these events, the book is about its vividly-drawn characters. I found this book easy and enjoyable to read (as opposed to, say, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which took me years).

A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan

This novel explores Horace Cross's struggle to find his place in a small, tightly-knit, religious town in North Carolina while accepting his identity; he attempts to reconcile his family's expectations and the religious truths with which he's been raised with his growing awareness of his homosexuality. Although Horace cannot come up with a workable solution (he turns to magic and demons, which ultimately betray him), the book uses its beautiful style and complex structure to give depth to Horace's experience and to the spirits of his family which haunt him and which have their own secrets.

Bloodline by Ernest Gaines

This volume collects five stories by Ernest Gaines that mostly focus on the problem of becoming a man or asserting your position in a society that is designed to tear you down because of your race. Gaines's characters don't just turn to violence or protest, however: living or working within the society while calmly refusing to accept indignities or charity seems to be more of the model his characters work with.

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

This book collects forty-one of Welty's stories including the collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of Innisfallen and two previously uncollected stories. The Golden Apples hung together the best for me--they're almost all set in or around Morgana, Mississippi and feature the same characters at various points in their lives. I also enjoyed the stories that revisited historical events like the Burr plot and the Medgar Evers assassination. The stories are dense--there's a lot of meaning compressed into small actions, but the prose and the characters are both beautifully realized.

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan

This collection of short stories, mostly set in the fictional neighborhood of Tims Creek, North Carolina, delights with its beauty, humor, and meta-fictional commentary. The stories feature a wide range of protagonists, and gradually set out a depiction of a community with memorable characters. I particularly loved "Clarence and the Dead (and What do they tell you, Clarene? and The Dead Speak to Clarence)," "Things of This World ; or, Angels Unawares," and "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead; Being the Annotated Oral History of the Former Maroon Society called Snatchit and then Tearshirt and later the Town of Tims Creek, North Carolina [circa 1854-1985]." The stories show the magic inherent in everyday life and satirize academic attempts to interpret or explain the community.

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 Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

This volume gathers all of Flannery O'Connor's published short stories. They are nothing short of brilliant. Every time I read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," I see new details to admire and enhance my reading of the story. I think one of the reasons I admire these stories so much, is that O'Connor is so good at getting inside a person's head and exploding all his or her prejudices, bigotries, and limitations for the reader. It's not like she has a great deal of sympathy for these characters: she really doesn't hold back on her criticism, but on the other hand, she knows them so well that you have to think that she must like some part of them at least a little bit. Really magnificent: these stories are the work of a master of the form and the human condition.

Black Boy by Richard Wright

This autobiography chronicles Richard Wright's development as a writer--it starts in early childhood, when his only way of shaping and constructing his environment is through action and he vents his frustration and boredom by playing with fire (and setting the family home ablaze). Despite his frustration with his family life and with race relations in the South, and a very haphazard education (he only completes the ninth grade, and most years he only attends part of his classes), he discovers that writing and books offer him a way out of the tension he feels living as an African American man in the U.S. South. In the second half of the book, he moves to Chicago and becomes involved with the Communist Party. The book chronicles both the hope (for racial unity) and disillusion he feels as a result of his involvement with the Party. The story Wright tells is at times moving, and at other times horrific (for example, he lynches a kitten)--and this horror is necessary to his story. Wright's careful attention to the power of language--both at its most lyrical (he uses anaphora to show his childhood self confronting and moving beyond barriers to perception) and most violent (the power of words to threaten and cause violence) make this book essential for any writer, beyond its sociological importance.

The Complete Stories by Zora Neale Hurston

This collection of stories spans a wide range of time (from Hurston's early 30s to just before her death) and includes all her published short fiction and a number of unpublished stories as well (including one, "A Woman in Gaul" which was almost burned after Hurston's death). It also covers a wide range of subjects and genres: some stories draw heavily on the Southern, African-American folklore that Hurston collected professionally, some are set in Harlem, some are fantastical--bordering on magical realism, and some are non-fictional, anthropological pieces. One of the themes that carries throughout the stories is the question of understanding (and language's role in that understanding)--can we really understand each other? how can we use language (or laughter) to both reveal and hide parts of ourselves to protect ourselves from the world? The figure of John (the trickster who came from Africa and outwits Massa despite being enslaved) is key to many of the stories. This collection contains some real gems and demonstrates the range and skill of Hurston's career.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

This book is about the Fall of the House of Compson, as told through the points of view of its last three sons--Benjy, who is mentally retarded, Quentin, who is suicidally insane, and Jason, who is morally bankrupt--and a third-person, omniscient narrator. Although the majority of the narration technically happens during Easter weekend 1928, the story is continually haunted by its past traumas, which keep slipping in and out, along with Faulkner's cruel golf jokes. This book is a hauntingly beautiful warning about the dangers of getting caught up in the past and about the dangers of settling for a flawed modernity.

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

This book tells the story of David Lurie, a middle-aged literature professor who is forced to leave his University post after he has an affair with one of his students. He moves to a rural part of the country, where his daughter lives alone on a farm, but his safety and his relationship with his daughter are imperiled when the farm is attacked. None of the characters clearly held the moral high ground, and I think that this ambiguity is one of the book's strengths. I'm not sure that the book had a fantastic answer, but it posed the question of how do you live life past disappointment and things not working out the way you might have hoped very well. Booker award winner, 1999.