The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle

I read this book based on Patrick Rothfuss's recommendation and it fulfilled and exceeded my expectations. The book tells the story of a unicorn who accidentally discovers she's the last one left, and then embarks on a quest to find the other unicorns. It was a really delightful story, made all the better by lots of humor that gently lampoons the fantasy genre. I could see myself coming back to this delightful book time and time again.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

In this book Malcolm X and Alex Haley work together to tell the story of Malcolm X's life. He doesn't hold any punches either--we see a tragic childhood give way to a life of hustling and crime before Malcolm X discovers the Nation of Islam. We also see his break with the Nation of Islam. There's a helpful epilogue that not only gets into Haley's relationship to Malcolm X, but that also covers the assassination. A moving book.

A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama by Robert Stepto

This book looks back at the African American canon and contrasts scenes in writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Frederick Douglass to scenes in Obama's Dreams of My Father. It's perhaps not surprising that these scenes are often educational--for example, set in a school--because of Stepto's earlier thesis, that African American literature is driven by freedom and literacy narratives. While the book offers persuasive readings, and the comparisons to Obama are interesting, it doesn't have the heft, examples, or theoretical grounding to be a major work.

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop Frye

This book investigates the literary features of the Bible without making the case that the whole Bible is poetry (or that the Bible should necessarily just be read as literature). This book is heavily invested in the ways that we communicate as humans (the metaphoric, metanymic, and descriptive modes of narrative) and in the typology of the Bible--the way that truth in the Bible is portrayed as relative to itself (so the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament, and the New Testament is predicted by the Old Testament). The arguments are erudite and the book is informative.

A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear

I enjoyed the latest Maisie Dobbs novel. Maisie gets a job with a hush-hush government agency requiring her to go undercover at a new college in Cambridge and try to suss out the truth regarding a pacifist who wrote a book that caused mutinies during World War I--a pacifist who's murdered fairly quickly into Maisie's work. I loved the story of the book within the book (the children's book that caused the mutiny), and Maisie does much more of the old-fashioned crime solving these days (a few of the books in the middle, she'd just sit in the room and know who had done it--which is not satisfying at all as a read). The side plots didn't really tie in to the main murder mystery, but the main mystery was good enough to carry the book.

Delirium by Lauren Oliver

I found myself enjoying this book much more than I expected to. In a futuristic society where love is a disease that can be cured (by laser brain surgery) after you turn eighteen, Lena, an average girl in every way, falls in love just months before her procedure and learns to question the foundational tenets of her society. I thought the character of Lena was well done, and the love story tenderly and realistically achieved. Furthermore, the world building worked particularly well: each chapter's headed by some witty epigram taken from the books, websites, and policies that provided the canon of this dystopic government. My biggest complaint is that the book ended on a cliff-hanger, so now we have to wait a year to see how it resolves! This book is definitely part of a trilogy (too many loose ends for a stand-alone novel), but it is a promising opening.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

This play depicts the decision of an African American family to move into a house in a white neighborhood. It does a really lovely job depicting the family's conflicting dreams--Lena (the matriarch) wants to buy the house (and fulfill plans she had made with her now-dead husband when they were first married), while her daughter Beneatha wants to become a doctor and her son Walter wants to buy into a liquor store. Walter and his wife Ruth in particular have interesting developments as each feels stifled (and a loss of autonomy) in their marriage.