Archive for the ‘2010 Top Picks’ Category
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot
Rebecca Skloot’s THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS is an enthralling look at the origin of HeLa cells that grew “with [such] mythological intensity,” that they “seemed unstoppable.” They were a “continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample” acquired from Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who suffered from a particularly virulent form of cervical cancer complicated by syphilis…Neither she nor her family had any idea that the cells obtained from her cervix in 1951 would eventually number in the trillions and become a vital part of medical research all over the world.
December 21, 2010
· 
Judi Clark · 
2 Comments
Tags: 2010 Favorites, medical, Nonfiction, Sciences · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Award Winning Author, Class - Race - Gender, Morality, Non-fiction, US South
DANIEL by Henning Mankell
Book Quote: “I’m a little boy, he thought. I have travelled much too far away. My parents and the other people I lived with are dead. And yet they live. They are still closer to me than the man called Father and the woman who doesn’t dare come close enough for me to grab her. […]
December 15, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 19th-Century, 2010 Favorites, Around-the-World, Henning Mankell, Historical · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Africa, Award Winning Author, Class - Race - Gender, Sweden, Translated, World Literature
EVERYTHING LOVELY, EFFORTLESS, SAFE by Jenny Hollowell
For the longest time, growing up in rural Virginia, Birdie Baker is convinced she is destined to follow the path set forth by her devout Christian parents. Like them, as a Jehovah’s Witness, she will spread the word of the Lord, marry, settle down and wrap it up. But the sense of unease that plagues her even after she is married to a church-going man named Judah, is worsened when she runs into her high school drama teacher at the grocery store. “What are you still doing here?” he asks, “I figured the next time I saw you it would be in a movie.” Eventually, leave Virgina she does. Birdie pools all her savings toward a one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles.
December 14, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 2010 Favorites, 2010 PB Release, Contemporary, Hollywood, Los Angeles · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, California, Contemporary, Debut Novel, Drift-of-Life, guilt, Job, Life Choices
UNDER FISHBONE CLOUDS by Sam Meekings
If UNDER FISHBONE CLOUDS doesn’t attain the high readership it deserves, there is no justice. It’s quite simply one of the most lavishly imagined, masterfully researched, exquisitely written contemporary novels I’ve read. And if that sounds as if I’m gushing…well, it’s probably because I am.
December 7, 2010
· Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: Around-the-World, Chinese, Communism, Family Matters, Historical, Literary, love, lyrical, Myth · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, China, Magical Realism, Real Event Fiction, Real People Fiction, World Literature
THE EVOLUTIONARY VOID by Peter F. Hamilton
In the final volume of Peter F. Hamilton’s VOID trilogy, we once again find Edeard trying to make things right in Makkathran, his city on Querencia, a planet in the Void.
December 4, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 2010 Favorites, Peter Hamilton, Speculative (Beyond Reality) · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Speculative (Beyond Reality)
SKIPPY DIES by Paul Murray
The Ireland that is the setting for Paul Murray’s delightful novel SKIPPY DIES, is not the one we have heard about recently in the news—crippled by debt and threatening to bring down the Euro. Instead, the novel is set in the not-so-distant past when the roaring Celtic Tiger was a prominent player on the world economic stage. SKIPPY DIES is set in an Ireland where the “past is considered dead weight—at best something to reel in tourists, at worst an embarrassment, an albatross, a raving, incontinent old relative that refuses to die.”
It is in this Ireland that the boys of Seabrook College, the primary characters in the novel, come of age. One of their frequent haunts away from school is Ed’s Doughnuts House, a franchise branch of an international food chain. And it is at Ed’s where, in the very first chapter of the book, Skippy dies.
November 23, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: Around-the-World, Contemporary · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Reading Guide, United Kingdom, World Literature
