OPEN CITY by Teju Cole

When Julius, a young psychiatrist living in New York, looks out of his apartment window, he loves to watch the birds fly past. And when he occasionally spots geese flying in formation, he wonders how our life below would look like to them. This same external perspective—which one could argue immigrants master especially well—permeates Teju Cole’s debut novel, OPEN CITY.

February 8, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Literary, New York City

CARIBOU ISLAND by David Vann

This is a richly absorbing and dark, domestic drama that combines the natural, icy world of the Alaska frontier with a story of deceptive love and betrayal. If Steinbeck and Hemingway married the best of Anita Shreve, you would get David Vann’s CARIBOU ISLAND. His prose is terse and the characterizations are subtle, but knifing. Like Shreve, his characters are saturated with loneliness and disconnection with their lives, with each other, in a pit of misperception, despair and exile, in a conflict of selves that beat each other down. The topography and remoteness of this “exclave” state, a place non-contiguous physically with its legal attachment (of the US) serves as one of many metaphors to the attachments exemplified in this story.

January 18, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Alaska, Character Driven, Contemporary, Family Matters, Reading Guide, Wild West

THE COUNTERLIFE by Philip Roth

Long though it is, this quotation sums up just about everything about Roth’s magnificent novel of 1976: its strange title, its grand theme, its somewhat simplistic view of history, and its humor that jumps cheerfully into offensive self-mockery. A long section of the novel takes place in Israel shortly after the Yom Kippur War, when the stereotypes were indeed being turned on their heads, and conversely significant criticism of the state was beginning to be heard from the West. But Roth’s principal subject is not the engaged Jews who assert their selfhood either through Zionism or religion, but the countless secular Jews like himself, living securely in a distant country; how do they establish their identity, especially in mid-life when the question of “Is this really all I am?” typically arises.

January 7, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Facing History, Israel, Literary, Man Booker International Prize, National Book Critic Circle (NBCC), y Award Winning Author

ANNABEL by Kathleen Winter

Being born a hermaphrodite is a very hard road to hoe. It is especially hard when you are born in remote Labrador in 1968. The nearest specialist is miles away and living in a town that does not relish diversity. Even today, in large urban areas, there is a lot of controversy about what to do about gender when an infant is born with ambiguous sex organs. Some doctors utilize blood tests to determine gender and others go by outward appearance. A true hermaphrodite is born one in 81,000 births.

January 6, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Canada, Class - Race - Gender, Contemporary, Reading Guide

MR. TOPPIT by Charles Elton

The first half of MR TOPPIT takes its readers for a grand ride. This debut novel, written by Charles Elton, has had quite a following in the United Kingdom and has just been released in the United States. It is a novel about speculation and conjecture, the ‘what ifs’ of life, and wishing things might have been different. Mostly though, it is about Luke Hayman and how he became immortalized in his father’s Hayseed Chronicles as the boy who eluded Mr. Toppit in the Darkwood.

December 24, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: California, Contemporary, Debut Novel, United Kingdom

THE FINKLER QUESTION by Howard Jacobson

Nevertheless, Howard Jacobson does talk about it, together with gentile anti-Semitism and that philo-Semitism that may well be anti-Semitism in disguise. This brilliant novel, at once comedic and penetrating, is nothing less than a study of Jewish identity, at least as reflected by a group of middle-class Jews in contemporary London. This is satire, but equal-opportunity satire; there is nobody who may not be offended by it at one point or another, yet nobody who will not recognize the wisdom of Jacobson’s insights, as loving and humane as they are witty.

December 23, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Class - Race - Gender, Humorous, Man Booker Prize, Satire, United Kingdom, y Award Winning Author