The 2011 P&P Holiday Newsletter and Children’s Winter Favorites are filled with our many recommendations and suggestions for reading and gift-giving. Click to download the pdfs or visit the store to pick up your copies. Each year we highlight ten outstanding books. The following five novels and five works of nonfiction are the store’s 2011 favorites. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have! And don't forget, all of the items included in the holiday newsletter are discounted to all of our 8500 members all month long.
FICTION
A novel that can make you laugh, cry, and stand up and cheer, The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown, $25.99) by Chad Harbach is a smart, funny, big-hearted story. Henry Skrimshander is a sure-handed shortstop from a small town recruited by the team’s captain to join the squad at fictional Westish College, a Div. 3 school in Wisconsin. His dedication to his position is mystical, owing much to his well-worn copy of the Tao-like Art of Fielding. When the national record for errorless innings is within his grasp, though, and an errant throw nearly kills his room-mate/team-mate/best friend, the irrepressible Owen, everything Henry has taken for granted is thrown into question. One of the most talked about books of this year and for good reason, The Art of Fielding is more than a baseball book. It’s as knowing about relationships as it is about sports. It also displays in equal measure the author’s passions for literature and baseball.
A three-week voyage across the Indian Ocean from Ceylon to London lies at the center of Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The Cat’s Table (Knopf, $26). The title refers to the table farthest away, in physical distance and therefore in social standing, from the captain’s table. One of that table’s regulars is eleven-year-old Michael, who, with his two friends Cassius and Ramadhin, has the adventure of his young life. Whether spying on other passengers, doing the ignominious bidding of eccentric adults, or being shown the mysterious realm below decks, the three find the journey a priceless education. Later, looking back from the vantage point of adulthood, Michael and his friends see that the relationships formed and the experiences shared on the voyage have left an indelible impression on all of them. Ondaatje captures the freedom and brightness of adolescence and brilliantly contrasts them with the responsibilities that come with adulthood.
Do you remember college? Jeffrey Eugenides does, and he brings all of the dizzying highs and emotional lows to brilliant life in The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28), his first novel since he won the Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex ten years ago. Eugenides follows a trio of Brown University students through the early 1980s. Cloistered on Providence’s College Hill, they immerse themselves in literature, philosophy, and semiotics—but how can mere texts help them in love, or in navigating the paralyzing recession they graduate into in 1982? No one makes these themes vibrate as freshly as Eugenides. There is no better send-up of that gorgeously experimental undergraduate phase, when trying on a new identity was as easy as switching your major, and when books really did have the power to change your life.
A master of both the novel (Flaubert’s Parrot, Arthur and George) and the short story (The Lemon Table, Pulse), Julian Barnes may have found his perfect genre with the novella. His brief, conversational, and Man Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending (Random House, $23.95) is a moving meditation on time; it’s also a meticulously constructed work that repays immediate rereading, each incident and conversation gaining meaning and resonance when seen in terms of the whole story. That story focuses on Tony Webster, retired yet suddenly swept up again in the events of some forty years before. He recounts his youthful friendships and an early, fraught relationship with a woman who later took up with his best friend. Tony begins to question what happened and how well he really knew the people he was involved with—let alone himself. As he revises his memories, the novel becomes a deft, subtle study of the elusive effects of time. Tony’s stream of reminiscences is akin to a succession of photos of himself, some comforting, others shocking, that constantly show him as a new and different person, yet also, somehow, the same one.
The authority and assuredness with which The Tiger’s Wife (Random House, $25) unfolds belies the fact that it’s a first novel written by a twenty-something author. Téa Obreht’s narrator, Natalia, is on a mission to inoculate children at an orphanage in a town once separated from her own by a civil war. While she’s there, she learns of the death of her grandfather, the source of her childhood stories. She informs the reader that “everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man.” Fantastic and fabulous, these powerful stories from Natalia’s grandfather’s childhood make up a large part of the novel. They embody timeless ideas: courage, honor, trust, and, in the story of the deathless man, matters of life and death. As Natalia travels to her grandfather’s hometown, she learns that the stories originated in real events. The juxtaposition between superstition and reality, between magic and medicine, contributes to the richness of this amazing novel.
NONFICTION
The best food writing is always about more than food, and that is the case with Blood, Bones, and Butter (Random House, $26), the excellent memoir and first book by Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef and owner of Prune, a popular restaurant in New York City’s East Village. The book is part coming-of-age tale about the pluses and minuses of growing up with artistic and food-loving parents whose divorce ultimately shattered their children’s lives. Beyond recounting her family travails, Hamilton uses her considerable training and skill as a writer to describe how a succession of food experiences (including hunger) led her to open a restaurant that would transcend the faddish trends of modern American cooking. A cross between M.F.K Fisher and Patti Smith? Sort of. Hamilton’s book will appeal not only to cooks and omnivores, but to anyone who appreciates a well-told story about finding one’s passion and meaning in life.
This vibrant narrative history of political economics from the 1840s to today recasts the dismal science as a Grand Pursuit (Simon & Schuster, $35). Sylvia Nasar covered economics for The New York Times before turning to biography with A Beautiful Mind, and she combines these two areas of expertise to elucidate ideas and investigate the lives they grew out of. Here’s Alfred Marshall, walking Dickens’s London to get a firsthand look at labor conditions. Here’s Marx, hunkered down in libraries. Nasar covers the Great Depression and two world wars, recreating the experiences of Schumpeter, Keynes, Hayek, Fisher, and others as they faced the terrific challenges of avoiding economic ruin once the gunfire had stopped. The book closes with Amartya Sen, a high-caste Bengali, witnessing the horrors of the 1943 famine, partition, and violence, and using ethics to develop a new economics of social welfare. As much an adventure as a history of ideas, Nasar’s book shows economists in action as the “trustees…of the possibilities of civilization.”
In one of this year’s outstanding works of American history, Tony Horwitz recognizes the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry with Midnight Rising (Holt, $29), an absorbing portrait of that revolutionary firebrand. Brown was born into a strict fundamentalist and abolitionist family (his father was an early trustee of the radical new Ohio college, Oberlin) that was never financially secure. Intensely idealistic but domineering and uncompromising, Brown embraced terrorist tactics and finally engaged in a retaliatory massacre in his fight against slavery, carrying out an unrealistic plan to overpower the pro-slavery American government with a force of nineteen men. At the ensuing trial, the verdict was a foregone conclusion, but Horwitz tells the story with dramatic tension; Brown, described by Julia Ward Howe as a “holy and glorious” martyr, was unrepentant, and you can’t help having mixed feelings as Brown climbs to the gallows.
The world into which Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things was reborn in 1417 felt threatened by the ideas expressed there. But The Swerve (W.W. Norton, $26.95) history took in this event, from a God-centered to a material conception of the universe, influenced subsequent thinkers and changed the course of Western culture. In his riveting and suspenseful story of those ideas and their rediscovery, the eminent scholar Stephen Greenblatt, author of the popular Will in the World, recounts how Poggio Bracciolini, a canny and ruthless papal apparatchik, but also an intrepid book hunter with exquisite handwriting, found the only surviving copy of this classical masterpiece secreted in a remote German monastery. Greenblatt, himself heir to the humanistic turn effected by the surfacing of On the Nature of Things, has made narrative central to our understanding of literature and culture and unfailingly finds anecdotes that catch the reflected light of an entire cosmos.
In this engrossing narrative about World War I, Adam Hochschild writes vividly not just about the politicians, generals, and propagandists who pushed for war. He also chronicles the stories of a number of civilians and soldiers who waged a principled if unsuccessful antiwar struggle. To End all Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28) portrays the rush to battle and the inability to stop it as the product largely of entrenched mindsets. He compellingly contrasts the passions and principles of the dissenters with the deeply embedded commitment to war and empire of the war-makers and the majority of the population.
Section contributors: Michael Allen, Bradley Graham, Laurie Greer, Mark LaFramboise, Barbara Meade, Lissa Muscatine, Elizabeth Sher
The Member Sale may be over, but our suggested gifts are still 20% off until December 31. Take a look at the entire publication, there is something for everyone!
- Brad and Lissa
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