N.Y. Times Book Review: 10 Best Books of 2011

The season of book lists is now in full swing!

The New York Times Book Review has published its list of the ten best books of 2011.  My co-blogger, Eric, has previously reviewed two of these books, The Art of Fielding and Ten Thousand Saints.  I'd let him post about the list, but he's out racing this morning.

Interestingly, only two of the books (The Art of Fielding and The Tiger's Wife) on this list also appear on book critic Michiko Kakutani's list, suggesting that there hasn't been a lot of consensus about what has been good this year.

Here is the complete list:

FICTION

• The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
• 11/22/63, by Stephen King
• Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell
• Ten Thousand Saints, by Eleanor Henderson
• The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht

NON-FICTION

• Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens
• The Boy in the Moon, by Christopher Hitchens
• Malcolm X, by Manning Marable
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
• A World on Fire, by Amanda Foreman

Which of these have you read?

Related posts:

Quick Review: The Art of Fielding

Ten Thousand Saints
Quick Hits

Michiko Kakutani's Top Ten for 2011

Perrotta Novels

I've had mixed experiences with the novels of Tom Perrotta. I absolutely loved Little Children (you can find my review here), but The Wishbones, not so much - I found it to be too glib and with too many coincidences.

His new novel The Leftovers has a fascinating premise: "a rapturelike event has whisked millions of people off the face of the earth." What makes this conceit really interesting is that the people that were taken away have nothing in common. As Stephen King puts it in his great NYTimes review, "Nor do all (or even most) of the missing qualify as Camping-style Christians; those raptured away include Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and the odd alcoholic… [and] the rapture’s failure to conform to biblical prophecy has driven some people plumb over the edge."

I heard Perrotta talking about the novel on NPR the other day and was intrigued by his thinking about the premise. He was thoughtful and respectful about the implications of the rapture but didn't seem too serious. I enjoy the idea of taking a seemingly absurd idea and making it come true but with a twist. Plus, if the book is anything like Little Children, it will be written well in what SK describes as "beautifully modulated narration... His lines have a calm and unshowy clarity."

What do you think? Have you read any Perrotta? If so, did you like it or not?

Cross posted at Thought Ambience.

Ten Thousand Saints

In this week's New York Times, the cover review is of Ten Thousand Saints, a novel by Eleanor Henderson. The book delves into the straight-edge music scene of the late 1980's, of which I know only a very little. The reviewer says that, "Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus."

I'm going to put this on my list of books to watch for. At $12.99 on the Kindle ($15.85 hardcover), I'm not quite ready to pull the trigger, but maybe if the price comes down or I see a used copy.

PS: Although much of the book takes place in New York City, portions of it apparently take place in Lintonburg, VT, a fictional town that whose name is an anagram for Burlington, VT, and which resembles Burlington in many ways.