The Point Books, December 27th
The Trends of 2010 included dogs, zombies, vampires, green (ecologically friendly), historical fiction, Jane Austen & Mark Twain. For a Mark Twain read try: Twain’s Feast: searching for America’s lost foods in the footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Beahrs.
Mindy’s Favorites of 2010
The Red Thread by Ann Hood
The Tin Ticket: the heroic journey of Australia’s convict women by Deborah J. Swiss
Fur, Fortune, and Empire : the epic history of the fur trade in America by Eric Jay Dolin
Jill’s Favorites of 2010
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig
Room by Emma Donoghue
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
And the Pursuit of Happiness by Maira Kalman
Pocketful of Posies: a treasury of nursery rhymes by Salley Mavor
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve) and The Guermantes Way (translated by Mark Treharne ) both by Marcel Proust.
One sentence from Proust (there wasn’t enough time to read on air!):
“And thus it was she who first gave me the idea that people do not, as I had imagined, present themselves to us clearly and in fixity with their merits, their defects, their plans, their intentions in regard to ourselves (like a garden viewed through railings with all its flower beds on display), but, rather, as a shadow we can never penetrate, of which there can be no direct knowledge, about which we form countless beliefs based upon words and even actions, neither of which give us more than insufficient and in fact contradictory information, a shadow that we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, as masking the burning flames of hatred and of love.”
Melanie’s Favorites of 2010
Fiction:
The Wives of Henry Oades by Johanna Moran
The Passage by Justin Cronin
The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
All the Stieg Larsson novels
Ford County by John Grisham
The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell
The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith
Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith
City of Thieves by David Benioff
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
A Corpse in the Koryo by James Church
This Body of Death by Elizabeth George
Nonfiction:
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Dan Okrent
Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World by Seth Stevenson
The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick
War by Sebastian Junger
This is my favorite regular feature on Mindy Todd’s show! Yea, Jill, for loving Lionel Shriver and Maira Kalman!