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The most read review from November 2012. Click the titles for the full review.

Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me by Karen Swallow Prior

I love books.  I love people that love books.  I love books about books by people that love books.

Karen Swallow Prior is an English Professor, writer, and essayist.  She has written a memoir highlighting the books (and poems) that have changed her life and made her who she is today.

Each chapter highlight a book and then uses that book to help tell the story of her life.  Sometimes the book helps her to learn, sometimes the book helps her to explain.  But in each case, it is her as a reader that comes through….

Embracing Obscurity: Becoming Nothing in Light of God’s Everything by Anonomous

Takeaway: Obscurity, humility, smallness.  All undervalued and difficult disciplines in a world of individualism, social media and mixed messages.

I ran across the very interesting book Embracing Obscurity on Tim Challies’ blog.  His review gave a bit of the back story and resulted in the book being put on sale for a couple weeks at Amazon.

An anonymous author decided to write a book about humility.  The author realized that writing a book about humility was in itself an un-humble activity so he (and I think it is pretty clearly a he) decided to write and publish a book secretly.  Even his family is unaware.

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2012 National Book Award Winners (Link to all the finalists)

Fiction: The Round House by Louise Erdrich

499 pages, 95 of 96 reviews are 4 or 5 star

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe’s life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

Written with undeniable urgency, and illuminating the harsh realities of contemporary life in a community where Ojibwe and white live uneasily together, The Round House is a brilliant and entertaining novel, a masterpiece of literary fiction. Louise Erdrich embraces tragedy, the comic, a spirit world very much present in the lives of her all-too-human characters, and a tale of injustice that is, unfortunately, an authentic reflection of what happens in our own world today.

Nonfiction: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

290 pages, 188 of 242 reviews are 4 or 5-star

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.
 
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

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