You could do a lot worse than follow Laura Miller’s picks at Salon for gift buying or for your own enjoyment this weekend, or in 2012.
Salon’s choices for best fiction
- The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. As Publishers Weekly said: it “so impressively, ambitiously breaks the mold of its predecessor [Middleses] that it calls for the founding of a new prize to recognize its success both as a novel—and as a Jeffrey Eugenides novel.
- Pym by Mat Johnson. Also set in academia, as is Eugenides’ novel, with a literally darkly comic bent about an all-Black expedition to Antarctica.
- State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. It’s off to the Amazon for the imaginative Patchett, who occasionally moonlights for (and brightens) the Wall Street Journal with journalistic contributions.
- The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips. A tribute to Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
- The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Well, it’s a lot shorter than Infinite Jest.
Salon’s choices for best nonfiction
- Townie by Andre Dubus III
- Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution by Mary Gabriel
- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
- Catherine the Great: The Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie
- Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff
While these might not be my choices (I might have included Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, Candice Miller’s Destiny of the Republic and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs) they are all great choices to curl up with on a winter’s night.
Want a book today but not near a store and don’t have an ereader? McNally Jackson, the fine bookshop on Prince St. in lower Manhattan hand-delivers free in lower Manhattan. Love to discuss books with others? Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn sponsors a fiction book group, a young readers group and a moms book group. Want a nibble to go along with a sale? Book Culture’s two Morningside Heights stores offer a wine and cheese reception to kick off its sale this Friday evening.
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