Fall 2009 big books are just around the corner. But before I start thinking about the newest William Boyd, Margaret Atwood, John Irving, or David Mitchell--Dan Brown who?--I want to look back on the books I read between June and last night. There were common themes in many of these titles, and overall, it was one of my best reading seasons.

 Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories by Elizabeth Strout
I'm taking a stand and calling this a novel even though each story could probably stand on its own. Definitely a case where the whole is better than its parts. Each segment of the book is about a character in a small Maine town, with a connecting character, Olive, whose emotional complexion changes over the decades in which the episodes take place. Warning: there are several situations in this book that will make you cry. So read it alone, and be patient with the couple of less-than-perfect interludes. I will definitely read this again.
(Finished on June 7, five out of five.)

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
This was a selection for my book club and I think its inclusion as a work worth reading has created a chasm into our group, for this is not a good book. Yes, it has a plot that is readable, but the writing is terrible, and the characters lack that essential "it" that is generally required to provoke a satisfying level of reading pleasure. I didn't care what happened to any of these women, and found their situations entirely unlikely. There was tension during our discussion, and a haughty and defensive, "Well I liked it!" on the part of the chooser.  It makes me want to revisit my future choices when it's my turn, to make sure I'm not asserting too much arrogance as a counterpoint to dreck. Ah, such is the stuff of surburban drama.
(Finished on July 2, two out of five)

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
I meant to read this with the OS book club, but things got out of hand at home and I wasn't able to keep up. This was a wonderful two or three hours, and many of the character's situations and the book's underlying melancholy still sneak up on me at surprising intervals. Read it if you can, and better, read it to a child.
(Finished July 6, five out of five)

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
This is a first novel for Mandel, published by a wonderful house in Denver, Unbridled Books. UB is known for exquisite literary fiction. Edward Falco (brother uncle of actor Edie Falco) is one of their authors. Anyway, Mandel's book is about a girl, a runaway, and her lover, who tries to find her. This is a terrible summary of a complicated, beautiful book. Mandel masterfully juggles characters, states of mind, geography, and broken timelines. Besides supporting a very important source for excellent fiction, your participation by reading will leave you with lasting and satisfying impression.
(Finsished July 8, five out of five)

Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir by Jennette Fulda
After having discovered Fulda's weight loss blog, I was curious to read her memoir because I am sucker for personal success stories. The writing turns out to be a bit muddled; a deft editor could have shaped the narrative into something better. (Pun!) Not a bad story, but not a particularly enlightened one, either.
(Finished July 11, three out of five)

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
David Mitchell has written several amazing, clever, oddly-structured novels that I highly recommend for readers who don't mind unconventional texts (see: Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten). However, Black Swan Green is conventional and lovely: a coming-of-age novel about a thirteen-year-old boy in 1982 Britain, which covers one year in his life. You have to read Mitchell's prose to appreciate how talented and on-the-mark his character's observations are. The pain and mystification of adolescence is only amplified by the boy's poetic sensibility, yet there is also a comic bent that rounds the experience out. This is accessible and will leave a mark on you.
(Finished July 31, five out of five)

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Post World War II Britain (so thirty-five years or so before Black Swan Green) comes alive in a Jamesian sense in The Little Stranger. We get the ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw but without the nested narrative, and with a lot more sexual and societal tension. The British class system is dismantled by this story. Tense, terse, and exciting. For some book clubs, this would be an excellent pick. Just not mine.
(Finished August 2, four out of five)

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey
This novel was written in the fifties by celebrated mystery writer Josephine Tey, so it has a post WWII vibe but does not at all dismantle the class system or odd gender stereotypes. While I did enjoy the story, I was jolted out of my trance of the excellent writing by some of Tey's bigotry. I'm not a person who will persecute a novel because it reflects the mores of its day, but I couldn't help but notice.
(Finished August 12, four out of five)

Prep:A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld
After finishing and mostly liking An American Wife (veiled, fictionalized account of a Laura Bush-like character), I was compelled to go back in time to Sittenfeld's previous novel about a girl who gets to go to a snobby prep school on scholarship. Class distinctions are a key part of this book, but the main character's onerous inhibitions and shyness seriously impede the book's pacing and plot. Good god, I wanted to shake her and yell at her to get beyond her excrutiating tics and make something happen. It was a long novel, but curiously unsatisfying.
(Finished August 13, three out of five)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Barbery has written an odd, pretty, and sometimes maddening novel about, what else, the boundaries of class, education, manners, propriety, and psychology. With a smattering of philosophy. I liked it a lot, but was also somewhat deflated by it. Good book club pick for groups seeking the big idea.
(Finished August 26, four out of five)

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
What at first seemed to be a wonderful premise borrowed from many classic children's lit books (Narnia, Harry Potter, etc) devolved for me into a cold and badly-paced novel. In the beginning I kept thinking about Laura Miller's The Magician's Notebook and how our childhood immersions into fantasy worlds made impacts on us in big and small ways, but Grossman's novel does not live up to this premise. For a novel about magic, it often lacked a child's sense of wonder.
(Finished 9/4/09, three out of five)

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
To write too much about the plot of this novel would be to steal your chance to be sucked in and carried on a journey across continents, the Internet, and personas that we construct. This is a scary, tense, and complicated story. I thought about it all the time I wasn't reading it.
(Finished 9/9/9! four out of five)