We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

December 30, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013. 310 pgs. Library copy. Rosemary Cooke, the narrator, begins her autobiography in the middle: a seemingly bizarre incident where an unknown woman becomes violent in the middle of a cafe after her boyfriend breaks up with her and Rosemary joins in by climbing on the table and dropping her glass of milk. The charges against Rosemary are dropped after a phone call to her father, who extracts a promise from Rosemary that nothing […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Animals, Fiction, North America, United States • Tags: Karen Joy Fowler

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

December 29, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. McSweeney’s, 2014. 330 pgs. Library copy. Raised in a Mennonite household haunted by remembers of religious persecution in Russia, Elfrieda and Yolandi are expected to conform to particular expectations for their life and live in a community where people gossip and whisper about the nonconformists. Elfrieda, known as Elf to her family, is a progeny at the piano offering her an opportunity to escape from the insular community and her sister, known as Yoli, an example of […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Canada, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America • Tags: Miriam Toews

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

December 28, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 334 pgs. Library copy. Winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize and nominated for the 2014 Miles Franklin, Flanagan’s novel centers on a single day in a Japanese slave labor camp in August 1943 where Australian prisoners of war struggle to survive horrific and torturous conditions as they are forced to build the Burma Railway. Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor, tries desperately to save his follow POWs in the camp while recollections of […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Fiction, Oceania • Tags: Richard Flanagan

Journalism by Joe Sacco

December 27, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Metropolitan Books, 2012. 192 pgs. Library copy. This collection of short-form comics produced by Sacco for various journalist enterprises reports from conflict zones around the world — Gaza, Chechnya, Iraq — and as well as from areas trying to reconcile with the aftermath of those conflicts — migration from war torn African nations to Malta, the war tribunals for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, poverty amongst the Dalits (“untouchables”) in India. At the end of reprinted […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Balkans, Comics, Europe, Genocide, India, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Russia • Tags: Joe Sacco

Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indriðason

December 26, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder. Picador, 2005. Originally published 2002. 293 pgs. Library copy. On the outskirts of Reykjavík, a human skeleton is discovered half-buried — the victim’s hand outstretched towards red current bushes — in a shallow grave near the former barracks of American and British military personnel during World War II after an infant is spotted chewing on a human rib bone. An archeologist is called to exhume the body; the soil at the […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Glass Key Award, Iceland, Icelandic, Translated • Tags: Arnaldur Indriðason

The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz

December 23, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Simon & Schuster, 2014. 480 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet”, Teicholz’s book documents how the low fat diet became the national – and thanks to America’s outsized influence on that global food system, international – nutrition diet nearly sixty years ago. With rates of heart disease skyrocketing, nutritionists and scientists assumed correction meant causation decreeing that fat, especially saturated fat, were to blame. Yet while rates of heart […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Chunkster, Food, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Nina Teicholz

The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriðason

December 21, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder. Minotaur, 2008. Originally published 2004. 312 pgs. Library copy. Since a 2000 earthquake opened cracks in the lakebed, Lake Kleifarvatn has lost nearly twenty percent of its surface revealing trash, remnants, and a skeleton dating from the Cold War of the 1960s with a large hole in the skull. Attached to the skeleton is a heavy communication device – possibly a radio transmitter – bearing inscriptions in Russian, and Inspectors Erlendur, […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Iceland, Icelandic, Translated • Tags: Arnaldur Indriðason

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

December 16, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Scholastic, 2010. 390 pgs. Gift. In the final installment of Collins’ dystopian series, Katniss Everdeen – the “Girl on Fire”, the Mockingjay – has now become the symbol of a revolution following her disastrous rescue from the destroyed arena of the Quarter Quell. Separated from Peeta and Johanna, Katniss is reunited with her mother, sister, and Gale in the one district the Capital claimed to have destroyed and utilized as an example of what could occur in […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Dystopia, Fiction, Young Adult • Tags: Suzanne Collins

Marbles by Ellen Forney

December 15, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Gotham, 2012. 256 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me”, Forney’s memoir chronicles her diagnosis with bipolar disorder, her attempts to find the right formula of medication, and her struggles to reconcile the source of her creativity (which Forney believes to be her manic phases) with her identity as an artist. She spends some time detailing the famous artists who were either diagnosed with or believed to have bipolar disorder – Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Comics, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Ellen Forney

The Fixer by Joe Sacco

December 11, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Drawn and Quarterly, 2003. 140 pgs. Library copy. During his coverage of the Bosnian genocide and the Balkan conflict, Sacco worked with a rather shady character known as a “fixer” – someone who can assist foreign journalists with gaining access to the front-lines of the conflict, the warlords and gangs running the countryside as the nation is torn apart, and victims to provide stories to color the news articles being written about the region. Sacco’s “fixer”, known […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Balkans, Comics, Europe, Genocide, Nonfiction • Tags: Joe Sacco

A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached

December 10, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Translated from the French. Graphic Universe, 2012. Originally published 2007. 188 pgs. Library copy. Born to a Lebanese Christian family in 1981, the Lebanese Civil War has been a constant part of Abirached’s life and it seems almost normal that the city of Beirut is cut into two – East Beirut for Christians and West Beirut for Muslims – by bricks and sandbags. Snipers and artillery bombings keep people from leaving in the windowless rooms of their […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Comics, French, Middle East, Nonfiction, Translated • Tags: Zeina Abirached

Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle

December 9, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Translated from the French by Helge Dascher. Drawn and Quarterly, 2008. Originally published 2007. 263 pgs. Library copy. Burma, also known as Myanmar, has been ruled by a military junta since a coup in 1962 and has largely been demonized by the governments of Western countries, particularly the United States. The ruling generals use isolation as a tool of social control – censors monitor the papers and remove stories with scissors, the leader of the opposition won […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Comics, French, Nonfiction, Translated • Tags: Guy Delisle