Sweet and Vicious

David Shickler

Reading this book is like seeing in color after a lifetime of black and white. Think Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut meet Dave Barry. Schickler proves he can handle a novel as masterfully as he can a short story, and he keeps the violence and the fantastic in check. The mob, silliness, magic and lots of hot sex – what more could one want?

The Big Love

Sarah Dunn

A breezy read about a young woman whose boyfriend walks out on her during a dinner party. She’s a former evangelical Christian, which adds a few fresh notes, but this is a solidly entertaining story even without them, walking the line of keeping it light without insulting the reader’s intelligence. For the underemployed single woman, it has what we’re craving: plenty of sharply funny commentary, and a sprinkling of fairy dust.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

David Sedaris

Everything you’ve read is true; it’s his best yet. The angry mania beneath his humor has mellowed into an achey discomfort. The only disappointment was realizing I’d already read two thirds of it over the past three years in the New Yorker.

On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men who Sleep with men

J.L. King

Anecdotal rather than scientific (Mr. King would rather talk about himself than anything else), but an eye-opener on a little-discussed subject (and public health crisis).

Persepolis, Persepolis 2

Marjane Satrapi

A two-volume graphic memoir: the first is about her childhood in Iran, the second, even better, picks up as she goes to boarding school in Europe, returns to Iran, marries, and again leaves Iran for Paris. She’s neither afraid to toot her own horn or to show her warts; in one alarming scene (alarming for how lightly she treats it) she turns an innocent stranger over to the police – and, in 1980s Iran, a most uncertain fate. Much funnier is the quandary her art class is faced with when the model is required to wear a full hijab.

Joy Comes in the Morning

Jonathan Rosen

A literate Reform Jewish romance: Rabbi Babe meets Mopey Guy, they go to funerals and baseball games together. Irreverent and sweet.

Janet and Me: An Illustrated Story of Love and Loss

Stan Mack

The Village Voice cartoonist meets the love of his life, travel partner and collaborator in YA nonfiction, they have 18 great years together, and she dies of breast cancer. Too, too sad. Don’t try to read it in public.

22 July 2004

The Body of Jonah Boyd

David Leavitt

A novelist loses his only copy of his greatest work on a Thanksgiving visit to a family that includes a fifteen-year-old aspiring writer. At first, what has happened seems obvious, but as the story unfolds the truth turns out to be more complicated and sinister. Leavitt stays one small step ahead of the reader at all times and not a word is wasted in this compact, well-crafted novel. The narrator, surely a cousin of Barbara in What Was She Thinking?, thinks she’s an impartial observer but turns out to be more carefully observed than she thought. While none of the characters is exactly likable, their actions reveal the darker motivations in human nature, and since it’s a novel and not a real dinner party, that’s a good thing.

Truth and Beauty: A Friendship

Ann Patchett

Novelist Ann Patchett met the poet Lucy Grealy at Sarah Lawrence in the early 1980s, but it was when they shared an apartment at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop that their friendship was forged. Grealy, in Patchett’s description, was a fascinating and maddening person – oddly enough, Grealy’s own memoir, Autobiography of a Face, which I read seven years ago and which throughout Patchett’s book is referred to as a masterpiece, sticks with me hardly at all – I was impressed by the harrowing descriptions of the chemotherapy she suffered as a child, but Grealy always seemed removed from her experiences, and not of much interest as a personality. Not so in Patchett’s book – Lucy Grealy would have been a very difficult person to have as a friend – childishly needy, sex-crazed, a spendthrift, – but she certainly wouldn’t have been dull. Grealy had Ewing’s Sarcoma as a child, a rare cancer that ravaged her face and resulted in a lifetime of radical, disfiguring surgeries to replace the missing part of her jaw. Until Lucy’s life spins out of control, Patchett and Grealy together are the ant and the grasshopper, Apollo and Dionysus, Prose and Poetry, and this tribute to Grealy, who died of an apparent heroin overdose in December 2002, is a beautiful story of friendship and the writing life. “Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties”, writes Patchett, “but we gave it our best shot.”

Little Children

Tom Perrotta

The title could refer to the “adults” in this novel: a father obsessed with Internet porn, several suburban moms taking their frustration out on each other, and a Peter Pan-ish stay at home dad who begins an affair with one of them. Wandering through the book and leaving a trail of slime is a pedophile, and hot on his heels is a retired cop turned vigilante. Perrotta captures perfectly the feel of a summer spent lolling by a suburban pool, and sharply satirizes a certain smart but aimless middle-class type. His novel, though improbable, is solidly entertaining, edgy and sexy, and kept me simultaneously rooting for and disgusted by the adulterers. Like a bag of goldfish crackers (which appeared on the cover until Pepperidge Farm threatened to file suit, apparently unable to recognize free advertising when they saw it), this was easy to gobble up, and left me feeling a little sick afterwards.

Generation Kill

Evan Wright

Like David Lipsky, Wright took an assignment from Rolling Stone to write about the military, and ended up writing a book. Unlike Lipsky, he’s in a war zone rather than a military academy, and his book benefits from the rawness and danger. As the Iraq war begins in March 2003 he’s right there with a company of marines as their jeep is fired upon, as they shoot unarmed shepherds, as they banter and wrestle in their underwear to stay in shape, and as they chafe under incompetent command as much as under their torturous Mission Oriented Protective Posture suits. These are exceptional men, who don’t fit the Marine stereotype: a Dartmouth graduate; a devoted yoga practioner; an aspiring rock star; an atheist and electronics geek. Wright lets us get to know them, as well as their leaders: the general who is paralyzed by indecision; “Captain America” who wreaks havoc with his panic and bluster. With the rules of engagement ever shifting – an unarmed civilian with a cell phone could be an innocent businessperson, or could be instructing his cohorts on where to aim their missiles – this is a war that is increasingly confusing and scary, and this close-up account is engrossing.

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