The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

The Shipping News is delightful. Proulx gives us a protagonist who is down on his luck, down on himself, and adrift at the whims of others—mostly in the form of a mean girl wife. When the wife dies and he loses his on-agin-off-again job, he reclaims the ground he has ceded. A life of sorts becomes available, and he claims it in pieces and parts, with increasing confidence and guided, always, by love and the need to be useful to those he loves. 

I cheered, of course, but also, I fell in love with Proulx’s prose, her wit and wonder, and her beautiful way with words. Bonus for getting to read this while on vacation in a small maritime island town, though not nearly as far north as our protagonist. 

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Paul Harding takes on an exploration of the interior workings life in this short, brilliant novel. Overlaid on the workings of a clock, we see a landscape of gears that create, propel, shudder, chime, and escape. 

The language of Tinkers is brilliant; Harding has paragraph-long sentences that feel like a journey and at the end of the action, I felt as though I should have gotten a stamp for my passport. He deftly handles the musings and broken timelines, returning us to where we left off in just the right moment and with just the right tone. 

As I turned the last page, I felt as though I had been imprinted with mechanisms of George and the various springs that propelled his life.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If you liked Tartt's The Secret History, you'll love this. It's just as immersive, and as Dickensian, as ever, and Tartt does a masterful job of weaving deatils and cognition into everything. It's a long book, with sentences built on reflections, and some sentences spanning a page or more. I didn't read this book so much as I inhabited it, or, more accurately, let it inhabit me. 

This is another round of David Copperfield, and while the original tale came from England, we in the States seem to eat it up mightily, perhaps becuase twenty-first cetury America is so neat a parallel to nineteenth century England. 

The power of found family, the power of the truth, and the power of being seen ring through with authenticity and brilliance. Ultimately the power of a life of substance holds the key to the whole novel, and Tartt couldn't have chosen a better painting on which to hang her tale.

James by Percival Everett

This retelling of Tom Saywer and Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, who becomes James, is as satisfying as I could have wanted. Definitely recommended.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Despite this being recommended to me in a thousand ways, I avoided reading it until it got the resounding endorsement from a band-family member. 

I was hooked by the end of the first chapter.

This is wonderful. Don't miss out on one of the best books in decades.