Elizabeth
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
“I think it’s going to win a Pulitzer. It’s really good. It reminds me of The Secret History meets Empire Falls.”
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Julie
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
“This book won’t be out until January. I might need that long to wrap my mind around it. So far, what we know is that language is making people sick. The language of children is most devastating. The main character and his wife are “forest Jews”; one day a week they take their weak, sick bodies to a hut in a forest and listen to underground broadcasts (literally – they have to use special equipment to plug into a hole in the ground to receive the transmissions) from a Rabbi. There’s a sinister red headed man named Murphy lurking around. I don’t know where this is going, but what I do know is that I can’t stop reading it. This is one of the most original books I’ve read in a very long time. There are parallels between the world of the book and the world we live in that jump out from time to time, issues about privacy and, of course, communication, which are jarring because you’re mired in this dire and outrageous world that suddenly looks all too much like your own. It’s fascinating and also terrifying. This book is putting me in a weird mood. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
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Mandy
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ismael Beah
“It’s grueling. It’s difficult to imagine anybody coming out of Beah’s experience and being able to see any amount of light. What he went through was so completely dire, the fact that he’s able to write about it with any candor and loveliness at all is incredible. I’m reading this book for the Happy Hour Book Club at the Highball.”
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Mark
Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr
“This is important reading from the early twentieth century. It’s a book on social ethics and political power. In a recent interview someone asked (author, civil rights activist, and Princeton professor) Cornel West, if he could make President Obama read any book, what would it be? And he answered Moral Man and Immoral Society. So I picked it up. I had it lying around.”
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Jamie
Swamplandia by Karen Russell
“I’m reading this for the New and Noteworthy Book Club. It’s awesome so far. I’m 150 pages in. It’s kind of spooky. It’s about a family that runs a gator-themed amusement park in Florida. The mother dies, the family falls on hard times, and they’re all trying to keep it together and make it work. As a kid, my grandparents lived outside of Orlando, so I’m having flashbacks of feeding chickens to alligators. It’s a magical book, kind of creepy. I’m really liking it.”
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