NITHAE HIJA DE LA MADRE TIERRA

Cristina García Ruiz

"Son gente mediocre hablando de dinero; Costureras, herreros, alguna que otra criada."

The 10 Best Books of 2014

FICTION

1.      ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

By Anthony Doerr

Scribner, $27.

With brisk chapters and sumptuous language, Doerr’s second novel follows two characters whose paths will intersect in the waning days of World War II: an orphaned engineering prodigy recruited into the Nazi ranks, and a blind French girl who joins the Resistance. Tackling questions of survival, endurance and moral obligations during wartime, the book is as precise and artful and ingenious as the puzzle boxes the heroine’s locksmith father builds for her. Impressively, it is also a vastly entertaining feat of storytelling.

2.      DEPT. OF SPECULATION

By Jenny Offill

Alfred A. Knopf, $22.95.

Offill’s slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and motherhood and infidelity; and especially love and the grueling rigors of domestic life. Part elegy and part primal scream, it’s a profound and unexpectedly buoyant performance.

3.      EUPHORIA

By Lily King

Atlantic Monthly Press, $25.

In 1933, the anthropologist Margaret Mead took a field trip to the Sepik River in New Guinea with her second husband; they met and collaborated with the man who would become her third. King has taken the known details of that actual event and created this exquisite novel, her fourth, about the rewards and disappointments of intellectual ambition and physical desire. The result is an intelligent, sensual tale told with a suitable mix of precision and heat.

4.      FAMILY LIFE

By Akhil Sharma

W. W. Norton & Company, $23.95.

Sharma’s austere but moving novel tells the semi-autobiographical story of a family that immigrates from India to Queens, and has just begun to build a new life when the elder son suffers severe brain damage in a swimming pool accident. Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender, the book chronicles how grief renders the parents unable to cherish and raise their other son; love, it suggests, becomes warped and jagged and even seemingly vanishes in the midst of mourning.

5.      REDEPLOYMENT

By Phil Klay

The Penguin Press, $26.95.

In this brilliant debut story collection, Klay — a former Marine who served in Iraq — shows what happens when young, heavily armed Americans collide with a fractured and deeply foreign country few of them even remotely understand. Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. The collection is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad: the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.

NONFICTION

6.      CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?

By Roz Chast

Bloomsbury, $28.

Cartoons, it turns out, are tailor-made for the absurdities of old age, illness and dementia. In Chast’s devastating and sublime graphic memoir, the odd dramas and repetitive minutiae find perfect expression in her signature antic drawings as she describes helping her parents navigate their final years — from packing up their cluttered Brooklyn apartment to getting a seat at the “right” table in the nursing home. No one has perfect parents, and no one can write a perfect book about them. But Chast has come close.

7.      ON IMMUNITY: An Inoculation

By Eula Biss

Graywolf Press, $24.

In this spellbinding blend of memoir, science journalism and literary criticism, Biss unpacks what the fear of vaccines tells us about larger anxieties involving purity, contamination and interdependency. Deeply researched and anchored in Biss’s own experiences as a new mother, this ferociously intelligent book is itself an inoculation against bad science and superstition, and a reminder that we owe one another our lives.

8.      PENELOPE FITZGERALD: A Life

By Hermione Lee

Alfred A. Knopf, $35.

The life and times of that elusive, original miracle worker, the English novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, have been brilliantly captured by Lee, previously the author of masterly portraits of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. Growing up steeped in literature but sidetracked by the vicissitudes of life, Fitzgerald published her first book at 58 and did not become famous until she was 80. But her fiction, when it finally emerged, had a tamped-down force and intense compression, as if the decades-long wait had worked its own clarifying, crystallizing magic.

9.      THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: An Unnatural History

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Henry Holt & Company, $28.

Kolbert reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem — from the Great Barrier Reef to her own backyard — in this, her third, book. Traveling to some of the world’s remotest corners, she examines how man-made climate change threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century. This is environmental writing at its most rigorous and richly detailed — and as riveting as any thriller.

10.   THIRTEEN DAYS IN SEPTEMBER: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David

By Lawrence Wright

Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.

In 1978, over 13 days at Camp David, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter hammered out a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt that remains the most profound diplomatic achievement to emerge from the Mideast conflict. In a fascinating account of the talks, Wright combines history, politics and, most of all, a gripping drama of three clashing personalities into a tale of constant plot twists and dark humor. He reminds us that Carter’s visionary idealism and doggedness represented an act of surpassing political courage.

Un home que se'n va

Vicenç Villatoro

"Amb la memòria, com amb el sexe: de vegades fer és la manera de demanar que et facin."

The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2014

1. DRAW!, Written and illustrated by Raúl Colón. 31 pp. A Paula Wiseman Book/Simon & Schuster. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 9).
2. SHACKLETON’S JOURNEY, Written and illustrated by William Grill. 80 pp. Flying Eye Books. $24.00. (Picture book; ages 7 to 11).
3. HAITI, MY COUNTRY, Poems by Haitian Schoolchildren, lllustrated by Roge. 35 pp. Fifth House Publishers. $14.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 12).
4. HARLEM HELLFIGHTERS, Written by J. Patrick Lewis. Illustrated by Gary Kelley. 32 pp. Creative Editions. $18.99. (Picture book; ages 9 and up).
5. TIME FOR BED, FRED, Written and illustrated by Yasmeen Ismail. 26 pp. Walker Books/Bloomsbury. $14.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8).
6. HERE IS THE BABY, Written by Polly Kanevsky. Illustrated by Taeeyun Yoo. 30 pp. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 2 to 5).
7. WHERE’S MOMMY?, Written by Beverly Donofrio. Illustrated by Barbara McClintock. 30 pp. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 7).
8. THE PROMISE, Written by Nicola Davies. Illustrated by Laura Carlin. 40 pp. Candlewick Press. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 6 to 9).
9. THE BABY TREE, Written and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. 40 pp. Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 5 to 8).
10. THE PILOT AND THE LITTLE PRINCE, The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Written and illustrated by Peter Sis.48 pp. Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18.99. (Picture book; ages 5 to 12).

If I stay

Gayle Forman

"Am I dead?"

The Litigators

John Grisham

"Lawyers making millions in fees."

Aquellos años del boom

Xavi Ayén

"El 12 de febrero de 1976, en un parque frente al Palacio de Bellas Artes de Ciudad de México, Elena Poniatowska corre azorada hacia una hamburguesería y pide un filete crudo. Gabriel García Márquez la espera atontado en un banco porque uno de sus mejores amigos lo acaba de noquear  en público. Hay nervios en la calle y en el interior del Palacio, donde van a proyectar Supervivientes de los Andes, una película de René Cardona en la que las víctimas de un accidente de avión acaban devorando la carne de sus amigos muertos.
Los nudillos de la mano derecha de Mario Vargas Llosa aún laten. Fue solo un golpe, pero bien medido. Los amigos de ambos se mueven entre agitados y compungidos. Nadie tiene tiempo de pensar. Hay un inquieto hormigueo humano, los comentarios brotan como espasmos y los rostros exhiben un catálogo de muecas. El mundo ha dado un giro. En ese justo momento acaba de romperse el boom."

Where the moon isn't

Nathan Filer

 

DOMINGO CATALÁN. De 0 a 100

Ignasi Gaya



"Un cop hem arribat a aquest punt, el nord-americà Bob Glover, un dels gurus del running als Estats Unitas, es pregunta: "Qui està tan boig fins al punt de voler córrer una marató? Al capdavall" ―recorda Glover― "l'entrenament exigeix molt temps i esforç. I el risc de patir lesions és elevat. A més, la mateixa cursa resulta penosa i impredictible, prou llarga per esgotar el cos, la ment i l'ànima.""

THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN

Katherine Applegate

"I've learned to understand human words over the years, but understanding human speech is not the same as understanding humans."

Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site

Sherri Duskey Rinker and Tom Linchtenheld

"Construction site, all tucked in tight, 
                             The day is done, turn off the light.

Great work today! Now...shh...goodnight. 

A Family of Readers

Roger Sutton & Martha V. Parravano 

"And poetry. Poetry! (Yes, thanks to a quirk in the Dewery decimal systems, poetry is classified as nonfiction in your local library).

MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING

Viktor E. Frankl


"So, let us be alert―alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. 

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."

The book thief

Markus Zusak

"The day was gray, the color of Europe."

PERSEPOLIS 2. THE STORY OF A RETURN

Marjane Satrapi

"AH, THERE’S NOTHING LIKE IRANIAN TEA!
OH YES, ESPECIALLY WITH A CIGARETTE. DO YOU WANT ONE?
MOM!
WHAT? YOU KNOW THE PROVERBS: “PROSPERITY CONSISTS OF TWO THINGS: TEA AFTER A MEAL, AND A CIGARETTE AFTER TEA.”