Every Love Story is a Ghost Story - DT Max

There must have been a temptation on the author's part to start this story in the middle (the making of Infinite Jest, the part we all want to read) or at the end (the suicide in 2008) but he starts the way most biographies do, at the beginning and this conventional style dominates the book, a rather standard troubled genius pulls it together to make great art and then fizzles out and it all ends tragically. (See: Kurt Cobain)

The revelations here are those that DFW kept hidden - his battles with serious mental illness and addiction, his fragile state and repeated breakdowns. In interviews he gave (most notably in 'Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself') DFW was able to create his own media persona, one stronger and better put together than what he really was. (Also notable are the admissions that he applied his fiction skills to his non-fiction work, making up his own facts and people in order to better suit the story)

The author mixes in some literary criticism, connecting points of DFW's life to his work (another surprise is how much his relationship with his mother played a role in creating Infinite Jest) and the fact that DFW and DeLillo shared a regular correspondence is a truth better than fiction.

Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

A master at his best. The day Winston Niles Rumfoord flew his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum was a bad day - he was converted into pure energy and only materializes back on Earth every 59 days, only for an hour. But he knows the future and the past, including that an alien on Titan is waiting for a spare part for his  spaceship and that his home planet is manipulating events on Earth in order to deliver that spare part.  An examination of free will, destiny, and the forces that control us.

Telegraph Avenue - Michael Chabon

A work from a master at the height of his powers, channeling Pynchon and mixing Melvin Van Peebles, 1970's kung-fu films and comic books, reaching down to find something deeper, more human, written with prose that makes you want to either never write a sentence again or quit your job, your relationships and all contact with the outside world and sit in a chair in your basement until you figure out how he did it. Two friends - one white, the other black - run a record shop in a neighbourhood that straddles Berkely and Oakland, a strip of land that has seen better days and is now threatened by a local boy made good, a former NFL quarterback who wants to re-vitalize the area by dropping a retail monolith into the middle.  It doesn't quite reach the level of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but the level it does reach is worth the read.

NW - Zadie Smith

A love letter to the place you grew up, the kind of love letter that itemizes all of your lover's faults and compares them to your own, but ends with an I love you anyway sentiment. Four people from the NW corner of London, linked together by space and history and secrets. Not as enjoyable as White Teeth, but still very good, even with the different narrative styles.

The Taliban Shuffle - Kim Barker

I know what it's like to get a foreign country under your skin, to have it feel more like home than home does. For Kim Barker that place was Afghanistan - an odd choice, but after being sent there to report after 9/11 she falls for the place. She finds it so hard to leave that when she quits her job after the paper wants to recall her back to Chicago, she stays.
Anyone looking for a serious dissection of the West's role in this region should look elsewhere - this a memoir, but it does offer up some behind-the-scenes of a foreign correspondent in a strange country.

Swamplandia! - Karen Russell

Reading the jacket copy (OK - online copy) of this book turned me off - a story of a family of misfits told from the perspective for a precocious young girl. I relented eventually, though the fact that it was nominated along with The Pale King for the Pulitzer should have warned me off. (I'm a DFW fan, but The Pale King as a notebook that should have been left unpublished)

Swamplandia! starts off strong but gets murkier the more it goes along. Alternating between characters and perspective doesn't help, and there's a hollowness in the characters that echoes in the prose. The first-person accounts from Ava are so over the top with metaphor they are reminiscent of a undergrad creative writing workshop, while the third person chapters told from her brother's point of view skirt the edges of any real emotion.

A Hologram For The King - Dave Eggers

A middle-aged businessman finds himself in debt, in poor health (mental and physical) and in a tent in Saudi Arabia, waiting for the King to arrive so he can demo the hologram technology and win the IT contract for the city the King is building in the middle of the desert. He has a lump on his back that he is sure is going to kill him, and he's not sure how to pay for his daughter's university tuition. He's part of the old world, when the U.S. actually made things, and his life is an analogy of America over the last three decades. Eggers gets better with every book, and this one is his best yet.