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.

Canada - Richard Ford

A series of bad decisions can ruin not only your life but the lives of people around you. Dell Parsons, the narrator in this very sad story, learns this first hand. He traces the first bad decision back to his mother deciding to marry his father, then building in a series until the ultimate bad decision that his father and mother make to rob a bank. He's taken to Canada to live with the brother of his mother's friend, a man that has made a series of bad choices that has left him hiding in a small town in Saskatchewan. Ford writes with the same level of mastery in Independence Day, and though Dell is no Frank Bascome, he's a man coping to his circumstances, most of which are beyond his control.

The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

When you're 12, it often feels as if the world is ending, that things are changing beyond your control. For the narrator of this tightly written story, it's true - the world slowly stops rotating, causing days and nights to last longer and people to go crazy. It's an end-of-the-world story without the usual trappings (roaming gangs, mass panic, survival against all odds). The ending had me wanting more, but there it's nicely written, with hardly an extra word.

Interworld - Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves

Intended originally as a TV script, this story moves quickly, told from the perspective of a regular teenager who discovers that alternate universe versions of himself are engaged in a battle between two warring forces over the fate of the universe. Perhaps a little too colloquial at times, it's nevertheless very entertaining.

Griftopia - Matt Taibbi

 A dark and cynical look into the 2008 financial crisis. Based on a article Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone about Goldman Sachs back in 2009 that caused a shit storm, the book fleshes out the argument with additional articles on how financial institutions have plundered the U.S., written in a frank style that offers up hilarious analogies.

The Man Who Knew Too Much - GK Chesterton

A look into the dark corners of upper-crust, pre-First World War British society, a place where hypocrisy and murder nestle nicely with tea and a stiff upper limit. The comparisons of the detective to Sherlock Holmes are apt (and perhaps intended) but Horne Fisher's deductions come from knowing what shadows lurk in men's souls and the moral implications weight more heavily on him than the resident of 221B Baker Street.

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

It builds to a point that never finally comes, ending with a whimper not a bang. Ambitious, yes, but its reach far exceeds its grasp, and the reader is left holding a long story with no satisfying conclusion. Not that you need a satisfying conclusion in all cases, but in this one there are too many loose threads. The three book structure (collected as one for North American readers) does the story no favours - most of the third volume could be (and should have been) cut and there's far too much time spent by the characters sitting around, waiting for something to happen.

Having read Murakami before I expected something bigger (not in word count but in concept) and there are different paths the story could have gone down that would have made it more satisfying. (There's that word again) Even a Sixth Sense switcheroo (as it's known in the literary world) would have been better, but perhaps that was the kind of event Murakami was trying to avoid. If so, he also avoided the chance to make something truly great. Not to bring a crass pop culture reference, but this book reminds too much of the last episode of Lost - starts out strong, creates a layer of suspense, but willingly fails to followup on all of its promise.

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - Frank Brady

A straight ahead account of the chess prodigy's rise and fall, with the only thing lacking is a peek inside that mad genius brain. The author knew Fischer but never got the chance to speak to him the last years, and the book suffers for it. Still, an entertaining account.

The Imperfectionists - Tom Rachman

A quirky, English-language newspaper in Rome is the spine that connects the stories in this novel, from the past-his-due date stringer who gives up the business to connect with his son to the workaholic editor who runs into an old lover and makes the mistake of asking what he really thinks about her. Good insight into the life of a paper, but the very human stories and all the things left unsaid make this an excellent read.

Hemingway's Boat - Paul Hendrickson

We can all agree that something happened to Hemingway, sometime in the 1930's. It's hard to pin down exactly when and where, but he wasn't the same writer after A Farewell To Arms. He started to believe in his own legend, never a good move, especially when most of it he made up himself. This biography of Hemingway has a revealing letter that perhaps provides some clue as to what wrong - after getting his boat, the Pilar, Hemingway wanted to chuck the writing gig and become a fisherman.
Perhaps he should have. He might have been happier, and we would have been spared the slow descent of a great young writer into a mediocre old one. And, perhaps the people around him would have been happier as well - his wives (second, third and fourth) and his children, especially his youngest son, Gregory, who died in a jail cell in October 2001.

Game Change - John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

Only four years later it's hard to remember what Barack Obama's campaign for President was like. A virtual unknown with an unusual name and a bi-racial identity beat Hilary Clinton to to claim the Democratic nomination, and then goes on to become President. There's no hint in the book of the dark days ahead, but the blow-by-blow account of the campaign is heroin for political junkies. Perhaps our only consolation is that the U.S. didn't end up with President McCain and Vice President Palin.

King John of Canada - Scott Gardiner

Less a novel than a Canadian political science major's fantasy, this novel tells of a wonderful future where peace and prosperity is brought about by Canada having a king. Not just any king, but King John, chosen randomly by a lottery. Lucky for Canada, because King John is smart, wise and able to get Quebec to secede from the Dominion, re-invigorate the Armed Forces and marry a beautiful Norwegian Princess. Told in a diary form by his loyal sidekick, it wastes too much time in the present as he details his exile in the frozen north.

American Pastoral - Philip Roth

About a third in to this book Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, completely disappears into the life of Swede Levov, a paragon of post-war, post-religion America - born Jewish, he marries an Irish former Miss New Jersey and takes over his father's glove business and makes it more successful. He moves from the city to a rural paradise, complete with cows, stone houses that reek of history and the WASPy descendants of the men who created the country. Everything picture perfect, and a stark contrast to Zuckerman's life, who has no wife, no family. But, of course, nothing is perfect, for the Swede's only daughter joined the anti-Vietnam movement and planted a mailbox bomb in the rustic post office/general store that kills the local doctor who was dropping of his bills.

As a boy Zuckerman idolized the Swede but was always afraid to talk to him, even when Zuckerman came over to get beat at ping pong by the Swede's younger brother. Years later Swede writes Zuckerman a letter, asking if he might be interested in writing a story about his father. They meet for dinner and nothing comes of it, but it's after Zuckerman attends a high school reunion and talks to Swede's brother, now a successful cardiac surgeon in Miami who keeps divorcing and marrying his nurses, does bits of the story comes out. Of course Zuckerman was wrong about the idolized version of the Swede, just as wrong as he is about the fiction one he creates. We're always wrong, according to Roth:

''You get them wrong before you meet them,'' Zuckerman says of ''people'' in general, ''while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.''

Honor Thy Father - Gay Talese

The true story of a son of Mafia Don who finds himself regretting the life he chose as the bodies pile up around him. Instead of the glam and gals of the Movie Mafia, it's doom and gloom, sitting for long hours in a car and wondering if the next shot you hear is for you. New Journalism once shook the foundations of non-fiction, but these we expect our stories to seem as real and as fiction. Instead of a hail of bullets the Mafia Don's son is brought down by a credit card fraud case - an example of truth being stranger than fiction.