The 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008

San Francisco Chronicle

No one will soon forget 2008, a year defined by an extraordinary groundswell of hope (yes, that unavoidable word) as well as lie-awake-at-night dread (nothing quite like bracing yourself for the Great Depression 2, or, if you prefer, the snappier GD2).

It will take a while, of course, for us to grasp the significance of the events of this year, but some of the best books of 2008 provide a clearer understanding of the serious issues that confront us, from wars to financial woes. Many of the books also remind us, in these challenging times, of what is most valuable in life: family, friends, community.

But there's plenty in these titles - 50 fiction and 50 nonfiction - that allows us to escape our troubles and those of this world, and sink into tales well told. Baby, it's cold outside. Grab a blanket, grab a book, and enjoy.

- John McMurtrie

Few the Entire List Here...

Author John Updike Dies at 76

By Mark Feeney
Boston Globe

John Updike, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, whose jeweled prose and quicksilver intellect made him for decades one of America's foremost literary figures, died yesterday. He was 76.

Mr. Updike, a longtime resident of Beverly Farms, died of lung cancer at Hospice of the North Shore in Danvers, said his wife, Martha.

"He was obviously among the best writers in the world," said David Remnick, editor the New Yorker, Mr. Updike's literary home for more than half a century.

A master of many authorial trades, Mr. Updike was novelist, short story writer, critic, poet - and in each role as prolific as he was gifted. He aimed to produce a book a year. Easily meeting that goal, Mr. Updike published some 60 volumes. The first was a collection of poems, "The Carpentered Hen" (1958). "My Father's Tears and Other Stories" is to be published in June.

Mr. Updike combined diligence with brilliance. Few writers have staged such elegant lexical ballets on the page. "The scrape and snap of Keds" fill "the moist March air" in the opening of Mr. Updike's second novel, "Rabbit, Run" (1960). Thirty years later, in "Rabbit at Rest," something as mundane as angina becomes "that singeing sensation he gets as if a child inside him is playing with lighted matches."

Mr. Updike could be brilliant even about his own diligence, writing in his memoir "Self-Consciousness" (1989) of "my ponderously growing oeuvre, dragging behind me like an ever-heavier tail." Or there was the description of Fenway Park, "a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark," in Mr. Updike's classic account of Ted Williams's final game, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu."

It was Mr. Updike's boyhood attachment to Williams, as well as access to area beaches, that brought the Pennsylvania native to the North Shore, in 1957. He lived north of Boston the rest of life: first in Ipswich, later in Georgetown and, for the past three decades, Beverly Farms.

Mr. Updike long ago became a monument on the literary scene, so much so that in 1991 the novelist Nicholson Baker could devote an entire book to his fascination with him, "U and I." Yet what seemed monumental and effortless to readers didn't necessarily feel that way to Mr. Updike.

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DIG YOUR JOB: Keep it or Find a New One

DIG YOUR JOB: Keep it or Find a New One
By GL Hoffman

Review By Lisa Hagendorf
Found At Playboy.com

I am fortunate enough to have been spared the chopping block given the current economy, but it seems everyone knows at least one person who hasn't been as lucky. For those still employed you may not feel completely secure, so when I found out about DIG YOUR JOB: Keep it or Find a New One I was amazed that it offered “more than 200 tips on keeping or finding a new job in today’s job market -- including over 50 RPT.” (As an enthusiast of gratuitous abbreviations I was amused to learn that RPT stands for “recession protector tips”).

Dig Your Job is that rare career-advice book that not only tells you how to get a new job but also offers advice to determine if keeping the one you have is the best option. Author G.L. Hoffman brings a quick-witted, SNL writing-style to otherwise traditional career topics, which engage, cajole, insult and advise us how to get along better at work…or find a new job. Think All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten on Red Bull.

To read the entire review please click here.

To visit GL Hoffman's personal blog please click here.

"The Vagrants" by Yiyun Li

"The Vagrants"
By Yiyun Li

Reviewed By Conan Putnam
Chicago Tribune

"The Vagrants," Yiyun Li's extraordinary debut novel, is set in China in spring 1979, two years after the death of Chairman Mao and the arrest of his wife, Madame Mao, and her gang in the central government. The Cultural Revolution has been declared a failure and the party has launched "a new Communist era full of love and progress" to lift up the masses. In the countryside, after years of the people's commune, peasants are being allowed to own their land. In the newly industrialized town of Muddy River, where 80,000 people live in blocks of shabby, one-story houses, young people are returning from rural re-education camps to work in factories and the shops along main street.

Among those returning is Gu Shan, 28, a former Red Guard, who, after serving a 10-year prison sentence for denouncing Chairman Mao, is about to be executed as an unrepentant counterrevolutionary. The novel opens on the morning of her execution, which is also the first day of spring. Gu Shan's mother is gathering a bag of clothes to burn at the crossroads in a Chinese burial ritual to ensure that her child will be kept warm on the journey to the next world. Her father, Teacher Gu, who is having troubles of his own finding someone to bury their daughter's body after she is executed, cautions his wife against a public display of grief: "It's superstitious, reactionary—it's all wrong."

To read more of Conan Putnam's review, please click here.

"Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age" by Steve Knopper

"Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age"
By Steve Knopper

Reviewed By Erik Himmelsbach
LA Times


Few industries inspire more enmity than the record business. It's been tainted since the birth of rock, with transgressions that include payola, greed, a reactionary aversion to technology and a plantation mentality toward its bread and butter -- the recording artists.

Thanks to the Internet and the MP3 revolution, karmic justice has finally been served: The record industry has toppled like a house of cards. To many, its collapse is less a crisis than a beautiful sunset.

Yet as Steve Knopper notes in "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age," this was a business hellbent on destroying itself for at least 30 years. Digital music was merely the final dagger in its heart.

Knopper, a Rolling Stone music business writer, thoughtfully reports on the record racket's slow, painful march into financial ruin and irrelevance, starting with the near-catastrophic sales slump that began in 1979 after the demise of disco. Though the labels persevered, they finally lost control of their product when they chose to ignore the possibilities of the Internet.

Now, it's consumers and recording artists who have the power. Musicians can create, produce and distribute their work without the indentured servitude of record labels.

That's great news for younger artists, but even geezers like the Eagles and Paul McCartney have taken advantage of the new technology.

To read the entire review by Erik Himmelsbach, please click here.

"The Associate" by John Grisham

"The Associate"
By John Grisham

Reviewed by Janet Maslin
New York Times


John Grisham kick-starts his latest morality fable just as he has kick-started so many others: by introducing the warring forces of good and evil. On the side of the angels: Kyle McAvoy, idealistic editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal. As “The Associate” begins, Kyle is coaching a basketball team for underprivileged kids in New Haven as he waits to graduate and pursue his career of choice. He has accepted a $32,000-a-year legal aid job so he can help migrant workers in Virginia.

But there is a sinister stranger with a “slick head” and “calm hairy hands” in Kyle’s future. He shows up to broach a different career plan. This vaguely foreign-sounding man, calling himself Bennie Wright and aided by a team of fake F.B.I. agents, announces that he would like Kyle to become a $200,000-a-year associate for a high-powered New York law firm. Translated from the Grisham-ese, what that means is that Bennie — acting on the same kinds of murky but all-powerful motives that used to fuel Hitchcock plots as he sets up a corporate espionage scheme with Kyle as its patsy — would like Kyle to sell his soul to the devil.

Kyle is a brash, attractive good guy. (Think back to “The Firm.” Mr. Grisham has.) Why would he agree to an about-face like that? Because he has to. Quicker than you can say, “Duke lacrosse team,” Bennie brings up an ugly college episode that involved Kyle, his Duquesne University fraternity brothers and a woman named Elaine who now claims to have been raped by four of them at a party. Bennie has a cell-phone video record of the incident that is remarkably clear, even though all participants were too drunk to remember whether the sex was consensual.

To read the rest of the review by Janet Maslin, please click here.

The human brain: Not perfect, but good enough

Kluge
The Haphazard Construction
of the Human Mind
By Gary Marcus

Reviewed by Steve Mirsky
Found at the Philadelphia Inquirer

Furniture, self-confident, corner, adventuresome, chair, table, independent, television. Early in Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, author Gary Marcus asks the reader to memorize that short list of words. He then notes, "What follows is more fun if you really do try to memorize the list." So go ahead; it'll take only a few seconds.

Marcus then tells a short story, the gist of which is: "Donald often sought excitement. He had climbed Mount McKinley, kayaked rapids, driven in a demolition derby, piloted a jet-powered boat. He had risked death numerous times, and was now seeking new thrills."

Now your assignment: Sum up Donald in a single word.

Chances are your word is adventuresome. But had the list substituted for adventuresome the word reckless, your word choice would probably be more pejorative. The snap judgment of Donald is swayed by information - the word list - that should be irrelevant. Unfortunately, your brain turns out to be alarmingly bad at evaluating individual situations truly objectively.

To read more of Steve Mirsky's review of Kluge, please click here.