2011 Summer Reading List   Tags: books, fiction, non_fiction, reading, recreational_reading  

"In 1985, 19-yearold Frank Mackey and his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, made secret plans to elope to England and start a new life together far away from their families, particularly the hard-drinking Mackeys. But when Rosie doesn't meet Frank the night they're meant to leave and he finds a note, Frank assumes she's left him behind. For 22 years, Frank, who becomes an undercover cop, stays away from Faithful Place, his childhood Dublin neighborhood. When his younger sister, Jackie, calls to tell him that someone found Rosie's suitcase hidden in an abandoned house, Frank reluctantly returns. Now everything he thought he knew is turned upside down: did Rosie really leave that night, or did someone stop her before she could? French, who briefly introduced Mackey in The Likeness, is adept at seamlessly blending suspenseful whodunit elements with Frank's familial demons." (Review from Publisher's Weekly) Recommended by Wendy Simpson, Library Specialist III, NMSU Library

"The Goal gives students (and others) a GREAT insight into modern thinking in Managerial Accounting. The story is about the manager of a failing plant who meets a physicist. This physicist uses the Socratic method to lead the plant manager into discoveries of how to better, and, ultimately, successfully run his plant. I used to assign this book as required reading for my MBA level managerial accounting class. Ultimately, believe it or not, it is a fun read!"
Recommended by Kevin McNelis, Assistant Professor, Accounting & Information Systems

"Orphaned enroute to America from Ireland, seven year old Lavinia is put to work alongside the slaves in the kitchen house of a tobacco plantation. She is raised by Belle, the master's half caste illegitimate daughter, with whom she develops a lifelong friendship. Told in turns by Lavinia and Belle, the story spans several decades in their lives. Each must face difficult choices that concern family, race and social status." Recommended by Susan Beck, Professor, NMSU Library

"One of his very last collections published before his death, these are semi-autobiographical stories of writers and writing. All of his books are great, but these short stories give a good sense of him as a writer, and are less focused on crime than some of his other novels and short story collections."
Recommended by Lindsey Stafford, Library Assistant, NMSU Library

"In most of the 11 stories of Udall's gritty debut, narrators reconstruct the genesis of their current woes and seize-or at least seek-control of their lives in moments of decisive, often dramatic action. In "Midnight Raid," a man's late-night visit to his ex-wife's new house a year after their divorce culminates in a confrontation with his former spouse and her new husband in which the narrator's desperate attempt to avenge his suffering and assuage his loss of love is both funny and achingly sad. In the title story (the only one that isn't a first-person narrative), a husband returns home after months hunting in the mountains to find that his wife has abandoned him. Recalling these recent events whips him into a rage and provokes even more outrageous actions. Some stories do falter: the disastrous road trip of "The Opposite of Loneliness" ends with the hodgepodge cast too neatly united; in "Junk Court," a young man's desire to connect himself to the world plays itself out in a forced, disingenuous relationship with a disabled woman. Most of the time, however, Udall articulates the sorrow and humor of his characters' situations so well that their bellowing displays of bravado do provide a catharsis of sorts. Udall clearly understands the truth abut punching walls: it won't make problems go away, but it sometimes feels awfully good." (Review from Publishers Weekly. Recommended by Cindy Pierard, Associate Professor, NMSU Library

King makes full use of her considerable skills at probing the dark of the human psyche in this utterly mesmerizing tale of Mary Russell's trip back to the San Francisco of her parents with her husband, Sherlock Holmes. On board ship from India and Japan, where the duo's last adventure took place, Mary begins to have three disturbing and evocative dreams: objects flying, a man without a face, and locked rooms. She remembers almost nothing of her childhood except the car crash that killed her parents and her little brother. But in San Francisco, she remembers that she was there, with her family, during the 1906 earthquake. In alternating sections, told in first person for Mary and third for Holmes, the unraveling of long-buried and terrifying memories also unwinds a skein of wonderful historical texture: the place of Chinese immigrants and the use of feng shui; the nightlife of a city during the age of jazz, Prohibition, and flappers; and the presence of Dash Hammett, who plays a fascinating role as a very different sort of Irregular. A highlight in an altogether outstanding series. (Review by GraceAnne DeCandido from Booklist) Recommended by Wendy Simpson, Library Specialist III, NMSU Library

"Mason's fantastic first novel, a deft reimagining of Homer's Odyssey, begins with the story as we know it before altering the perspective or fate of the characters in subsequent short story–like chapters. Legendary moments of myth are played differently throughout, as when Odysseus forgoes the Trojan horse, or when the Cyclops—here a gentle farmer—is blinded by Odysseus while he burgles the Cyclops's cave. Mason's other life—as a computer scientist—informs some chapters, such as The Long Way Back in which Daedalus's labyrinth ensnares Theseus in a much different way. Part of what makes this so enjoyable is the firm grasp Mason has on the source material; the footnotes double as humorous asides while reminding readers who aren't familiar with the original that, for instance, Eumaios is the swineherd who sheltered Odysseus when he first returned to Ithaca and later helped him kill the suitors. This original work consistently surprises and delights." (Review from Publisher's Weekly) Recommended by Wendy Simpson, Library Specialist III, NMSU Library

"Love and Summer by William Trevor is a good book about the lives of some unusual people living in rural Ireland in the 1950s. The story involves memory and mourning as well as impermanence and landscape." Read a complete review at http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2009/09/fiction_review_love_and_su
mmer.html Recommended by Monte McCrossin, Director, University Museum & Associate Professor, Anthropology

" 'Hell. We’re always alone. Born alone. Die alone,' says Olive Kitteridge, redoubtable seventh-grade math teacher in Crosby, Maine. Anyone who gets in Olive’s way had better watch out, for she crashes unapologetically through life like an emotional storm trooper. She forces her husband, Henry, the town pharmacist, into tactical retreat; and she drives her beloved son, Christopher, across the country and into therapy. But appalling though Olive can be, Strout manages to make her deeply human and even sympathetic, as are all of the characters in this “novel in stories.” Covering a period of 30-odd years, most of the stories (several of which were previously published in the New Yorker and other magazines) feature Olive as their focus, but in some she is bit player or even a footnote while other characters take center stage to sort through their own fears and insecurities. Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope. People are sustained by the rhythms of ordinary life and the natural wonders of coastal Maine, and even Olive is sometimes caught off guard by life’s baffling beauty." (review from Booklist) Recommended by Wendy Simpson, Library Specialist III, NMSU Library

"This is the story of 20th-century artist, Pan Yuliang, an orphan who was sold to a brothel at the age of 14 by her opium-addicted uncle. There she became "top girl", meeting a progressive & intelligent customs inspector who makes her his concubine and later sends her to school. She studies art at the Shanghai Arts Academy, travels to Paris and then returns to Shanghai just as China enters a period of turmoil and revolution." Recommended by Susan Beck, Professor, NMSU Library

"In a carefully calculated period style that is remarkably akin to that of the late Robertson Davies, Priest writes of a pair of rival magicians in turn-of-the-century London. Each has a winning trick the other craves, but so arcane is the nature of these tricks, so incredibly difficult are they to perform, that they take on a peculiar life of their own?in one case involving a mysterious apparent double identity, in the other a reliance on the ferocious powers unleashed in the early experimental years of electricity. The rivalry of the two men is such that in the end, though both are ashamed of the strength of their feelings of spite and envy, it consumes them both, and affects their respective families for generations. This is a complex tale that must have been extremely difficult to tell in exactly the right sequence, while still maintaining a series of shocks to the very end. Priest has brought it off with great imagination and skill. It's only fair to say, though, that the book's very considerable narrative grip is its principal virtue. The characters and incidents have a decidedly Gothic cast, and only the restraint that marks the story's telling keeps it on the rails." (Review from Publisher's Weekly) Recommended by Wendy Simpson

"Two contemporary scholars, each studying one of two Victorian poets, reconstruct their subjects' secret extramarital affair through poems, journal entries, letters and modern scholarly analysis of the period." (Description from publisher) Recommended by Wendy Simpson, Library Specialist III, NMSU Library

"Natalia Stefanovi, a doctor living (and, in between suspensions, practicing) in an unnamed country that's a ringer for Obreht's native Croatia, crosses the border in search of answers about the death of her beloved grandfather, who raised her on tales from the village he grew up in, and where, following German bombardment in 1941, a tiger escaped from the zoo in a nearby city and befriended a mysterious deaf-mute woman. The evolving story of the tiger's wife, as the deaf-mute becomes known, forms one of three strands that sustain the novel, the other two being Natalia's efforts to care for orphans and a wayward family who, to lift a curse, are searching for the bones of a long-dead relative; and several of her grandfather's stories about Gavran Gailé, the deathless man, whose appearances coincide with catastrophe and who may hold the key to all the stories that ensnare Natalia." (Review from Publishers Weekly). Recommended by Theresa Westbrock, Assistant Professor, NMSU Library