Books make for great holiday gifts. Here’s a quick roundup of what’s out this season. Snag your copy from the Boulder Book Store (1107 Pearl St.; www.boulderbookstore.com) or the Colorado “On the Hill” Bookstore (1111 Broadway; www.colorado.bncollege.com).
Evening’s Empire
By Zachary Lazar; Little, Brown and Company 228 pages, $24.99
Zachary Lazar’s remarkable Evening’s Empire — his novelized investigation into the killing of his father, Ed Lazar, in the stairwell of a Phoenix parking garage in 1975 — breeds anger, and it’s cosmic anger that runs true crime stories.
Hollywood Moon
By Joseph Wambaugh; Little, Brown
352 pages, $26.99
Veteran author Joseph Wambaugh weaves together several seemingly unrelated vignettes for a darkly comic, gritty look at street cops and identity thieves in Los Angeles in Hollywood Moon.
Under the Dome
By Stephen King; Scribner
1,075 pages, $35
Stephen King’s new novel, Under the Dome, is nearly 1,100 pages of stuff so scary that you’ll realize early on that even if Mommy were Wonder Woman, she couldn’t help you out of this nightmare.
A Creed Country Christmas
By Linda Lael Miller; HQN Books
253 pages, $16.95
A rather tepid, but nice, romance. You won’t need tissues nearby, feel your heart race or break out in laughter while you read it. But it’s a fast, easy read and a sweet story.
The Museum of Innocence
By Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely; Alfred A. Knopf
544 pages, $26.95
At more than 500 pages, “Museum” can be slow going, although the action picks up considerably toward the end. Even when the plot is at a standstill, however, the grace of Pamuk’s prose makes it a delight to luxuriate in the company of his delusional, sad-sack main character.
The Ghosts of Belfast
By Stuart Neville; Soho Crime
326 pages, $25
In his stunning debut, Stuart Neville delivers an inspired, gritty view of how violence’s aftermath lasts for years and the toll it takes on each person involved. The Ghosts of Belfast also insightfully delves into Irish politics, the uneasy truce in Northern Ireland, redemption, guilt and responsibility.
The Untamed Bride
By Stephanie Laurens; Avon Books
356 pages, $7.99 Reading a Stephanie Laurens book is a lot like panning for gold. You have to sift through a lot of boring stuff to find the shiny material, but once you unearth it, it’s definitely worth keeping. Laurens gives readers a new series, and it’s a good one.
War Dances
By Sherman Alexie; Grove
208 pages, $23
Alexie’s works are
piercing yet rueful. He writes odes to anguished pay-phone calls, to
boys who would drive through blizzards to see a girl, to couples who
need to sit together on airplane flights even though the computer
thinks otherwise.
A New Literary History of America
Harvard University Press
1,095 pages, $49.95
New Literary History of America is
an extraordinary anthology of literary culture brought to you by a
seat-of-thepants polyglot of a country. As rich as its title is dry,
this chronological collection of essays starts with the first
appearance of the name “America” on a map in 1507 and concludes with
the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver; Harper
$26.99
Told through journals, letters, newspaper articles and congressional testimony, The Lacuna is
both epic and deeply personal, with Kingsolver masterfully interlacing
one man’s journey from houseboy to acclaimed writer with the equally
tumultuous mid-20th-century courses of the United States and Mexico.
No Impact Man
By
Colin Beavan; Farrar, Straus & Giroux
274 pages, $25
Beavan was
freaked out about what was happening to the environment. He decided to
spend a year trying to do without, just to sort out what he absolutely
needed to do with. He wondered just how much of it was avoidable, how
much was inevitable. It has significant emotional and ecological heft. No Impact Man works, most of all, because Beavan is intelligent, funny, provocative, and, above all, honest.
Box 21
By Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom; Farrar, Straus & Giroux
400 pages, $26
Dark, often crushingly grim, Box 21 introduces
us to a world of characters who hate what they do for a living. The
book is profound, with much to show, much to say, much to set in play,
on the human condition. It’s a novel with a heart, even if it’s a
hardened heart.
Compiled from the McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
