From the latest issue of Booklist, here on some books that sounded rather interesting to me:

The Fire by Katerine Neville: "Twenty years after The Eight, Neville finally unveils the next chapter in Cat Velis’ story. Alexandra Solarin, Cat’s daughter, receives an invitation from her mom to visit her in Colorado. When Alexandra arrives, she finds that her mother has vanished and that the clues left behind reveal a sinister mystery. To find her mom, Alexandra will have to pursue the same “game� that Cat did years earlier, searching for the pieces of an ancient chess set with mystical properties. Unfortunately, the people accompanying her on her journey might not be trustworthy. Alexandra’s quest is intertwined with the story of a young girl in 1822 named Haidee, faced with a parallel challenge involving the great English poet Lord Byron. Fans of The Eight who have long awaited the rest of the story will be delighted with this entrancing blend of history, chess, and high adventure. "

I was a very big fan of The Eight and I'd love to see a worthy sequel here. It was a great smart thriller with a ton of fascinating history thrown in. Neville disappointed me a bit with her other books, I'll have to wait and see if she has returned to form with this one. (Although I'm quite happy to see it in the most fangirlish way!)


Icarus at the Edge of Time by Brian Greene. "Theoretical physicist Greene, author of The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), combats our fear of science with enticing analogies and now ups the comfort quotient with a board book for adults of all ages. The large, reassuringly solid volume is meant to counter the mysterious intangibility of its subject: black holes and how they alter time. Illustrated with gorgeous photographs of nebulae and galaxies by way of NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope, it begs to be read aloud as Greene reimagines the cautionary tale of Icarus. His rebelliously curious 14-year-old was born aboard the spaceship Proxima, as were his grandfather and father, all members of a five-generation mission to travel 25 trillion miles from Earth to reach Proxima Centauri, which has been sending out radio signals, evidence that “we are not alone in the cosmos.� Precocious Icarus has designed a micro-warp-drive engine for a runabout, and can’t resist exploring the periphery of a black hole. The ensuing Einsteinian drama is clever, charming, and mind-expanding, the perfect vehicle for conveying the astonishingly supple nature of space, time, and the human mind."

Okay, I simply defy you to find anything even remotely like this book out there. It sounds amazing and unusual and utterly unique. I'd love to see what this one looks like - it really seems like an unusual concept merged with some outright odd design choices.

Personal Record: A Love Affair with Running by Rachel Toor. "Toor, a columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, didn’t set out to be a long-distance runner. In fact, she spent many years, if not ridiculing runners, at least being aggressively uninterested in understanding or appreciating the challenges involved in pushing the body to—and past—its limits. But eventually she sort of fell into the sport (there was a guy involved) and became, not just an occasional athlete, but an enthusiastic, almost fanatical runner. This slim memoir charts the evolution of the author’s devotion to running and explores the benefits, both physical and psychological, she derives from it. She also explores the community of running, the immediate bond between people who have never met but who share a passion, even a philosophy of life."

I'm struggling to love running so I really need all the help I can get. (This should not surprise anyone who's been reading my blog for the last two months.)

Spirits in the Grass by Bill Meissner. "Novels about baseball or small-town life often fall prey to a too-easy sentimentality and a tendency toward soft-focus prose. Meissner tackles both these topics but, remarkably, avoids both flaws. Luke is a thirtysomething dreamer living a desultory life in a small Wisconsin town and wishing his high-school baseball career hadn’t ended. Now he’s helping build a new ball field and hoping to get a second chance in a local amateur league. But when he finds bone shards in the turf, it appears that the field may be a Native American burial ground; caught between representatives of the local Indian tribe, who want to purify the ground, and the town’s mayor, who wants to protect his plans for a new highway, Luke sees his dream fading yet again. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Louise, is fed up with the town and with Luke’s inability to keep his mind out of the “dream-smeared sky.� Meissner handles all his story lines—the centerfielder manqué, the “spirits in the grass,� the troubled romance, the fight with city hall—with admirable subtlety, sidestepping the multiple clichés that can so easily attach themselves to all of these themes."

This one got a starred review and ever since WP Kinsella, I've been a sucker for baseball novels - especially those set in small towns. (It's a childhood longing, I'm sure - but the memories are good ones and remain unshaken.)

The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays by Robert Fisk. "Fisk’s passionate coverage of the Middle East for London’s Independent has earned him a global following; unhesitant to blame the powerful for the region’s many injustices, his columns have also drawn intense flak (and, in the blogosphere, caused his last name to be used as a verb). This selection collects about 115 of Fisk’s weekly columns, most penned since 9/11. Many, if not all, of these columns are archived and available for free online, but when bound together in a book and organized by theme and not chronology, they provide unique insight into Fisk himself as well as the historic tumult that is his beat. Each column is, of course, imbued with Fisk’s characteristic urgency; many, especially those dealing with the war in Iraq, seethe with exasperation. There are some delightfully barbed movie reviews. But this gathering’s most compelling moments may be when Fisk steps back to grapple wistfully with the cumulative effects of being a 30-year witness to unrelenting violence. And a few moments, in which he aches for the loss of close friends, are downright haunting."

It is a doorstop (520 pages) but clearly a worthy one. Iraq is the most significant foreign policy subject of our time and anything that will help us understand it better really should not be missed. (Obama said something Thursday night that echoes this theme - that a major role of citizenship is to simply be involved. Too many of us have checked out in the last eight years - it is truly time that we become determined to learn more and thus become capable of demanding far more intelligent discourse from our elected officials.)