Terese Svoboda's Black Glasses Like Clark Kent was one of my favorite reads last year. I wrote about it several times here at Chasing Ray but it was Dan Wickett's early post that first got me interested: " Just order this one and do so now. That way you won't forget when the time truly comes. Granted, I was trapped in a jury room with strangers and had nothing else to do, but I don't think I'd have set this down for a second had I been at home, kids running around, dinner cooking and television on. It's an amazing merging of facts from when her uncle was serving as an MP at a prison of U.S. Soldier prisoners in Occupied Japan in 1946, family relationships, mental depression, and too many other things to really list them all. And Svoboda does so seamlessly. And it's interesting as hell to boot. Really, go order it."

I emailed Terese and asked her what books she enjoyed reading this year. Here is her list:

Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream
Per Petterson To Siberia
David Crouse The Man Back There
Lynn Lurie Corner of the Dead
Kelly McMasters Welcome to Shirley
Maureen Seaton Sex Talks for Girls
Caroline Knox A Beaker
J.M.G. LeClezio Onitsha
Tierno Monenembo The Oldest Orphan
Abdourahman A. Waberi In the United States of Africa

Wow! Talk about an eclectic list of titles! The first one to jump out at me was Welcome to Shirley which I've been thinking about reading for months. Here's the PW review: "Journalist McMasters's look at the toxic relationship between Brookhaven National Laboratory and the neighboring Long Island towns careens into a tedious memoir of childhood. McMasters moved to the unpromising working-class town of Shirley in the early 1970s when she was five and her golf pro father got a job with Hampton Hills Golf & Country Club. For a child without siblings, the street teeming with young families was a magical place to grow up, and McMasters made lifelong girlfriends. However, the town was economically depressed, despite its optimistic founding by Walter T. Shirley in the early 1950s. And Shirley was in the shadow of the top-secret Brookhaven atomic research laboratory, whose nuclear reactor was completed in 1965 regardless of the dangers posed to the growing community. Tritium, the waste from nuclear experiments, leaked into the adjacent rivers and aquifers for decades, and the author ploddingly traces the seepage into private wells. The town flirted with a name change to bolster property values, just as residents were plagued by alarming cases of cancer. Indeed, thanks to the Long Island Breast Cancer Research Project of 1993, a 'cluster' of cases was discovered within a 15-mile radius of Brookhaven. Intermittently, McMasters summons considerable research and critical powers, yet the litany of Shirley's resident misery resists an elegant synthesis"

Hmm, not so fond of the use of the word "plodding" and this reads more as a synopsis then an actual review, but Kirkus called it "powerful" and I like what Bill McKibben had to say: "All places are mute till someone speaks for them — this book bears marvelous, scalding witness to the kind of horror that's been repeated in so many spots that we've almost gone numb. But no one will be numb after reading this account."

Yeah, I'm gonna read it.

I also looked up the others on this list and really - it's pretty damn impressive. The Corner of the Dead is about "American photojournalist Lisette, her heart set on helping Peruvian citizens terrorized by the Shining Path guerrillas, does her best as a humanitarian worker to understand and protect her fellow villagers. Wracked with dismay and guilt, Lisette's good intentions don't always go as far as she would hope, and she finds herself powerless to stop her friends and neighbors from being captured or butchered. As the novel unfolds, Lisette finds love amidst the bloodshed in her housemate Karl, but a shifting chronology sees Lisette back in America with a husband and children, seemingly unable to cope with all she's witnessed. Lurie's haunting debut is a spare, confident look at third world tragedy and the complex, conflicting reactions it spurs in well-meaning citizens of the first world." (Again from PW.)

And The Oldest Orphan? Consider this synopsis: "Tierno Monnembo was among the African authors invited to Rwanda after the 1994 Tutsi-Hutu massacre to write genocide into memory. In his novel The Oldest Orphan, that is precisely what Monnembo does, to devastating effect. Powerful testimony to an unspeakable historical reality, this story is told by an adolescent on death row in a prison in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Dispassionately, almost cynically, the teenager Faustin tells his tale, alternating between his days in jail, his adventures wandering the countryside after his parents and most of the people of his village have been massacred, and his escapades as a cheerful hoodlum in the streets of Kigali. Only slowly does the full horror of his parents' death and his own experience return to Faustin. His realization strikes the reader with shattering force, for it carries in its wake the impossible but inescapable questions presented by such a murderous episode of history and such a crippling experience for a child, a people, and a nation."

Lots of wonderful books here that might have been missed - be sure to check them out now.