Best Reads Of The Month

Crime and punishment, high-tech style

For Kevin Mitnick, hacking wasn’t about material gain. Rather he lived for the thrill of the hack, infiltrating the data centers of companies including Nokia, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems. His memoir recounts his most spectacular feats, as well as a life lived on the lam, always one step ahead of the Feds — until excessive bragging brought about his downfall. All the pleasures of a great con man’s story are on display here, but with a high-tech twist.

An African honeymoon, and its aftermath

A sequel to Fuller’s acclaimed Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, which recounted her upbringing in Africa, this memoir goes back a generation. Her parents’ childhoods couldn’t have been more different from one another: her mother grew up in Happy Valley-era Kenya, while Fuller’s father was raised in a dreary Scotland. The honeymoon period they shared when they met in Kenya is painted with promise: but in Africa, nothing is ever simple, and their lives together are upended by the harsh realities of the war-torn continent. From Kenya to Rhodesia to Zambia, fleeing violence and hardship, theirs is a story of survival.

From a distinctive American voice

If Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke was an enormous treasure-trove of prose, his new novella is a single glittering gem. Set against the backdrop of the American West, the story of railroad laborer Robert Grainer combines historical fiction and magical realism as he witnesses momentous events of the early 20th century — the influenza epidemic, the advent of the automobile, even the gyrations of Elvis Presley — from a perspective as unique as Johnson’s unmistakable, kaleidoscopic prose.

A novel of the Japanese-American dream

When the Emperor Was Divine established Julie Otsuka as a dynamic author articulating the Japanese-American experience. Her new novel confirms her early promise with an insightful portrait of a group of Japanese picture brides. Through their shared experiences — on the boat to San Francisco, in the internment camps during WWI — she paints a gorgeous picture of the American Dream cast anew.

Paradise lost

If Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus was the “before” image, then his new book, 1493, is the “after” — and what a difference a year makes. In his pursuit of a passage to China, Christopher Columbus brought together species of flora and fauna, virus and fungi that had never interacted previously, with dramatic effects on the environment. With a remarkable wealth of research and insight, Mann demonstrates how the pressing questions of globalization were already germane more than five hundred years ago.

Deepening the spell of J. K. Rowling

Lev Grossman’s bestselling The Magicians was heralded as a more intricate and sophisticated version of the magical narrative realm of the Harry Potter novels. In this highly-anticipated sequel, Grossman invites readers back to Fillory, where the graduates of the Brakebills College of Magical Pedagogy have fled the sorrows of the mundane world only to face terrifying new challenges. Filled with high-level spell casting, soothsaying dragons, and inter-dimensional portals, The Magician King is, at its heart, a brilliant portrait of two young people who must accept the limitations of their ambition in order to thrive.

Lessons from the battlefield

Matterhorn, the acclaimed novel by Karl Marlantes, has been heralded as a classic of war literature rivaling Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Now with this powerful work of nonfiction, Marlantes taps his experience as a young second lieutenant serving in Vietnam to offer a critical examination of how we might better prepare soldiers for war. A wrenchingly honest memoir, What It Is Like to Go to War should be required reading for every soldier sent into combat — and for those who send them.

A fascinating, forgotten “Founder”

The name might be familiar, but Ethan Allen remains one of our least understood Founding Fathers. Cunning entrepreneur, amateur soldier whose impetuosity led to the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, and the man who almost single-handedly brought the state of Vermont into the union, Allen was an enigmatic product of the American frontier, blessed with an extraordinary intellect and hot-tempered propensity for action. The author of biographies on Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton, Willard Sterne Randall delivers another rich portrait of an American original.

A sumptuous new ‘Bruno’ mystery

Mystery fans with a healthy appetite will find this third installment in Martin Walker’s series featuring Chief of Police Bruno Courr’ges tr’s formidable. The setting is St. Denis, a sleepy village located in a rural region of France famous for its exquisite black truffles. A scam in the local market is uncovered that threatens the area’s lucrative truffle trade, and Bruno’s on the case. Peppered with evocative descriptions of the French countryside, and overflowing with food, wine, romance, and intrigue, Black Diamond delivers, like the truffle itself, both complexity and delight.

Ingenious tales from a master storyteller

For anyone looking to escape the summer heat, what better way than a trip to 19th-century Vienna, the corridors of a monstrous museum, or Thomas Edison’s laboratory, in company with a wide-ranging cast of characters — a knife thrower and teenage boys, ghosts and a cartoon cat and mouse. A narrative enchanter along the lines of Borges and Calvino, Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser’s decade-spanning collection of wonderfully readable stories showcases the indomitable imagination of one of America’s greatest living writers.

An exquisite, blistering debut novel

Critics and authors alike are already buzzing about Justin Torres and his beautiful new take on the coming-of age story (“a brilliant, ferocious new voice” — Michael Cunningham; “A miracle in concentrated pages” — Dorothy Allison). And now it’s time for readers to find out why. Written in magical language vivid with indelible images, We the Animals is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.

Courtesy of Barnes & Noble.

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