The Possessed / Elif Batuman

Smart and very, very funny, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.00 paperback original) is well worth a read. Batuman has an ear for dialogue—and the luck to have found herself, repeatedly, in unexpectedly zany situations. While academia doesn’t lack for characters, Batuman seems to have stumbled upon some of the most excessively strange of these.

The best chapters in the book are the introduction and Batuman’s essays “Babel in California” and “Who Killed Tolstoy?” The introduction sees Batuman teaching English and judging leg contests (read it) in Hungary after her freshman year in college. In the first essay, the Stanford Slavic department finds itself suddenly bound up in the tensions and eccentricities of Isaak Babel’s surviving family; in the latter, Batuman attends a conference at Leo Tolstoy’s estate, weaving through the whole chapter her cast-aside theory that Tolstoy was poisoned and her attempt to regain her lost luggage:

“Oh, it’s you,” sighed the clerk. “Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?”

Batuman’s humor, often good-natured, can also be biting at times—it’s then that she seems to prey on the weak—and the final chapter is an unworthy, unfocused conclusion to an otherwise fine book. But these are both small quibbles. The Possessed will make you laugh and read aloud, and when Batuman talks about the literature itself, she does so beautifully.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Little Bee / Chris Cleave

Talk about coming late to the party: Chris Cleave's Little Bee (Simon & Schuster, $14.00 paperback) made its resounding critical splash in 2009. When a book is much-hyped my instinct is to avoid it, for reasons I can't always fathom. But I've been watching Little Bee pick up a second wind in paperback this year, and when a copy fell into my hand I decided the gods were sending me a message.

I have not cried this much while reading a book for a very long time. It took me two nights to read Little Bee, during which I entered the early hours of the morning clutching a fistful of tear-sodden tissues. Everything about it -- the cover, the blurb on the back, the glowing praise from People and O Magazine -- suggests a story that will ultimately resolve itself through an affirmation of humanity's innate goodness. But instead of presenting a cleanly wrapped emotional package of love triumphing over sorrow and despair, Chris Cleave ruthlessly, albeit beautifully, skewers your heart.

This is a powerful, genuine novel that more than earns its considerable critical accolades. If you haven't yet considered it seriously, I urge you to pony up for the paperback, but prepare yourself; it is only for the strong of soul, and while quick to read it is difficult to forget.

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Wolf Hall / Hilary Mantel

I’m coming late to the party on this one—several months after Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Henry Holt & Co., $27.00) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and almost a year after it won the Man Booker Prize, I tackled the lengthy novel.

A friend gave it to me, endorsing it by telling me that she had finished it in a four-day blitz. It took me nearly a month, and although I was admittedly juggling several other books at the time, I’m not surprised it took so long. Wolf Hall was a long, slow journey for this reader. Every step the story took towards the coronation of Anne Boleyn, in the inevitable onward slog of history, felt as incremental and hard-won as it might have felt for Thomas Cromwell, Mantel’s protagonist. And every pronoun with an unclear antecedent—Cromwell is mostly referred to as “he,” and Mantel doesn’t bother to clarify her terms when another male character enters the scene—is as disorienting as the last. You never quite gain your balance when reading Wolf Hall.

But working for Mantel’s novel are her unsentimental, sparse prose, and the immediately sympathetic—nay, lovable—Cromwell. If history is complicated and stripped of its romance here, the orchestrations of Henry VIII overwhelmed by the constant negotiations of his lawyers and courtiers, Cromwell’s rich inner life more than makes up for it. So much so, in fact, that I find myself eagerly awaiting the rumored sequel.

A slow-paced book of subtle, but certainly worthwhile, rewards.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Henry Holt & Co.

The Name of the Nearest River / Alex Taylor

Gritty’s the right word to describe Alex Taylor’s most recent book, The Name of the Nearest River (Sarabande Books, $15.95). The edges here sometimes chafe, as in the moments when the language runs to extremes (on the more poetic end, sometimes spiralling too wildly out of control, and, at other times, seeming almost brutish in its minimalism). But these stories hurtle along and take you with them. It’s a quick read, and a compelling one.

“The Coal Thief” and “Equator Joe’s Famous Nuclear Meltdown Chili” paint stark portraits of poverty-stricken children, and other stories—despite their varying plots, depicting violence and passion, the reader always senses that what’s at stake is life and death—are as desolate and grim as any Cormac McCarthy novel. Still, there’s a humming hope here. For every windy, snowy landscape, and for every drunken punch, there’s a truck on a river on a summer night.

Ideal reading for a sultry evening in a hammock or a night alone by the fire.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Sarabande Books