Surviving marriage
"Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage" by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking, 285 pages, $26.95)
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"Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage" by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking, 285 pages, $26.95)
A Jasper Fforde novel is always a treat for the imagination — and good for a lot of laughs. His Thursday Next series mixes time travel and books that come to life, while his Nursery Crimes series stands traditional tales — and detective stories — on their heads. His stories soar with madcap ingenuity, flying by so fast that if you don’t pay attention, you’re bound to miss some of the jokes. And you don’t want to miss them: They’re absurd, they’re funny, and his references are so clever they’ll make you glad you haven’t forgotten everything you learned in history or English class.
"Elvis: My Best Man" by George Klein (Crown, 320 pages, $25)
"The Farmer's Daughter" by Jim Harrison (Grove Press, 320 pages, $24)
"The Girl With Glass Feet" by Ali Shaw (Henry Holt, 287 pages, $24)
Ever wonder what the best-selling novels were in the year just gone by? We're not necessarily talking about the best fiction of the year, but rather, the books that garnered the most sales. According to marketingcharts.com, they were, in order:
"Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed" by Robert Sellers (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 304 pages, $25.99)
"Dream House: The White House as an American Home" by Ulysses Grant Dietz and Sam Watters (Acanthus Press, 312 pages, $75)
A good children's book is nourishment for the soul, as fine as a bowl of chicken soup on a winter's day.
It's the end of the year, so it must be time for a list. From the books I read in 2009 — those I reviewed in The Eagle and others — I've selected standouts in several categories:
"Too Much Happiness" by Alice Munro (Knopf, $25.95, 304 pages)
"A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen" edited by Susannah Carson (Random House, 320 pages, $25)
"The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire That Saved America" by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 324 pages, $27)
"Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession" by Julie Powell (Little, Brown, 307 pages, $24.99)
1. "U is for Underflow" by Sue Grafton
"U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth" by Joan Waugh (University of North Carolina Press, 384 pages, $30)
"La's Orchestra Saves the World" by Alexander McCall Smith (Pantheon, 294 pages, $23.95)
"Hollywood Moon" by Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown, 344 pages, $26.99)
"Generosity: An Enhancement" by Richard Powers (A Frances Coady Book/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 296 pages, $25)
When it comes to popular entertainment, the late Michael Crichton was about as successful as any writer could hope to be.