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2001–2002 Booklist

Ahab's Wife: The Star-Gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund: A Kentucky girl goes to sea on a whaling ship disguised as a boy. Part love story, part adventure, and brimming with literary references, this ambitious work recreates pre-Civil War America.
Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth by Naguib Mahfouz: In the 11th century B.C., a young boy seeks the truth about the recently deceased pharaoh, the first monotheistic ruler of Egypt.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood: Read a fictionalized account of Grace Marks, one of the most notorious women in 19th-century Canada, who was convicted of the murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon: This imaginative novel traces the fantastic adventures of two Jewish cousins, one American and one Czech, who create comic books in 1939 New York.
Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje: Anil goes to Sri Lanka to assess the civil war and learn its history.
Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver: This suspenseful love story movingly explores life largest committments, blending flashbacks, dreams and Native American legends.
Arranged Marriage by Chitra Divakaruni: These short stories are about Indian-born women caught in cultural changes both in the U.S. and India.
The Barbarians Are Coming by David Wong Loui: This touching tale of the relationship between father and son reveals the complex realities of the Chinese-American identity.
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino: Cosimo, an 18th-century Italian aristocratic rebel, defies parental authority and makes his home in the trees.
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg: When a previously indifferent 9-year-old student sweeps the local spelling bees, everyone sees her in a new light, one that changes the family dynamic.
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich: This vibrant tale of abandonment, sexual obsession, jealousy and unstinting love is also a 40-year saga brimming with unforgettable characters.
Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigianai: It's 1978 and a self-proclaimed spinster of a sleepy town in Virginia is in a rut. But when she is presented with a family secret of her own, things begin to happen in Stone Gap.
The Black Rose by Tananarive Due: This fictionalized account describes the life of Madam C. J. Walker, who rose from poverty to become America's first black female millionaire.
Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found by Jennifer Lauck: This riveting memoir describes Lauck's childhood, starting at age 5 when her mother died, through a six-year descent to near homelessness.
The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha: When his sister dies in childbirth, a unnamed man in Calcutta takes his newborn niece overnight. She will be adopted in the morning, but as she lies sleeping, he writes stories about the family she will never know.
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald: A kindhearted English widow's struggles to open a bookshop in a seaside town against the polite but uncompromising opposition of the town's arbiters of culture.
Bootlegger's Daughter by Margaret Maron: While campaigning for district judge in North Carolina, an attorney whose father is a retired bootlegger tries to solve an old murder.
Brain Droppings by George Carlin: The renowned comedian shares a collage of random thoughts, musings, lists, beliefs and observations.
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking: Hawking explains the scientific questions of the universe without using technical jargon.
Chocolat by Joanne Harris: When Vianne Rocher and her daughter arrive in a small village and open a chocolate shop opposite the church during Lent, it's war between Vianne and the local priest.
Citizen Washington: A Novel by William Martin: The tale of George Washington who emerges as an ambitious, land-hungry young man, full of imperfections and personal struggles, who nonetheless transcended his limitations and became one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known.
Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres: This sprawling novel follows the lives of the inhabitants of an idyllic Greek island from the peaceful days before World War II through the tumult of the war and into the present.
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner: This rich story describes the lifelong friendship between two couples.
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende: A Chilean immigrant in San Francisco goes to the Gold Rush fields disguised as a man to follow her lover.
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula LeGuin: Unwilling to accept that his anarchist planet must be isolated from the rest of the civilized universe, a brilliant physicist risks his life by traveling to the utopian mother planet to challenge the complex structures of life and living.
Eating Chinese Food Naked by Mei Ng: A Columbia graduate returns home to find herself living above the family's laundry in Queens.
Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life by Alison Weir: A popular British historian focuses her professional biographical light on one of the most fascinating women in history.
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons: An adolescent's first-person memory-narrative is told in two distinct time frames: now, while she is safe, and two years ago, when she was not.
Evening by Susan Minot: A 65-year-old woman dying of cancer reflects on her life and love, and recalls a weekend during which she fell in love with a man who married another.
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser: A devastating expose of how the fast-food industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways.
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Bari Kolata: The 1918 epidemic wiped out 40 million people in less than a year and afflicted more than one in four Americans.
Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel: Drawing on the lifelong correspondence of his daughter with Galileo, Sobel has written a fascinating history of the Medici era in Italy.
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn: A carnival family saves its show from bankruptcy by giving birth to freaks in a "Ripley's Believe It or Not" world.
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman: This biography offers a rollicking picture of 18th-century British aristocracy and the woman who was for a time its undisputed leader. Winner of the Whitbread Prize.
The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken: An unusual love story set in the 1950s about a librarian on Cape Cod and the tallest boy in the world.
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen: A memoir of her two-year stay as a teenager at a psychiatric facility.
Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland: This story of an "unknown" painting flows from its present owner back three centuries to its creation by the Dutch master Vermeer.
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier: This fictional story traces the life of the subject of the Vermeer painting, who is a servant in the artist's household.
Go and Come Back by Joan Abelove: A Peruvian teenager is drawn to the two American anthropologists who have come to study her tribe.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: Armed with only with the invincible innocence of childhood, a brother and sister fashion a world for themselves in the shadow of their wreck of a family. A Booker Prize winner.
The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw: Brokaw pays homage to the folks who fought World War II and then built America.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond: Why did some civilizations develop into industrialized civilizations while others remained agrarian societies? Jared explains how geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. A Pulitzer Prize winner.
The Hacienda: A Memoir by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran: This mesmerizing tale describes a young Englishwoman's strange life in the backward world of a remote South American sugar plantation in the 1970s.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling: Orphan Harry Potter discovers that he comes from a line of distinguished wizards and is invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Headlong by Michael Frayn: In this comical presentation of assessing paintings, a possible masterpiece is beneath one unlikely sooty painting.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story by Dave Egger: This novel-like object is at once autobiographical, ironic and self-referential.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: Join hapless Arthur Dent and his pal as they travel through the galaxy wrecking hilarious havoc.
Home Town by Tracy Kidder: Tracy Kidder's view of Northampton, Massachusetts is an affectionate evocation of small-town life at the end of the 20th century.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham: Deeply moving, interwoven stories of three women in this novel that is an acknowledgement of Woolf. A Pulitzer Prize winner. A PEN/Faulkner award for fiction winner.
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus: Through a clerical error, Kathy, emotionally reeling and the personification of fog, loses her house to Colonel Behrani, full of fury and pride and symbolic of sand. Narrated from both sides of view, each character is compelling and sympathetic as they head to a dramatic impact.
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson: Bryson's entertaining exploration of Australia is sprinkled with history and contemporary culture notes.
Interpreter of Maladies by Lhumpa Lahiri: This stunning collection of short stores is from a wonderfully distinctive new voice. A Pulitzer Prize winner. A PEN/Hemingway Award winner.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: Experience the classic romance between an orphaned governess and her employer, the brooding Edwin Rochester.
Kindred by Octavia Butler: In this time-traveling story, a contemporary African American woman tries to resolve the mystery of her "out-of-time" experiences.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen: This thought-provoking discussion of the reactionary patriotism and falsehoods found in history textbooks offers a revised chronicle of U.S. history that restores suppressed or ignored information.
Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones: An expedition in China searching for the missing bones of Peking man serves as the backdrop for this tale of the nuance and complexity of character and relationship.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez: A man with the soul of a poet and the patience of a saint, Florintino Ariza has waited 50 years, nine months and four days to realize his love for Fermina Daza.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett: While seeking his partner's murderer, Sam Spade, the archetypal hard-boiled detective, encounters deceitful characters looking for a golden falcon.
The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif: This intricate tale of love between an American journalist and an Egyptian American conductor mirrors her grandparents involvement of an English woman and an Egyptian nationalist.
The Measure of Our Days: A Spiritual Exploration of Illness by Dr. Jerome Groopman: These moving portraits of eight people with life-threatening illnesses offer a compelling look at heroism, strength and what one can learn from confronting one's mortality.
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden: This story of a celebrated geisha is told with authenticity and lyricism.
Mendel's Dwarf by Simon Mawer: Following his great, great uncle Gregor Mendel, Dr. Benedict Lambert searches for genetic clues to his own condition, achondroplastia: he's a dwarf.
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker: An ordinary ride up an office escalator turns into a meditation on our relations with familiar objects: shoelaces, straws and more.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville: Captain Ahab is obsessed with his pursuit of the great white whale.
Moo by Jane Smiley: This wickedly funny send-up of academia is set at Moo University, a mid-western ag school.
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey: This comic extravaganza is an incendiary call to protect the American wilderness.
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Letham: This mystery features a detective with Tourette's syndrome.
My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love, and Forgiveness by Patricia Raybon: These essays document the passage of an African American woman from racial hatred to forgiveness and personal salvation. Raybon is a commentator on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition.
My Kitchen Wars by Betty Fussell: In cookbook author Fussell's autobiography, the kitchen is a battlefield as often as it is a haven.
My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki: Jane, a struggling filmmaker, is producing a piece for Japanese television sponsored by the American meat exporting lobbying group, while Akiko's child-craving husband, the ad exec for the series, is pressuring her to put some meat on her bones — literally. When the two women get together, they join forces to expose the meat industry's hazardous practices.
The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Reflects on Medical Myths by Sherwin B. Nuland: This lively text explores medicine, history and folklore about the human body.
Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee: Korean American Henry Park is a perpetual outsider who's always looking at American culture from a distance.
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: In this classic story, an immigrant family struggles to save its Nebraska farm.
On the Rez by Ian Frazier: This astute, personal and disarmingly frank book assesses life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation.
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez: This fictional history follows several generations and the passions, thoughts, and myths of a labyrinth of people. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.
The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean: Journey with Orlean through a strangely fascinating subculture of horticultural obsession in Florida.
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster: Tensions arise when a visiting Englishwoman accuses a well-respected Indian man of attacking her during an outing in Forster's exploration of the relationship between the British and the Indians in India.
Personal History by Katharine Graham: Katharine Graham's fascinating memoir traces her life, starting with her childhood in a world of high privilege among the New York and Washington aristocracy, through her difficult marriage to Phil Graham, to becoming owner of the Washington Post, which she built into one of the nation's most respected news organizations.
Plainsong by Kent Haruf: This heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity is set in the High Plains east of Denver.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver: Follow the experiences of an overbearing missionary and his family in the Belgian Congo as they struggle for independence.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving: A New Hampshire child believes he is God's instrument after accidentally killing his best friend's mother with a baseball.
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester: This is a true tale of murder, insanity and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye: A white man shipwrecked on an African coast is slowly stripped of his pretensions of self-importance.
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant: Where women are banished during their monthly cycles, childbirth and illness, the red tent is also where women take comfort and courage from one another in a celebration of the ancient continuity and unity of women.
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie: The magical story of how misfit storyteller Spokane Indian Thomas Builds-the-Fire's life changes when blues legend Robert Johnson gives Thomas his enchanted guitar.
Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America by Gelareh Asayesh: In this vibrant memoir, a young newspaper journalist immigrates from Iran in 1977, assimilates into American culture and returns to Iran in 1990.
The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama: A Chinese man recouperates from TB on the eve of WWII in his family's summer home in Japan, where he meets four of the local residents.
Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past by Daniel L. Schacter: This is an authoritative summary of the most up-to-date scientific knowledge in the field of memory and the brain.
Seasons of Sun and Rain by Marjorie Dorner: During a reunion, six middle-aged women come to terms with the early onset of Alzheimer's in one of them.
The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga: At a crossroads in her life, a book conservator goes to Florence, Italy to help restore books after the floods of 1966. She soon gets involved in selling a rare volume of Renaissance erotica for a convent and has an affair with an older married man.
The Sky Fisherman by Craig Lesley: This moving family portrait is etched in the rugged terrain of a small Oregon town.
Songlines by Bruce Chatwin: Chatwin's homage to the nomadic spirit explores the labyrinth of Aboriginal "Dreaming-tracks" meandering all over Australia.
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois: Du Bois reflects on black identity, emancipation and African American culture in this classic book of essays
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell: A charismatic Jesuit priest leads a 21st-century scientific mission to a newly discovered extraterrestrial culture.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman: An American woman's friendship with a Hmong refugee family whose daughter suffers from severe epilepsy leads her to explore cultural differences.
Sula by Toni Morrison: Two black heroines grow up together in a small Ohio town and take sharply divergent paths as adults, before their final confrontation and reconciliation.
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald: A wealthy American couple on the French Riviera support friends and hangers-on financially and emotionally at the cost of their own stability.
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose: This story of Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery reads like an adventure novel filled with high drama, suspense and person tragedy.
Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho: Veronika seems to have everything, but she feels that something is missing in her life. After a failed suicide attempt, she wakes up in a mental hospital and is told that she has only days to live.
Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River by Robin Cody: Travel from Columbia Lake in the Canadian Rockies, 1,200 miles to the Pacific Ocean in 82 days in this epic canoe adventure.
Waiting by Ha Jin: A doctor in Communist China must wait 18 years before he can divorce his wife from an arranged marriage in order to marry the nurse he loves.
The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve: While shooting a photo essay about a century-old double murder, Jean's teetering marriage becomes a parallel emotional tragedy.
Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America by Maria Laurino: This witty book examines Italian stereotypes in both America and Italy and the immigrant experience.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith: Smith's take on race, sex, class, history and the immigrant experience chronicles the experiences of two eccentric multiracial families in working class London.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jane Rhys: Have all your sympathies and understanding of Jane Eyre turned upside down with this story of the first Mrs. Rochester.
Wild Life by Molly Gloss: In 1905 Washington state, a feminist writer of dime-store adventure novels for women joins the hunt for a little girl lost in the woods. She herself gets lost and encounters a group of huge hairy humanoids.
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon: Spend a wild weekend with an aging "wonderboy" author hopelessly mired in his second novel and his brilliant but troubled student as they try to find renewed purpose in their lives.

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