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2006–2007 Booklist

Midnight at the Dragon Café by Judy Fong Bates
Bates tells the story of Su-Jen Chou, the only daughter of unhappy and isolated parents who immigrate to Canada from China to seek a better life, and the challenges she and her family encounter as they try to fit into their adopted homeland while preserving their heritage. Join us for Everybody Reads, Multnomah County Library's annual community-wide book discussion.
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Bellow's 1953 novel is a coming-of-age story of a poor Jewish youth from Chicago and his sometimes highly comic journey through the 20th century.
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit.
Atomic Farmgirl: The Betrayal of Chief Qualchan, the Appaloosa, and Me by Teri Hein
The granddaughter of German Lutheran homesteaders, Teri Hein was raised in the 1950s and 1960s in rural eastern Washington. This starkly elegant landscape serves as the poignant backdrop to her story, for 100 miles to the south of this idyllic, all-American setting lay the toxins — both mental and physical — of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bad Land recounts the exploits of the many homesteaders who came to the prairies of eastern Montana in 1909, drawn by the promise of free land — only to be defeated by a country so arid and unforgiving that maps identified it as the Great American Desert.
Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min
This fictional portrait follows the life of Jiang Ching, from her youth as the unwanted daughter of a concubine, to her search for fame as an actress in Shanghai, to her marriage to revolutionary Mao Zedong, to her role in the turbulent communist rule of China.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
Bo Mason and his wife and two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair; drifting from town to town, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks his fortune. Stegner has created a masterful, harrowing saga of a family trying to survive during the lean years of the early 20th century.
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant
Turning 15 in Renaissance Florence, Alessandra Cecchi is given the freedom, within the confines of her home and position, to pursue her own interests. Married off to an older man who uses his marriage as a shield to hide his homosexual proclivities, Alessandra becomes intoxicated with the works of a young painter whom her father has brought to the city to decorate the family's Florentine palazzo.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
This multi-layered story uses a novel within a novel to tell of the death of a woman's sister and husband. Brilliantly weaving together seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz
In an informative look at the life and travels of Capt. James Cook, Horwitz combines a sharp eye for reporting with subtle wit and a wonderful knack for drawing out the many characters he discovers. The book is both a travel narrative and a biography of the renowned 18th-century British explorer widely considered one of the greatest navigators in maritime history.
The Book of Salt by Monique Truong
Intricate, compelling and witty, the novel weaves in historical characters, from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh, with remarkable originality.
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities, whether communist or Taliban, to supply books to the people of Kabul. This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family — two wives, five children and many relatives — sharing a small four-room apartment in this war-ravaged city.
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. Who is domesticating whom?
Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx
Pulitzer Prize-winner E. Annie Proulx forays through the underside of America's beloved Wild West in this prize-winning collection of stories about hardship and more hardship in Wyoming territory.
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Hailed as a classic, Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy and endless gradations in between.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Diamond casts a wide net in the realms of history, geography and science to address questions essential to humanity's continued survival.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
Perkins, a former chief economist at a Boston strategic-consulting firm, confesses he was an "economic hit man" for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinationals cajole and blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American business.
Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber
Thirty-nine-year-old Sirine, never married, lives with a devoted Iraqi-immigrant uncle and an adoring dog named King Babar. She works as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant, her passions aroused only by the preparation of food — until an unbearably handsome Arabic literature professor starts dropping by for a little home cooking.
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
In a two-day span, American symbologist Robert Langdon finds himself accused of murdering the curator of the Louvre, on the run through the streets of Paris and London, and teamed up with French cryptologist Sophie Neveu to uncover nothing less than the secret location of the Holy Grail.
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Tey focuses on the legend of Richard III, the evil hunchback of British history accused of murdering his young nephews. With an American researcher's help, protagonist Grant delves into his country's history to discover just what kind of man Richard Plantagenet was and who really killed the little princes.
Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
This is a vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family's preparations for her cousin Dabney's wedding.
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
A brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a "dew breaker" — a torturer — a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality.
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
An uninspired college teacher's affair with a student is discovered, and he seeks solace on his daughter's farm in South Africa. A violent attack launched by three black men alters how he perceives many things including his daughter and the rights of South Africa's aggrieved majority.
The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars by Joel Glenn Brenner
An account of the cut-throat competition between Hershey and Mars, two of the biggest candy manufacturers in America. Their history involves industrial espionage, blatant copycatting, bitter legal battles and many personality clashes.
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
A tale of blue-collar life which increasingly resembles a high-wire act performed without the benefit of a safety net.
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Hilarious, energetic and touching, this novel follows a young writer as he travels to the farmlands of Eastern Europe, where he embarks on a quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Guided by his young Ukrainian translator, the writer discovers an unexpected past that will resonate far into the future.
Ex-Libris by Ross King
In 1660, Isaac Inchbold, middle-aged proprietor of Nonsuch Books, is given a strange task: He is to track down a certain ancient and heretical manuscript. King expertly leads his protagonist through an endless labyrinth of clues, discoveries and dangers, all the while expertly detailing 17th-century Europe's struggles over religion and knowledge.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Oskar Schell is an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist. He is 9 years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
This devastating exposé reveals 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.
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands
Brands has written a biography of perhaps one of the most famous founding fathers. "Of those patriots who made independence possible," he writes, "none mattered more than Franklin, and only Washington mattered as much." Franklin was also an inventor, publisher and diplomat.
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris
The daughter of a woman accused of a tragedy in a small French village during World War II finds a scrapbook of her mother's recipes and opens a small crêperie.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
In 1956, as a minister approaches the end of his life, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets. The book won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Giovanni's Room: A Novel by James Baldwin
Baldwin delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving and passionate story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart.
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Baldwin chronicles a 14-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
A bestselling and Booker Prize-winning literary novel — a richly textured first book about the tragic decline of one family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love.
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
This great modern classic depicts life in China at a time before the vast political and social upheavals transformed an essentially agrarian country into a world power. Nobel Prize-winner Buck traces the whole cycle of life — its terrors, passions, ambitions and rewards.
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Hazzard tells an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. A man and woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance and tenderness, and they struggle to reclaim their humanity. The book is a National Book Award winner and Booker Prize nominee.
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry
In 1918, a plague swept across the world virtually without warning, killing healthy young adults as well as vulnerable infants and the elderly. In this sweeping history, Barry explores how the deadly confluence of biology and politics created conditions in which the virus thrived.
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.
High Tide in Tucson: Essays From Now or Never by Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver returns to her familiar themes of family, community and the natural world, and brings a moral vision and refreshing humor to subjects ranging from modern motherhood to the history of private property to the suspended citizenship of human beings in the Animal Kingdom.
The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch
While the sea continues to offer him discoveries from its mysterious depths, such as a giant squid, a teenaged boy struggles to deal with the difficulties that come with the equally mysterious process of growing up.
Hold the Enlightenment by Tim Cahill
This collection takes the reader from the largest toxic waste dump in the Western Hemisphere to citing studies of dolphin gang rape. There's something for everyone!
Holes by Louis Sachar
As further evidence of his family's bad fortune, which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure and a new sense of himself.
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus
An attractive bungalow in California represents more than a place to live when an immigrant family from Iran purchases it from a county auction and the house's former owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, wants it back.
The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
Allende tells the magnificent epic of the Trueba family - their loves, ambitions, spiritual quests, relations with one another and participation in the history of their times. That history becomes destiny and overtakes them all.
How to Rent a Negro by Damali Ayo
A hilarious and satirical look at race relations that is almost too close for comfort, this pseudo-guidebook gives both renters and rentals "much-needed" advice and tips on technique. This text shocks and amuses, presenting a strikingly stark mirror of human relationships.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Capote invented a genre with this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal 1959 slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers. The book has influenced countless authors.
Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World by Jack Weatherford
Offers dramatic and amazing insights into Indian achievements in architecture, agriculture, ecology, law, religion and education.
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto
In a landmark work of history, Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.
John Adams by David G. McCullough
In this powerful, epic biography, McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution.
Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa by Mark Mathabane
This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered "Kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do — he escaped to tell about it.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. A classic time-travel novel by an acclaimed African American science fiction writer.
The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander
The tragic story of Nicholas and Alexandra is told in a historically vivid and compelling narrative as seen through the eyes of their young kitchen boy, Leonka.
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Jones tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
In this darkly comic collection of 22 interlocked tales, Alexie brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation.
Losing Nelson: A Novel by Barry Unsworth
A novel of obsession, it is the story of Charles Cleasby, a man unable to see himself separately from the hero — Lord Horatio Nelson — he mistakenly idolizes.
Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones
For Alice Mannegan, an American living in Beijing, adventure begins with a phone call from an American archaeologist seeking a translator, and ends in an intoxicating journey of the heart.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
A murdered 14-year-old girl looks down from heaven at her friends and family as they struggle to cope with her disappearance. The story deals with love and healing even in the midst of the worst situation a family has to face.
March by Geraldine Brooks
Brooks tells the story of the absent father, March, in Louisa May Alcott's classic, Little Women. When March goes off to join the Union cause during the Civil War, his experiences change his marriage and his beliefs.
Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel by Arthur Golden
Golden tells this story of a celebrated geisha with authenticity and lyricism.
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
Set in a Benedictine monastery off the coast of South Carolina where legend claims a mermaid was converted, a middle-aged housewife is called to the island to deal with her mother's attempted suicide.
Middlemarch by George Eliot
With sure and subtle touch, Eliot paints a luminous and spacious landscape of life in a provincial town, interweaving her themes with a proliferation of characters: an innocent idealist; a self-defeated young doctor; a naive young woman; and a cold man, who "lives too much with the dead."
Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey
A guest lecturer at a college for women, psychologist Miss Pym steps in to prevent a young student from cheating during final exams, an act of compassion that precipitates a fatal "accident" — or was it murder?
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
The true story of Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up in bus and on a boat and became an international health doctor, "a man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it."
My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor by Alec Guinness
This 18-month diary, from January 1995 to June 1996, from one of the most distinguished — and beloved — actors of stage and screen, reveals the octogenarian spryness of a civilized mind and a beguiling mixture of the meditative and the hedonistic.
Night by Elie Wiesel
Powerful and moving, this is Wiesel's true story of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
Award-winning journalist Brooks offers an intimate, often shocking, portrait of the lives of modern Muslim women. Her stunning vignettes carefully distinguish misogyny and oppressive cultural traditions from what the author considers the true teachings of the Koran.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Immediately upon setting up shop, Precious Ramotswe, Botswanas only lady private detective, is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing 11-year-old boy who may have been snatched by witch doctors.
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
This book is a potent expression of the power of sexual obsession and of modern man's yearning for freedom.
Oh My Stars by Lorna Landvik
A young woman growing up in the Great Depression heads off to California to find a new life. The bus crashes in North Dakota, and Violet finds that she can triumph even in adversity.
The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream by Samson Davis, George Jenkins and Remeck Hunt
Three young black men in the medical profession — a dentist, an emergency-room physician and an internist — recall an informal pact they made that guided them out of their inner-city Newark neighborhoods and into successful careers.
Palace Walk by Najib Mahfuz
This first volume in the Cairo Trilogy describes the disintegrating family life of a tyrannical, prosperous merchant, his timid wife and their rebellious children in post-World War I Egypt. Mahfuz is the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize (1988).
Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels by Katherine Ann Porter
Texas-born in 1890, Katherine Anne Porter was a master of the short novel or long story, as she preferred to call her pieces. Noon Wine; Old Mortality; and Pale Horse, Pale Rider are considered among the most beautifully wrought narratives in American fiction.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Jane Austen's last completed novel features a heroine much older and wiser than her predecessors in earlier books, and presents a more intimate and sober tale of a love found long after such happiness had been deemed hopeless.
The Pine Island Paradox by Kathleen Dean Moore
Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? Acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate.
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.
Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Rose City by Phil Stanford
By the 1950s, an opportunistic con man named Big Jim Elkins had taken over the vice industry in Portland and had most of the police brass and local politicos on his payroll. An entertaining and fascinating story.
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less by Terry Ryan
This bestselling memoir stars a Midwestern wife and mother whose prize-winning poetry and prose kept her family afloat through the most difficult of times.
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
This true tale describes the criminally insane American physician who, locked up in an English asylum for murder, spent his life compiling the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Reader by Bernard Schlink
A story of love, sex, reading and shame in postwar Germany.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, this is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm's-eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters Shakespeare's play.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
When her African American nanny is thrown into jail for attempting to vote during the 1964 Civil Rights movement, 14-year-old Lily rescues her and the two set across South Carolina to begin a new life.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
This international literary sensation is about a boy's quest through the secrets and shadows of postwar Barcelona for a mysterious author whose book has proved as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bryson can render it.
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary Lovell
This engrossing narrative captures the distinct personalities of six headstrong, determined and witty women who had a surprisingly pervasive impact on 20th-century social, political and literary history.
Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver
Whether Kingsolver is contemplating the Grand Canyon, motherhood, genetic engineering or the future of a nation, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as from our own backyards, and that answers may lie in both places.
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings — for love, art, power and God — set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.
Sometimes a Great Notion: A Novel by Ken Kesey
The legendary Oregon author tells a wild-spirited and hugely powerful tale of an Oregon coastal logging town torn by lumber strike and family differences.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
A charismatic Jesuit priest leads a 21st-century scientific mission to a newly-discovered extraterrestrial culture.
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
"Uproariously funny" doesn't seem a likely description for a book on cadavers. However, Roach, a Salon and Reader's Digest columnist, has done the nearly impossible and written a book as informative and respectful as it is irreverent and witty.
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
Two men meet while traveling and play at concocting mutually beneficial murder plans. At the end of the journey, one man takes it seriously. A classic thriller.
The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith
The author of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency introduces a new series that takes place in Edinburgh and features an amateur sleuth, Isabel, who feels morally bound to solve problems that are none of her business, including a murder.
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
In her first novel for adults, the Newbery medalist and bestselling author pens an exciting, beautifully written, erotic addition to the popular vampire genre.
The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction by Tim O'Brien
With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America's most controversial war.
A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
Russell tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of 43,000 Jews during the war's final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, this is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history and marvelous characters.
The Time Traveler's Wife: A Novel by Audrey Niffenegger
A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
How do social epidemics — whether they be hush puppies or STDs — work? This elegant book examines significant social trends and their reflection of that elusive critical mass: collective consciousness.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, the conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice.
The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Explores illegal immigration in a gripping story of two couples in Southern California who live in close proximity but are worlds apart. One couple live in an exclusive housing development and the other couple have crossed the border illegally are desperately looking for work and a place to live before their baby is born.
The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy
In Nazi-occupied Poland, two Jewish children are renamed Hansel and Gretel and then left by their father and stepmother to seek safety in the forest, where they encounter an eccentric old woman who cares for them.
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
In her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.
Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom
The author recounts his weekly visits with a dying teacher who years before had set him straight.
Vintage Lopez by Barry Lopez
Lopez is an unparalleled explorer of the relationship between humanity and nature, one he describes in prose that is both beautiful and economical.
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson
Bryson hauls his out-of-shape, middle-aged butt over hill and dale in this delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes.
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Markham — aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty — tells the story of her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.
When the Elephants Dance: A Novel by Tess Uriza Holthe
In the waning days of World War II, the Filipino people were caught between a brutal Japanese occupation and battling U.S. forces. In this novel, 13-year-old Alejandro Karangalan, his spirited older sister Isabelle, and Domingo, a passionate guerilla commander, narrate the story of the Karangalans — a family who waits out the war huddled with their neighbors in the cellar of a house near Manila.
When the Emperor Was Divine: A Novel by Julie Otsuka
The story of an unnamed Japanese American family's internment during World War II. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination — both physical and emotional — of a generation of Japanese Americans.
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
In 1666, a young woman comes of age during an extraordinary year of love and death. Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a "plague village" in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history.

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