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LIT HUB'S HOME FOR BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK MARKS BULLETIN 10/8

In literary land this week, in non-kidney-related news: Noname opened an LA library dedicated to the Black experience; a very cool 7-year-old noticed his local library had almost no books centering kids with disabilities so he organized a wildly successful book drive; and a Virginia library is encouraging kids to read with... robots.

Here at Book Marks,  we got rapid-fire book recs from Jen Winston and  Margaret Verble, and we rounded up the best science-fiction and fantasy titles of spooky season.

The Best Reviewed Books of the Week

FICTION

1. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

 20 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE •  5 MIXED

“[A] mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. Crossroads is warmer than anything he’s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect.”  –Dwight Garner (The New York Times)  

=2. Fight Night by Miriam Toews

7 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“This material could have been strident, but the wonder of Fight Night is that it’s a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who have learned to fight against adversity.”  –Michael Magras (BookPage)  

=2. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

8 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED • 1 PAN

“Towles binds the novel with compassion and scrupulous detail: his America brims with outcasts scrambling over scraps from the Emerald City, con artists behind the curtain, the innocents they exploit.”  –Hamilton Cain (The Washington Post)  

4. 1979 by Val McDermid

6 RAVE • 1 POSITIVE

“McDermid can do edge-of-seat suspense better than most novelists. But what really lingers in the mind is the world she has created in 1979, long before the internet and the end of the Cold War.”  –Andrew Taylor (The Spectator)  

5. Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo

3 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE • 2 MIXED

“With her anagrammatic take on the experience of the African diaspora, Onuzo’s sneakily breezy, highly entertaining novel leaves the reader rethinking familiar narratives of colonization, inheritance and liberation.”  –Bliss Broyard (The New York Times Book Review)  

NONFICTION

1. A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris

5 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE

“What he does in his exquisitely crafted essays is reconstruct his life as a funny story, the kind you’d hear at a dinner party if you were very lucky in your friendships.”  –Liana Fink (The New York Times Book Review)  

2. Speak, Silence by Carole Angier

4 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“Ultimately, the brilliance of her biography, a spectacularly agile work of criticism as well as a feat of doggedly meticulous research, lies in Angier’s ability to look her subject straight in the eye while holding on to the sense of adoration that made her want to write it in the first place.”  –Anthony Cummins (The Guardian)  

3. Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh

4 RAVE • 2 POSITIVE

“Mr. Sanneh, a staff writer for the New Yorker, gets high marks both for his encyclopedic knowledge and his breadth of taste. He also writes like an angel, making Major Labels one of the best books of its kind in decades.”  –David Kirby (The Wall Street Journal)  

4. King of the Blues by Daniel de Visé

5 RAVE

“The book expertly interweaves King’s music career into the U.S. social fabric, especially the civil rights movement … With this fast-moving, informative, evenhanded, and exhaustive biography, de Visé vividly captures King’s life.”  –David P. Szatmary (Library Journal)  

5. There Is Nothing for You Here by Fiona Hill

2 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE

“[A] valuable and riveting historic document … Hill’s personal, professional and political lives form a coherent whole so that each part illuminates the other.”  –Gideon Rachman (Financial Times)  

Books Making the News This Week

Biggest New Books: Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads, Miriam Toews' Fight Night, Claire Vaye Watkins' I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness, Eugene Lim's Search History, Tracy K. Smith's Such Color, and Stanley Tucci's Taste are some of the biggest titles hitting shelves this week.

Books Deals: National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree Moriel Rothman-Zecher's Before All the World, where two Jewish immigrants leave the traumas of a pogrom for Philadelphia, finding kinship and recognition with a young, Black writer and communist, and reckoning with the very real nightmares of early 20th century amerike, has been sold to FSG; Cohost of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour Aisha Harris's Wannabe: Figuring Out a Life Through Pop Culture, a collection of essays blending the personal and critical, charting the author's coming of age as a young Black woman in a predominantly white Connecticut town and eventually finding her voice as a cultural critic, to Harper One; Olympic champion and elite runner Caster Semenya's Silence All the Noise, a story of courage, resilience, and hope, about the author's childhood in rural South Africa, her running career, and her experience as an intersex woman in professional sports, to Norton; Pulitzer-winning reporter David Streitfeld's Western Star: Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove, and the Making of an American Myth, a biography of the writer whose books and movies helped create—and sometimes did their best to subvert—the beloved and brutal mythology of Texas and the Southwest, written by a longtime friend, to Mariner; and author of Reese's Book Club Pick and NYT Notable Book of 2020 His Only Wife Peace Adzo Medie's Nightbloom, focused on the dueling stories of two Ghanaian girls who, while inseparable in childhood, grow up to lead very different lives an ocean apart until a family crisis calls one back home to Ghana, to Algonquin.

Adaptation Announcements: Esi Edugyan's Washington Black is coming to Hulu, starring Sterling K. Brown; the trailer for the musical adaptation of Cyrano was released, with Peter Dinklage in the leading role; Midnight Mass creator Mike Flanagan is adapting Poe's short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher" for TV; and it looks like we'll be getting an adaptation of Sue Grafton's alphabet series.

Awards Circuit: The finalists for the National Book Awards have been announced, and Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Most Viewed Books of the Week

According to traffic data from Book Mark's widget and website

1. ↑ 208.90% The Lincoln Highway  AMOR TOWLES

2. ↑ 9.46% Cloud Cuckoo Land  ANTHONY DOERR

3. ↑ 53.85% Bewilderment  RICHARD POWERS

4. ↑ 126.24% Matrix  LAUREN GROFF

5. ↑ 595.96% Hell of a Book  JASON MOTT

6. ↑ 814.67% Zorrie  LAIRD HUNT

7. ↓ 59.32% Beautiful World Where Are You  SALLY ROONEY

8. ↑ 97.60% Crossroads  JONATHAN FRANZEN

9. ↑ 482.22% The Prophets  ROBERT JONES, JR.

10. ↑ 1,385.00% The Ugly Cry  DANIELLE HENDERSON

(*Percentages based on week-to-week change in total views.)

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