Fiction:
The Corrections and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen: Although I think a lot of people eschew Franzen's writing, I personally find it invigorating, witty, and even poetic. IMO, Franzen is basically the bees' knees in the literary world today (a statement I am hilariously unqualified to make). I am at a loss to decide which is the better of Franzen's two most recent books. While The Corrections is more comic and less flawed than Freedom, the latter is more relevant today and its bleakness about the state of affairs in America and about humanity in general is only so harsh to read because it is so convincing. Both novels are very powerful though, and you should read both of them. Immediately. Run, little birdie, go read them! (I just told you to run and then called you a bird. I guess you're an ostrich or something.)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: The only "schoolbook" I decided to put on this list, not because I didn't enjoy anything else I read for school this year (I thought Sister Carrie was awesome enough to join the honored bees' knees ranks of The Corrections and Freedom), but mostly because I already had a sentence I wrote about this book at hand. And here is that sentence: "Beneath Little Women's thick gild of cozy Christianity and warm sentimentality, there pulses a burning core of frustrated feminine rage." Good sentence, right? True too, the book acts as a fascinating portrait of Alcott's inner frustrations and struggles with the limitations in her own life and for women in all of society.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon: A dog has been stabbed with a garden fork, and an autistic boy sets out to solve the mystery of the dog's murder in the style of his literary hero Sherlock Holmes. Told in first person from the autistic boy's point-of-view, Haddon deftly avoids either sentimentalizing or trivializing his protagonist's disorder, instead giving us a character with both rich mental complexity and terrifying problems, without either of those things being contradictions.
Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue: Another tricky first-person narrative, this one from the point-of-view of a five-year-old boy who's spent his entire life in one tiny room, kept there with his mother by a psychopath the boy knows only as "Old Nick." While Room contains some of the most terrifying and suspenseful stuff I've ever read, its young protagonist's narration keeps the book from ever becoming too unbearable, and his naivety recasts his world in an almost poetic light. (In the novel's opening scene, the boy describes "waterfalling" milk into his cereal bowl.) A deeply moving novel about motherhood and the sacrifices and demands it necessitates, I highly recommend it.
Falling Man by Don DeLillo: This short novel follows the lives of a 9/11 survivor and his family as they cope with our nation's greatest modern tragedy. DeLillo plays here with time and voice, drifting in between paragraphs from one narrator to another, from years before the disaster to the weeks after. In less skilled hands, such a conceit might confuse or alienate, but in DeLillo's meditative prose, this drifting instead reflects the internal chaos and melancholy of its protagonists. The novel gradually follows its characters to 2007, showing how they, and the rest of the country, have come to internalize and cope with the events of 9/11, before concluding with a devastating first-person account of the World Trade Center's Collapse.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman: Oh man, you guys... I love this book. I think I want to marry it. You are cordially invited to the wedding celebration of Benjamin Joseph Baker and The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I don't know how to sell this book to you because I want you to read it but I also want you to read it knowing very little about it. You shouldn't even read the back cover, it gives too much away. Look, you like Harry Potter, right? Of course you do. This book is like that, only R-rated. Well, that's an oversimplification. It's more an author grappling with how to reconcile his childhood love for fantasy books (Narnia in particular) and his understanding that most children's fantasy is hinged on the suspension of the sort of psychological detail and realism that animate the modern novel. The Magicians basically finds a way to fuse both those things together, which is reflected not only in its construction but in the story itself too. It's a great book, and Grossman is not afraid to take his characters to some unpleasant emotional places. That ending is a gut punch.
Well, that's it. Now go out there and read, kiddos!
