Rock the vote and go to the One Book - One Lincoln official site to choose Lincoln's 2010 One Book!
I was shocked and delighted to find that The Tortilla Curtain had been selected as one of this year's 5 finalists for the One Book - One Lincoln read. I remember also being shocked 3 years ago, when I read the book for the first time, to note that it in fact had been published in 1995. I found in 2007 that it seemed surprisingly topical, and think it may be even more so now in 2010. And though the political and social issues that drive the narrative of Boyle's novel are relevant and well thought-out, the characters take on a giddy realism that springs almost painfully from the page. I found myself positively aching with Cándido's absolute and oh-so-familiar obsession with the care of his family. Woven together with Dickensian coincidence, T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain is a brave and brilliantly crafted choice for this year's top 5.
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Tracy Chevalier's newest novel is delightfully evocative of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman: the brimming limestone cliffs of Lyme Regis, the stuffy countryside & countrymen about & within it, & - perhaps best of all - women behaving badly. As in, behaving in a manner in which a lady is not to behave; namely engaging in such activities know not to behoove the fairer sex. Dear me, how could they? In the same vein as Chevalier's previous novels, Remarkable Creatures weaves fiction & reality in an engaging & feministic narrative that carries through to a nice, tidy end.
Editor's Note: Tell-All, Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, is just out in hardcover! Quite delicious - Palahniuk fans will be greatly pleased. As the jacket flap says, it's "the hyperactive love child of Page Six and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, caught in a love triangle with The Fan. Even Kitty Kelly will Blush." ~ Kirsten
Haunted is a novel made up of twenty-three stories. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months". Instead of a utopic resort they find themselves in an abandoned theatre, with few supplies and absolutely no contact with the outside world. Haunted is not for the faint of heart; the stories that Palahniuk has crafted test the will of the reader to go on. The book is part satire of reality television, part journey down through the darkest areas of the human psyche.
If you can make it through "Guts", you can make it through anything.
If you let it, Shane Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution will challenge much of your daily routine and how you interact with our world. Because of this, it is not an easy read but a changing one, and honest change rarely comes easily or naturally. If, however, you can work up the courage to open the cover, prepare to have you worldview shaken or even flipped on its head! Claiborne, now a well-known author and activist, is a founder of The Simple Way in Philadelphia, a coalition of professionals, hippies, doctors, bums, activists, dropouts, and PhDs working and living together, investing in the community of people surrounding them. Irresistible Revolution chronicles their life-changing journey and their attempts to catalyze what they view as a complacent population and a stagnant, apathetic church in America.