Books for December
1st book of December - December 1st- 16th
2nd book of December - December 16th-31st
The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci -- clues visible for all to see -- yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.
Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion -- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.
In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can deipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret -- and an explosive hysterical truth -- will be lost forever.
THE DA VINCI CODE heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightening-paced, intelligent thriller…utterly unpredictable right up to its stunning conclusion.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale.... Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family - their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it."
Secret History by Donna Tartt
This well-written first novel attempts to be several things: a psychological suspense thriller, a satire of collegiate mores and popular culture, and a philosophical bildungsroman. Supposedly brilliant students at a posh Vermont school (Bennington in thin disguise) are involved in two murders, one supposedly accidental and one deliberate. The book's many allusions, both literary and classical (the students are all classics majors studying with a professor described as both a genius and a deity) fail to provide the deeper resonance of such works as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose .
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion’s widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke out whatever meager promise isn’t already boarded up.
Miles Roby gazes over this ruined kingdom from the Empire Grill, an opportunity of his youth that has become the albatross of his daily and future life. Called back from college and set to work by family obligations-his mother ailing, his father a loose cannon-Miles never left home again. Even so, his own obligations are manifold: a pending divorce; a troubled younger brother; and, not least, a peculiar partnership in the failing grill with none other than Mrs. Whiting. All of these, though, are offset by his daughter, Tick, whom he guides gently and proudly through the tribulations of adolescence.
A decent man encircled by history and dreams, by echoing churches and abandoned mills, by the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors, Miles is also a patient, knowing guide to the rich, hardscrabble nature of Empire Falls: fathers and sons and daughters, living and dead, rich and pooralike. Shot through with the mysteries of generations and the shattering visitations of the nation at large, it is a social novel of panoramic ambition, yet at the same time achingly personal. In the end, Empire Falls reveals our worst and best instincts, both our most appalling nightmares and our simplest hopes, with all the vision, grace and humanity of truly epic storytelling.
Everyone's Burning: A Novel by Ian Spiegelman
A young man without prospects finds his place in the universe--as a young woman's slave.
Poised somewhere between high school and adulthood, Leon Koch roams the bars and bedrooms of Bayside, Queens, twenty minutes and a thousand psychic miles from Manhattan--a multicultural landscape where the line dividing the middle class from the street gangs has been obliterated. With his two best friends just out of prison for pipe-bombing a house, Koch discovers that cocaine and alcohol have imbued him with "superpowers," twisting his mind into a plexus where love, fear, violence, and intimacy are indistinguishable. As life becomes a waking nightmare spent fighting with police, predators, and the law-abiding, unscarred citizens he dismisses as "normals," Koch drives relentlessly toward a fantasy zone. What he finds is a fetishistic realm of worship and ritual where people are never quite certain whether they're role-playing or getting played by their roles. Testing the bounds of sensation under the constant threat of violence, Koch explores a world that is a slave to its own secrets, where freedom exists only in a 911 call from the brink of self-annihilation.
Told in a hallucinatory, street-poetic voice, Everyone's Burning depicts the lives and deaths of a generation that raised itself on Star Wars, talk shows, and Charles Manson interviews. Koch is a bleary yet gimlet-eyed tour guide through one of their neighborhoods.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut's first novel, an unforgiving portrait of an automated and totalitarian future, was published in 1952. A human revolt against the machines which control life was arranged by the machines themselves to prove the futility of such resistance. Visionary and unrelenting, this is felt by some critics to be Vonnegut's best and most original novel.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colorful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will witness the making of history from its edge, dressing in the flamboyant fashions of each day, following passing customs, and socializing with celebrated artists and writers. Orlando's journey will also be an internal one -- he is an impulsive poet who learns patience in matters of the heart, and a woman who knows what it is to be a man. Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, Orlando is a funny, exuberant romp through history that examines the true nature of sexuality.
Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne
He didn't intend to burn half of Berkeley to the ground, or create a media frenzy by faking his best friend's suicide, or enroll in high school dressed as an elderly Italian woman. However, he did. Nick Twisp started out an honor student and ended up a fugitive. Youth in Revolt is the journals of Nick Twisp, California's most precocious diarist, whose ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity result in his transformation from an unassuming fourteen-year-old to modern youth in open revolt. As his family splinters, worlds collide, and the police block all routes out of town, Nick must cope with economic deprivation, homelessness, the gulag of the public schools, a competitive Type-A father, murderous canines (in triplicate), and an inconvenient hair trigger on his erectile response - all while vying ardently for the affections of the beauteous Sheeni Saunders, teenage goddess and ultimate intellectual goad. He's smart, he's horny, he's resourceful, and he's on the loose. Youth in Revolt is Nick Twisp's own story.