Sitting on the bedside table

January 2, 2009 / favorite books / 4 Comments »

Another year has begun, another 365 days at my disposal in which to read good books. My To Be Read stack is dangerously high – there are still books there from 2006 and 2007 begging to be elevated to the top after months of forced captivity with the dust bunnies.

But I list here just the handful that I am most looking forward to diving into in 2009, starting with the top three. Can’t wait. . .

When I told someone recently that I had Same Kind of Different as Me sandwiched in the middle of my towering TBR stack, this person enthusiastically insisted I move it right to the top, it’s that good, he said. The subtitle sheds some light on the concept behind this book: Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together. The story is told in two alternating viewpoints, that of a wealthy international art dealer who travels the world and the other, a homeless man who grew up in Louisiana, living a life that wasn’t altogether different from the lives of slave ancestors. One reader-reviewer said: “Each man teaches the other about life and faith. . . [They] offer a glimpse into two worlds that are nearly opposite and shows what happens when these worlds come into contact with each other.” It’s gotten oodles of five-star reviews on Amazon.

Just under Same Kind of Different as Me is The ZooKeeper’s Wife. Research for my Fall 09 book took me mentally to the Warsaw Ghetto and tales of courage I had not heard before, so when I saw this book at Borders it literally called out to me.

In this book, Diane Ackerman presents “the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds. Using Antonina’s diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman takes us into the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 Jewish uprising and also describes the Poles’ revolt against the Nazi occupiers in 1944.” (Publishers Weekly) Stories of the Nazi nightmare in WWII are without fail unspeakably hard to read, but the depth of honor and courage evidenced by those who stood against that kind of evil has always amazed me and probably always will.

My friend Tosca Lee’s Havah has garnered wonderful reviews and everyone I know who has read it has been wowed by this fictionalized tale of Eve. You know, the Garden of Eden Eve. Says Publishers Weekly: “From having known only blissful innocence, [Havah] must struggle through every post-Garden moment. Frustration compounds her plight as she repeatedly attempts to regain her former idyllic existence and repeatedly fails. Havah’s life becomes a fight for survival once she and Adam are cast from the Garden, and Lee’s poetic prose beautifully depicts the couple’s slow surrender to a world tending to destruction. Havah gives birth, raises a brood of children, watches one son kill another, observes disease and death. Yet all the while, she waits for the fulfillment of “the One” (God) who will bring reconciliation and redemption through her seed. Lee’s superior storytelling will have readers weeping for all that Havah forfeited by a single damning choice.”

Also at the near tippy top of my TBR stack: The Guernsey Literary and Potatoe Peel Pie Society, The Heretic’s Daughter, The Lace Reader, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Pillars of the Earth and Anna Karenina.

So many books, so little time! What’s on your TBR stack??