“My favorite book of 2011 was ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot (Crown, 2010). I read the book in three days during a trip to Mexico over the summer, and I embodied the ‘could-not-put-it-down’ cliché. I brought the book with me to meals and read it while eating. I sat in a room by myself for hours with this book, ignoring the beach, the sun, and all human contact. Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cancerous cells were taken from her without her knowledge in the 1950s. After her death, Lacks’s cells strangely multiplied indefinitely, becoming ‘immortal,’ and were subsequently used in groundbreaking scientific research around the world. Skloot interweaves Lacks's history with encounters with Lacks's surviving family members, science writing, explorations of ethics and racism, and Skloot's own personal experiences as a journalist trying to enter into the lives of a troubled and wary family. I was stunned both by the story itself and Skloot's expert and seamless craft; I felt personally invested in following Skloot on her obsessive and passionate journey toward discovering the truth about a woman whose story challenges us to think deeply about the ethical questions raised by science.”

“I found Carol Shields’s Unless (Fourth Estate, 2002) at our local Friends of the Library used-book sale fund-raiser. I recognized Shields as the author of a novel I had really enjoyed back in the early nineties—The Stone Diaries (Viking, 1993). I knew anything written by her would be a treasure and I was not disappointed. A rush of storytelling, like a wave crashing upon an empty beach at dawn, suddenly the reader is pulled under and moving with the tide. What is more beautiful than a novel that finds a way to worship the process of writing as Shields’s does in the first chapter of Unless: ‘I thought I understood something of a novel’s architecture, the lovely slope of predicament, the tendrils of surface detail, the calculated curving upward into inevitability, yet allowing spells of incorrigibility, and then the ending, a corruption of cause and effect and the gathering together of all the characters into a framed operatic circle of consolation and ecstasy, backlit with fibre-optic gold, just for a moment on the second-to-last page, just for an atomic particle of time’? My mind drools, so in love with this language am I.”

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House, 2010) by David Mitchell was a volume I purchased on a whim. I had previously read Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas (Random House) and was not very impressed by it, but the glowing review from Dave Eggers on the Thousand Autumns cover gave me a great deal of hope. I probably would have liked the book from the start if I had not read the cover copy, but burdened with this information, I found the book very hard to read initially. In fact, I stopped half way through. I had developed a great deal of compassion for the main character and the Japanese midwife he was attracted to. According to the back of the book, something terrible would happen, morally speaking, and I was concerned that I would find this upcoming twist unbelievable, or unbearable. However, after putting the book down for four months, I returned to it and found myself reading it compulsively. The twist I feared never came, the warning on the back was false. The book instead became more and more preoccupied with faith, a word not even mentioned on the back. Thousand Autumns has stayed with me in a way few modern books do, the names of characters bringing the same smile to my face as the names of old friends do. The writing is elegant, memorable, and strangely charming. The story is unlike any you would commonly encounter in contemporary literature."

“My reading tends toward innovative fiction, especially fiction written by novelists unafraid of exploring the possibilities of language and style—those such as Nathanial Mackey, Percival Everett, Mary Caponegro, Joanna Scott, and Brian Evanson. When I discover authors whose work I admire, I try to find out whose work they admire, then track down their work and so on. I also tend to choose titles from publishers I respect (e.g., Dalkey Archive, New Directions, and Coffee House Press). Dave Kress’s Hush, published by MAMMOTH Books in 2010, which published my first novel back in 2002, is a fascinating work of sheer fiction that jigs in a kind of snake handler’s ecstasy at the dangerous four-way intersection of religion, language, sex, and…bowling. To spin his narrative, which is at once otherworldly and down to earth, Kress has produced a startling narrative voice in protagonist Reanne Mone, sole member of the Church of God the Silence and sporadic freshman at Bristol County Community College in fictional Awnry, Massachusetts. Mone’s is the voice of a young woman whose intelligence outreaches her vocabulary but who nonetheless crafts an outrageous, sexualized, hilarious, and highly personal bible out of her own harrowing circumstances. She does so with a charming fearlessness, and ants-in-the pants brio, and a philatelist’s attention to detail. To say the least, Kress’s uproarious blend of sex, slapstick, scripture, and semiotics gave me whiplash of the mind that had me, on reaching the final page, turning immediately back to the first.”