A Word About Awards

THE STRANGER by Albert Camus   Awards: Nobel Winner 1989, PEN/Translation Winner 1989   Date Read: July 20, 2001   From Kirkus Reviews: “A strange interlude, in the first person, in which a young man, nameless and emotionless, tells of the circumstances which led ironically, implacably to his death. Living in Algiers in a rooming house, he is called away for the funeral of his mother, in the home for the aged where he had placed her. Untouched by her death, he returns home, to Marie, his girl, and to the involvement with Raymond, a fellow roomer, and the shooting of an Arab native in Raymond's defense, Months of imprisonment, inaction, finally the trial which leads to the death sentence, not for the crime, but for the character condemnation by witnesses for his indifference to his mother's death. For all its impervious detachment, this has a certain odd fascination, though its market will be limited.”

ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy   Award: Oprah Book Club 2004, PEN/Translation Winner 2002   Date Read: October 20, 2003   From Wikipedia: “Many writers consider Anna Karenina to be one of the greatest works of literature ever written, and Tolstoy himself called it his first true novel.    Anna Karenina deals with themes of  betrayal ,   faith, family, marriage,  Russian Empire society,  desire, and rural vs. city life. The story centers on an extramarital affair  between Anna and dashing  Cavalry officer  Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky that scandalizes the social circles of  Saint Petersburg  and forces the young lovers to flee to Italy in a search for happiness, but after they return to Russia, their lives further unravel.   Anna Karenina   consists of more than the story of Anna Karenina, a married socialite, and her affair. The story starts when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother's unbridled womanizing—something that prefigures her own later situation,

THE KITE RUNNER by Khaled Hosseini   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2005   Date Read: August 11, 2007   From Kirkus Review: “Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.   Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the

THE ELECTRICAL FIELD by Kerri Sakamoto   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2000   Date Read: January 16, 2003   From Kirkus Reviews: “A lugubrious debut novel describing a middle-aged woman’s attempts to come to terms with the mystery of her best friend’s murder. In comparison to most Westerners, the Japanese are famed for both their restraint and their highly developed sense of honor. This can make difficult burdens even harder to bear, of course, even after the passage of many years, just as it makes them harder to describe. In her narration, Asako Saito is well aware of this: “I had long ago understood you had to live in the midst of things to be affected, in the swirl of the storm, you might say. . . .You couldn—t simply sit and watch, imagining from time to time how such-and-such would feel, would be, what happened to others and not to you.” Like most Japanese living on the West Coast, Asako and her family were interned in camps during WWII, and the shame of this particular memory has n

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by John Green   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2014   Date Read: March 15, 2014   From Kirkus Review: “He’s in remission from the osteosarcoma that took one of his legs. She’s fighting the brown fluid in her lungs caused by tumors. Both know that their time is limited.   Sparks fly when Hazel Grace Lancaster spies Augustus “Gus” Waters checking her out across the room in a group-therapy session for teens living with cancer. He’s a gorgeous, confident, intelligent amputee who always loses video games because he tries to save everyone. She’s smart, snarky and 16; she goes to community college and jokingly calls Peter Van Houten, the author of her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, her only friend besides her parents. He asks her over, and they swap novels. He agrees to read the Van Houten and she agrees to read his—based on his favorite bloodbath-filled video game. The two become connected at the hip, and what follows is a smartly crafted intellectual explosion of

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN by Paula Hawkins   Award: Goodreads Winner 2015 Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2017   Date Read: April 19, 2015   From Kirkus Reviews: “Desperate to find lives more fulfilling than her own, a lonely London commuter imagines the story of a couple she’s only glimpsed through the train window in Hawkins’ chilling, assured debut, in which the line between truth and lie constantly shifts like the rocking of a train.   Rachel Watson—a divorced, miserable alcoholic who’s still desperately in love with her ex-husband, Tom—rides the same train every day into London for her dead-end job, one she unsurprisingly loses after one too many drunken outbursts. Continuing her daily commute to keep up appearances with her roommate, Rachel always pays special attention to a couple, whom she dubs “Jess and Jason,” who live a seemingly idyllic life in a house near her own former home. When she sees a momentary act of infidelity, followed soon after by news that Jess—whose real name is Meg

EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2016   Date Read: November 3, 2015   From Kirkus Reviews: “Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.   When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parents—blonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor James—older brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydia—a promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother

THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2005   Date Read: October 5, 2006   From Kirkus Reviews: “In an updated quest for the Holy Grail, the narrative pace remains stuck in slo-mo.   But is the Grail, in fact, holy? Turns out that’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a member of that most secret of clandestine societies, the Priory of Sion, you think yes. But if your heart belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, the Grail is more than just unholy, it’s downright subversive and terrifying. At least, so the story goes in this latest of Brown’s exhaustively researched, underimagined treatise-thrillers (Deception Point, 2001, etc.). When Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon—in Paris to deliver a lecture—has his sleep interrupted at two a.m., it’s to discover that the police suspect he’s a murderer, the victim none other than Jacques Saumière, esteemed curator of the Louvre. The evidence against Langdon could hardly be sketchier, but the cops feel huge pressure