50 Books You’ll Want To Read in 2010 (Pt 2)

Yes, yes, maybe we should mention the fact that Orhan Pamuk and Richard Powers (entitled The Museum of Innocence and Generosity, respectively) both have new novels out in 2010 but – you know what? For whatever reason (and we’re willing to admit the failing is our own) Pamuk and Powers don’t float our proverbial boat. These books on the other hand…

1. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen – Almost a decade in the making, Franzen’s fourth novel and first since the bestselling The Corrections, is soon to see the light of day (‘Good Neighbours‘, an excerpt from Freedom ran in the New Yorker in June 2009)
2. Nemesis by Philip Roth – Despite the fact that The Humbling has only just hit shelves, another new Philip Roth novel has already been completed for publication next summer (this one more in the vein of The Plot Against America)
3. Wild Child by TC Boyle – Featuring the eponymous novella (‘written’ by the heroine of Boyle’s Talk Talk and previously published in McSweeneys) and a handful of other short stories, expect excellence from a grand master… 
4. Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison – As with recent reissued/re-edited books by Hemingway and Carver, so with Invisible Man author Ellison. 42 years in the making and drawn from over 2,000 manuscript pages…
5. Solar by Ian McEwan – In which the current grand man of the English literary scene ‘does funny’, McEwan’s latest is a broadside against global warming, apparently…
6. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell – Clocking in at a whopping 576 pages and allegedly demonstrating a return to the more fantastical writing on display in the likes of Number 9 Dream (as opposed to the more sombre Black Swan Green)…
7. Point Omega by Don DeLillo – Here’s the early short description: “A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.”
8. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace – called ‘the long thing’ by Wallace and left unfinished at the time of his death, The Pale King may be the book, curiously enough, that gets Wallace a wider readership. People are vultures…
9. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis – When he isn’t slagging off Jordan, he’s writing novels – and his latest concerns ‘a long, hot summer holiday in a castle in Italy, where half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea change of 1970. The result is a tragicomedy of manners, combining the wit of Money with the historical sense of Time’s Arrow and House of Meetings.’ We’ll see eh?
10. Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey – This is Carey in full-on Illywhacker mode methinks. Listen up: ‘Olivier is a French aristocrat, the traumatized child of survivors of the Revolution. Parrot the son of an itinerant printer who always wanted to be an artist but has ended up a servant. When Olivier sets sail for the New World, ostensibly to study its prisons but in reality to save his neck from one more revolution – Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, and their picaresque travels together and apart – in love and politics, prisons and the world of art – Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, with dazzling wit and inventiveness…’

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow: Haruki Murakami! Henning Mankell! Yann Martel! Roddy Doyle! Willy Vlautin! And More!