2008: The Year in Review

Reviewed on this blog...

Atonement
The Naked and the Dead
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Water for Elephants
The Varieties of Human Experience
How to Be Alone [Selections]
Borges [Selections]
Barbarians at the Gate

... and not reviewed. A few words on some of them ...

The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
Recommended by Tom Schopflocher. Does not involve dwarves (ask him about his passion for said mythical creatures). Devilishly twisted.

Darkness Visible, William Styron and An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
These two go hand in hand. Powerful first-hand accounts of what it is like to have bipolar disorder.

The Rise and Fall of LTCM, Roger Lowenstein
"On account of a crisis... [the President of the New York Fed] had summoned - "invited," in the Fed's restrained idiom - the heads of every major Wall Street bank. The chiefs of Bankers Trust, Bear Stearns, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, J.P Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Salomon Smith Barney gathered under the oil portraits in the Fed's tenth-floor boardroom - not to bail out a Latin American nation but to consider a rescue of one of their own." Sound familiar?

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Highly, highly recommended. Experiencing a revival in advance of the release of an upcoming movie adaptation with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. Scariest book I have read in a long time.

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Mystery set in San Francisco by the writer that essentially invented the hard-boiled detective novel.

Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Remember the Lobster [Selections], David Foster Wallace
Is it ethical to eat lobsters? Also, if you read nothing else by David Foster Wallace, read this. All other advice given in commencement speeches pales pitifully in comparison.