Book Rec of the Day 12/25-12/28/2008

THE NEW CHRISTMAS CLASSIC

There’s Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and a host of others. We love them. We read them to our children. Then we put the children to bed, go downstairs, and take out Holidays on Ice and have a Christmas reading for the adults. Rib-achingly funny, it should be a Yuletide tradition.

HOLIDAYS ON ICE: STORIES, by David Sedaris (Back Bay Books, 1998)

CRITICS RAVE
“A thoroughly original tale . . . wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed . . . that rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The families of two academic rivals are forced to deal with each other when the son of one falls in love with the daughter of the other. Smith’s third novel is a lively, smart, and witty exploration of class, race, and gender built on what she calls the “classy old frame” of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End.

ON BEAUTY, by Zadie Smith (Penguin, 2005)

KILLER FICTION
Harry Bosch, leaving retirement to return to the LAPD, is assigned to the Open Unsolved Unit. His first case is that of a teenage girl murdered 17 years ago. She was the daughter of a mixed-race marriage, and new DNA testing of blood on the murder weapon points to a hate crime. Other evidence suggests a cover-up in the department. Connelly, a master of the police procedural, has given us another first-rate specimen of the genre.

THE CLOSERS, by Michael Connelly (Warner Books, 2006)

FAMILY OF STRANGERS

“A novel whose addictive embrace continues after the last page has been turned.”—Publishers Weekly

A year after the death of their mother, the siblings of the Cohen family find that their eldest sister has gone missing. While their father has an affair with a “tart,” his adult children try to cope. One gets married, one looks after a sister who is mentally unstable, and the only brother wastes his life on gambling, drink, and women. From the 1920s to the 1950s the saga of this family, “the most familiar of strangers,” unfolds—discerningly and luminously written.

THE FIRST DESIRE, by Nancy Reisman (Anchor, 2005)