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Drood
By Dan Simmons
Everyone knows the name Charles Dickens, but only dedicated mystery buffs remember his friend and fellow writer Wilkie Collins. This is an injustice Collins wishes to rectify from the grave, so he reaches out to you, “Dear Reader” of the future, to describe his life and longings in this first-person account (ostensibly written in the 1860s for posthumous publication).
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Top of the List: 2008
Every January, Booklist publishes Editors’ Choice: lists of the best books, databases, video/DVDs, and audiobooks of the past year. From these lists, we further select what we call the Top of the List: the single best title in eight categories—Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Youth Fiction, Youth Nonfiction, Youth Picture Book, Video, Audio, and Reference Source.
Adult Nonfiction
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. By Mark Harris. Penguin, $27.95 (9781594201523).
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“Add Mark Harris to the short short list of film writers who can tell a story. And what a story it is! Harris uses the Academy Award nominations for Best Picture of 1967 (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Doolittle) as the lens through which to view the cultural revolution of the late 1960s as it affected the movies.”
—Bill Ott, Booklist, January 1 & 15, 2008
Adult Fiction
Lush Life. By Richard Price. Farrar, $26 (9780374299255).
.jpg) “Lush Life is deceptively simple. On New York’s gentrifying Lower East Side, two boys from the projects hold up three men, killing one. Two cops investigate. But Price’s investigation is no mere police procedural, scouring away layers of self-defense in all of his vividly drawn characters. Such is his talent that we care about them all equally.”
—Keir Graff, Booklist, December 1, 2007
Youth Fiction
Little Audrey. By Ruth White. Farrar, $16 (9780374345808).
.jpg) “Based on incidents from her own life and told in the voice of her older sister, White offers a heartfelt story of what it’s like to be poor, hungry, and sometimes happy. It’s 1948, and Audrey lives in a Virginia coal-mining camp. The first-person narrative allows readers to see clearly the real people who inhabit this world and how hunger or the fear of it taints everything.”
—Ilene Cooper, Booklist, September 1, 2008
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| Sometimes life just hands a nonfiction writer a hook: in the latest entry in the dual-biography sweepstakes, Adam Gopnik builds an intriguing book, Angels and Ages, out of a simple but startling coincidence: the fact that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, February 12, 1809.
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Jonah Winter starts out his new book nearly sputtering with incredulity: “You gotta be kidding! You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!” Maybe you have, and maybe you haven’t, but by the end of this picture-book biography, you’ll be captivated by the legendary lefty’s pitching-mound heroics.
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Reader Richard Poe lends his voice to the grieving, guilt-stricken, and mute title character in David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. With Oprah’s stamp of approval, this audiobook is sure to be in high demand.
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Books by Booklist Authors: Michael Cart’s Talking Animals and Others
By Gillian Engberg
Even if they have never picked up a Freddy the Pig book, readers of Michael Cart’s Carte Blanche column, a favorite of Booklist subscribers for nearly 15 years, have more than a glancing familiarity with the famous porcine sleuth. In addition to the always insightful musings on young-adult literature’s past, present, and future, Cart’s columns have included frequent, heartfelt references to the animal residents of Bean Farm, including a few entirely Freddy-focused tributes, such as “Hog Heaven,” which ran in Booklist’s March 15, 1998, issue, or “Freddy the Detective,” in the May 1, 2002, issue. Yet these columns were just a preview of the labor of love that has occupied Cart for decades: a critical biography of Freddy’s creator, Walter R. Brooks.
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