Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Black Swan Green has to be one of the funnest books I've read in years. Take a modern day adventure tale and mix it with a kid who's most of us as we were at 12 or 13 and you get a painstakingly hilarious reminder of all the moments we've chosen to forget in adulthood. David Mitchell has created the character of Jason Taylor in his newest(2006) book. He's 13, he lives in a sleepy small town, and suffers from a ghost of a stutter. I'm not saying that it's a faint stutter. I like to think of it more as a goblin or spirit that seems to have a mind of its own. Let's just say that since so few of us were emotionally and physically perfect in those early teenage years, Jason Taylor will feel so familiar (whether you stuttered or not).

What Mitchell does in this novel is link 13 short stories together into a broad expanse of a year to cover every detail of his character's life. Here's the zinger. There are countless books about adolescence, but it's as if Mitchell sat down at that age and took notes. Detailed notes. Notes about what it felt like, what it sounded like, and what it looked like in 1982 before he grew up and forgot it all. It's what's missing in so many nostalgic novels; the feeling behind it.

I remember living as a kid in a section of town with tight housing. Any chance I got I was climbing houses and running over rooftops, spanning entire neighborhoods in a day. It's this type of trouble that occurs in Black Swan Green. It's outdoor trouble mostly, allowing the reader to journey with Jason Taylor unconfined by tight prose. Believe me, read this book and you'll smile in a way you haven't in say oh, however many years it was since you were 13.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an engulfing, interesting, and disturbing novel. It tells the story of a young Princeton graduate, Chengez, seemingly on top of the world when the attacks on the World Trade Centers happen. He is forced to confront what his Middle-Eastern heritage means in a post-9/11 world. We also meet Erica, whose life is woven inextricably with Chengez's. While she is arguably the flattest character in the novel, we see what unreasonable loss can do and how it's possible never to recoup. While her character is recovering from an event that took place far earlier than 9/11, Hamid forces the loss in New York onto her psyche, showing us that sometimes we can't go back to ease or sanity in the face of large-scale grief. Like Chengez, the reader is eventually shut-out of her world as well.

The novel is sparse and rests on the conversation between two men. In the silences between their words the reader becomes truly engaged. One thing is for sure, The Reluctant Fundamentalist pulls you in and forces you to have an opinion. This is no neutral book, but it isn't quite as simple as taking sides. What stands out about Hamid's story is his ability to paint a complex character that can't be forced inside an argument of right vs. wrong. Aside from this one , I haven't read a novel that resonates so specifically in the Zeitgeist of the last ten years.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

I've been flying a little bit more than usual lately and on my way out the door on my way to Florida, I grabbed Vendela Vida's newest book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I've delayed writing about it because I thought I would be able to find a perfect way to describe it, but I keep landing on the word "crystalline." I don't mean it so much in that I feel this book is transparant. It's sharp and jagged and beautiful. Maybe that is the only way I can describe it. Being set mostly north of the Arctic Circle, the landscape lends itself to such terms, as snow does; we all become nostalgic and innocent when the snow is deep. Combine that with a sharp, focused prose and we receive an elegiac tightly-woven novel that is so linked to the landscape that it couldn't be any other way.

Like the main character (and I suspect us all), I feel it's hard to go home. The precious difference between Clarissa Iverton's trip north and my own trip south is that when I land, while it will always be a little bit strange and disconnected, it will always be warm.

I've been curious about Vida's work since I started reading The Believer. I'd glad I started here. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is an addictive and necessary novel, one of those rare works that tells us what we already know in a completely new language.