nomadreader

The backstory: The Sellout  won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and has been longlisted for the 2016  Booker Prize . It was also a 2015 New York Times  Notable Book  (including being honored as one of the five best fiction titles of the year) and a contestant in the 2016 Tournament of Books . The basics:  "A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant."--publisher My thoughts: The first ten percent or so of this book had me thinking, "this may be the most provocative and brilliant thing I've ever read." I should remind myself when I get that excited about a book that early, it's nearly impossib...

The backstory: Originally written in 1998 and rejected by publishers, Lionel Shriver's The New Republic  still feels like a modern, contemporary novel. The basics: The New Republic  is a satire of terrorism, which sounds preposterous, but Shriver manages to be witty, evocative, informative and engaging. Corporate lawyer Edgar Kellogg decides he wants to become a journalist. With little experience, he lands an interview at a national newspaper. Against the odds, he gets a job covering Barta, an invented peninsula off of Portugal that has a newly active homegrown terrorist group. The reporter who had been covering it, Barrington Sadler, has gone missing. The job is Edgar's until Barrington returns. My thoughts: Despite having read and enjoyed two of Shriver's earlier novels, We Need to Talk About Kevin and So Much for That -- which made my top 10 of 2010 , I was somewhat apprehensive about The New Republic . Would it really be good enough to publish now when it wasn'...