Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book. – Arthur Helps

If there are times you need to be taken away from it all, forget the bath salts and pick up one of the following. These are the books that kept the world at bay, even for just a little bit.

General Fiction/Mystery/Thriller

Don’t Breathe A Word by Jennifer McMahon
Room by Emma Donoghue

Literature/Classic

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Horror

The Strain by Guillermo Del Torro & Chuck Hogan
Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Fantasy

Monster by A. Lee Martinez
The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill

Science Fiction

Boneshaker & Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

Juvenile Fiction

Hieronymus White: A Bird Who Believed That He Was Always Right by Jeff Ross
The Undertakers: Rise of the Corpses by Ty Drago
The Atomic Weight of Secrets by Eden Unger Bowditch
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Young Adult Fiction

The Declaration by Gemma Malley
Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Non-Fiction

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle
Anything by Anthony Bourdain (A Cook’s Tour, Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw, etc.)

If you don’t have these on a wish list or your TBR shelf, take a look at the links and see if they should be. I’d call myself an enabler, but hey, I read your blogs too. I owe ya.

FTC Disclosure: Review copy provided by publisher

Colson Whitehead is either one helluva daredevil who could give a crap about the possible fall-out (or failure) of what’s he’s tried to achieve with Zone One, or a genius. I think he’s both.

He all but destroys the notion that if you write in a particular genre, it has to be told a certain way.

Yes, there will be those who won’t get it or choose not even to try. My experience in the bookstore has made it clear that there are those who never stray from the comfort of what they know and like. Nothing wrong with that. The one thing about reading is that it is the last great stronghold where true freedom of choice resides and we all should have the right to choose, even if it is to choose the same thing over and over.

However, I feel there is a significant number of us who like King as much as Kafka, but fear admitting it. Now we have a hero to help us come to terms with our literary duality. Whitehead takes a pedestrian genre and elevates it well above that which you generally find among the great tomes of the Western Canon.

When it comes to a book, why should it’s trappings, whether it be romance or horror, hold it back from being great literature? Is it merely perceptual or an actual reality? After reading this book, I am heavily leaning toward the former.

The dining hall was pastel and affirming, and no one complained when some rogue operative booted up the old sound system one day and the anodyne instrumentals scored every meal in a ceaseless loop of deracinated pop. The fort’s inhabitants fluttered down the concrete paths in electric carts and every night the windows crackled with the blue glow of screens, as the extensive video library reacquainted these minions of reconstruction with the old entertainments that had meant so much to them. It was hard to believe that there had once been faces like that, the beautiful ones with their promises and lures.

Yet he doesn’t fail to to remind the reader of the reality living behind the exquisite façade of literature:

Some of the marines died. Some of them didn’t hear the warnings until too late for all the gunfire. Some of them lost their bearings in the macabre spectacle, drifting off into reveries of overidealized chapters of their former lives, and were overcome. Some of them were bit, losing baseballs of meat from their arms and legs. Some of them disappeared under hordes, maybe a glove sticking out, waving, and it was unclear if the hand was under the direction of the fallen soldier or if it was being jostled by the feasting.

This is an easy book to recommend at the store where I work. The only caveat I add is to the fan of zombie fiction, advising them that this is not your typical version of the zombiepocalypse.

So far it’s been successful.

I feel as comfortable recommending to a horror fiction fan as I would to a fan of Faulkner or Updike. And I am counting it up there as one of my most favorite reads this year. If you’ve read it, I’d like to hear what you think. Don’t forget to add a link to your review.

As I noted in an earlier post, I’m participating in a read-along of East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

It has been amazing.

The first week has been one of re-discovery, or more like discovery. This is not like any other of Steinbeck’s work. I never came away before with the impressions I have gotten while reading this, a novel even he said was his best:

It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years . . . I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this

In terms of the title, I initially thought of what lays to the East of Eden literally and what it may symbolize. To the east is the land of Nod. A place where one wanders, yet never settles. You may reside there, but it is not home. Home is where you came from, or are looking for, so in a sense, it’s purgatory - at least until you come to that place where you know you belong.

Symbolism is strong in this book. It’s the tool used to engage the reader completely.

In the beginning, there is the Salinas Valley, an integral part of the setting and story. He describes the majesty of the mountains, it’s ability to cast shadow and reflect light. That within this valley there is good and bad, birth and death, feast or famine.

I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous. I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains.

There is a cycle to everything and extremes to those cycles. Such is life and this sets the tone for what lays ahead for the characters and their struggles.

The even greater challenge is the fact that these people came to the valley in search of a home. They are pioneers trying to find their Eden and wondering if they have found it or if they’ve fallen short of their goal. Are they stuck in the land of Nod, or can they make it work, make this valley their Eden.

They landed with no money, no equipment, no tools, no credit, and particularly with no knowledge of the new country and no technique for using it. I don’t know whether it was divine stupidity or a great faith that let them do it . . . And the families did survive and grow . . . I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units – because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back.

Another striking feature of his writing is his characterizations. He finds a way to give the reader a deeper view of his people – you just don’t see them, but their souls too:

Alice retired to the background until she was barely visible at all.

—–

Mrs. Trask was a pale, inside-herself woman. No heat of the sun ever reddened her cheeks, and no open laughter raised the corners of her mouth. She used religion as a therapy to fit ills of the world and of herself, and she changed the religion to fit the bill.

—–

Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms . . . He lived in a world shining and fresh and uninspected as Eden on the sixth day . . . And he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.

This is why so many people may like his other novels, but positively wax poetic about this one.

Of course I am only eighty pages in, so I’m still in the “enthralled” stage of this relationship. We’ll see if it goes the distance, or if it turns out to be a passionate fling that burns out by the end of the novel.