The genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator 
Efraín Rios Montt, the Army general who ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983, ended May 10 with a landmark conviction of genocide and crimes against humanity for the 1982 massacre of 1700 Ixil Mayan Indians who were considered sympathetic to left-wing guerrillas. The two-month trial echoed another dark episode from US-Latin American affairs - the 1954 CIA coup that deposed Guatemala's reformist President and later provoked the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War. The new catalog list of Latin America Historical Fiction doesn’t have a fictional account of the Guatemalan civil war, but there is a remarkable collection of short stories, River of Lost Voices, that chronicles life in the impoverished Guatemalan towns of Santa Cruz and nearby Coban, both close to where the massacres took place. Another book on the list, Lost City Radio, is set in a fictional South American nation (Peru) where guerrillas clashed with the government for years. The list of books begins with the 1500s and ends with a book set in Bogota, Bolivia in 2005. They are not all tales of violence. Try Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon to experience love in 1920s Brazil, or The News from Paraguay to learn about a country you may never have thought about. Mario Vargas Llosa has four books on the list, and two are my favorites. The Green House is an epic of life in Peru in the 1950s and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is an unforgettable semi-autobiographical novel.
APL Recommends
Books from our Booklists
Best Fiction 2006
By Gary Shteyngart.
Hoping to get out of Russia and return to his adopted home in the U.S., Misha Vainberg, the obese son of a wealthy Russian, makes his way to Absurdsvani, a small unstable country on the brink of civil war.
By Alice McDermott.
A portrait of an American family during the middle decades of the twentieth century evokes the social, spiritual, and political turmoil of the era as seen through the experiences of a middle-class couple and their children.
By Julian Barnes.
Chronicles the lives of two boys--one who is forgotten by history, and one who becomes the creator of the world's most famous detective--as they pursue their separate destinies until they meet in a remarkable alliance.
By Brad Kessler.
"One fall night off the coast of a remote island in Nova Scotia, an airplane plummets to the sea as an innkeeper watches from the shore. Miles away in New York City, ornithologist Ana Gathreaux works in a darkened room, full of sparrows, testing their migratory instincts. Soon, Ana will be bound for Trachis Island, along with other relatives of victims who converge on the site of the tragedy." -- Jacket.
By Emily Barton.
"The remarkable story of a determined and intelligent woman in eighteenth-century Brooklyn who is consumed by a vision of a bridge, a gargantuan construction of timber and masonry she devises to cross the East River in a single magnificent span." -- Jacket.
By Da Chen.
Two half brothers born to a powerful general, one to the general's wife and one to his mistress, know nothing of each others existence. One is driven to glorify his father, the other wants revenge.
By Marie Arana.
Unexpected consequences are the result for an American engineer, who constructs a paper factory in the middle of the Amazon rain forest, as a plague of truth affects his entire family.
By Christopher Moore.
Charlie Asher, a neurotic and anxious hypochondriac who hates change, confronts the challenges of being a widower and a single parent when his wife dies of a freak medical condition on the day his new daughter, Sophie, is born.
By Richard Powers.
Twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter, suffering from a rare brain disorder that causes him to believe his sister to be an impostor, endeavors to discover the cause of the motor vehicle accident that resulted in his head injury.
By Lisa Carey.
Five years after their oldest son, Hugh, disappeared, the members of the Furey family try to move on with their lives, with his mother losing herself in a new career, his father leaving behind his faith, and his two siblings, Owen and Lena, trying to come to terms with the loss of their brother and their own adolescent crises.
By T. Jefferson Parker.
After surviving a push from a sixth-floor hotel room, detective Robbie Brownlaw uses his new talent for synesthesia--seeing colorful shapes tied to emotions when someone speaks--to investigate the death of a fellow San Diego cop.
By Maile Meloy.
A young woman from the Santerre clan accompanies her family to Argentina, where their lives become entwined with an uninhibited rich girl, an aging French playboy, a young Eastern European prostitute, and an orphaned child.
By Alan Furst.
In 1939 Paris, the murder of an Italian political émigré OVRA, Mussolini's secret police, brings new danger to his successor, Carlo Weisz, who finds himself the target of OVRA, MI6, Stalin's NKVD, and Hitler's Gestapo.
By Peter C. Brown.
Essie, a Midwestern farm girl fleeing from a stormy marriage, joins up with prospectors bound for Nome where she is drawn to Nate Deaton, the idealistic foreman of the Cape Nome Company.
By Andrew Holleran.
A pensive, creative, and haunting novel that speaks expressly to the heart without sentimentality, by the author of Dancer from the Dance (1978), an important novel from the 1970s-'80s gay-lit renaissance. The title of Holleran's new novel states its theme. He offers the story of a middle-aged gay man heading to Washington, D.C., to live and teach for a short term, to get away from his hometown after his mother's death. He takes a room in an elegant townhouse owned by another middle-aged gay man, who is slowly and quietly grieving over the loss of youthful energy, attractiveness, and prowess. While living in Washington and commiserating with his landlord and the friend they have in common over the loss of lives the tsunami of AIDS caused in the '80s, he rather accidentally picks up a volume containing the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, and he is taken by her grief and sense of displacement after her husband's death and ends up reading every page. His plan, however, especially in coming to Washington, is to start life over again, which Mrs. Lincoln was never able to do--her grief and loneliness became a deep well from which she couldn't escape. Holleran's "message"--that grief is never avoidable for any of us--is so sensitively rendered that it never impedes the swift development of the story line. - from Booklist (ALA)
By Lolly Winston.
"The marriage of a seemingly perfect couple dissolves into a complicated dance of affairs, lovers, and admirers"--Provided by the publisher.
By Dean Koontz.
When Mitchell Rafferty receives a phone call that his wife has been kidnapped and there is a two million dollar ransom, his extraordinary commitment to his wife will take him on a seventy-two-hour journey of sacrifice and redemption.
By Jennifer Egan.
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed both their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome tower. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story--a story about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle--that brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.--From publisher description.
By Sarah Dunant.
In 1527, when the city of Rome is sacked and burned by an invading army, the famed courtesan Fiammetta Bianchini and her dwarf companion, Bucino Teodoldi, escape to the wealthy and powerful city of Venice in order to rebuild their business.
By Kiran Desai.
In a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai.
By Allegra Goodman.
A trio of researchers becomes caught up in the desperate quest for a financial grant from the Philpott, a prestigious research laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
By Joseph Finder.
Lacking the competitive instincts considered necessary to get ahead in his sales job, Jason Steadman meets a recently-hired Iraq War veteran who recruits him for the company softball team and offers him a job in corporate security.
By John Hart.
When Work Pickens finds his father murdered, the investigation pushes a repressed family history to the surface and he sees his own carefully constructed faade begin to crack. Work's troubled sister, her combative girlfriend, his gold digging socialite wife, and an unrequited lifelong love join a cast of small town characters that create no shortage of drama in this extraordinary, fast-paced suspense novel.
By Kate Mosse.
Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig, becomes a target after discovering a pair of crumbling skeletons in the Pyrenees mountains, while eight hundred years in the past, Alais, the daughter of a crusader, must safeguard the location of the Holy Grail.
By by Richard Ford.
With "The Sportswriter," in 1985, Richard Ford began a cycle of novels that ten years later--after "Independence Day"--won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Now, Frank Bascombe's story resumes, in the fall of 2000, with the presidential election still hanging in the balance and Thanksgiving looming before him with all the perils of a post-nuclear family get-together.
By Michael Cox.
Convinced that he is destined for great wealth, power, and influence, Edward Glyver will do anything to reclaim a prize that is rightfully his, including a showdown with his rival, poet-criminal Phoebus Rainsford Daunt.
By Margaret Atwood.
A collection of short fiction presents ten stories that capture important moments in the course of a life and in the lives intertwined with it, in a volume that ranges from the 1930s to the 1980s.
By George Pelecanos.
When the body of a local teenager turns up in a community garden, veteran homicide detective Gus Ramone teams up with T. C. Cook, a legendary, now retired detective, and Dan "Doc" Holiday, his former partner who left the force under a cloud of suspicion.
By Tom Spanbauer.
In 1967, seventeen-year-old Rigby John Klusener leaves his hometown in Idaho to hitchhike to San Francisco, where he must face his fears and his own sexuality.
By James Meek.
In a remote Siberian town torn apart by civil war and inhabited by a small Christian sect, Anna Petrovna, a beautiful photographer, becomes involved in the fate of Samarin, an escapee from Russia's northernmost prison camp.
By Cormac McCarthy.
In this postapocalyptic novel, a father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other. This book boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. It is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.--From publisher description.
By Lisa Fugard.
Returning to her South African home to attend the death of her violent father, Eva van Rensburg is forced to confront a terrible childhood secret, in a tale set against a backdrop of the region's troubled history.
By Thrity Umrigar.
Captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two women--Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.
By Marisha Pessl.
A darkly funny coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs), Blue is clever, deadpan, and possessed of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific knowledge--and is quite the cinéaste to boot. In her final year of high school at the élite (and unusual) St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. But when the drowning of one of Hannah's friends and the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural references to guide--or misguide--her.--From publisher description.
By Irène Némirovsky ; translated by Sandra Smith.
[In this novel], "A Storm in June," is set in the chaos of the tumultuous exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. As the German army approaches, Parisians seize what belongings they can and flee the city, the wealthy and the poor alike searching for means to escape. Thrown together under circumstances beyond their control, a group of families and individuals with nothing in common but the harsh demands of survival find themselves facing the annihilation of their world, and human nature is revealed for what it is - sometimes tender, sometimes terrifying ... "Dolce," is set in a German-occupied village near Paris, where, riven by jealousy and resentment, resistance and collaboration, the lives of the townspeople reveal nothing less than the essence of the French identity. The delicate, secret love affair between a German soldier and the French woman in whose house he has been billeted plays out dangerously against the background of Occupation.-Dust jacket.
By by Charles Frazier.
At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins a mysterious girl named Claire. As Will's destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians, including a Cherokee Chief named Bear, he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and men, and eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington City to preserve the Cherokee's homeland and culture. And he will come to know the truth behind his belief that only desire trumps time.
By Judith Lindbergh.
A tale set in Viking Greenland at the turn of the ninth century follows the intertwined lives of three women straddling the pagan past and Christian future, from the slave Katla, who anticipates the promise of a new land; to Bibrau, the daughter born to Katla after a brutal rape; to the prophetess Thorbjorg, who teaches Norse magic to Bibrau.
By by Verlyn Klinkenborg.
Verlyn Klinkenborg traces the natural history of tortoises through the story of Timothy, a tortoise who lived in the garden of eighteenth-century English curate Gilbert White for thirteen years while White observed its actions.
By Greg Iles.
The idyllic life of busy Natchez doctor Chris Shepard is turned upside down when undercover FBI agent Alex Morse recruits him for a case involving a local divorce attorney who is suspected of murdering the spouses of his clients.
By Valerie Martin.
A collection of six stories explores the essential nature of art and depictes the contradictions and compromises of artistic life, as the artist struggles to reconcile his audience with his muse.
By Sara Gruen.
A novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.--From publisher description.
By Tony D'Souza.
Refusing to leave his post in an African Muslim village after his funding is cut off, maverick American relief worker Jack Diaz, at the side of his village guardian, Mamadou, gains insights into the region's hunting, farming, culture, and struggles with AIDS.
APL Recommends Blog
Thursday, May 23
by: carolyn.rogers
Monday, May 20
by: dean.smith
I was reading movie critic David Thomson’s latest, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (2012), and enjoying it so much that I checked out a bunch more of his books including The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, but after a few pages of that one, I decided I'd had enough of Thomson's style for now. Maybe another time.
But I did get past the dedication page, and near it are some quotations from people involved in making movies, one of them Gore Vidal, who said “Find out the movies a man saw between ten and fifteen, which ones he liked, disliked, and you would have a pretty good idea of what sort of mind and temperament he has.” I’m sure Vidal meant women, too, so I checked Wikipedia (sorry library gods) for lists of movies made from 1966 through 1971, the years I turned 10 and 15.
My first revelation was that I don’t remember seeing many first-run movies before 1968. I must have, but the earliest, and one of the few that sticks, is Goldfinger, 1964, and I remember it not for gold lamé nudity, but for my sister and me in our jammies in the back of the car trying to sneak a peek at the drive-in screen through the bucket seats of my dad’s Grand Prix. I better remember watching old movies on our tiny Zenith portable TV with a wire hangar antenna, pliers for changing the channel, and a green-tinted screen, and I remember the jingle from KNXT in Los Angeles:
The Late Show / Relax enjoy a snack and watch / The Late Show / Channel 2 is proud to bring the greatest of stars / Here on the great Late Show
(I wish I could link to the tune for you, but it’s nowhere. If you come to the library and ask for me, I'll sing it to you, if you have a library card.)
Late-night movies in those days were beat-up prints from the 30s and 40s—the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, Basil Rathbone as Sherlock, Fred and Ginger, Errol Flynn buckling swash, Hope and Crosby, Dean and Jerry, and Bogie. Those movies affected my development; I freely admit I am a Marxist. But doing this exercise made me realize that until 1968 I was either too young, too broke, or too dumb to pay attention to new releases. After 1968 is a different story.
NEXT: Lists of movies. And don’t we all love those?
Saturday, May 18
Many of you may know that this year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. Austen wrote the novel in 1797-98, originally calling it First Impressions. Her father attempted to have it published, but the manuscript was rejected. It was not until her first novel, Sense and Sensibility was published in 1812 that Pride and Prejudice was accepted. By that time, another author had published their novel called First Impressions. Austen found another title for her book from a quote in fellow female author Fanny Burney’s novel, Cecila. Thus Pride and Prejudice was born. The novel was an instant success and has proved to be her most popular novel.
While we know much about her life from records and her own letters, there are aspects of her life of which we know nothing because her sister destroyed letters after the author’s death in 1817 in order to protect family privacy. Scholars and authors can only speculate what the subjects of those letters were and what dimensions they could have added to our understanding of Jane Austen.
By Jane Austen:
Jane Austen's Letters by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice (DVD) Miniseries starring Colin Firth
Based on Jane Austen:
Mr. Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange
Lost in Austen (DVD) Miniseries starring Jemima Rooper
Friday, May 17
by: betsey.blanche
The Twitter feed “Fake Library Stats” recently tweeted “After complaining the pituitary glands of 63% of librarians secrete a hormone that is necessary to keep them alive.” Sure, there’s a stereotype that we librarians like to complain but we can also be overwhelmingly positive when it comes to resources we offer. And I’m about to be super positive about the fact that I just read a library book and did not enjoy it at all.
The Library’s Graphic Novel Book Club just finished reading and discussing Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden. In Garden, a large group of people with strange masks and costumes on explore a strange garden and describe what they see in terse sentences. That goes on for 300 pages in which none of the characters are developed and nothing really happens in a conventional plot kind of way. As a result, I was feeling nervous before the meeting. I couldn’t think of a single productive thing to say about it. Worse, I was reminded of a frustrating, non-library book club meeting I’d attended to discuss Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore in which most participants could only comment on the weirdness of the novel. Was that going to be me?! After finishing the reading all I could think was, “Huh. Well. I just don’t . . . What?! I don’t get it. It’s weird.” Neither articulate nor a good way to start a conversation. I felt like I was missing something. But this is one of the best things to happen to a book club because it this case everyone felt the same way and was more than willing to talk about how much they disliked the reading experience and why. It turns out this makes for a much more fruitful conversations than when everyone unanimously enjoys a book. In those cases all you can do is say, “yeah, it was good. I liked the art and the characters and the story. Yup.”
I’m willing to consider the possibility that I really just didn’t get it. So give it a try for yourself and see! Maybe ask some friends to read it too. It might result in a heated debate if one of you loves it. Or, you might just have a pleasant time complaining about how annoying it was. Either way is pretty fun.
Side note: Graphic Novel Book Club is free and open to the public. We meet on the third Wednesday of every month at Jo's Coffee Downtown and you can find our reading list on the Events page of the Library's website.
Thursday, May 16
by: carolyn.rogers
The 2010 novel Anthill is a fictional account of an Alabama backwoods boy who grows up to be a Harvard lawyer fighting to save the woodlands of his childhood, the West Nokobee Tract at the edge of William Ziebach National Forest. It is a privately owned tract of longleaf pine savanna. It becomes his secret place and he bicycles into it every chance he gets to escape his parent's troubled marriage. The woodlands and the national forest are fictional but the ecology is not. Longleaf pine forests are the most diverse ecosystem in North America, with 500 species per square kilometer. In the novel, the eminent Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson tells a southern coming-of-age story while persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, to protect our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.
E.O Wilson also wrote the forward to Longleaf, Far as the Eye Can See: A New Vision of North America's Richest Forest which offers 11 essays on these forests, including numerous photographs that cultivate appreciation for the beauty of the tree itself; of the unique species it supports; and of the breathtaking landscape it creates.
Longleaf pine savanna is one of the only ecosystems that is both forest and meadow. The book reveals this dynamic system in panoramic images of golden light filtering through trees and illuminating long grasses beneath. And there's no shortage of close-ups. Longleaf was once so common that it was hardly remarked upon, and ecologists are only now beginning to understand the forest that once covered 90 million acres of North America and now covers only 3 million acres, some of it in Texas. The final sections of the book detail potential restoration solutions for the longleaf that remains. Longleaf is not a story of loss, but one of deep reverence for the grandeur and mystery of these regions.
Using your Austin Public Library card you can read both books together.
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By Hilma Wolitzer.
When Edward Schuyler, a modest and bookish sixty-two-year-old science teacher, is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. Even an attractive married neighbor offers herself to him. The problem is that Edward doesn't feel available. He's still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching. But then his stepchildren surprise him by placing a personal ad in The New York Review of Books on his behalf."--Provided by publisher. flood in, and Edward is torn between his loyalty to Bee's
