Sandfuture

by Justin Beal

I picked up this book (at New York's McNally Jackson bookstore) because it didn't look like anything else on the shelf, and inside it doesn't read like anything else either. Mostly, it's a biography of the Seattle-born architect Minoru Yamasaki, known to us as the designer of what is now the Pacific Science Center but best-known to the world for two since-destroyed structures: the Pruitt-Igoe public housing in St. Louis and the World Trade Center. Around and through Yamasaki's courageous, tireless, sometimes tragic life, Beal—an artist and, by the evidence of this first book, a writer—threads erudite but approachable meditations on architectural failure and success, on the flooding of Hurricane Sandy, on his wife's migraines, on the health of cities and buildings, and more. My brain was working, happily, on every page.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

by Kate Beaton

While Kate Beaton was first creating the goofily hilarious history comics that made Hark! A Vagrant such a hoot, her day job was in the oil fields of Alberta, trying to make money quickly, like so many of her fellow Canadians from the Maritimes, where well-paying jobs were few and far between. Now she looks back on those years in an epic graphic memoir in which her humor is subdued but not her powers of observation of the boredom, isolation, and low-key brutality—and the humanity—of working as a young woman in the masculine world of resource extraction. It's a quietly harrowing and sometimes heartening (and sometimes funny!) portrait of a place rarely seen.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

by Amy Bloom

When Amy Bloom's husband, a vigorous ex-jock architect in his mid-60s, learned he had Alzheimer's, he knew immediately he wanted to end his life well before full dementia could have its own way. Doing so legally, as he and Bloom learned, remains nearly impossible in America in his situation, but In Love is the story of how they were able to, a how-to as well as an elegy written with the wit, honesty, and character insight readers will know from Bloom's brilliant fiction. Bloom writes like a messier (she would say more Jewish) Ann Patchett, with a voice that brings her full humor and worldly competence to bear on a dilemma that confounds (but ultimately affirms) both qualities. It's a beautiful and necessary little book.

The English Understand Wool

by Helen DeWitt

This little book is a delight every bit as scrumptious—though perhaps not quite as sweet—as the slices of Wayne Thiebaud cake on its cover. Helen DeWitt is, for my money, the most brilliant novelist going right now, and she puts all of her talents—for inhabiting people whose genius doesn't fit the world, for finding just the right word (no matter the language), and for inserting her stiletto into the fattiest parts of corporate culture—to work in this marvelously constructed story of a young woman raised to certain standards, which she finds useful when her life takes a sudden turn. It's one of the first set of New DIrections' yummy new line of Storybooks—slim volumes to be read in one sitting—and it's been flying from hand to hand among our staff and in my family ever since we got it. It's that kind of book.

Diary of a Film

by Niven Govinden

My glib line on this novel is, "Like Rachel Cusk, if she liked people," but that doesn't really do this book (or the great Cusk) justice. Like Cusk, Govinden, a British novelist hardly known over here, places his narrative in the uneasy but alluring conversational space between people, but what his story (built from the unpromising bones of a master filmmaker presenting his latest picture at a European festival) reminds me most of, in its generosity, its easy-going, wide-ranging intellect, and its savvy and immersive celebration of creative work, is The Conversations, the wonderful dialogue between the writer Michael Ondaatje and the film editor Walter Murch. I was swept away by this brilliant and humane little book—it's my favorite novel of the year so far.

South Riding

by Winifred Hotly

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

My reading (and listening) usually jumps from subject to subject and style to style, but when I recently finished Evan Hughes’s The Hard Sell, a thorough evisceration of the executives behind Insys Therapeutics, a (briefly) billion-dollar pharma startup built on the aggressive marketing of a single addictive pain drug, I wanted to stay with the subject, and immediately followed it with Keefe's rightfully acclaimed account. The Hard Sell is compelling and infuriating, but Empire of Pain is a masterpiece, a patient and rich profile of three generations of Sacklers, full of brilliance, ambition, and greed, in which Oxycontin, the pill that made them billions while leading many thousands to addiction and death, doesn't appear until halfway through the tale. A riveting and authoritative new classic in one of my very favorite genres, white-collar true crime.

Five Decembers

by James Kestrel

For a fat book that covers half a decade (as the title implies), Five Decembers moves at the speed of a drag-race sprint. Published by the self-conscious throwback wizards at Hard Case Crime, it's a throwback of sorts too, a stripped-down, hard-boiled World War II tale, but with a bit more heart than the coldest tales of Hammett and Cain. Joe McGrady is a Honolulu cop, and the first December of the story is 1941, so you might think you know where the story is going, but his war years are spent on a goose chase of his own, leading him into a lonely obsession that, if you're like me, you'll spend a few late nights staying up to get to the thrilling end of.

Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan

by Darryl Pinckney

In 1973, as a Columbia undergraduate, Pinckney talked his way into Elizabeth Hardwick's writing class, and—at least for the decade and a half covered by this wonderful book—he never left. Nearly 40 years her junior, this aspiring writer from a middle-class black family in Indiana became her student, protégé, friend, and confidant, and a part of the brainy, gossipy world that swirled around the New York Review of Books, while his pals his age, like Luc (later Lucy) Sante, Jim Jarmusch, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, were creating their own scene downtown. His memoir is a tender and sharply observed tribute to Hardwick's fierce brilliance and a stylish journal of his messy and ambitious young life as a reader and writer. It's hard to imagine a book better engineered to my particular obsessions than this one, but its beauty and wisdom are also what made it my favorite book of the year.

Ma and Me: A Memoir

by Putsata Reang

Reang was her mother's youngest, with a special bond founded between them when she barely survived their escape from the war and the coming genocide in Cambodia in her mother's arms in 1975. But once they settled in Oregon, Put became the most restless of her children, eventually traveling the world as a journalist (at the Seattle Times among many other places) and finally marrying an American woman, which her mother couldn't bear. Reang's memoir is a compelling story, told with both humor and pain, of their bond and their break, of the duty to family and heritage that Reang often embraces at the same time that she claims her independence, and of two fiercely loving and tireless women carrying the weight of tradition and trauma.

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers

by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green

You might know the late Mary Rodgers as the author of the kidlit classic Freaky Friday, or as the composer of the musical Once Upon a Mattress (her one big hit in a long career of trying), or—her most double-edged claim to fame—as the daughter of the composer of big hit after big hit, Richard Rodgers. But after reading Shy, you'll know her as the most entertainingly dishy memoirist you can imagine. From an early age she knew everybody, from (of course) Oscar ("Ockie") Hammerstein to Mae West to her longtime boss Leonard Bernstein to her longtime best pal Stephen Sondheim, and she tells you exactly what she thought about each one of them—and, equally hilariously and unsparingly, about herself as well. ("Reader, I slept with him," is a frequent refrain.) And along with the delicious dish, you get a fascinating portrait of a woman building a creative career and constructing a life in the shadow, and the gilded cage, of fame.

Winter Love

by Han Suyin

In her long and well-traveled life, Han Suyin, the physician daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, wrote mostly about Asia, but in 1955 she published this very British gem of a novel, telling, with exquisite precision, the story of a love affair between two medical students in wartime London. Mara, already married, is glamorous amid the drab rationing; Bettina, known as "Red," the narrator, is "mousy" by her own description, but driven and attractive in her own way. The writing is breathtaking in its exactness and in its sudden revelations of beauty and doom, in an affair brutally corralled not only by the social enforcement of who could love each other, but by one character's inability to love at all.