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Moore does it again. The fool (of King Lear fame) Pocket shows up again, this time in Venice for a comic journey through Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and the Cask of Amontillado (plus some supernatural shenanigans to boot (after all, there's always a bloody ghost). Moore's comic sensibility remains sharp, slightly off color, and always funny, and his characters seem like caricatures until he finds ways to work in genuine pathos. It's a balancing act that rewards both lovers of silliness and lovers of Shakespeare. It all makes me wonder--and look forward to--where Pocket will turn up next.

I really loved this book. It's all about identity and art and creativity and family and the chaos and ambiguity and comedy and tragedy that are a part of all of those things. It's funny and bittersweet and heart-breaking and hopeful all at the same time, which is a pretty neat trick to pull off. Buster and Annie are characters I wanted to spend more time with, not because they are perfect, but because they felt so human in the bad choices and confusion they find themselves facing. The novel's structure, alternating between the "present" and gallery-like explanations of the Fangs' prior performance art pieces strikes just the right tone. I'm excited to see what Wilson writes next.

The Mountain Goats' lead singer John Darnielle creates a recursive exploration of fantasy, obsession, empathy, and pain. He asks us to consider why we do the things we do, and why sometimes the gaps in our lives seem unexplainable and need something--anything--to fill them. You stand in a field, your sights set on the Italian Trace. But what if you can never make it there? And what will be the cost if you do?

If you're looking for a beginner's intro to Shakespeare's life, this is a great place to begin. Less "academic" than Greenblatt's also-fine Will in the World and anchored by Bryson's pleasant voice, this slim volume provides a just-the-facts approach to what we know (and don't know) about the most influential author to ever live. Bryson enjoys the "details"--how many signatures we have of Shakespeare's, where they can be found, what an appearance at court might or might not tell us--but he doesn't get bogged down in speculation, and he has a very low tolerance for those who want to spin out great biographies from making assumptions based on the content of the plays themselves. Bryson is instead content to point out where the plays seem to line up with what we know, and where perhaps they raise surprising questions. As with all his texts, he does not rely on histrionics or emotional appeals, but rather walks you through the author's life with a calm and slightly sardonic tone. Incidentally, I was pleased that the last chapter is basically a pointed rejection of the "Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare" theories that seem to be so prominent these days. I have little interest in the snobbish arguments that the Oxfordians and others seem to make, and I appreciated Bryson's wry rejection of those pointless theories. There's enough in the historical record to make a man, and there's enough in the plays and poems themselves to make a living and thinking and feeling human. Getting caught up in the silliness of "yes, but which human" seems to miss the point of what makes the plays so powerful.

I was really pleased to fall in love with Gloria Naylor's Tempest-inspired masterpiece set just off the Georgia/South Carolina coast. It's close enough to home for me now to feel the rhythms and the lifestyle at play, and foreign enough to be full of the magic and fantasy of Shakespeare's play. It helps that Naylor has such a keen ear for dialogue (and dialect) and character to make it all ring with life and truth. Naylor's tale alternates voices and narrators--mostly the first-person accounts of budding lovers Cocoa and George, but also a third-person narrator who tracks the mysterious Mama Day and the other characters wending their way through life in Willow Springs, an island that has its own roots in history and mystery--a no-man's land unclaimed by any state, a rich heritage of seventh-sons and seventh-sons, a strong rooting in magic. As Mama Day goes about her life and touches the lives of those around her, Cocoa (living her life in New York City) attempts to figure out what place her own individuality has with personalities as strong as Mama Day and the stiff and similarly-independence-minded George vying to influence her life. The resulting story hits the rough outlines of the Tempest well enough that familiarity with the play will add richness to the story, but Naylor is such a powerful storyteller and writes with such a poetic and reflective voice that I would also recommend it to readers who have no knowledge of the play and just like a well-written text. Yes, it gets a little magical and "non-realistic" at some points, so if that bothers you, be prepared. But I found the story and the writing completely enriching and entertaining. A definite recommend for fans of Zora Neale Hurston or other writers in that vein.

I absolutely loved this book. Johnson's novel of North Korea presents the insular nation as almost comically ridiculous before veering into black and tragic territory. Pak Jun Do, the titular orphan master's son, serves as an almost picaresque hero in a world that is more 1984 than recognizable. In a country where lies become truth when they are agreed to, where identities can be erased with the nod of the Dear Leader's head, where not fitting into the system will almost certainly kill you, Pak Jun Do slips into experiences that should result in his obliteration with the silence of a fish. Survivor, kidnapper, spy, prisoner--he fills all these roles and more as he exposes the idiosyncrasies and insanities of North Korea under Kim Jong Il. Driven by his love for the famous North Korean actress Sun-moon, Pak Jun Do follows the passionate heart he keeps hidden under a stoic face. Johnson won pretty much all the major awards last year, and it's easy to see why. He makes this world, so foreign to Western eyes, come alive in all its absurdity and horror. It's easy to love Pak Jun Do, whose inner torments and triumphs against all odds seem to have something profound to say about the human spirit and the drive for fulfillment and wholeness we all face, no matter the obstacles. The novel alternates between three separate voices--the propaganda announcer on the radio, a third person narrator following Pak Jun Do, and a first person interrogator who is attempting to learn the story of Commander Ga, husband of Sun-moon and rival of Kim Jung Il. As these stories intertwine around and through each other, journeying from the seas around the Korean peninsula to a Texas ranch, and from a prison camp to the shores of Japan, Johnson allows us to ask questions about truth, about love, about what makes us who we are, and about human nature. The plot barrels forward without ever becoming trite, and as Pak Jun Do's world becomes increasingly labyrinthine and complicated, it also becomes richer and more rewarding for the reader, culminating in a climax that I completely adored. It's been a great reading year for me so far, but this is currently one of my front runners for my book of the year: just absolutely compelling and, despite those Orwellian tones, like nothing I've ever read. I'm guessing it's too complex (and maybe even dark) for my tenth grade students, but this is the kind of book I would love to teach in school if I can find a way to fit it in, simply to expose more people to it.

It's hard to say what I loved most in A Tale for the Time Being. Naoko's sense of humor? The spot-on descriptions of Japanese culture? The slow reveals of everyday tragedy? The blending of quantum physics and Zen buddhism? The idea of time as a being and a state and a flexible fabric that enfolds us all? Ozeki's voice is enthralling and invigorating, and her characters stayed with me long after I closed the cover. This is the kind of book I want to lend people--not everyone, just the people who will "get it"--to let them into the secrets of the lives of these two women. It all worked. Perhaps in a few years I will embrace my time-being-ness and travel back to read it again. And I never do that.

I've been hoping for a while to find a Christopher Moore book that I loved as much as Lamb, and Sacre Bleu comes solidly into second place. Moore aims his typical sense of the absurd at the Impressionist painters gathered in Paris in the late nineteenth century, and the book works in some levels as a fascinating primer on art (if you can sift past all the Moore-ish silliness to find the kernals of reality), topped off by the inclusion of lovely color reproductions of many of the paintings discussed in the text. In addition, Moore does a nice job playing with the insanity and insatiability of some of the artists of the time, from Henri Toulouse-Lautrec to Renoir to Monet to Van Gogh to Pisarro. They are all here, united in a madcap fashion that only Moore could come up with, but as with his best work, the absurdity (donkey in a hat) is matched with a zest for life and an enthusiasm that is just plain fun to read. I'll admit, I had no clue where he was going with the plot of the story (the ambiguous woman, the Colorman, the donkey with a hat) for a long time, and when he finally revealed what was happening it was a bit of a "Oh, duh" moment, but he had me hooked so early with his characters and his charm that I didn't really care.

Ethereal and dreamlike, Under the Feet of Jesus slides its story across your face like gossamer--a swish of love here, a whisper of coming-of-age there, a murmur of tragedy and broken dreams, a flutter of hope. Viramontes is not particularly interested in driving forward a story; she's interested in capturing a mood, a feeling, a piece of life that often slips by the rest of the world as they look the other way. She writes with empathy, she writes with heartbreak, but most of all she writes with beauty. At its heart the novel is about thirteen-year-old Estrella, the daughter of migrant workers, as she discovers love, delves into her own strength, and starts to work out her identity. But beyond that it is a haunting a lyrical evocation of a life in the borderlands. In one passage Viramontes explores Estrella's experiences at school, with teachers who care little for the migrant families who will be moving through, and so don't teach her the tools she needs, she craves, and so further alienate Estrella and those like her from being able to thrive in this society. This passage is matched later as Estrella translates for her family at a health clinic where they have no money to pay for the services and so Estrella looks for other tools at her disposal. It's a powerful (but fleeting) look at life in a limbo world.

At this point, it's really not too much of a stretch to say that I think I prefer Joe Hill's writing to that of his better known father, Stephen King. In a lot of ways, Nos4a2 is Hill's most King-like book, but he still writes with a vitality and sense of propulsion that King seems to lose sight of, as many of his books meander and dawdle at times with ideas that King latches onto but that don't actually propel narrative forward. (I'll have a chance to compare soon; Doctor Sleep, King's long awaited sequel to The Shining, is sitting in my to-read stack right now). But I don't want to spend my review of Nos4a2 talking about Stephen King. Here Joe Hill introduces a concept that loosely connects at least one of his earlier works (I don't remember his short stories enough to know if there were references to them the way there was a passing allusion to his first novel, Heart Shaped Box) in a wonderful way: the connection between fantasy and reality (and, in Hill's writing, the way that some people can cross between and blend together the two worlds): The Inscape. It's a concept that he clearly loves--it's at the heart of his excellent comic series, Locke & Key--and it works beautifully here as well. Victoria McQueen has a bike that lets her find lost things--she just crosses over a bridge that shouldn't exist, and boom, she's where those lost items can be found--but when she runs into trouble one day, her life will forever be altered. Because trouble takes the form of Charlie Manx, a twisted old man who bleeds the innocence from the young in exchange for a trip to Christmasland, the imaginary world in his head in which everyday is Christmas and children can forever eat candy, open presents, and play games like scissors-for-the-drifter. Manx bends reality to suit his desires, and those desires come at a price. When Victoria escapes from Manx's custody (avoiding being caught in his 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith), she is forever scarred by it, and the two seem destined to meet again for another confrontation. Hill's story flies along, full of little allusions, gags, shocks, and surprises, and it bleeds on every page with a great degree of humanity. Hill, like his father, is more than willing to put his characters through and into hellacious situations, but he also sees his stories through to satisfying conclusions (and note that satisfying doesn't necessarily mean happy or that every character you like will live)--something else King always struggles with to me. This may be popcorn lit, but it's popcorn lit that leaves me content and satisfied and ready for more. And it's horror that kept me up at night--not in fear, but unable to put down the novel. And that's a good thing. Because I have a feeling Hill isn't done with his concept of the Inscape. I believe it will show up again in some form or other. And when it does, I'll be there, ready to read again.

I devoured this book like Saturday morning breakfast cereal. Rainbow Rowell captures about as perfectly as I could hope that feeling of teenage love--the consuming, overwhelming, enveloping feeling of wanting and needing and feeling hungry to consume another person that anyone who had a relationship that mattered to them in high school is sure to recognize. And in Eleanor and Park, she creates the kind of misfits that so many teenagers can identify with. Not so much the idealized wunderkind who other YA writers celebrate, but the mostly average kid who is passionate about a few things and lost about a lot of things and feels broken much of the time and doesn't know she (or he) needs someone who helps her (or him) feel found. Kids who love music and comic books and are smart, but they're not savants, and they're not about to change the world or save the world, because they're just trying to survive. Because sometimes high school can be the loneliest place on the planet. And then someone says something like, "You can be Han Solo. And I'll be Boba Fett. I'll cross the sky for you." And if your little heart doesn't melt a little at that, then you're not the kind of person I probably have much in common with, because damn, that's fantastic. And that's just the tip of the iceberg for Rowell's millions of metaphors about trying to capture that feeling of love. There is drama here. One of the two lives in a hellacious and abusive home. Teenage cruelty, and parents who don't understand, and figuring out how to get time alone. All that drama is here, and more. But at heart, it's about being an outsider, and finding someone who makes you feel like you're a part of the only inside circle that matters. I loved it. (PS: On Spotify Rowell has listed a killer soundtrack to the novel. A mixtape from Rowell to us--a kind of "Best Of" of Park's mixes for Eleanor. It's fantastic.)

Who doesn't love the Muppets? I know I do, and clearly author Brian Jay Jones does as well. While I was interested enough in Henson's life, ups, and downs to keep reading, however, I wish Jones had as much creativity in writing about Henson as Henson had in writing about, say, coffee advertisements. It's not that this was a bad book. It was just much flatter than I expected it to be. Granted, I'm much more of a fiction than a biography kind of guy, so perhaps I just came at the story of Henson's life and work from the wrong angle, but I got bored much more often than I expected to. Jones writes about every detail of Henson's life with little regard for what details are interesting and what are somewhat bland. He waxes philosophical on Jim's rather generic childhood for nearly a hundred pages and spends nearly as much time writing about how who he hires to decorate his house as he does about much more interesting elements such as Henson's disagreements with Roald Dahl. I think the problem is he likes Jim and the Henson family (both literal and professional) so much that he's not really as interested in exploring Jim's complexities and contradictions as he is praising and celebrating him. Which is fine, it's just that it gets a little dull.The book becomes a chronicle rather than a story, and the peaks and valleys that should be there eventually all get evened out and flattened. Which is not to say there's not great stuff here. Jones clearly drives home several aspects of the "What made Henson tick" question: his love of creativity, his desire for positivity, the pleasure he took in work. All of those elements are explored--and explored well--at several points throughout the book. And though the book could and should have had more pictures (Jim was, after all, a visual storyteller), reading the biography was still fun in that it drove me to the Internet repeatedly to look up film clips (like Henson's short film "Time Piece" on YouTube) or to find scenes with individual Muppets. And it also made me wish I had some Muppet movies/tv episodes in my own collection! In the end, the book isn't bad, it's just not as dynamic or compelling as it should have been, given the creative genius at its heart.

Every once in a while you get to read a book that really pushes all your buttons, and The Good Lord Bird was one of those books for me. Growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, I heard again and again (so much so that I started to tune out) about Bleeding Kansas and the border wars with Missouri ruffians over the slavery issue. Of course we focused in Lawrence on Quantrill's burning of the city in 1863, but we also touched on John Brown's time in the state. After all, there in the capitol building in Topeka is that mural of Brown--a raging lunatic with a flowing beard, Bible and gun in hand. He's a terrifying figure, looking equal parts inspiration and insanity. In The Good Lord Bird, James McBride brings Brown to vivid life, a prophetic madman who is driven by God or folly to try and end slavery by waging a one man war against it, no matter the cost. In McBride's incredibly skilled hands, we see Brown through the eyes of Henry/Henrietta Shackleford, better known as Onion--a slave boy mistaken for (and then disguising himself as) a girl, freed by Brown and accompanying him from his Kansas days and through Harper's Ferry, able to testify to the Old Man's derangement as well as his determination, his psychosis as well as his passion. The novel is funny, rich, and often poignant, and in less skilled hands it could have been to self-serious or too wild, but McBride finds a perfectly Twain-like balance between the two. Onion him/herself isn't quite sure what to make of Brown, and so she sees identifies his deficiencies with a deft eye. But she also respects this man who trusts so fully in his cause and in his God that his faith makes his defeats into victories and his victories into divine will. Onion's adventures sometimes take him/her away from Brown, and buried in the narrative is an equally compelling coming-of-age story of a young black man in the worst of times, when anything you need to do to save your skin--even denying your identity by putting on a dress--seem to make sense. McBride writes with a sense of the hypocrisy surrounding the slavery question, both of the whites and of the African Americans themselves. Frederick Douglass may be taken down a peg or two, even as Harriet Tubman is elevated. In the end, those who do nothing but talk are exposed for the pretense and false virtue, while those who act--in whatever way they know how--are elevated and celebrated. There are elements of the novel that I'm still working through. I'm not sure, for example, what the opening set up for how Onion's story came to be told really serves any particular purpose, other than to set up the possible unreliability of the narrator (an idea further confirmed by a few of the details that don't quite match up within the narrative), and perhaps a second read through would help me see why having an unreliable narrator might be a boon to this book instead of a detraction. But on the first time through I just loved the journey, the voice, the characters, and the contemplation the book inspired. It's quirky, but it's also one of the best books I've read in a long time--and I like a lot of books.

Set in the mid nineteenth century, the tale of Tristan Thorn, a young man who leaves his hometown of Wall and passes into the land of Faerie to retrieve a fallen star for the woman he loves, is exactly the kind of story I think I would read aloud to my children (though there is, I believe, one word that might need censoring for the young) if I had them. It's got villains who are scary, but not nightmare inducing, heroes who are common, and therefore somewhat relatable, and both male and female characters worth looking up to. If nothing else, it's the kind of book I can imagine reading aloud with my wife, because we do that sort of thing sometimes. Stardust is a sort of sweet and slightly more modern version of something like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan, and I think that's exactly what Gaiman is going for. It's funny, it's full of magic, it's heartfelt. It may not have the dark edge that Gaiman's more adult work has, but that's not really the point. It's a love story, at its heart, but it has the same sort of cleverness that Gaiman is known for. It's a frothy bit of nothing that feels like an old friend by the time you close its cover. And that's a pretty great accomplishment.

So funny. So real. The one book this year that I didn't just tell people I loved, but immediately lent out to people as well.