2012: Books 6-11

Title	Author	Review
How to be Good	Nick Hornby	A fluffy quick-moving tale of an adulterous wife who gets her wish -- a transformed husband who looses all his bitterness and becomes the extreme embodiment of Good: loving, understanding, gaggingly empathetic, reaching out to the poor, giving away their worldy posessions, and more.
Into Thin Air	Jon Krakauer	Famous in the late 90s, this book tells a personal account of a survivor who returned from the Summit on of one of the deadliest days on Everest.  A humbling reminder of how human life is fragile and existence, despite the best technology, depends on luck, good judgment and the cooperation of mother nature.
IQ84	Haruki Murakami	A three-book saga of childhood acquaintances who fell in love, grew up pining for one another, and finally found each other in another world with two moons where magical powers exist.
Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	A haunting tale of clones rasied to be organ donors and the minimal lives they lead.
Winter's Bone	Daniel Woodrell	An epic tale in Ozarks dialect of stubborn survival in a savage poverty-governed world of blood-law.  I read this after returning from Cambodia and it reminded me that "third world problems" exist in every country, even America.  I am a few generations away from super strong blood-law.  But I understand it at a visceral level.  Both my father's people and my mother's people have their pride and their inherent rules (and their high numbers of siblings and cousins).  Blood law is a strong force.
Solar	Ian McEwan	A hilarious tale of a non-sympathetic protaganist: Brilliant. Dellusional.  Nobel Prize Winner. Philanderer. Lack of discipline. Fat. Guilty Situational Laughter inspirer. Exceedingly functional alcoholic.  Gloriously entertaining to watch the minimal plot as it unfolds, and yet, it ends, as you know it must, in tragedy.