The Last Song of Dusk, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. This is the first novel by an Indian author that I've enjoyed. It is also the first novel by an Indian man that I have read. I think these two facts may be related. It's not a great book, but it is quite enjoyable.
The Ticking, Renee French. A strange little graphic story about a young man born with the same disfigurement as his father, and their lonely life as hideous people, and fishing flies. With a strange, sad ending. Read in approximately an hour as a copy passed between the three people working at New Dominion on a Saturday. We all liked it.
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I felt somewhat trashy reading this novel. It starts out plausibly enough, but the subplots eventually twist around each other and spiral into a great orgy of gothic-novel murder, unwitting incest, sadism, homosexuality, random impalings, and dead babies. Holy shit. I was not expecting that from a recent novel that masquerades as a clever intellectual mystery. It lies! It LIES!
Disgrace, JM Coetzee. I read this during one night of insomnia. And then I finally got tired, but I stayed up to finish it. This man knows his writing shit. For serious. Brings up all kinds of great questions, about the nature of sex and violence, about white man's guilt in South Africa and black reprisal. And no easy answers. No answers really at all.
The Demon under the Microscope, Thomas Hager. I finished the advance reader's copy of this nonfiction today. It chronicles the story of the German doctor Gerhard Domagk who introduced the world to its first miracle medicine, sulfa. The author does a very good job with presenting the context in which sulfa was developed--a time when it was completely ordinary for the son of the President of the United States (Calvin Coolidge, Jr) to die from an infected blister on his foot. It's hard to imagine that contracting a strep infection used to basically amount to a death sentence. Also tells the story behind the modern FDA, which involves industrial solvent and a lot of dead children. Oh, and the book also has Nazis.