* Two days without power, 10″ of snow, and temperatures in the teens. Screw YOU, Winter.
End of the year and these kinds of lists start piling up. I’ve only read the four books below, one in hardcover (bought before I got my iPad) and three as digital copies. Full list with links to reviews and a brief commentary at The New York Times.
THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY. By Zachary Mason. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The conceit behind the multiple Odysseuses here (comic, dead, doubled, amnesiac) is that this is a translation of an ancient papyrus, a collection of variations on the myth.
MEMORY WALL: Stories. By Anthony Doerr. (Scribner, $24.) These strange, beautiful stories all ask: What, if anything, will be spared time’s depredations?
ROOM. By Emma Donoghue. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Donoghue’s remarkable novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy, whose entire world is the 11-by-11-foot room in which his mother is being held against her will.
THE SURRENDERED. By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $26.95.) As death draws near, Lee’s heroine, a Korean War orphan now living in New York, sets off for Europe to look for her estranged son.
Akopos 