Hello readers. Over the holiday season, many of you might be inclined to sneak away from family and loved ones and curl up with a good book. With that in mind, we give you the next three entries in our monthly Wrapped Up In Books series:
The week beginning Monday, January 25: We kick off the new year with Joshua Ferris’ 2007 debut novel Then We Came To The End, a surreal cubicle comedy about a Chicago advertising firm beset by rolling layoffs in the wake of the dot-com bubble burst. It’s also written almost entirely in first-person plural, which enforces a sense of the office as a collective, dysfunctional organism. (Tasha Robinson’s pick.)
The week beginning Monday, February 22: You’ve seen the movie, now read Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring 1970 adventure Master And Commander, the first in a 20-book series set during the Napoleonic Wars and centering on the relationship between Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his ship surgeon Stephen Maturin. (Donna Bowman’s pick.)
The week beginning Monday, March 22: And now for something completely different: Stephen Dobyns’ certifiably odd 1993 novel The Wrestler’s Cruel Study mixes fairy-tale mythos, Nietzsche quotations, and the World Wrestling Federation into the modern-day story of a New York wrestler searching for his kidnapped fiancée. (Leonard Pierce’s pick.)
Beginning in 2010, Wrapped Up In Books will also be trying out a new format. Instead of filling the week with individual writers’ general musings on the featured selection, each day will bring a group post (AVQ&A-style) addressing the book from different angles. This way, we hope to avoid redundancy and have something fresh to talk about every day. As before, the week will still conclude with a live chat on Thursday on weeks where scheduling permits. Get reading, and we'll see you in 2010.