The Leopard

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's depiction of a decline of a way of life, and his explication of the Sicilian mind, are elegant and perceptive.

Masters of Atlantis

This Charles Portis novel has an overwhelming feel of being half-assed. The tone of winking satire becomes unbearable after a while.

Black Sunday

Thomas Harris's thriller about a planned terrorist attack on the Super Bowl impresses with its detail, suspense, side plots, and dialogue. In short, it succeeds in every way.

Super-Infinite

Subtitled "The Transformations of John Donne," this is a fangirl biography for the general reader that gives in quick, sharp strokes the life and themes of England's greatest love-poet.

Happening and A Simple Passion

Two more memoir/novels from Annie Ernaux: the first about her difficulties getting an abortion in the early 1960s, and the second about a sexual affair she carried on with a married diplomat from Eastern Europe. Happening was turned into an effective film, which like the book looks at Ernaux's quest in matter-of-fact and unblinking terms. A Simple Passion is a short and precise description of an obsession: the irrational behaviors, the waiting, the hoping – all told brutally, honestly and (maybe not surprisingly for this writer) without recourse to the sexually explicit.