Jason's Picks

Jason is co-owner of The Book Table with his wife, Rachel.

 

$19.99
ISBN-13: 9781936365746
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: McSweeney's, 6/2012
The old writing adage, "Show, don't tell," should go double for political fiction where characters often launch into monologues filled with prose that is better suited to The New York Times Op-Ed page. And though this novel is about outsourcing, the decline of American hegemony, rising personal debt and the looming presence of China, Eggers never seems like he's writing a manifesto. Instead, by focusing on his 54 year old protagonist and his powerlessness, guilt, and worry tempered by humor, we get a slice of contemporary life that will be read for decades to come, helping us to understand the times in which we live. This multi-layered novel filled with pared-down prose is a remarkable work by an author at the height of his game.

Angelmaker (Paperback)

$12.75
ISBN-13: 9780307743626
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage, 9/2012
This hilarious novel feels more like a radio play or a Flash Gordon comic from the 30s or 40s. There are automatons, an evil villain/despot, secret societies, a spunky sidekick, a doomsday machine, travels through London sewers, one of my favorite sexual fetishes ever in fiction and one serious badass tommy gun. It may all be wrapped up in a giant postmodern genre stew, but despite all the wacky adventures, at the heart it's a story of a man coming to terms with his father's past.

$11.99
ISBN-13: 9781566892742
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Coffee House Press, 9/2011
Ben Lerner is one of my favorite contemporary poets and in his VERY autobiographical first novel, he shows that a poet's touch can do wonders for prose. The novel's main character is an American poet in Spain on a Fellowship, but the plot is less interesting that the writing style, the musings on what art is and the showing how difficult translating can be. Forget Paris in the 20s and spend some time in Madrid in 2004.

Pocket Kings (Paperback)

$11.15
ISBN-13: 9781565126206
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 3/2012
Every once in awhile a character comes along that is so unlikable that you can't help but root for him. Enter Franklin W. Dixon, the main character of Ted Heller's Pocket King, whose satirical adventures in publishing and online gambling alternate between making you giggle wickedly and cover your eyes because you can't believe what you're going to read next.

Lamb (Paperback)

$12.75
ISBN-13: 9781590514375
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Other Press, 9/2011
David Lamb is a middle-aged man who befriends and then convinces an 11 year old girl to take a road trip with him. You would think that would be creepy enough, but the power of this debut novel is that at every juncture where Lamb could make a decision to do the right thing, he rationalizes why he shouldn't. In fact, you get so deep into his head that I found myself feeling as guilty for being a voyeur to Lamb's actions as Lamb should have felt about living them.

The Pale King (Paperback)

$13.50
ISBN-13: 9780316074223
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Back Bay Books, 4/2012
What could be a better setting for a meditation on boredom than an IRS examination facility in Peoria? David Foster Wallace's amazing powers of description are in full effect as he shows a wealth of characters so fully developed that you're sure you've been living inside their heads for years. There are passages of humor that will have you holding your sides and for those of you that love Wallace's digressions, my favorite is a 6 page description of traffic patterns to and from the facility that was so fascinating, I had to read it twice. The inevitable question with a posthumous novel is is it finished in the way that DFW would have wanted? The answer is no because that would be impossible, but there's no doubt that the novel that we get to read has section after section of one of America's most important post-WWII writers at his dazzling best. Is it the most important book of the year? (decade?) (millenium?) For me, on a personal level, as someone who has reread INFINITE JEST every year since it came out, I don't think there could be any denying it.

$11.99
ISBN-13: 9780446571586
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Twelve, 2/2012
So, let’s get it out of the way. There is a love affair in this book between a chimpanzee and scientist, but I promise that by the time that you get to it, you’ll be so involved in this novel and thinking about what makes a human a human that you’ll be rooting for them. This is a novel about big ideas including the nature of language itself, but the narrator, a chimp taken from the Lincoln Park Zoo that learns how to speak, is so laugh out-loud funny and witty and the writer, a debut novelist, is so talented that it never feels like an intellectual chore and is instead an incredibly engrossing read.

The Color of Night (Paperback)

$11.99
ISBN-13: 9780307741882
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage, 4/2011
This book is not for everyone, in fact it's probably not for most people. But, for anyone that's ever wanted to see someone out-Palahniuk Chuck Palahniuk or out-Vollmann William Vollmann, then this novel's meditations on violence is for you. It deals with everything from the Manson Family to September 11th to child sexual abuse. It's both frightening and brilliant.

$15.95
ISBN-13: 9780307378132
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Pantheon, 4/2011
I’m not a fan of reviews where someone just gushes all over the place, but...I could not have loved this book more. The subject material, the characters, the text and the images all come together in a way that makes this one of the finest graphic novels I’ve ever read.

$12.76
ISBN-13: 9780393337129
Availability: Not in stock. Can usually be ordered within 1-5 days.
Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 11/2009
A fascinating series of snapshots of the pre-recession contemporary art world: an auction at Christie's, a critique at CalArts, Art Basel, the Turner Prize, Artforum Magazine, a visit to Takashi Murakami’s multiple studios and the Venice Biennale. Thornton conducted over 250 interviews spanning 3 years, so there is a lot of information packed into each of the vignettes, but she has a very conversational writing style, so this work, created as ethnography, feels much more like a group of interconnected magazine articles.

$11.95
ISBN-13: 9780307739452
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage, 9/2011
What a pleasure to travel in time and land in an alternate universe where a novel can deliver playful humor, raw emotion and concepts that will blow your mind.

Room (Paperback)

$11.99
ISBN-13: 9780316098328
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Back Bay Books, 6/2011
You would think a novel told from the perspective of a five-year-old would just be a literary device, but Donoghue never falters as you completely get immersed in the life of a child, from the everyday fascination and frustrations to the horrors stemming from his captivity with his mother in a room. It's one of the best novels of the year, relentlessly pummeling your emotions and making the readjustment to your regular life incredibly difficult.

The Instructions (Paperback)

$14.25
ISBN-13: 9781936365166
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: McSweeney's, 7/2011
First of all, don't be scared of its size. Because the novel takes places over four days and is told (almost entirely) from one voice, it's a much smaller and intimate novel than its girth would make you believe. I found it impossible to not be converted to the cause of the 10-year-old potential messiah as he justifies each of his seemingly unjustifiable actions. This is a novel about power and appalling violence, but it's filled with so many cute and tender moments and such a variety of humor, from a brilliant dissertation on the word "combover," to a hilarious response to the narrator's fan letter to Philip Roth, to several scenes of physical comedy that would make Laurel & Hardy proud. This is a masterly conceived debut and will be a topic of discussion for decades to come.

Cryptonomicon (Paperback)

$13.50
ISBN-13: 9780380788620
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: William Morrow Paperbacks, 6/2000
There are certain books that I reread every year and since 1999 this has been one of them. It’s a huge sprawling novel and to try to describe all of its plot lines would be an exercise in futility, but suffice it to say that in this multigenerational work are contemporary hackers, WWII code breakers, crusty treasure divers, psychotic marines and Japanese mine engineers. There’s plenty of math (which can be skipped if you desire), but the quality of writing, the richness of characters and the complexity of plot make this one of my all-time favorite reads.

Not a Box (Hardcover)

$11.99
ISBN-13: 9780061123221
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: HarperCollins, 12/2006
In a world of too much TV and too many video games, this simply illustrated book shows the amazing power of imagination. Every kid knows how to turn a simple object into hours of fun with just their mind. It’s an added bonus that adults get to relearn the lesson as they read this book to their kids.

Franny and Zooey (Paperback)

$11.19
ISBN-13: 9780316769020
Availability: Not in stock. Can usually be ordered within 1-5 days.
Published: Back Bay Books, 1/2001
Nine Stories may be his greatest work, but this is my favorite of Salinger’s books. The religious themes can be a little heavy-handed, but these two short stories about Franny and Zooey Glass, two young adults trying to recover from being precocious children, are about as well-written as fiction can be.

Kafka on the Shore (Paperback)

$12.75
ISBN-13: 9781400079278
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage, 1/2006
I think this novel is the perfect blend of Murakami’s career--Japanese magical realism, pop culture references and sparseness in writing. What I like most about Murakami is that he’s an incredibly cerebral writer that is also incredibly readable and he wanders into the fantastic, but never crosses over into fantasy.

Gain (Paperback)

$12.00
ISBN-13: 9780312204099
Availability: Subject to Availability: May be out-of-print or otherwise unavailable.
Published: Picador, 6/1999
Though I applauded Powers’ 2006 National Book Award win for Echo Maker, this is still my favorite novel by one of my favorite authors. Corporations have long been treated like individuals under the law and in this book, Powers has done the literary equivalent--a corporation as a living breathing character. One plot line follows the corporation from its humble beginnings in 19th century Boston to a multinational conglomerate, and the other plot line is the painful story of Laura Bodey who is facing a terminal illness. You know how the stories will collide from the beginning, but you enjoy every second of the journey. The history of this fictional corporation is the history of this country, from cute jingles to advertising savvy, from family ownership to shareholder control, and the consequence of the shifts of American capitalism are written horribly on Laura’s life.

$11.16
ISBN-13: 9780872865006
Availability: Not in stock. Can usually be ordered within 1-5 days.
Published: City Lights Publishers, 2/2009
The best Caucasian writer to focus on the white supremacy that is still embedded in all aspects of American life is at it again with a great series of essays that deal with the issues of race that have come up around the election of Barack Obama. The book is filled with scary statistics, for instance, black high school graduates actually have higher unemployment rates that white dropouts, and white males with a criminal record are more likely than black males without one to be called back for a job interview, and black women are 9 times more likely to be searched for drugs coming through customs even though white women are twice as likely to be caught with drugs. Mostly though it focuses on the myth of meritocracy and the dangers of thinking that we’ve reached any sort of post-racial United States.

$11.20
ISBN-13: 9780896087729
Availability: Subject to Availability: May be out-of-print or otherwise unavailable.
Published: South End Press, 5/2007
Though it won’t necessarily cause you to pick up a Molotov cocktail or an AK-47, this little book will cause you to at least question some of your assumptions about past successes from nonviolence movements. From Gandhi to MLK to the anti-Vietnam movement, there have always been more militant groups working at the same time. These more militant groups through either actual violent acts or through the threat of violence may have done as much to change policy as the nonviolent groups that we feel more comfortable focusing on. Plus as an added bonus, we guarantee an FBI file to be created with every purchase!

Infinite Jest (Paperback)

$14.25
ISBN-13: 9780316066525
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Back Bay Books, 11/2006
This is simply one of the greatest post-WWII American novels. The measure of its greatness to me is that I have very little interest in any of the big subjects of the book—tennis, AA and Quebecian separatists, but it just doesn’t matter. Unlike so many other novels that get labeled postmodern, the level of detail in the writing is phenomenal and the characters are so vivid that you truly believe that you’ve personally met them all.