Joan Didion is at her best in The Year of Magical Thinking, an unusual memoir in which she applies her uniquely acute observation skills to her own grief in the wake of the deaths of her husband and daughter. What makes this book different than her others is the the raw emotion that courses through her spare prose. Although her usual reserve is apparent, she invites the reader far closer to her point of view than she has ever done before.

A friend asked if she could borrow this book when I was finished, but—halfway through it—I had to admit that I wasn’t going to be able to part with my copy, even if it were only to be for a few weeks.

I believe this is an essential read for everyone’s bookshelf.

Set in 1940s wartime London, The Night Watch is the quietly engaging story of four survivors of the Blitz, whose paths cross at key junctures in their lives. “It’s a dark novel of blacked-out streets and bomb shelters,” author Sarah Waters says in an interview on Meet The Author. “It’s about people’s relatively quiet but intense emotional journeys.”

The Night Watch story moves backward in time through three sections, set first in 1947, then 1944, then 1941. The reverse structure of the novel allows Waters to leave important questions about her characters hanging—at least for a time. Once the reader understands that answers unfold through action in retrospect, as opposed to narrative asides, the novel becomes a kind of sophisticated psychological puzzle. The effect is so enjoyable that I shared the response of a few other reviewers: Once I finished, I wanted to start over again to discover how all of the pieces fit together.

“The moment you’ve finished the last beautiful paragraph, you have to turn immediately back to page one,” says children’s author Jacqueline Wilson in the Guardian Unlimited. “Two readings of a 440-page novel should last you for a very happy week.”

Waters already has quite a following based on three previous novels she has described as “lesbian Victorian romps.” With Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet, and Affinity, she also racked up an impressive list of literary awards. In addition, both Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet were made into BBC miniseries that are worth a spot on your Netflix list (if you have such a thing).

Even though Waters is mining new historical territory with The Night Watch, she hasn’t left behind her interest in lesbian—and gay—characters. Like her earlier work, it chronicles stories and characters that haven’t previously been committed to print, and does so with a quality and literary style that ensures her work an audience outside of any single niche.

If you haven’t yet discovered Sarah Waters, you are in for a treat. And if you have? Enjoy The Night Watch.

• Tasting Club: Gathering Together to Share and Savor Your Favorite Tastes, by Dina Cheney: Help your friends jump into next year’s party trend with this guide to throwing a fabulous tasting party. This guide spells out everything one needs to know to throw a sophisticated gourmet tasting soiree, and the gift will be a not-too-subtle hint to add your name to the invitation list.
• The Bon Appétit Cookbook, by Barbara Fairchild: For the first time, the editors at America’s favorite cooking magazine have culled through the thousands of recipes published through the years and compiled an encyclopedic look at editor and reader favorites. And they provide easy-to-follow instructions!
• The Organic Cook’s Bible: How to Select and Cook the Best Ingredients on the Market, by Jeff Cox: Interest in organic and sustainably farmed food is on the rise, and this thorough overview can help make sense of all those yummy options. Cox presents information ranging from history and seasonality to varietals and preparation methods; it all adds up to an invaluable and engaging reference.
• I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, by Amy Sedaris: Okay, I fear for the partygoer who attends an event that is actually based on some of Amy Sedaris’s wacky advice. But for those who are fans of this Sedaris sibling’s raucous comedy, I Like You is a holiday gift to die laughing for.
• Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford: Buford, the former fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine, has written a compelling profile of popular chef and restaurateur Mario Batali that’s chock full of insight and Italian cooking tips for foodies. If the gourmet in your life hasn’t read Heat yet, this is a surefire winner. (I enjoyed this book in audio, by the way. It’s read by the author, and his nuanced reading enhances the already sparkling prose.)

The six shortlisted books are:

• The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai
• The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
• Carry Me Down, by M.J. Hyland
• In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar
• Mother’s Milk, by Edward St. Aubyn
• The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters

For a real treat, read—and participate in—the Man Booker Prize Library Reading Group blog, where members of the six selected British reading groups are writing about reading the nominated novels and the process of providing feedback to the judges. The enticing book discussions are sure to draw you in and to inspire you to add the nominees to your own reading wishlist.

Murderous bosses, cruel animal trainers, and the abusive husband of a beautiful circus performer with a heart of gold provide the atmosphere of adversity that Jankowski must withstand to survive. It is a strength of Water for Elephants that when Jankowski jumps the circus train, we jump with him into a world that is less bright lights and big top than it is desperate, dangerous.

Author Sara Gruen paints a compassionate picture of circus freaks and the nearly indentured working poor. Her intriguing portrayal of Rosie hints at the elephant’s deep intelligence and capacity for emotional bonds with humans. (Gruen is an animal lover, as exhibited by her promotion of animal causes on her author Web site.)

Water for Elephants feels, however, too morally simplistic. The animal cruelty and domestic violence evoked a bit of Black Beauty—a childhood staple that also explores interspecies bonds. And the circus tale is told from the difficult vantage point of a 90-year-old man reminiscing as he struggles with loneliness. Can I really fault him for painting himself an over-virtuous hero? In the end, any weaknesses are forgiven. They certainly haven’t inhibited independent bookstore sales. Gruen’s tale is an engrossing, atmospheric read.

“I tried to give a sense of proportion to life in the South,” said Lee in one of the few interviews she has given since the novel’s publication. “I think that Southerners react with the same kind of horror as other people do about the injustice in their land.” (You can find this interview and much more on To Kill a Mockingbird & Harper Lee, the comprehensive Web site of an admirer.)

It’s a testament to the power of Lee’s work and to the accuracy of the social mirror that she provides that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most frequently challenged and sometimes banned books of the twentieth century. In school districts across the United States, parents and administrators have challenged the propriety of requiring students to read a work that includes profanity, racial slurs, rape, and racism. At times, the challenges have been successful. But, most often, the novel remains on library shelves and on class curricula as an important reflection of American life and history.

The first full-length biography of Harper Lee, by the way, was published in May, 2006. Biographer Charles J. Shields “has done an admirable job of getting to know Nelle Harper Lee from a distance,” writes Anita Beaman for The Hub. “Due to Lee’s desire for privacy, it’s as close as readers are likely to come to getting inside the mind of the author of one of the greatest books of the twentieth century.” Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee has already been nominated for a Quill Book Award.

Oh, there’s more than a whiff of commercialism to the whole affair. Borders bookstores, Publisher’s Weekly, and NBC Studios are sponsoring the awards, which will by aired on NBC in October and hosted by svelte Today weatherman Al Roker. But librarians and independent booksellers have been involved from the ground floor, and I have to admit that there’s something satisfying about knowing that dozens of authors will receive a brief moment in the sun as a result of all of the hoopla.

There are far too many nominees to list here, so I’m only offering up a list of nominees in a few categories below. See the rest and vote in all Quill Book Awards categories, ranging from Romance to Sports to Children’s Literature and even Graphic Novels (a personal heroine of mine, Alison Bechdel, is a nominee on that list). You may find a few good reading ideas there too!

And the nominees are:

General Fiction
• Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell
• A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore
• The March, by E.L. Doctorow
• Suite Française, by Irene Nemirovsky
• Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

History/Current Events/Politics
• An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore
• The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, by Jonathan Harr
• Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, by James L. Swanson
• The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Biography/Memoir
• Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival, by Anderson Cooper
• Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, by John Grogan
• Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields
• The Tender Bar: A Memoir, by J.R. Moehringer
• The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

Jackson has a gift for creating vivid central characters cursed with moral dilemmas and honest voices. (Her first novel, Gods in Alabama, was possibly an even better book than Between; both have been number-one Book Sense Picks.) Between’s protagonist, Nonny Frett, was birthed and abandoned by her mother (who stood on one side of a family feud) and then immediately embraced by her deaf and blind adoptive mother (who stood on the other). That series of events (where “the war began,” the narrator tells us) shapes Nonny and the town, and the book is the story of Nonny’s struggle to make peace with herself and her past, and to bring some peace to the members of her fractured families.

It could be tempting to classify Jackson’s work as chick lit, but Nonny Frett is her own knight in shining armor, and the novel is certainly not written to formula. No, Jackson’s fiction straddles the line between good literature and great summer reading, and her work is best classified somewhere between Southern gothic, humor, and the writing of Flannery O’Connor and Fannie Flagg.

That’s a spot that would, no doubt, please Jackson, although she says that she can’t read the Southern classics while writing. “A truly great Southern book like To Kill a Mockingbird can put me on the floor, foaming and biting at the carpet,” says Jackson in an interview available from her Web site. “[I’d be] yelling why lord, why! Why do I even try to write when Harper Lee already said everything worth saying perfectly!”

I think that many of us might have that dilemma. But no matter what she has to read (or not to read), I do hope she’ll do it, that Joshilyn Jackson will just keep on writing.

• Garlic and Sapphires, by Ruth Reichl: New York Times critic Ruth Reichl’s ruminations on the life of a food critic has sold briskly since its March publication in paperback. Slashfood called this “a gift that works for food freaks and normal people alike.”
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan: Pollan examines the origins of four very different meals—one from McDonald’s, one from a grocery run to Whole Foods Market, one from ingredients gathered entirely with the author’s own hands (including a hunt and kill), and one from a small Virginia farm. If you are guessing there’s no single right answer to what food is best to eat, NPR’s Terry Gross says you’re right.
• Heat, by Bill Buford: Former New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford left life in the magazine’s Gotham tower to step into the heat of celeb chef Mario Batali’s kitchen and write what could be called this summer’s literary beach read. The result, according to Mango & Ginger, is “an amazingly detailed picture of what it feels like to work in a professional kitchen.”
• My Life in France, by Julia Child: “Those early years in France were among the best of my life. They marked a crucial period of transformation in which I found my true calling, experienced an awakening of the senses, and had such fun that I hardly stopped moving long enough to catch my breath,” writes cuisine’s grand dame in the introduction to her posthumously published memoir. It sounds compelling, but buyer beware: “While the book is absolutely wonderful, we faced the problem of being totally hungry for whatever Julia would describe,” wrote the Gothamist about reading the book.
• Chew on This, by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson: The author of Fast Food Nation has reworked, for kids, his popular investigation of America’s obsession with fast food. How deep an effect a book like this can really have on young minds is debatable. “What did you think of the book?” Bay Area Bites blogger Jennifer Maiser posed this question to a young friend to whom she had given the book. “I liked it,” he said. “After practice now, when everyone wants to go to Burger King, I don’t really want to go.”
• The Grail, by Brian Doyle: For those who weren’t satisfied by the knowledge gained through the movie Sideways, Doyle’s book, subtitled A Year Ambling and Shambling through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World, explores the intricacies of winemaking and Doyle’s promise that Oregon will soon be regarded as “the pinot noir capital of North America.”
• Blithe Tomato, by Mike Madison: After years of selling the wares of his Northern California farm at open-air markets, Mike Madison has compiled his “insider’s wry look at farmer’s market society” to languorous, pleasing effect. His short essays will appeal to anyone with a love of gardening, fresh produce, and human nature. You’ll find an excerpt on Californiaauthors.com.

Alibris visitors can donate books to the New Orleans Public Library via the library’s wishlist established through the Donate-A-Book program. By purchasing titles from the list created by the library, it’s possible to send titles that have been preselected by librarians to help fill the needs of their patrons.

You’ll also find the following two related Donate-A-Book wishlists on the Alibris site:

• NOCCA|Riverfront Public High School is asking for books that help them to provide professional arts training to students. The school recently returned to its home on the banks of the Mississippi in downtown New Orleans.
• Mississippi State University Library is creating a special collection on “The Southern Table.” As I’ve written about before, many Southern cookbooks and family recipes were lost as a result of the hurricane. The archive and special collection at MSU should help to rebuild and preserve a unique cooking legacy.