64. Lost on Planet China

By J. Maarten Troost
Rated 5 Stars
From: Library


FROM BOOK LIST:

Troost, who entertained readers in The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004) with tales of life on a South Pacific island, now turns his attention to China. Settled in Sacramento, California, with his wife and two sons, Troost gets restless and floats the idea of moving his family to China. His wife is amenable, so he sets off to scout ahead. What he finds in Beijing is a crowded, smoggy city where something as simple as taking a walk can be a dangerous proposition, given the hazardous traffic. Troost visits one burgeoning industrial city after another, finding immense crowds, odd cuisine, piteous beggars, and masseuses offering sexual favors. He also discovers a country that firmly believes that it's on the edge of something big; in spite of a great divide between poor and rich, China is undergoing a tremendous push toward modernity. Troost's crisp, engaging prose invites the reader to experience his adventures right alongside him. At turns meditative, whimsical, humorous, and shocked, Troost is an excellent guide to the vast, multifaceted country that is modern-day China.

63. The Night Villa

By Carol Goodman
Rated: 5 Stars
From: Jani

FROM: AMAZON

In this complex and lyrical literary thriller from Goodman (The Sonnet Lover), University of Texas classics professor Sophie Chase, after barely surviving a gunman with ties to a sinister cult, joins an expedition to Capri. A donor has funded both the exact reconstruction of a Roman villa destroyed when Mount Vesuvius buried nearby Herculaneum in A.D. 79, and a computer system that can decipher the charred scrolls being excavated from the villa's ruins. Sophie's hopes for a recuperative idyll fade after her old boyfriend, who disappeared years before into the same cult as the campus gunman, appears in the area, implicating the cult in a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, extracts from the scrolls—the journals of a Roman visiting the villa just before the volcano erupted—shade toward bloodshed and betrayal. The scrolls' oddly modern tone aside, Goodman deftly mixes cultural and religious history, geography, myth, personal memory, dream and even portent without sacrificing narrative drive, against the beautiful backdrop of the locale with its echoes of unimaginable loss.