This was one of my more disappointing reads of 2011. It wasn’t actually on my reading list at all, but I found myself about to board a 6-hour flight with only 50 pages to go in my current book and so I quickly picked this one up at an airport bookstore. The plot traces the twists and travails of a love triangle of sorts from the final few months of college into the first year or so after graduation. Madeleine Hanna is a privileged east-coast girl who finds herself being quick dragged down in life due to her love for Leonard, a mentally unstable man. Meanwhile, Mitchell has been head-over-heels for Madeleine for years but makes a few interesting discoveries about himself during a year long trip around the world while Madeleine and Leonard’s troubled love tale unfolds back home.

I disliked the book for several reasons, the first of which is that there is no point to the plot and no real climax. At the end, I was left feeling that I’d just spent several hours perusing a seemingly random snapshop of a given amount of time in the lives of a few people. I found the same was true, although to a lesser degree, in the author’s previous work, Middlesex. In The Marriage Plot, there were few connections between events throughout the story and even less insight into the human condition, marriage, love, or any other topic.

The plotline is also unbelievably conventional without any indication that the author intended to critique or otherwise comment on this fact. In this sense, the character of Madeleine is incredibly poorly developed–she’s a girl who wants to marry no matter the costs (although she doesn’t recognize this about herself), and we never get any sense of where this desire comes from. I assume that Eugenides’s idea was to reinvigorate the “marriage plot” for the 21st century, but I have to say that he’s far closer to Jane Austen, except without the depth.

For what it’s worth, the best written parts were Madeleine’s mini-crisis that occurs early on in the book, during her last few months of college. Whether this experience is accurate to the early 1980s (when the story is set) is debatable, but it certainly captures an under-reported experience on many campuses today. The sex scenes towards the end were also compelling, which perhaps signals that the author would’ve been better off trying for something in the chick-lit genre.

Siddhartha’s Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned offers a profile of the new, ever modernizing India through an in-depth look at five career paths. Some of his chapters focus on individuals, such as a business education guru that may be running an elaborate ponzi scheme and a woman from the conflict-weary north east of India trying to make it as a waitress in Delhi. Others look at multiple people in the same line of work, such as migrant workers who take on dangerous jobs and suicide-prone farmers. Deb spent significant time in India interviewing people for his book and shows up vividly as a character throughout the different narratives.

Overall, I found the emphasis on individual stories both enlightening and limiting. In a country of over a billion people, it is often easy to overlook individual stories and hardships, and Deb does a good service in framing India’s struggle in modern times as the struggles of individuals. Nonetheless, Deb has a negative take on modernization throughout the book that is certainly reflected in the stories he finds, but one wonders if fell into the classic trap of simply finding what he was looking for. In terms of gaining substantial insight into the changes India has undergone in the last few decades, I think one is better off picking up Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India.

Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities is a vivid story about greed, class, crime, and the justice system set in New York City in the 1980s. I must confess that this is the first novel by Wolfe that I’ve ever read, an omission primarily due to my dislike for excessive use of exclamation points. That difference aside, once I got into the book, I found Wolfe’s writing style incredibly engaging as he conjured up nearly palpable images of a rough and tough, grimy, seedy city.

The plot of the book revolves around Sherman McCoy, a rich resident of the upper east side who tries to take too big of a bite out of life and ends up as the poster child for a justice campaign in the Bronx criminal court. Many other compelling characters pepper the pages, including a drunk but promising British journalist, a cunning mistress, a corrupt Harlem pastor, and an unfulfilled district attorney. The story captures many aspects of NYC in the 1980s and is definitely a must-read for anybody who lives in the city. Reading it I was often struck by how much has changed in the last twenty-five years and yet how much hasn’t really changed at all.

After a several month break in my reading (occasioned by an unusually busy summer), I picked-up Into Africa in preparation for a trip into sub-Saharan Africa myself. I would highly recommend this fascinating, enthralling book for any fellow travelers as well as those interested in well-written historical narratives.

Into-Africa details the true adventures of Dr. David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley on their epic and somewhat tragic quests into the heart of Africa. Martin Dugard, the author, does an excellent job molding history into an appealing story. His deep research and use of various types of historical sources are evident in his careful presentation, and I truly enjoyed what some might see as the drier parts of the book, such as the raging debate in mid-19th century Europe on the source of the Nile River.

The book’s prose is always flowing and often riveting as first Livingstone and then Stanley press into a world of wilderness, swamps, and the unknown. The highlight of the book is how Dugard really brings Africa alive and vividly captures the travelers’ challenge in this very different world. Nearly equally impressive, however, is how Dugard weaves in the personal life stories of Livingstone and Stanley and along with them snapshots of mid-19th century England and America as well. The raw material is itself fascinating and as retold here will capture the imagination of anybody with a strong imagination and a taste for history and adventure.

Middlemarch is one of those classic books often referred to by literary scholars and that I’m embarrassed to have never read. As a New Year’s resolution, I decided to rectify my ignorance, and now, 5 1/2 months (and several intervening books) later, I can honestly say that I love this novel. The plot line is far too complicated to outline here, but it is essentially the story of an English village in the early/mid-19th century. There are dozens of characters, and a combination of marital relations, struggling careers, and contemporary politics compete for the reader’s attention. I was surprised to find the book oddly hilarious in addition to being a serious work of fiction.

The main character, Dorothea, particularly captured my imagination because I found a lot of parallels between her story and trials and tribulations that women face today. Certainly many of the more structurally sexist elements of Dorothea’s world are absent from our own. But Dorothea’s inner life, and how she thought through decisions struck me as oddly relevant to modern times. Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as “…one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” I concur, and would highly recommend Middlemarch.

I picked up Ian McEwan’s Solar in an airport that had a very slim selection of reading materials. Even then, I think I made the wrong choice. The book is a satirical novel that double-features the hopeless love life of a failing scientist and his problematic attempts to solve the crisis of global warming. McEwan’s penchant for crafting non-sympathetic heros is on full display here and is no doubt the most interesting part of the novel. But the book dragged on, particularly in the second half, with repetitive descriptions of the scientist’s body, insatiable appetite to womanize, and lack of moral compass. No doubt, such topics can be highly interesting (Coetzee’s Disgrace comes to mind), but McEwan falls far short of the mark. All in all, a banal read.

The Imperfectionists features a series of interconnected narratives about people involved with an ever flailing English language newspaper based in Rome. At the beginning, the stories are light reading that poke gentle fun at the silly lives we all lead. As the book progresses, the darker side of life slowly becomes more manifest a sorrow and disappointment emerge as major themes. The book had me vacillating between laughing and crying until the very end. All in all, a very enjoyable commentary on the trials and tribulations of the modern world.

I thought about putting The Museum of Innocence down nearly every time I picked it up. But I always continued reading and am now left feeling as deeply ambivalent about Orhan Pamuk’s most recent novel as I did three weeks when I perused the opening pages. Let me be clear—it is no doubt a masterpiece. Some may be bored by the luxurious approach of dwelling on one man’s emotions towards one woman for over 500 pages. But I found the exploration into the human psyche and a world of obsessions mixed with pain deeply intriguing, which may be precisely what bothered me as well.

The Museum of Innocence tells the often experienced story of love and loss, a romance alternatively kindled and destroyed. But the bulk of the novel isn’t a narrative at all but rather a look into the deepest recesses of the mind of Kemal, a spoiled Turkish elite who serves as the narrator for most of the work. Instead of getting over his unobtainable love and living an ordinary life, Kemal spirals further into his desire for a particular woman for years and, increasingly as the novel wears on, for objects that remind him or her. The relationship between people and things is one of the most interesting aspects of the book as Kemal begins to put together a museum that serves as a memorial to his life’s work of longing and remembering.

I think what bothered me about the novel is that it hits close to home. Who hasn’t experienced love, desire, and heartbreak? Somehow when I read Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, however, I find the stories disconnected enough from my own life to avoid mixing personal emotions with my enjoyment of literature. Of course I read in large part because novels comment on the very issues at the heart of my own life, but commenting and feeling are two different things. There was little story to separate me and Kemal in The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk dwells so much on the inner thoughts on Kemal, a man in utter agony for most of the story, that he offers the fullest exploration into human relations and the need for closeness that I have ever read. The book certainly was not an easy read, but it was well worth the effort.

Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night is the story of a Kashmiri-born journalist who returns as an adult to cover the insurgencies and counterinsurgencies that have gripped his homeland. As Peer narrates his personal experiences growing-up in Kashmir and later traveling through the region as a reporter, he uses threads of his story to segway into discussions of larger issues, such as torture, Hindu-Muslim relations, and growing militarization. Peer provides an openly subjective, clear-minded, and refreshing view of Kashmir from a mix of insider and outsider perspectives.

Peer begins with his memories growing up in Kashmir as a child. We learn about his family and school life as well as various friends and neighbors along the way. In the middle of the book, Peer digresses into his time away from Kashmir, although he remains focused on his experiences in India as a Kashmiri. When Peer returns to Kashmir in the second half of the book, he attempts to stomach and then later to explain the changes he witnesses. Those interested in Kashmir as a conflict zone will be most interested in the later sections of the book, and here Peer also offers his most serious reflections on how those looking in from the outside can try to understand developments in Kashmir.

Peer makes no pretenses to be unbiased, but I did find that he offers a relatively balanced view given his combination of perspectives. Peer is aware always of his priviledged position as a highly educated member of Kashmiri society and makes no attempt to hide how that shapes his experiences. Additionally and particularly as a civilian, Peer does not personally witness a high amount of violence or bloodsheed. Most of the hard experiences that Peer describes focus around endless checkpoints or, at worst, close calls. In this sense, Peer describes what is probably a common experience amongst Kashmiri civilians who have suddenly found their home made into a militarized zone. Finally, Peer seeks out those who have been literally caught in crossfire, whether as militants or simply walking home from work one day. He weaves these tales and their assorted endings into his own to offer a view of Kashmir that highlights individual stories and experiences in order to put a human face on this contested part of the world.

In The Yacoubian Building, Alaa Al Aswany follows events in the lives of different residents of the Yacoubian Building in Cairo. This approach is particularly interesting because the Yacoubian building contains a series of quite nice apartments with well-off residents and also houses many poorer people in a series of make-shift rooms on the roof. The stories often center around sex in all its variations—married, unmarried, straight, gay, etc. Also on display are the fall into violent, fundamentalist Islam, various forms of corruption, and family quarrels.

Whether Alaa Al Aswany’s narrative accurately portrays life in modern Cairo (many claim it does), the book is a deep look into why people make what appear to be bad choices. Taha, who becomes a terrorist against the state, does so for understandable (if not justifiable) reasons. Busayna falls in a love with a man more than twice her age at least in part because of how she has been treated by others. Alaa Al Aswany doesn’t try to make any of this okay, but he does offer the back story.

In addition to more positive moments, The Yacoubian Building relays a series of quite awful scenes, such as sexual assault, death, and torture. Yet the book ends on a happy note—with a wedding. Why? Is there an ultimate optimism in this story of modern Cairo, or does the cycle of good-and-bad just keep rolling on?