WYPR Arts

What We're Reading: Nov. 3 - 9, 2009

Published November 3, 2009 at 10:00 AM EST

Welcome to the first issue of "What We're Reading." At NPR, we cover a lot of books every week. Among those, there are always a handful of standouts — the great reads as well as the books whose buzz-level makes them impossible to ignore. "What We're Reading" brings you our book team's shortlist of new fiction and non-fiction releases, along with candid reactions from our reporters, hosts and critics.

The Lacuna

A Novel

By Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years, mixes fiction and history to tell the story of Harrison Shepherd. Born of a Mexican mother and American father, Shepherd spends his life straddling the two cultures. After chance meetings with artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, he gets a job working for them and lives in their colorful and dramatic household. There, he gets to know Leon Trotsky, then exiled in Mexico. Shepherd's friendships with these larger-than-life characters set him on his own course toward a confrontation with history.

Hardcover, 528 pages, Harper, list price: $26.99, pub. date: Nov. 3

Eating Animals

By Jonathan Safran Foer

The writer of the novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close might not seem like an obvious choice to write a book about the ethics and economics of eating meat, but Jonathan Safran Foer found himself examining the issue closely once he became a dog owner. In Eating Animals, he considers the philosophical underpinnings of meat-eating, goes out on visits to factory farms to check out the issues for himself, and ultimately asks readers to consider their own choices against the backdrop of the way modern food production actually works.

Hardcover, 351 pages, Little, Brown and Co., list price: $25.99, pub. date: Nov. 2

Googled

The End of the World As We Know It

By Ken Auletta

The subtitle of Ken Auletta's book is The End Of The World As We Know It, which gives you some idea of just how important he believes Google to be. Googled is not the first book about the rise of the titans of search (and other businesses), but Auletta, a media columnist for The New Yorker, prides himself on his 2 1/2 years of research and broad access to the company. Combining anecdotes about the founders and others who make the company work with efforts to use Google as a metaphor for the broader digital revolution, Auletta attempts to explain the company's functioning and mind-set while drawing lessons that apply beyond its very famous doors.

Hardcover, 400 pages, Penguin Press, list price: $27.95, pub. date: Nov. 3

The Humbling

By Philip Roth

Philip Roth's new work, The Humbling, is about an aging actor who loses his touch and retreats from his work, only to enter into an intense (and explicitly described) affair with a significantly younger lesbian. The book is already controversial: a review in The Guardian condemned it as "scandalous frippery" (as perhaps only The Guardian would do), but other evaluations have been more positive, crediting the book for being provocative and thoughtful. Roth's latest may be brief at 160 pages — more a novella than a novel — but he hasn't lost the ability to drive discussion.

Hardcover, 160 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, list price: $22, pub. date: Oct. 21

Invisible

By Paul Auster

In the 25 years since the publication of his memoir The Invention Of Solitude, Paul Auster has developed a reputation as a writer of challenging fiction that combines elements from crime stories to ghost stories to — as sometimes seems inevitable for serious writers — visions of dystopia. Invisible, his fourth novel in the past five years, begins during the Vietnam era, a time of political turmoil and sometimes violent intergenerational conflict, when a young poet becomes entangled in the lives of a French professor and his girlfriend. A random act of street violence triggers a search for justice that covers four decades and settings from Morningside Heights to Paris to the West Indies.