2005- So Far This Year:
Explore the best books of 2005 with our curated list! Discover top fiction, non-fiction, and must-read titles from this iconic year in literature.
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The Effect of Living Backwards
by Heidi Julavits
Following her acclaimed debut, The Mineral Palace, Heidi Julavits presents a quirky, compelling novel about two sisters, a bizarre event, and the elusive nature of truth—a New York Times Notable Book. Does Alice really hate her sister, or is that love? Was she really enrolled in grad school, or was that an elaborate hoax? Is this really a hijacking, or is it merely the effect of living backwards? “Heidi Julavits—no stranger to edgy, dark topics—takes liberties with conventional notions of hijacking and hostages, weaving humor in a zingy and brainy spectrum...If you can take successive shots of wit with gulps of moral inquisition, then this fine book is for you.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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The Beans of Egypt, Maine
by Carolyn Chute
Earlene marries into the povertystricken Bean family and finds herself being pulled down into their destitution of resources and spirit. In spite of everything, Earlene chooses to become her own woman.
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Woman Hollering Creek
by Sandra Cisneros
A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
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Playing with Boys
by Alisa Valdes
Three Latin-American women in their late twenties, including an actress, a suburban mother, and a music manager, take Los Angeles by storm in their shared quest to find healthy relationships and success in a cutthroat city.
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Finding Miracles
by Julia Alvarez
Fifteen-year-old Milly Kaufman is an average American teenager until Pablo, a new student at her school, inspires her to search for her birth family in his native country.
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Girls in Pants
by Ann Brashares
It's been two summers since the Traveling Pants first worked their magic on four young friends, who are now facing their last summer together. The girls will be leaving to attend four different colleges in four different cities. They plan to gather to launch the Pants on their summer voyage and begin the time of their lives. Young Adult.
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The Girl who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa
by Alexander McCall Smith
Gathered here is a beguiling selection of folktales from Zimbabwe and Botswana as retold by the best-selling author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. This treasury contains most of the stories previously collected in Children of Wax and seven new tales from the Setswana-speaking people of Botswana. A girl discovers that her young husband might actually be a lion in disguise, but not before they have two sons who might actually be cubs . . . When a child made of wax follows his curiosity outside into the heat of daylight and melts, his siblings shape him into a bird with feathers made of leaves that enable him to fly into the light . . . Talking hyenas, milk-giving birds, clever cannibals who nonetheless get their comeuppance, and mysterious forces that reside in the landscape—these wonderful fables bring us the wealth, the variety, and the particular magic of traditional African lore.
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Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
A perceptive, achingly funny first novel featuring a middle-class Midwestern teenager trying to fit in at an elite East Coast boarding school, "Prep" is also a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
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The Other Side of Mulholland
by Stephen Randall
The Other Side of Mulholland is: "a frothy, fast-paced exploration of the dichotomies between the two distinct sections of Los Angeles: upper L.A. with 'all the glitz and the big houses and beautiful women and BMWs, and lower L.A., the suburbs 'too dull to be the subject of a TV show or a Joan Didion novel.'"-Washington Post The Other Side of Mulholland is: everything the image-makers of Los Angeles want to keep under wraps: the tract housing, the car dealerships, and the parents' place with its wet bar and kidney-shaped pool. The Other Side of Mulholland is: "a wise exploration of how, for many of us, family ties can not only bind, but gag."-Laura Zigman, author of Animal Husbandry The Other Side of Mulholland is: the cord that tethers twin brothers Perry and Tim Newman to their shared past when the present-with Perry a sleek television producer and Tim a lowly journalist-feels as competitive as Hollywood itself. The Other Side of Mulholland is:"a hugely readable debut by a terrific new voice in American fiction."-Jerry Stahl, author of Plainclothes Naked A Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book of 2001
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The Monk Downstairs
by Tim Farrington
Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent and a sense that she has used up her illusions. I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much, she tells a hapless suitor. I'm thirty-eight years old, and I've got a daughter learning to read and a job I don't quite like. I don't need the violin music. But when the new tenant in her in-law apartment turns out to be Michael Christopher, on the lam after twenty years in a monastery and smack dab in the middle of a dark night of the soul, Rebecca begins to suspect that she is not as thoroughly disillusioned as she had thought. Her daughter, Mary Martha, is delighted with the new arrival, as is Rebecca's mother, Phoebe, a rollicking widow making a new life for herself among the spiritual eccentrics of the coastal town of Bolinas. Even Rebecca's best friend, Bonnie, once a confirmed cynic in matters of the heart, urges Rebecca on. But none of them, Rebecca feels, understands how complicated and dangerous love actually is. As her unlikely friendship with the ex-monk grows toward something deeper, and Michael wrestles with his despair while adjusting to a second career flipping hamburgers at McDonald's, Rebecca struggles with her own temptation to hope. But it is not until she is brought up short by the realities of life and death that she begins to glimpse the real mystery of love, and the unfathomable depths of faith. Beautifully written and playfully engaging, this novel. is about one man wrestling with his yearning for a life of contemplation and the need for a life of action in the world. But it's Rebecca's spirit, as well as her relationships with Mary Martha, Phoebe, her irresponsible surfer ex-husband Rory -- and, of course, the monk downstairs -- that makes this story shine.
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