Volding summer reading 2010
Explore Volding's 2010 summer reading list featuring top book picks for the season. Discover must-read titles and literary recommendations for your summer.
Book
Tree of Smoke
by Denis Johnson
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year "The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson's.” —Jonathan Franzen Named A Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . . Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."
Book
The Sorrow of War
by Bảo Ninh
The daring and controversial novel that took the world by storm-- a story of politics, selfhood, survival, and war. Featured in The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick airing September 2017. Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originaly published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller.
Book
The Killer Inside Me
by Jim Thompson
In a small town in Texas there is a sheriff's deputy named Lou Ford, a man so dull that he lives in cliches, so good-natured that he doesn't even lay a finger on the drunks who come into his custody. But then, that would be too easy, for Lou's sickness requires other victims. . . . A nightmarish book of psychopathic evil.
Book
The Dew Breaker
by Edwidge Danticat
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A "brilliant book, undoubtedly the best one yet by an enormously talented writer” (The Washington Post Book World), about love, remorse, and hope; of personal and political rebellions; and of the compromises we make to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. In this award-winning, bestselling work of fiction that moves between Haiti in the 1960s and New York in the present day, we meet an unusual man who is harboring a vital, dangerous secret. He is a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, we enter the lives of those around him, and his secret is slowly revealed. Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant exploration of the “dew breaker”—or torturer—is an unforgettable story from one of America’s most essential writers.
Book
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
