None of these are new books, but they were recently made available in paperback and are some of the best reviewed books of last year. Maybe I was a bit negligent in compiling a Best Books of 2012 list without reading all of them first, but even though I did really enjoy two of them, I honestly don’t think any would have made the list any way.
The Newlyweds…What’s it About: Amina is a Bangladeshi national who meets George, an emotionally repressed American engineer on an internet-marriage website. It explores their relationship, the updated rules of what used to be known as a mail-order bride situation, their former flames who still cast large shadows (particularly in the last half of the book), and also Bangladeshi culture in general…Review: It has an interesting set-up, and loads of descriptive details about Bangladeshi culture (the author may in fact make the American mistake of working too hard to show us they did their homework), but the book is ultimately a slight disappointment because of two things.
The biggest is that I don’t actually feel like the author really cares about the central relationship. This bleeds through in a hundred different ways, most notably the fact that the side relationships (and is it really credible that both Amina and George would be in entanglements with their quasi-cousins who are still hanging around? Isn’t that a little too much of a gross coincidence?) dominate the second half of the book, and the first half never works up much heat or interest in seeing Amina and George happy together. In fact, the book’s second biggest problem is that I feel like the author was a little bored with George. The book is really Amina’s story———it could just as easily be a first person narrative since we’re never far from Amina’s perspective———and George is never brought fully to life. This book is really more a fish-out-of-water story about a Bangladeshi adapting to American life, and that’s fine, but it was sold as more of a realistic, quality romance, and I felt let-down by that aspect. Grade: B-
The Good Son…What’s It About: A group of intellectuals arrive in Pakistan for a conference on peace, and are soon taken hostage. Soon, the brilliant, cagey Sonia Laghari (white but married to a Pakistani, with a keen grasp of Pashto, Islam, and psychology) starts to unravel her Taliban captors by out-quoting them on everything from The Koran to history. Meanwhile, her soldier son looks for her and an Eurasian intelligence analyst works to discredit a reported nuclear bomb theft in Pakistan, tying into the main story in unexpected ways…Review: Alternately fascinating and frustrating (just like its main character Sonia), but with far more good elements than bad ones. Sonia is so slippery it’s a bit hard to really identify with her, but that’s also the point. The ending is far-fetched and anti-climactic (and is it really believable that one character would have her life and everything she cared about ruined only to fall for the man who ruined it?), but the whole of the book is an interesting ride, with informative digressions on everything from the psychology of radical Islam to the inner workings of military intelligence to an entire history of Bin Laden’s movement. The parts more than make-up for the whole. Grade: B+
People Who Eat Darkness…What’s it About: A true crime account of a missing British girl hostessing in Japan, and the singularly nasty killer. Although the book is really just as much about the complicated Japanese hostessing culture, and their bizarro-world criminal justice system, which is mesmerizingly different than our own…Review: The central crime is tantalizing enough, but the book’s real juice comes from being written by a first-rate reporter (Richard Loyd Parry) clearly interested in all things Japan. He lays out a comprehensive analysis of their sex industry, religious cults, historical mistreatment of minorities (the killer is part of a Korean subculture, and this is partially credited by the cops to be why he’s such an unprecedented “bad apple”), and their police investigations, with fascinating tidbits like detectives who are shocked that a guilty suspect doesn’t confess. Even if Parry sometimes bogs his book down in too much detail, it’s still more than worth it to come for the crime, and stay for the education. Grade: A-