50 Books About Books

The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt (Knopf, jacketed hardcover, $26.95). From the novelist who brought us Possession twenty years ago, this fine, evocative novel whose characters—a children’s book author, a potter, a curator, a philosopher, a puppet-master—dive deep into Victorian and Edwardian life.

The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek (Viking, jacketed hardcover, $25.95). A breezy novel set in the Hamptons with writers and artists as main characters. A missing painting plus a missing first edition equals a “winsome” novel for FB&C readers.

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Nieffenegger (Abrams ComicArts, jacketed hardcover, $19.95). A mysterious bookmobile full of every book you’ve ever read? It’s a cool concept. Even if you’ve never picked up a graphic novel before, this one from the bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, is worth the ticket price.

Watermark: A Novel of the Middle Ages by Vanitha Sankaran (Avon, paperback, $14.99). An intriguing account of papermaking in fourteenth-century France, from the perspective of a young woman who falls under the watchful eyes of the Inquisition. An impressive debut.

Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel by Yann Martel (Spiegel & Grau, jacketed hardcover, $25). From the author of Life of Pi comes this difficult-to-summarize but deeply allegorical Holocaust novel about an aspiring novelist, a taxidermist, and a play starring a donkey and a howler monkey.

The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery by Ian Sansom (Harper, paperback, $13.99). The fourth installment in Sansom’s series starring the erstwhile (and mildly pathetic) English-Jewish-vegetarian mobile librarian Israel Armstrong trying to make his way in the rural Northern Irish town of Tumdrum. Not much of a mystery here, but the characters remain as entertaining as ever.

The Anthologist: A Novel by Nicholson Baker (Simon & Schuster, jacketed hardcover, $25). A stream-of-consciousness narrative offering a romp through the history and technique of English poetry through the eyes of writers’-blocked poet Paul Chowder.

Woodsburner: A Novel by John Pipkin (Nan A. Talese, jacketed hardcover, $24.95). This debut novel opens with Henry David Thoreau’s accidental 1844 burning of Concord Woods and features the historical figure as a player among a cast of characters which includes a book collector who can’t read and an ambitious bookseller out to write a play. Featured in FB&C, December 2009.

The Cookbook Collector: A Novel by Allegra Goodman (The Dial Press, jacketed hardcover, $26). From the FB&C blog: “Bibliophiles who enjoy novels should not miss [this book]. Where else in modern fiction are you going to read a line of dialogue like this, ‘You think there's something materialistic about collecting books, but really collectors are the last romantics. We're the only ones who still love books as objects.’”

Perfect Reader: A Novel by Maggie Pouncey (Pantheon, jacketed hardcover, $24.95). An engaging debut novel set in a New England college town, where a young woman grapples with her father’s literary estate, a pack of unpublished poems, and their tangled family history.