The Bee Loud Glade by Steve Himmer – I loved this short novel about Finch, a corporate drone fired from his job creating fake lives in the blogosphere to promote his company’s products. He receives an offer from an eccentric billionaire to become the man’s “garden hermit” and heads down the road to completely removing himself from social contacts. A sort of Walden meets Being There.

What You See in the Dark by Manuel Munoz – Munoz combines a lurid 50’s voyeurism with Hitchcockian filmography. The great feat of this book, aside from the brilliant plot and characters, is how Munoz leaves space in the narrative for the reader. So what do you do with that space? You fill it, my friend, with your expectations, the things you know, and the things you only think you know. Like Adam Ross’s Mr. Peanut and Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, What You See in the Dark spins circles around cultural memories.

A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles – Is this really a sleeper? Everyone knows about it, but I wonder how many read it. I rarely receive recent books as gifts, since I’ve often read them before they hit the shelves. This year I got two, by request – A Moment in the Sun was the first. It’s too easy to call Sayles’ book cinematic – that’s to be expected. It’s a big, world-spanning earthquake of a book – It broadly buries itself in the global and social upheaval of the time, yet it’s life is in the intimately revealed characters. A beautiful brute of a book.

One to grow on: Parallel Lives by Peter Nadas – This is the other one I asked for. Forgive me for not yet having read it, but I’ll be starting it 12/25. If you’ve read the fantastic A Book of Memories since it arrived in English 15 years ago, you know why. That book was wide, sprawling and Proustian, I’m hoping that Parallel Lives lives up to the expectations created by its wonderful predecessor.