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Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times by Gregory Cowles, Senior Editor, Books.
How better to enter the new year than
with a look back? History runs through many of this week’s recommended
titles, from the fall of Rome to the birth of Islam to Michelangelo in
16th-century Constantinople. If Paris in the 1960s is your bag, Patrick
Modiano has you covered. If you’re interested in the Harlem Renaissance
but have never read Jean Toomer’s seminal 1923 novel “Cane,” which
helped catalyze that movement, you might add it to your list of
resolutions. If you’re curious about the Philippine-American War and its
lasting impact — inescapable in the Philippines, mostly ignored in
America — then Gina Apostol’s novel “Insurrecto” offers an improbably
fun, and funny, guide. (When you’re done with that, maybe pick up
another satire out of Asia. Yan Lianke’s “The Day the Sun Died” or
Gengoroh Tagame’s “My Brother’s Husband: Volume 2” both fit the bill.)
We
round things out with a debut novel about London and two books by
notable critics: a memoir of love and reading late in life by the
literary critic Susan Gubar, and a collection of film writing by the
movie critic A. S. Hamrah.
