22 books to read in 2014

(Image credit: (Patrick Smith/Getty Images))

last updated 8 January 2015

There are so many new books to read in a given year that it can be almost impossible to know where to begin — but you shouldn't let the ocean of options stop you from tracking down a few highlights. With so many books slated for release in 2014, where should you begin? Let The Week be your guide:

JANUARY

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For his fifth book, Korean American novelist Chang-Rae Lee branches out into dystopian fiction. The book follows Fan, a Chinese-American laborer who lives in a class-stratified city called B-Mor (which you probably know better under its current name, Baltimore). When her boyfriend mysteriously disappears, Fan decides to journey into unknown parts of the country to find him. In On Such a Full Sea, Lee uses science-fiction to comment on current political, economic, and environmental problems, painting a dark image of America's possible future.

The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead pens this intriguing literary hybrid, which doubles as a tribute to George Eliot's Middlemarch and a personal memoir. Mead discovered Middlemarch at a young age and routinely revisited the novel at important junctions in her life, drawing new lessons and insights each time. Though Mead's regard for Eliot is obvious, you don't need to be a Middlemarch fan to appreciate My Life in Middlemarch. If a book has ever truly spoken to you, you'll be able to relate to the way a piece of 19th century literature shapes Mead's perspectives and actions as she moves through life in the 21st century.

At first glance, a history of American public transit might sound like something you'd be forced to read in an engineering class. But the Boston Globe's Doug Most has come at the potentially dry subject from a unique and engaging angle: The story of two brothers — one in New York City and one in Boston — who each dreamed of creating America's first subway system in their respective cities. Most's narrative chronicles tackles the enormous undertaking at every level, from the high-powered political figures at the top to the "sandhogs" who created the tunnels, offering an intriguing top-down look at American transit.

PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author Yiyun Li's latest novel splits its narrative between Ruyu, Moran, and Boyang — a trio of friends linked by a mysterious crime they experienced as children in China. When a young woman was poisoned, it was written off as an accident — but there's a good chance at least one of the friends knows more than they've let on. The novel leaps between the 1990s, when the crime was committed, and the present day, where each of the long-separated friends is coming to terms with what really happened.

Legendary mystery author Raymond Chandler left some impossibly big shoes to fill, but his most famous creation — the hard-boiled Los Angeles detective Philip Marlowe — has managed to live on in film, television, and radio for decades after his creator's death. The Black-Eyed Blonde is the first authorized Marlowe mystery since Robert Parker's so-so Perchance to Dream hit shelves in 1991, and the Edward Award-nominated Benjamin Black seems like a solid choice to revive Chandler's famed literary detective for one last case.

Up in the Air author Walter Kirn turns to nonfiction to tell the bizarre true story of his 15-year friendship with a man who claimed to be a Rockefeller — and who was, in actuality, a psychopathic con man and murderer. Kirn uses Blood Will Out to document the nature of the friendship, and explore why he was so easily taken in by someone who proved to be so dangerous. Early reviews have compared Kirn's story to Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, with one chilling asterisk: This story actually happened.

Jaime Clarke's Vernon Downs, which has earned early praise from writers like Tom Perrotta and Gary Shteyngart, offers a deliberately meta tale of literary obsession. Between the death of his parents and a bad breakup, the life of aspiring novelist Charlie Martens has been characterized by instability — but when he manages to insinuate himself into the life of his literary idol, Vernon Downs, his happiness and gratitude eventually devolves into obsession.

You probably spend a fair amount of time in your office — in fact, there's a pretty good chance you're reading this article there right now — but how did such a strangely regimented workplace structure become normalized, anyway? Author Nikil Saval dives into the history of the white-collar office, exploring how the accounting offices once looked down on by "real workers" became the business standard — and how the workplace will continue to evolve in the years to come.

Also noteworthy in April: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, by Glenn Greenwald; The Revolutions, by Felix Gilman; Casebook, by Mona Simpson; Lovers at the Chameleon Club: Paris, 1932, by Francine Prose; Can't and Won't: Stories, by Lydia Davis; In Paradise, by Peter Matthiessen; Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything, by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Then We Came to the End author Joshua Ferris returns with a satirical novel about the increasingly important role that technology plays in the way the world understands us. Protagonist Paul O'Rourke is surprised when he discovers that a mysterious identity thief has created both a Facebook page and a Twitter account under his name. But as his other self's online footprint begins to spread, Paul is forced to confront the idea that this other self is better at being Paul O'Rourke than he is.

After concluding his Patrick Melrose series with 2012's At Last, Edward St. Aubyn aims his satirical lens onto the world of literary puffery with Lost for Words. The novel's sprawling narrative chronicles the mad grab for the (fictional) Elysian Prize for Literature, in which a series of shortlisted authors desperately vie for the press, celebrity, and book sales that come when a book has a little gold stamp affixed to its cover.

Dutch author Herman Koch's cynical The Dinner — which was set entirely at a meal between four repulsive people — polarized critics and readers alike on its way to becoming a bestseller in 2013. Summer House with Swimming Pool promises a similarly grim appraisal of humanity: A doctor who specializes in treating celebrities is forced to explain the death of a famous actor on his operating table less than a year after their families spent an eventful vacation together.

Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King; The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith; Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers; Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers, by Mike Sacks; My Salinger Year, by Joanna Rakoff; Brutal Youth, by Anthony Breznican; The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henriquez; The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham.

We don't know much about Bryan Lee O'Malley's upcoming graphic novel Seconds yet — but given that it's O'Malley first full-length project in a decade that's not called Scott Pilgrim, it's easy to be excited anyway. O'Malley has revealed that the "funny and weird and kind of big and crazy" story will follows a young woman named Katie who works in a restaurant called Seconds, which exists in a "fairy tale version of reality."

Also noteworthy in July: Nobody is Ever Missing: A Novel, by Catherine Lacey; Last Stories and Other Stories, by William T. Vollmann; The Hundred-Year House, by Rebecca Makkai; Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of a Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine, by Maximillian Potter; The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases, by Deborah Halber; The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London, by Judith Flanders.

Murakami's latest novel is already a smash success in Japan, where it debuted in April 2013. Since then, translator Philip Gabriel — who was also responsible for the English-language versions of Murakami books like Kafka on the Shore and South of the Border, West of the Sun — has been working away on the novel, which follows a man who reflects on the pain of a rejection from many years earlier.

Edward Dolnick specializes in digging up intriguing historical nuggets, which makes his latest subject a particularly apt one: the California Gold Rush that briefly swept the country in the mid-1850s. In The Rush, Dolnick aims to document what he describes as "the greatest treasure hunt the world has ever seen," which constituted the last gasp of American exploration, as thousands of people quite their jobs and traveled west in hopes of striking it rich.

Book stores across the country are littered with unsold copies of underwhelming autobiographies by overexposed celebrities — but Neil Patrick Harris' openly silly take on the genre sounds like one that might actually be worth reading. Choose Your Own Autobiography is the celeb-lit equivalent of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, allowing you to chart the life path you want NPH to take. "You will decide whether to try out for Doogie Howser, M.D. You will decide whether to spend years struggling with your sexuality. You will decide what kind of caviar you want to eat on board Elton John’s yacht," promises the book. Who could turn that offer down?

No, it's not the next installment in George R.R. Martin's insanely popular A Song of Ice and Fire series (which forms the basis for HBO's Game of Thrones). But for anyone who wants to spend a little more time in Westeros, A World of Ice and Fire promises the next best thing: an exhaustive history of the fantasy realm, offering unique and detailed insights into centuries of events that determined the futures of the Starks, the Lannisters, and dozens of Westeros' other storied families.

Denis Johnson, whose ambitious 2007 novel Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award, is back with a similarly sprawling novel about three friends who travel together to the Uganda-Congo border. Each of them is keeping a secret from the others — and as their ill-fated trip leads to kidnapping and other acts of violence, they're forced to confront the new versions of themselves that begin to emerge.

The prolific horror guru's upcoming Revival sounds like a fascinating distillation of the themes that have often characterized his novels: faith, sin, obsession, and the bonds that warp and shape us over the course of our lives. The novel begins, of course, in a small-town New England, where a charismatic minister holds sway over virtually everyone he meets. But an unexpected tragedy puts the minister on a different path, and he develops a connection to one of the boys in the town that has great implications for both of them in the decades to come.

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.

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