Marjane Satrapi is a gifted graphic artist who presently lives and works in Paris. An Iranian in all senses of the word, she writes this memoir as a comic strip – or what we call a graphic novel today. Her art is powerful, funny, wise, and triumphant as she tells the story of growing up in Iran during the Iranian Revolution - through the eyes of a child. The novel covers her life in Tehran from age six to fourteen. She is the only child of Marxist parents, the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, and her story bears witness to live under the Shah, during the Revolution, and during the war. One of the most striking things about the book is the intense contradictions between public and private life in Iran. Consider life with the veil, live without the veil, and then life with the veil. Marjane is irrepressible and funny and absurd. When you finish this book (a two hour read), you will want to move onto her second one.

In 1984, Marjane Satrapi leaves Iran to attend high school in Vienna. This graphic novel continues her story as she struggles with homesickness, culture shock, and all the trials of being a teenager. Eventually Marjane finds a group of friends - outsiders like herself– and after graduation, returns to Iran. Again, the difficult adjustment back to Iran and the changes in her country are told with humor and wisdom - all in the form of a comic strip. She attends art school, falls in love, but all the time struggles with the problems of being a woman in modern day Iran. She questions her future in a country torn apart by fundamentalism. There is something about how clearly Marjana Satrapi cuts through the issues to something close to “a truth” in each chapter of the book that surprises you and moves you to a sort of clarity not unlike her brilliance. I strongly recommend this book if you are interested in an illuminating (and quick) read about Iran today.

Five Skies is Carlson’s first novel in twenty-six years. The acclaimed short story author takes a story of three broken men who come together in the Rocky Mountains for a summer construction project and creates a multilayered tale that dissects the intimate connection between place and character. Carlson's deliberate and low-key prose successfully transports the reader to the remote Idaho wilderness. Author Antonya Nelson calls the book “a deeply moving contemporary western masterpiece.”

Primo Levi was a chemist, a holocaust survivor, and an author. A Tranquil Star is the first new American collection of his previously untranslated fiction to appear since 1990. The book was released in April to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Levi’s death. These seventeen short stories, first published in Italian between 1949 and 1986, demonstrate his extraordinary range and imagination. In one story a middle-age chemist experiments with a new paint that wards off evil. In another tale a pensive astronomer describes the fragility of the universe, terrified by the possibility that a long-dormant star might explode and reduce the entire planet to vapor. One of the most interesting pieces imagines all the characters invented by novelists living in a theme park together. This small collection of Levi’s fiction offers whimsy, fantasy, and even a bit of romance.

I never knew Barbara Kingsolver won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award in 1972 until I read her new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. An artful blend of memoir, environmental reporting, and how-to advice, this book is an entertaining read that delivers an important message. Kingsolver writes, “Every food calorie we presently eat has used dozens or even hundreds of fossil-fuel calories in its making.” Wanting to create a food culture that removed them from the industrial food pipeline, Kingsolver’s family resolved to feed themselves only with animals and vegetables that came from local sources. Husband Steven Hopp and daughter Camille contribute sidebars throughout which include political commentary and tasty recipes.

I’d like to recommend Vanishing Voices by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine. This book is extremely timely since we are now in a world language crisis and also since the United Nations has declared 2008 as the Year of the International Languages.

Purportedly a modern day Virgil, guiding Dante. But through Korea, and ‘Merica – at least. Really pidgin poetry, widget and an earful too. A playground of patois, a wonderland of words, this book is so inventive, so baroque, so formally smart, so not to be missed.

Armantrout works with the material of language, mining its sounds and contextual effects as emphatically as its semantics to explore territories of science and soul. My understanding of physics is greater for reading Armantrout’s poems.

Hewson returns to Rome in the fifth novel in the series, The Seventh Sacrament (July 31, 2007). The Calgary Herald had this to say about the British edition: “Hewson’s work has been compared to that of Donna Leon and Dan Brown, and it will certainly appeal to fans of both writers. His stories are fresh, original, brightly written and very smart, and his latest book is his best so far. This is definitely among this spring’s must-read crime fictions.”

Based on a close reading of Mark ’s gospel, this book offers a day-by-day account of the events leading up to and including the Easter story. The authors are New Testament scholars well versed in the conundrums of the search for the historical Jesus.

What’s a bright young person to read after getting through the Harry Potter books? Try the trilogy of fantasy novels by the Oxford-based writer Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000), now available in a boxed set. Told from the point of view of a clever girl named Lyra, the series is quite literate and indeed takes its title from Paradise Lost. The first novel is now in production as a film for the holiday season (http://www.goldencompassmovie.com).