New and notable books for January

The stacks are getting higher every day. These books have caught my eye so far in 2015

 Schubert's Winter Journey: An Anatomy of an Obsession, by Ian Bostridge (Knopf)

Books about music often fail because they cannot replicate the act of hearing music. The best any writer can hope for is a close approximation of the musical experience, which is what Ian Bostridge achieves in this amazing book. An exploration of Schubert's Winter Journey, Bostridge, a noted tenor from England, writes about each of the 24 songs in the cycle with verve, often drawing from his own performances of Winter Journey. Even those not familiar with Schubert, or classical music, can appreciate Bostridge's passion for Schubert's most famous work.

 

There's Something I Want You to Do: Stories, by Charles Baxter (Pantheon)

When critics talk about contemporary short-story writers, Alice Munro and George Saunders are often cited as the genre's best practitioners. But any discussion of short-story masters should include Charles Baxter, the Minneapolis-based writer. Baxter's new collection is divided into two parts, with five stories about virtues -- Bravery, Loyalty, Chastity, Charity and Forbearance, and five informed by the vices of Lust, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Vanity. Many stories are culled from the mundane and ordinary  -- a barking dog, an airline passenger reading a bible -- but Baxter manages to dig beneath the surface and find the extraordinary detail or insight. When he does step away from  so-called normal experience  --  notably the drug dealer reading Othello as he waits for customers in Charity -- the experience is similarly transcendent.

 

The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe by Roman Puertolas (Knopf)

f nothing else, this debut novel has a memorable title. Puertolas, who worked as a police inspector with the French border service, has devised an imaginative premise: A con artist and fakir from India thinks that going to an IKEA will be his ticket to success. But things go wrong when Ajatashatru Ogash gets trapped in one of the Swedish retailer's wardrobes, setting off a Marxian (as in Marx Brothers) chain of events.

 

Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search  For My Childhood Bully by Allen Kurzweil (HarperCollins)

Few of us care to revisit the indignities suffered during childhood, making Allen Kurzweil's attempt to track down his youthful tormentor seem like an exercise in masochism. But Whipping Boy is not the typical story about surviving an abuser. Kurzweil's bully -- they were roommates at a Swiss boarding school -- grew up to be an international criminal. The author's journey takes him from the slums of Manila to a law firm on Park Avenue to a federal prison camp in California.