Well, although there haven’t been a ton of reviews (yet), we’ve been getting a lot of comments from readers and booksellers about this book.

Karl Pohrt from Shaman Drum called me a while back to tell me how impressed he was with this novel. And since then, I’ve heard that wrote a staff pick about how The Conqueror forced him to rewrite his “desert island” list. And just today we received a postcard from about how The Conqueror was a “amazing and wonderful reading experience.”

Back a couple months ago, we gave away a few galleys of this book. And earlier this week I heard from about how effing good this book is . . .

It is the second part of a trilogy—the first part is which came out from Overlook a couple years ago—but the books really do stand alone. If you’d like to know more about the first volume, Michael Orthofer has a really comprehensive at Complete Review.

I’m mentioning all this now, because we’re in the process of preparing Jan’s U.S. tour. He will be in New York for PEN World Voices, and in Rochester (with Mark Binelli, author of ), and possibly a few other places as well. I’ll post all the details as soon as they’re finalized.

In the meantime, PEN America has an available online as part of their page, which is worth checking out in its own right.

In addition to simply promoting this list, the NBCC is arranging to discuss this list and the recent NBCC nominations. These events really are taking place across the country, making it easier for non-New Yorkers to get involved.

Not a lot of translations on the list (by “not a lot” I mean one book), but it’s an interesting list:

Fiction

1. *Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
2. *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
3. Diary of a Bad Year, by J.M. Coetzee (Viking)
4. People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
5. Zeroville, by Steve Erickson (Europa)

Nonfiction

1. The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross (FSG)
2. *Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
3. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press)
4. Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)
5. *The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan)

Poetry

1. *Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)
2. *Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco)
3. *Gulf Music, by Robert Pinsky (FSG)
4. *The Collected Poems, 1956–1998, by Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco)
5. Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow (Harper)

My one criticism of this is that it’s functioning more like an NBCC best-seller list rather than a recommendation of the best books to read now. The eight titles with asterisks all appeared on the , so less than half of these titles are “new” recommendations.

I have great hopes for this project—because NBCC is involved and its constituency is top notch—but I’d rather see a list of fifteen new books each time. Aren’t these the people who should be the most knowledgeable about the latest releases? I may be on my own here, but that’s what I’d like to find out about. After winning the NBA, getting truckloads of review praise, being on the fall Good Reads list, and everything else, what I don’t need is another recommendation for Tree of Smoke. I get it—it’s a book a lot of people like. I’ve moved on. . . .