What I'm Reading Wednesdays: Aug. 10

For the WWW weekly blog meme:

What I have read: "The Leftovers" by Tom Perrotta (from Amazon Vine). Perrotta returns to the suburbs, only this time a cataclysmic event of ambiguous (or no) meaning has occurred: Millions of people have disappeared. Was this the Rapture? Nobody's quite sure, because the people taken were from all walks of life and all religions. So what do you do when you're left behind? Well, you drop out of college, join religious cults, get elected mayor, run with a fast crowd -- and end up with the pregnant teen who may be bearing the Messiah. The novel takes place three years after the Sudden Departures, and at that ironic distance, Perrotta shows people slowly falling apart or coming back together. One particularly compelling character, Nora, after her husband and two young children vanished, takes to riding her bike and watching "SpongeBob." Kevin, whose wife leaves the family for a communal cult (they walk in pairs, dress in white, smoke and disrupt public events) tries to deal with his teenage daughter, slipping out of the A-track at school, and a friend who's living with them. And the son, Tom, falls in with a hugger-guru whose private life is shocking. This novel is really wonderful; it has suspense, surprises and deeply depicted emotions. I think it's going to make the Pulitzer final list.

What I'm reading now: "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach (from Amazon Vine). This novel is about baseball, which I love; college, which I also love; and successes and failures. So far, it's moving along very quickly; I think it's going to be big this fall.

What I'll read next: I may return to "The Indian Clerk," (because I like to read novels by Tom Perrotta and David Leavitt in tandem), or I may try to finish the outstanding Vine books I have, including "Zone One" and "My Life, the Theater, and Other Tragedies."