2006 books

54) Chico Buarque, Budapest, 2003
José Costa is an unexpectedly successful ghostwriter with an increasingly less successful personal life, and after a stopover in Budapest he becomes curious about Magyar, the notoriously difficult Hungarian language. Flitting back and forth between Rio de Janeiro and Budapest, Costa sees his life fade out while the life of his alter-ego Zsoze Kósta, Hungarian ghostwriter, becomes ever more real... A dream-like novel about transition between personal realities, thoroughly marinated in a particularly Brazilian kind of dazzling, literary creativity.
[ LJ BOOK BADGE ]

2006 books

55) Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy, 2006 [ RECOMMENDED BY ASHLEY YOUNG ]
An embedded US spy within Al Qaeda converts to Islam, but is then sent back to the US to carry out a terrorist mission as a test of his loyalty. Extrapolated from Al-Qaeda's ambitions of nuclear and biological terrorism, Kirkus Reviews described this as "a thriller worthy of le Carré", but there is too much missing for it to deserve such a comparison: le Carré would be far more oblique about American paranoia over terrorism than Berenson, who doesn't get too distracted with the awkward questions – Guantánamo, torture, the Iraq mess – before he quickly drops them. There's a huge elephant in the room here studiously avoided for the sake of the book's upbeat pace, and Berenson (a New York Times Iraq correspondent) would have done a better job by addressing these nagging issues with a more journalistic eye. Nevertheless, a very confident debut.
[ LJ BOOK BADGE ]