What is Christopher Hebert reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Christopher Hebert, author of The Boiling Season.

His entry begins:

Over the last year I did a ton of reading for research and for various nonfiction projects I’ve been working on. All of it worthwhile, but that kind of reading doesn’t always make for unmitigated enjoyment. I decided to make 2012 the year of reading pleasurably, and so far so good.

I just finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, which I’d pushed aside for forever. It’s a brilliantly fun book, which is all the more impressive considering how subtle it moves and develops. It’s the first time I’ve read Egan, and I was amazed by her deftness, the startling economy of what she can accomplish in prose. And the restraint she shows in putting together these fragmented pieces in a way that somehow doesn’t feel fragmented at all. Though the book ranges all over in time and space and with a vast cast of characters, I put it down feeling as though I’d had an intensely...[read on]

About The Boiling Season, from the publisher:

An ambitious young man struggles to define himself and his future in a Caribbean nation plunged into violent revolution.

Having spent his childhood trapped in the slums of a politically volatile Caribbean island, Alexandre dreams of escape. Within only a few years, he rises from being a valet for an important politician to becoming a caretaker for a derelict estate purchased by a wealthy foreign businesswoman. While the rest of the country copes with the rise of a brutal dictator, Alexandre flees to his new home in the remote mountains outside the capital. There he oversees the restoration of a manor house and gardens that evoke for him an innocent, unspoiled past.

When his new employer sees a chance to turn the estate into something more—a decadent, jet-setting resort—Alexandre views the undertaking as the culmination of his dreams. Eager to lose himself in the creation of this opulent Eden, Alexandre severs the last links to his unhappy past, including his family and friends. But as the outside world starts to crumble around him, Alexandre must face the limits of the utopia he has created. Soon he is trapped in the middle of a war he has tried to ignore, and discovers he will have to choose between preserving the estate he loves and protecting the people he has spent his life trying to escape.

Learn more about the book and author at Christopher Hebert's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Boiling Season.

Writers Read: Christopher Hebert.

--Marshal Zeringue