12. Blood Will Out - Walter Kirn
Walter Kirn's Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade is part memoir and part true-crime narrative - early reviews have gone so far as to compare it to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Walter Kirn is known primarily for his novels Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, the latter of which was adapted into the George Clooney film. But Kirn's real-life experiences provide the narrative drive of Blood Will Out, and it promises to be one of his most intriguing books yet, fiction or no. His friendship with one Clark Rockefeller - the impostor eventually outed as Christian Gerhartsreiter, currently serving a life sentence for murder - belongs in the Stranger Than Fiction category. While most watched the Rockefeller case unfold on television and on the internet, Kirn had a very real link to those involved. That link is explored in Blood Will Out, and Kirn may be giving us one of the most harrowing reads of the year.
11. Orfeo - Richard Powers
The art of music and human DNA: when you place the two side-by-side like that, they seem to have very little overlap. Novelist Richard Powers goes beyond a side-by-side placement, though, making musicality and genetic makeup inextricable. He touched on this in The Gold Bug Variations, his 1991 novel, which intertwined chemical structure with Bach's Goldberg Variations to varying degrees of effectiveness and, frankly, only varying degrees of readability. His novel Orfeo, though, sounds like a more distilled, more restrained attempt on a similar theme. The protagonist is 70-year-old Peter Els, a composer who spends his time "biohacking" - forcing musical patterns into a human genome. Naturally, this attracts the unwanted attention of Homeland Security, who force Els to flee under the moniker "Bioterrorist Bach". Having read The Gold Bug Variations, I can say this already sounds more intriguing and just more fun. The title, too, leads one to believe that the tale of Peter Els will touch on the Orpheus myth in a contemporary setting.