Even more recent books (2011)

#14.

Seamus Heaney's Human Chain is a book in which every word is at once a surprise and exactly the right word!

#15.

Edmund de Waal's memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes covers the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and takes the reader from the Ukraine to Vienna to Paris and to England via the Ephrussi banking family. It is gripping and surprising.

#16.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a very short novella, will reward anyone who has been to Mendoza and/or anyone who ever thinks about the relationship between reality and the reconstruction of reality in a work of art. It follows an actual German landscape painter's trip to Argentina in the nineteenth century and contains a roaring adventure.

#17.

If you ever had an interest in Isaac Bashevis Singer and the world of Polish Jewry out of which he emerged, as well as the very ambivalent relationship of non-Jewish Poles to the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, read the fascinating Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland by Agata Tusynska.

#12 and #13

I have learned an enormous amount about the Holocaust from two extraordinary books, Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office and Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. Browning provides us with the plight of Jewish slave laborers in one small Polish town, and argues strongly for the logic of the Jewish survival through labor policy. Wildt carefully studies a large number of officials in the Security Service - mostly trained in the humanities, law and social sciences and preparing for racial war since their radical student days - who get their opportunity in the East to solve the "Jewish question." We clearly see that what we call the Final Solution was primarily a series of operations spearheaded by the SS - far too many with PhDs - against Polish and Russian Jews.

#11 - Perhaps the best novel I have read in a decade! Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall - scarily intelligent, psychologically acute, and simultaneously a brainteaser and a totally readable narrative, it has not a wasted word and, amazingly, the history is seamlessly folded into daily life.

#10 Book recommendation
Beatrice and Virgil, an unusual Holocaust allegory by the celebrated author of Life of Pi, is well worth your time and money. A story within a story within a story, it opens up, slowly but with immense originality, numerous issues about the Holocaust rarely done so well in fiction. And it is very short!

Latest burger rankings

If it were not for the price (double that of Ray's), the burger at Vidalia would tie the burger at Ray's with nearly a perfect score. But $7 vs $17 keeps Ray's on top, with a burger not only unsurpassed, but (aside from Vidalia) unrivaled in quality in NoVA, MD or DC.

Burger Rankings Change
The former #3 burger is now #2, moving Black Market's excellent burger down one slot and moving Black's (Bethesda) to the slot behind the sensational Ray's Hell Burger. Black's (tasted twice) has fine meat cooked to perfection, fresh veggies and four choices of cheese, with a super bun. Don't miss the fries - they can rarely be beat.

#9 Book Recommendation

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a short novel you will not be able to put down. Set in impoverished Ireland of the early 1950s (not 1850s), and centering around Ellis, a young woman we come to know well, its focus is partly on Ireland and Brooklyn of that period, but mostly on Ellis, and her point of view. Toibin's novels develop complicated feelings with the simplest of prose; his deep psychological realism grabs you, even without Irish nationalism and Catholicism in your background. The steerage voyage to Brooklyn is unforgettable, surely one of the most vivid on record. You will love it!