Pearls

Another section: rare pearls. I guess almost everyone has had this experience: in a second hand book shop you pick up some title that you find remotely interesting. Reading it, you realise it's actually very good.
(1) Jens Bjørneboe: Silence. Rage and irony. An account of Pizarro destroying the Inca capital.. an account that could sound worse that it really was, but Jared Diamond cites the original source in "Guns, Germs and Steel" (see http://markoniinimaki.blogspot.com/) and we learn that the reality was more awful than the Norwegian author could imagine.
(2) Daniel Mason: The Piano Tuner. First I though the idea to be yet another copy of the Heart of Darkness, but the book proved me wrong. The author sure knows a lot about pianos, Burmese dances and puppet theatre, and plants.
(3) Jasper Fforde: The Ayre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten. Suppose one could actually step in a book. Thursday Next, a police officer (sort-of) can, but for her it's not a hobby; she needs to keep intruders out. All these Thursday Next books have brilliant ideas, e.g. Wuthering Heights being originally a country comedy but getting in its current state because the characters start hating another.. and science being like a boy band.
(4) Julia Bell: Massive. Superficially a book about eating disorders for teenagers. For some reason really interesting.
(5) Raj Kamal Jha: If You Are Afraid of Heights. Very skilled, quite pessimistic
(6) Ali Smith: Hotel world. So, now we know what happens after we die. Even more plausible than Alice Sebold's popular The Lovely Bones.

I noticed that Sebold is married to Glen Gold. Gold's "Carter Beats the Devil" is truly captivating and well written light fiction, a bit like Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Another section: I was not disappointed.
(1) Nuruddin Farah: Gifts. Normal life in Mogadishu, Somalia. The reader does not feel like a voyerist - the author is Somalian and tells about the lives of ordinary people without exaggeration.
(2) Jeannette Winterson (except for Power Book). Often labeled as a romantic author, Winterson can seemingly write about anything and make it captivating.
(3) Peter Carey: My Life as a Fake. If the characters were any more lifelike they would walk out of the book.
(4) Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin. Yes, Atwood can really write. Think about combining Edith Wharton and pulp sci-fi.
(5) Grahan Swift: Waterland. So absorbing that you almost see the landscape and hear people speaking.
(6) Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His most famous stuff has been analysed so much that I won't bore you, but just a note. There is a Brazilian very popular author who wrote a book about an insane asylum (set in Slovenia). Gabriel Garcia Marquez' collection Strange Pilgrim has a story called "I only came to use the phone". It is wonderfully distant and ironic.. and makes the Slovenia book look romantic and pretentious in comparison.
(7) Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex. Simply captivating.

Some other good collections of short stories (1) Raymond Carver: Elephant. The last story, about the death of Chekhov, is quite different from the others (2) Carson McCullers: The Ballad of a Sad Cafe (3) Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany's etc. Seen the film? The book is very different.
Capote somehow had the talent of creating really memorable characters like Holly Golithly of the Breakfast or Lily Jane Bobbit in Children on their Birthdays.