Great Reads to Unwind, post NaNo

I'm already compiling a great reading list to chill out and refresh the soul after NaNoWriMo is over. Here's what I have planned for the month of December. Anybody read these?

Came in the mail today:

1) Salvage the Bones, National Book Award Winner for fiction, 2011. A 14-year-old narrator during Hurricane Katrina.
2) Chime: Y/A, also a NBA nominee. Mystery, fantasy, and witchcraft.

On my Kindle, waiting:

3) The Tiger's Wife. Another NBA nominee. Adult (?) fiction by a twentysomething Yugoslavian prodigy.

4) Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I admit to having already started this one, and I'm dying laughing. Queer teens, depression, and how not to get your heart broken.

On my bedside table, waiting:

5) Wildwood. By Decembrists singer-songwriter Colin Meloy. I've read the first few pages of this already. Narrator's baby brother is abducted by "a murder of crows" on the first page. Did you know a flock of crows is called a "murder?" Seriously. This is just my cup of tea.

Also on my bedside table, waiting:
6) A pile of New Yorkers a mile high.

Recommendations, friends? What are you planning to read, come December, 2011, to round off your year?
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! And, for added inspiration, Decembrists' follies:

The Novel In Verse: Would You?

Until today, I'd never read a novel in verse -- at least not a kid's novel in verse. Yeah, I read Paradise Lost in college, and The Odyssey in high school. That counts, right? And even though I earned my M.A. in poetry writing, it never occurred to me to try to write fiction in verse.

But I started reading Inside Out and Back Again this morning, a middle grade verse novel by Thanhha Lai that's a finalist for this year's National Book Award. And as my blogging buddies know, Lai's subject fits perfectly into my research for novel number two (draft tbc during November Nano). Because Inside Out and Back Again is the story of a Vietnamese girl who immigrates to Alabama after the war.

So, the first question we might ask is, why write any novel in verse? A reviewer for School Library Journal rightly points out that a novel dealing with the immigrant experience might be uniquely suited for verse--because the narrator is somewhat estranged from both her native language and the new one she's supposed to be learning. The effect is "simultaneously intimate and isolating." I like that idea.

But I'm a snob.

I suppose my hesitation about novels in verse is because, well, I'm kind of a snob? I don't believe "verse" is just lines of narrative broken up into short lengths, like you might crack spaghetti to fit it into a smaller pot.