More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

by Nancy Pearl

  Lastly, as I wrote in Book Lust, one of my strongest-held beliefs is that no one should ever finish a book that they’re not enjoying, no matter how popular or well reviewed the book is. (Except, of course, if it’s for a homework assignment or for a book group.) Believe me, nobody is going to get any points in heaven by miserably slogging their way through a book they aren’t enjoying but think they ought to read. I live by what I call “the rule of fifty,” which is based on the reality of the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years old or younger, give every book about fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. (If you’re 100 or over, you get to judge the book by its cover, despite the dangers in doing so—see the section “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover.”)

  A corollary to the rule: If you care only about what happens—who the murderer is, who marries whom—well, just turn to the last page and read that. Or thumb through the last chapter. The point is, reading should be pure pleasure. You haven’t failed the author by not enjoying the book. Instead, the author has, at that moment in your life, failed you. That doesn’t mean that in six days, or six months, or six years, or sixty years, you won’t go back to the book and find that you love it. All it means is that at that particular moment in your life, you were looking for a different sort of book.

  Lawrence Clark Powell, founding dean of the School of Library Service at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote:“I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.” That’s how I feel and, I suspect, so do you. So grab a pen and a pad of paper, make yourself comfortable, and start reading. And remember, I love hearing from readers—please email me with suggestions of good books I might have missed or overlooked at nancy@nancypearl.com.

  Book lust forever!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  After Book Lust was published, I got hundreds of emails and letters from people who offered wonderful suggestions for books to include in More Book Lust, well before a second book was even a gleam in anyone’s eye. Many of these emails reminded me of books I had simply forgotten, while others listed books with which I was unfamiliar. I read many of those new books, was grateful for the reminders of other titles, and want to thank the following people for recommending books that ended up in More Book Lust. (Let me apologize in advance if I’ve inadvertently omitted anyone.)

  Sharon Aderman; Tom Adkins; Amy Alexander; Elinor Appel for help with the section on books for boys and girls; Nancy Bass; Martha Bayley; Victoria Beatty (for the “Living High in Cascadia” section); Terry Beck and the Reader’s Advisory group at Sno-Isle Library System for the section on fishing; Linda Beeman; Carrie Bowman; Scott Bradley; David Brown; Kathleen Burgess; Pam Cahn; Elaine Camuso; Raman Chandarsekar; Nancy Bogardus Colm; Lisa Creegan; Nina Crocker; Larry Curnutt; Gretchen DeMedeiros; Clare DeVries; Doreen Disney; Rome Doherty; Anita Elder; Jane English; Mary Kay Feather;Anne Ferris; Mike Flaxman; Dan Foran; Barbara Foster; Iva Freeman for “Near Novels” and “The Immigrant Experience”; George Frein; Elizabeth Fry; Robert Gardner; Gloria Gehrman; Ann Haward; Bob Hearn; Beth Henkes; Christopher Hodgkin; Joan Hortin; Amy O’Neill Houck; Margy Hovren; Sheryl Kelsey;Walter Kephart; Judy Kessinger; Jane Kops; Kathleen Lamantia; Eloise Lamum; Carol Lord; Pam Loya; Janet Martinson; Cheryl McKeon; Joan Moritz; Jeanne Nichols; Sheila Nickerson; Susan Noonan; Davis Oldham; Angela M. Otwell; Katherine Pennavaria (for the section on British literary biographies); Elaine Pfeffer; Brian Phillips;Aimee Quinn; Nancy Randall; Barbara Reed; B. J. Riter; Charlie Rossiter; Sue Ryan; Lindsy Serrano; Annie Sherrill; Robert Sloan; Barbara Smith; Wendy Smith; Marcia H. Snowden; Norm Solomon; Donna Stone; Jeanette Sullivan; Vicky Taylor; Kathy Waskiewicz; Celia White; Jennifer Wiegert; Alice Wilkinson; Deborah Wills; Lisa Winchester; Neal Wyatt (for the sections on horror, the Brontës, and Mary Stewart); and Yvette Zaepfel.

  And to my former colleagues at The Seattle Public Library, including crackerjack young-adult librarians Amy Kennedy, Sarah Webb, Marin Younker, Lesley James, Peg Dombek, and Christiane Woten for their suggestions for good books for teenagers; Carol Edlefsen; Susan Fort for help with the “Child Prodigies,” “All in the Family,” and “Nagging Mothers, Crying Children” categories; and Beth de la Fuente, Misha Stone, David Wright, and Jennifer Baker, for just about everything.

  And, once again, thanks to the great folks at Sasquatch Books—no one could ever wish for a better experience than I’ve had working with them: Gary Luke, Sarah Hanson, and Gina Johnston, especially. And special thanks to Sherri Schultz and Phyllis Hatfield for their most helpful and careful editing.

  Finally, I want once again to thank my husband, Joe, who not only makes my reading life possible but who will also occasionally enjoy a book that I’ve suggested he read.

  More Book Lust is dedicated to my two daughters, Eily and Katie, who not only love to read but (more importantly) are thoughtful, generous, and all-around wonderful women.

  ADAPTING TO ADOPTION

  The aftereffects of adoption are felt not just by the adopted child but also, of course, by the women who give up their babies, by the men in their lives, and by the adoptive parents. Here are some wonderful novels that explore adoption from various perspectives.

  The Crossley Baby by Jacqueline Carey is the story of two sisters—a stay-at-home mom and a career-driven businesswoman—who battle for custody of their dead sister’s child.

  Two characters are “confined” in Carrie Brown’s Confinement: World War II refugee Arthur Henning and Agatha, the teenage daughter of his employer. Arthur is trapped in memories of the past, while Agatha is in a home for unwed mothers where she is forced to relinquish her newborn child for adoption. As Arthur and Agatha—always friends and allies, despite the difference in their ages—secretly grow closer during Agatha’s pregnancy, their relationship subtly changes, and both start to set themselves free.

  In Joanna C. Scott’s The Lucky Gourd Shop, Mi Sook, herself abandoned as a child in postwar South Korea and now in a difficult marriage, must decide whether or not to give up her three children for adoption by an American couple.

  Unexpectedly made guardians of an eleven-year-old boy, Ed and Sam find their lives turned upside down, in Breakfast with Scot by Michael Downing.

  Rose, the main character in Ann Patchett’s first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, abandons her young husband and winds up in a home for unwed mothers.

  Trying to get over the unexpected death of her husband, Livia befriends a pregnant fifteen-year-old girl, who gives birth to a baby that Livia longs to adopt, in Ann Hood’s novel Ruby.

  When Taylor Greer leaves Kentucky for points west in order to escape the confines of small-town life, she finds an abandoned and abused Cherokee child left in her car, in Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees.

  With the love and support of the adoptive parents, sixteen-year-old Sara survives the trauma of giving up her child, but when George and Eva Rivers start worrying about Sara’s constant presence in little Anne’s life, she makes a decision that threatens to undo everything in Girls in Trouble by Caroline Leavitt.

  In Susan Merrell’s A Member of the Family, Deborah and Chris’s dream of a happy family is shattered when their son, Michael (adopted from Romania when he was eighteen months old), becomes increasingly violent both at school and at home.

  AFRICA: A READER’S ITINERARY

  I’ve always found reading about Africa immensely rewarding as well as sobering. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, whether explicitly or implicitly, all these books reveal the effects of colonialism and raise the question of how people with radically different beliefs, ethnicity, and backgrounds can possibly live together in peace.

  Grace Berggre
n is the charming heroine of Margaret Meyers’s Swimming in the Congo, set in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), where she lives with her missionary parents. Her father’s jungle sickness and her experiences with racism and boarding school give a picture of pre-independence Africa that I’ve never before seen explored from this point of view.

  Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One tells the story of Peekay, a young English boy growing up during World War II in a racially divided South Africa, who uses his talent for boxing to overcome both the personal and social obstacles that he faces. Tandia, the sequel, is just as good.

  Louisa Dawkins’s Natives and Strangers takes place in 1950s Tanganyika, just as the territory is struggling for independence. Marietta Hamilton, the granddaughter of British settlers, tries to balance her relationships with blacks and the demands of white society.

  Moses Isegawa’s sprawling, ambitious, and autobiographical first novel, Abyssinian Chronicles, is set in Uganda from the 1960s to the 1980s.

  The Somali Nuruddin Farah is probably the best-known African writing in English today. Exiled from his native country in 1991, Farah won the prestigious Neustadt Prize in 1998, an award that often leads to a subsequent Nobel Prize in Literature. His novel Links is the story of Jeebleh, a former political prisoner who returns to Somalia from NewYork to help find the young kidnapped daughter of a childhood friend.

  In M. G.Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, we follow the lives of Vikram, his sister Deepa (who are Indians living in Africa with their parents), their native friend Njoroge, and their two British playmates, Bill and Annie, during a time and in a place of great contradictions. The story begins in colonial Kenya in 1953, when Queen Elizabeth is being inaugurated and at the same time the Mau Maus are waging their guerrilla war against British rule. It ends in contemporary Canada, where Lall has fled.

  Here are three of the best nonfiction books about Africa and its peoples that I’ve ever encountered:

  Two books about the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert take different approaches and should be read together if one is to appreciate the basically unchanged culture of these earliest Africans. The first book is one of the classic armchair travel narratives, written by South African Laurens van der Post, the son of Dutch immigrants. The Lost World of the Kalahari is an account of his 1957 trek through the Kalahari Desert in search of the Bushmen, in order to study their beliefs and behavior. The second book is The Harmless People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. A few years before van der Post conducted his research into the Bushmen, Thomas went to the desert to live with them, and was one of the first Westerners to do so. She returned to Botswana and South Africa in the 1980s to study the effects of “modernization” on the culture of these people whom she so clearly appreciated.

  Howard W. French spent time in the Ivory Coast with his family after finishing college and eventually became bureau chief for the NewYork Times, covering Central and West Africa in the 1990s. In A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, French writes with skill and style about the major events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the Rwandan genocide, the AIDS crisis, the tragedy of gun-toting children in the Liberian army. He includes, as well, a discussion of how the West has abused and misused Africa for its own benefit, with dire consequences for the Africans.

  As for cookbooks, the two best are The Africa News Cookbook: African Cooking for Western Kitchens by Tami Hultman and The African Cookbook by Bea Sandler, which has the added benefit of drawings by Diane and Leo Dillon, the noted illustrators of children’s books.

  For more books about Africa, you might want to look at two Book Lust categories: “Africa: Today and Yesterday” and “African Colonialism: Fiction.”

  ALL IN THE FAMILY: WRITER DYNASTIES

  What do Benjamin Cheever, Eliza Minot, Nora Ephron, Richard Bausch, and Jenny McPhee have in common? They’re all writers related to writers.

  Raised apart, brothers Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff experienced dramatically different childhoods. Geoffrey relates his life with his father, the dissolute and charming Duke, in The Duke of Deception, while Tobias chronicles his difficult childhood with an abusive stepfather in This Boy’s Life.

  Susan Minot in Monkeys, Eliza Minot in The Tiny One, and George Minot in The Blue Bowl each offer their own fictional perspective on growing up as siblings in a large, dysfunctional New England Catholic family irredeemably scarred by their father’s alcoholism and their mother’s sudden and untimely death.

  I suppose that if you’re the child of a famous author you face an almost irresistible temptation to write about that experience, whether in fiction or in memoir, either directly or obliquely. John Cheever’s children, Susan and Benjamin, have done both: Benjamin has written the novels The Plagiarist and The Partisan, and Susan has written Home Before Dark (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography/autobiography) and Treetops: A Family Memoir.

  Although their father, John McPhee, sticks to nonfiction, two of his daughters, Jenny and Martha, have both become novelists. Jenny McPhee’s delightful novel No Ordinary Matter features two sisters, an engineered pregnancy, detectives, incest, and other soap opera staples, while Martha McPhee’s Bright Angel Time captures much of the McPhee sisters’ own unique childhood experiences in a tale of marriages breaking up, blended families, and a charismatic stepfather.

  The Ephron sisters, Amy, Delia, and Nora, offspring of writers Phoebe and Henry, all have an ironically humorous view of the contemporary world. Hanging Up by Delia may be the most autobiographical; it’s a poignant description of three sisters coping with a parent’s senility and death. Amy Ephron’s novels include the seemingly autobiographical Biodegradable Soap and Bruised Fruit, while Nora is best known for her novel Heartburn.

  Frederick and Steve Barthelme are both college professors and gamblers—as described in their autobiographical memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss—and their deceased older brother, Donald, was a prolific writer who explored existential and postmodern themes in such books as The Dead Father and Sixty Stories.

  You wouldn’t know that Margaret Drabble and A. S. Byatt were sisters unless you happened to stumble across that bit of information, since the two seem to prefer to keep their relationship under wraps. Still, both of them write with a searching intelligence and an enviable prose style. Although Possession is probably Byatt’s best-known novel, my favorite has always been The Virgin in the Garden, the first of a quartet that includes Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman.As for Drabble, I’ve never forgotten The Millstone, a novel set in London in the 1960s, but I also thoroughly enjoyed two of her more recent novels, The Seven Sisters and The Red Queen.

  Twin brothers Richard and Robert Bausch have each produced a significant body of good fiction, including Robert’s A Hole in the Earth and Richard’s Wives & Lovers: Three Short Novels and Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea.

  ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

  The really artificial (or artificially real) world of theater provides a wonderful backdrop for many types of fiction, from comedies of manners to mysteries to coming-of-age sagas and more.

  A Company of Three by Varley O’Connor describes the loving but occasionally difficult relationship of three people—two men and a woman—whose friendship mostly sustains them through their attempts to carve out careers as actors in 1970s New York.

  Also set in the 1970s is Reckless Eyeballing, a quintessential Ishmael Reed novel—bitingly satirical, fearless in its attack on all that is politically correct, and very very funny (even as you wince). It’s the story of Ian Ball, a black playwright attacked and scorned by theater feminists, who hopes to redeem his career and reputation by writing a play in which the women get all the major roles.

  Christopher Bram’s delicious Lives of the Circus Animals takes place over the course of a week in the lives of six people, all of whom are involved with the New York theater scene: Henry Lewse, an aging British actor; his personal assista
nt, Jessie; her brother, playwright Caleb Doyle, who had one huge success on Broadway but whose second play was given a terrible review by the New York Times’ second-string theater critic, Kenneth Prager, known as the “buzzard of Broadway”; Frank Earp, who is directing a play featuring Toby Vogler, the onetime boyfriend of Caleb Doyle and current gleam in the eye of Henry Lewse . . . along with assorted drivers and caterers as well as the gun-carrying, slightly agoraphobic mother of the Doyles.

  In Janet Burroway’s Opening Nights (one of the few theater novels set outside of Manhattan, in this case in a college town in Georgia), costume designer Shaara Soole becomes a reluctant ally of her ex-husband’s new wife during rehearsals of the play he has come south from New York to direct.