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

by Nancy Pearl

  More about contemporary Afghanistan can be found in The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad; The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland,a memoir by documentary filmmaker and native Afghani Saira Shah; and The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan by British journalist Christina Lamb, which chronicles her trip to the war-torn country following the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. For a wonderful novel set in nearly contemporary Afghanistan, don’t miss Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

  I greatly admire Karl E. Meyer’s two eminently readable and fact-filled accounts of the region: The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland and Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia,the latter written with Shireen Blair Brysac. It’s helpful to have an atlas handy while you’re reading these books, both of which have splendid suggestions for further reading.

  In 1996 Tom Bissell was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan, but his stint was cut short by personal issues. In Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, he returns in 2001 and, with the help of a trusty translator, takes a road trip through the now post-Soviet country, sharing with us his adventures and misadventures along the way.

  LEE CHILD: TOO GOOD TO MISS

  Even the most diligent reader has this happen: through some oversight or quirk of fate or willful neglect, you don’t hook up with an author’s books until late in his or her career. Then you feel compelled to make a mad dash through the complete works (which is often not the best way to read them, since you’re bound to notice the repetitions) until you’re caught up and are forced to sit and wait impatiently for the next book.

  This happened to me most recently with the suspense novels of author Lee Child. Child’s books have been getting great reviews ever since Killing Floor was published in 1997, but the reviews made them sound so violent that I avoided them. I even remember beginning one, not being able to get into it, and wondering, after I returned it to the library, what all the good press was about.

  Then, a few months ago, in a moment of desperation that all reading addicts are familiar with (“Oh no, I have nothing good to read!”), I picked up Persuader, and from page 1, I was hooked by Child’s tight writing and terrific suspense-filled plots. So hooked, in fact, that when I was about a quarter of the way in, I pulled myself away from the book and placed all of his earlier books on reserve at the library. When I was three-quarters done, I started to get nervous that I wouldn’t have another one on hand as soon as I finished this one, so I started making the rounds of the various bookstores in Seattle, both used and new, to buy all of his books that I could find.

  And just as quickly, I read them. Now, having read all eight of Child’s suspense novels, I’m still a bit breathless, but eagerly awaiting his ninth.

  Child’s main character is a former Army military policeman named Jack Reacher. Reacher is squarely in the mold of Travis McGee (hero of John D. MacDonald’s well-known novels, all with a color in the title): a loner, incredibly tough yet with a heart of gold, who always stumbles onto or into trouble, mostly because he can’t resist helping a lady (or, less often, a gentleman) in distress. Be forewarned: the books do indeed contain some intensely violent scenes (some I had to read with my eyes closed, really). I didn’t feel that the violence was gratuitous, but I can certainly see how some readers might.

  I recommend starting with The Enemy, then proceeding to Killing Floor,and finishing up with Persuader. If you’re going to read the remaining five, the order in which you do so doesn’t really matter.

  The Enemy

  Killing Floor

  Die Trying

  Echo Burning

  Running Blind

  Tripwire

  Without Fail

  Persuader

  CHILD PRODIGIES

  Everybody loves a talented child—with the exception, of course, of his or her siblings and peers. A gifted child provides a feel-good subject for most readers, and sensitive child prodigies battling unfair odds are somehow especially appealing. Think David, in his fight against Goliath. Or Frodo in his battle with Sauron. The abilities of the kids in the following novels run the gamut from chess to music to sports to a sort of overall intelligence.

  Beth Harmon, the eight-year-old heroine of The Queen’s Gambit, has one talent: chess. During her spectacular rise from her first game to the U.S. Open Championship, Beth struggles with all sorts of inner and outer challenges. The author is Walter Tevis, who is probably best known for his novel The Hustler(but who is also the author of The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Color of Money, and Mockingbird).

  Helen DeWitt tells the story of Ludo, a young genius, in her first novel, The Last Samurai, vividly evoking the odd relationship between Ludo and his rather strange mother, Sibylla, as well as Ludo’surgent search for his real father.

  In Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season,nine-year-old Eliza Nauman, an indifferent student at best, surprises her family with her amazing skill at spelling—but her talent ultimately unravels the tenuous strands that are holding her family together and causes her father, a cantor,to question his faith in God.

  In My Name Is Asher Lev,Chaim Potok traces the young and brilliant artist Asher Lev’s struggle between his religious life in the cloistered Hasidic community in post-World War II Brooklyn and his compulsive need to paint what he sees in the world around him.

  Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras is about a group of lonely teenagers with preternaturally high IQs, the result of a nuclear accident that claimed the lives of their parents and left them as infants destined to be geniuses. Watching these young people gather and form new relationships with each other and with the outside world is both heart-wrenching and heartwarming, particularly for anyone who ever felt out of place or “different” as a child.

  Rose Tremain’s The Way I Found Her describes the eventful thirteenth summer of Lewis Little, who becomes involved in the life of the oh-so-beautiful and mysterious Valentina Gavrilovich, the best-selling Russian émigré author whose book his mother has come to France to translate.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  There aren’t many—if any—twentieth-century statesmen who have generated the sort of massive yet readable biographies that Winston Churchill has. Given the scope and intensity of his life, it probably would be hard to write an uninteresting biography about such a man. Among his many quotable lines are “Any man under thirty who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains,” “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,” “I have taken more good from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me,” and “My most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me.” He was also the first to use the phrase “iron curtain,” in a speech after World War II ended.

  Churchill’s official biographer is Martin Gilbert, and his eight-volume work is more than all but the most dedicated Churchillians will want to tackle (or have the time to read). You might instead consider Gilbert’s one-volume distillation (only the high points of his subject’s life, which were many), Churchill: A Life.

  Hands down, though, the most popular books on Churchill are William Manchester’s The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 and The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40. Theyarethefirsttwoofwhatwasprojected as a three-volume biography. Unfortunately, Manchester died before he finished the third book. This is a real shame, because these books are enormously enjoyable—sweeping and intimate, insightful and well written. They give us entrée into the mind of a complex and brilliant man whose vision and words shaped much oft wentieth-century England and the world.

  Churchill:A Biography by Roy Jenkins is also a must-read, partly because it was written by a man who held various governmental positions as a member of the Labor Party and was first elected to Parliament in 1948, when the Tory Churchill still commanded much respect and awe. Jenkins’s one-volume b
iography shows his critical admiration of the man he calls “the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.”

  For a good picture of the young Churchill, don’t miss Ted Morgan’s Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry, 1874-1915.

  In addition, Churchill himself wrote copiously; his output includes a series of wonderful memoirs, including seven volumes alone on World War II. But take heed: Reading Churchill himself or about him will likely tempt you down some fascinating highways and byways. Churchill’s experiences in the Boer War sent me on a reading jag of many books—so my advice to readers of Churchilliana is to make notes on what you want to read next, but don’t let yourself be detoured until you finish the biographies.

  CIAO, ITALIA

  You could probably spend more time reading these books about Italy than you’ll ever have to vacation there. Now, I’m not necessarily recommending that you give up your trip, but there is certainly an awful lot of good reading that can be done before you depart.

  First, here are three books you may want to pack along with your toothbrush. Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Lawrence Venuti (part of the Traveler’s Literary Companion series), introduces you to twenty-three of the best twentieth-century Italian short stories. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (who lived from 1511 to 1574 and seems to have invented the term “Renaissance” as applied to Italian art) presents a gossipy, opinionated look at many of the author’s famous friends and contemporaries, including painters, sculptors, and architects such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Ghiberti. Desiring Italy, edited by Susan Cahill, is a collection of writings about the country by a stellar (and remarkably diverse) group of women, including Muriel Spark, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,to name just a few.

  For a nice historical perspective, try Jeremy Black’s Italy and the Grand Tour, an assemblage of excerpts from letters and diaries of travelers in the early eighteenth century, when it was considered de rigueur to study the ruins of Italy, and Rome in particular.

  In The Dark Heart of Italy: An Incisive Portrait of Europe’s Most Beautiful,Most Disconcerting Country, Tobias Jones, who left his native England to live in Italy in the 1990s, portrays a country that is far more complex than is usually seen in guidebooks or armchair travel accounts.

  Italian American Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote Italian Days about traveling throughout Italy to acquaint herself with her ancestral homeland, and she gives us the benefit of her thoughts on art, architecture, and the Italian character (and characters) as she journeys from region to region.

  Gary Paul Nabhan is an ethnobotanist who takes both a spiritual and scientific look at Italy in Songbirds, Truffles,and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy,as he travels from Florence to Assisi in the steps of St. Francis.

  Poet and novelist Frances Mayes has made a name for herself writing about her love affair with Tuscany, where she bought and refurbished an abandoned villa in the village of Cortona. She tells the full story in Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy; Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy; and In Tuscany.

  Take a look at a map of Italy and you’ll see that its shape resembles a boot. When I read Mark Rotella’s Stolen Figs and Other Adventures in Calabria, I wanted to put the book down immediately and make reservations to visit the toe of that boot. And so will you, because of Rotella’s cheerful and charming writing.

  Two insightful and engaging books about the Italian character are Luigi Barzini’s The Italians (published originally in 1964) and That Fine Italian Hand by Paul Hofmann, Rome bureau chief for the New York Times.

  For a picture of Italy during World War II, try Eric Newby’s Love and War in the Apennines, a memoir of the author’s experiences as an escaped prisoner of war in Italy, and Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis, who came to Italy as an intelligence officer and grew to love the chaotic, challenging, contradictory country. (He writes, “Were I given the chance to be born again, Italy would be the country of my choice.”)

  If Venice is your destination, you won’t want to go without at least dipping into historian John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice and immersing yourself in Jan Morris’s less daunting The World of Venice and Marlene de Blasi’s A Thousand Days inVenice.(Don’t miss her A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure, either.) And you’ll certainly want to take along some of the mysteries set there by Donna Leon, all featuring her Italian policeman sleuth, Commissario Brunetti, whose love of good food and despair about the political corruption in his native country play prominent roles in every book. Uniform Justice is a particularly good one, in which Brunetti is foiled at every turn by higher-ups in the government while seeking to discover the murderer of a student at a military academy.Others I’ve enjoyed a lot include Acqua Alta, Death at La Fenice,and A Noble Radiance. Michael Dibdin also sets his superior mysteries in Italy, and one of my favorites, Dead Lagoon, has Italian policeman Aurelio Zen traveling back to his native Venice from Rome to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy businessman. (Other good Aurelio Zen novels are Medusa, Così fan Tutti, and A Long Finish.)

  R.W. B. Lewis, who wrote an award-winning biography of Edith Wharton,lived in Florence with his wife for many years, and The City of Florence: Historical Vistas and Personal Sightings is the result of his love affair with the city, its past and its present. Other good books about Florence—its art, architecture, and people—include Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence and Ross King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture.

  I had to troll the used-book world to find a copy of The Hand of Michelangelo by Sidney Alexander, a novel that ranks right up there with the other great biographical novel about Michelangelo, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy. (You’ll want to read Ross King’s nonfiction Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling along with these.)

  Another good novel about Italy is Robert Harris’s historical thriller Pompeii. Even though you know the outcome—Mount Vesuvius is definitely going to erupt and bury Pompeii and Herculaneum—you’ll still find yourself turning the pages maniacally, eager to find out what happens to the characters.

  Three other contemporary novels I thoroughly enjoyed were Italian Fever by Valerie Martin; Any Four Women Could Rob the Bank of Italy by Ann Cornelisen (who also wrote Torregreca: Life, Death, and Miracles in a Southern Italian Village,about her experiences setting up a nursery school in an impoverished section of the country); and Francesca Marciano’s Casa Rossa.

  A whole category could be devoted to good books on Italian cooking, but the one you must read (and drool over, while thinking ahead to great meals) is Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.

  CIVIL RIGHTS AND WRONGS

  Sometimes the best way to learn about a historical period is to read a memoir by someone who played a major role in it. This is certainly true of Melba Patillo Beals’s Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High, the story of her experiences as one of the first black students to try to enroll in Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. It’s impossible not to be moved by this group of teenagers whose bravery paved the way for the next generations of “reluctant warriors” in the struggle for civil rights. An accompanying emotion will certainly be outrage at the reception they were given by the local authorities and citizens.

  Diane McWhorter’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution is really two stories in one. The first is an extremely readable yet very detailed historical account of 1963, “the Birmingham year,” when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Birmingham and the civil rights movement came into its own.The second part of the book is equally interesting: it’s the story of the author’s family, prominent members of the white Birmingham community who were always on the segregationist side of the Civil Rights struggle. McWhorter devotes a good portion of the book to discussing how vigilante l
eaders (some of whom were her relatives) were willing to use any means, including violence, to keep blacks from achieving equality in education, jobs, and housing.

  Compared to McWhorter’s book, Paul Hemphill’s Leaving Birmingham:Notes of a Native Son is more truly a memoir, describing Hemphill’s relationship with his father, with whom he vehemently disagreed on political and social issues. It’s an honest and painful look at what Hemphill feels to be the almost irredeemable shame of Birmingham’s past.

  Lamenting what he sees as a lost opportunity for true equality, Peter Irons, in Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision, takes readers behind the scenes of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

  Another excellent book—from a man who personally experienced the effects of the Brown decision—is Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree’s All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education, in which he reflects on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s career, the work of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and the history of the civil rights movement.

  CODES AND CIPHERS