by Nancy Pearl
The documented history of codes and code breaking is a long one, stretching back to the sixteenth century and the attempt by Mary, Queen of Scots, to oust her cousin, Elizabeth, from the throne of England. But no doubt the biblical Joshua also used codes when he communicated with the agents he sent to spy throughout the land of Canaan.
Among the nonfiction available on this subject, you won’t want to miss The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh, who offers his reasons for believing that the people who win wars tend to have the superior code breakers. (His The Code Book: How to Make It, Break It, HIt, Crack It keeps all the really interesting parts of the adult book and omits anything that could possibly bore the most exacting teenage reader.)
For two behind-the-scenes peeks at what went on in this field during World War II, take a look at David Kahn’s The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet and Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War,1941-1945 by Leo Marks. The latter is the author’s story of how his interest in codes began when he read Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold-Bug” as a child, and then continued through his wartime experiences in a top-secret British government project monitoring the security of codes being used. (Interestingly, Marks was turned down for British Intelligence’s high-profile Bletchley Park code-breaking section.)
If you want to learn how to break codes and work on some examples yourself, the book you’re looking for is Helen Fouché Gaines’s Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their Solution, which includes more than 150 puzzles.
The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick combines history and detection in a biography of the first person to decode the language of the Mycenaeans, who lived on the island of Crete, circa 1500 B. C. If you have ever been curious about how ancient languages are deciphered, this is the book for you.
For a fine novel about codes and code breaking, try Robert Harris’s Enigma, about the Allies’ attempts to break the Germans’ codes during World War II. Somehow Harris keeps you reading, even though you know that (surprise!) the codes were broken, the Axis powers were defeated, and the Allies prevailed.
COMMONPLACE BOOKS
Commonplace books have existed at least since Aristotle’s time, and I for one would not be surprised to learn that Noah kept his own collection of his favorite proverbs, bon mots, and quotations. Called locus communis in Latin and topos koinos in Greek, these collections (if they’re in a language you know, like English) are frequently fun to read: it’s a rather different way of getting to know the author. Commonplace books are not strictly diaries because the entries are triggered by something read or heard, not by something the author felt or did.
The title of Helen Bevington’s When Found, Make a Verse Of comes from a Dickens character in Dombey and Son, Captain Cuttle, who, upon hearing something he deems important, takes out a notebook and writes it down while murmuring, “When found, make a note of.” Bevington’s commonplace book is an anthology of proverbs, oddities, excerpts from what she’s reading, and descriptions of conversations with people she meets; most entries are complemented by Bevington’s own comments, frequently in the form of a poem.
It’s a little unfair of me to include E. M. Forster’s Commonplace Bookin this list. Although it’s a record of his thinking about what he was reading from 1925 to 1968, and therefore invaluable to Forsterists and other scholars, it’s a bit rough going for all but the most dedicated reader. There are, however, some priceless bits, as when he writes, “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” But to be honest, most of the best stuff here ended up in Forster’s important and influential Aspects of the Novel (see page 236).
Poet W. H. Auden arranged A Certain World: A Commonplace Book in alphabetical order, from Accidie to Writing, with all stops in between. All fans of poetry, and Auden’s in particular, will want to take a look at this.
Word lovers rejoice in the existence of Willard R. Espy’s books on words at play. The Word’s Gotten Out, one of his best, includes epigrams, verses, and quotations, along with a collection of ways in which to play with words—rebuses, palindromes, and the like. I never get tired of reading Espy’s books.
THE COMPLEX NAPOLEON
I first became interested in Napoleon Bonaparte after I read a curious and charming little book called Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story by Michael Allin. Although Napoleon plays only a bit more than a bit part in this nonfiction account of the first appearance of a giraffe in Western Europe, I was immediately taken with Allin’s report that Napoleon read a book while leading his army in Egypt and tore out each page as he finished it, tossing it to the soldiers who rode behind him, so that each book he read eventually passed all the way down through the entire invading French army!
But it became clear to me almost immediately that it’s impossible to have only a passing interest in Napoleon. Once one meets him, one is hooked, and there are dozens of good books to read about him. Historians either admire or revile Napoleon; nobody is halfhearted about him. The books below exhibit the full range of opinions.
Probably the most accessible book about Napoleon is Julia Blackburn’s beautifully written The Emperor’s Last Island: A Journey to St. Helena, the story of Napoleon’s final years in exile at the seeming end of the world.
Emil Ludwig, author of a 1915 biography called simply Napoleon, has this to say about the general’s love of reading: “He read so fast that a book lasted him scarcely one hour, and at Saint Helena, a servant was kept busy carrying away armfuls of finished books which only a day before had been brought from the shelves.”
Three fascinating though dauntingly door-stopping biographies (but really, how could any normal-size book ever contain this man?) are Alan Schom’s Napoleon Bonaparte; Steven Englund’s Napoleon: A Political Life; and Frank McLynn’s Napoleon: A Biography.
If you’re looking for a shorter overview of the general’s life, career, and influence, check out Paul Johnson’s Napoleon, part of the Penguin Lives series; Alistair Horne’s The Age of Napoleon; or Felix Markham’s Napoleon.
And of course, once you start on the Napoleon track, you’ll find yourself at some point heading straight for all those books about the Napoleonic Wars. A good place to begin is with Simon Forty’s Historical Maps of the Napoleonic Wars. If you’re looking for a gripping nonfiction account of a key episode in Napoleon’s life, read Alan Schom’s One Hundred Days: Napoleon’s Road to Waterloo.
But don’t forget that there’s good fiction, too, in which Napoleon’s campaigns and the man himself play an important role, including Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Brooks Hansen’s The Monsters of St. Helena (based on a memoir by a woman who as a child knew Napoleon in exile on St. Helena), and two series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars: the Hornblower novels, including Captain Horatio Hornblower by C. S. Forester; and Bernard Cornwell’s series about Richard Sharpe, including Sharpe’s Honor and Waterloo.
And certainly don’t neglect the excellent biography of Napoleon’s complicated wife, The Rose of Martinique: A Life of Napoleon’s Josephine by Andrea Stuart.
For a fascinating little sidelight on the general’s career, take a look at Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History, by Penny LeCouteur and Jay Burreson, in the “Science 101” section.
THE CONTRADICTORY CARIBBEAN: PARADISE AND PAIN
The literature of the Caribbean is filled with contradictions: the turbulence and violence of its history contrast with the great natural beauty of its setting. The tentacles of slavery great natural beauty of its setting. The tentacles of slavery and the area’s subjugation to the great colonial powers have left their mark on the writers of the region and the stories they tell, whether they’re focused on Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or islands such as Antigua, Martinique, or Barbados.
Among the most interesting nonfiction books about H
aiti are The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis (about an ethnobotanist’s search for a powerful “zombie” drug), Amy Wilentz’s The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, and The Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti (an impressionistic tour through the country by Herbert Gold, a man who loves it deeply). As for fiction, try Graham Greene’s The Comedians; Madison Smartt Bell’s three-volume novelistic history of the country, including All Souls Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone That the Builder Refused; and four books by Haitian-born novelist Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (about the lives of a Haitian mother and daughter in New York), Krik? Krak! (a National Book Award finalist about the brutality of life under Duvalier’s dictatorship), The Farming of Bones (a very political novel set in the Dominican Republic), and The Dew Breaker (the people’s name for members of the Tonton Macoutes, the murderers who killed their fellow Haitians at their government’sbehest).
St. Lucia native Derek Walcott, the 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is both a poet and a playwright. In Omeros (a retelling of Homer) and Collected Poems, 1948-1984, as well as in newer writing such as Tiepolo’s Hound, he blends his love for his homeland and the sadness of exile with classical Western myths and history.
On the island of Martinique, a saucy, aging woman named Marie-Sophie Laborieux recounts her family’s struggles from slavery to the founding of a shantytown called Texaco in the novel of the same name by Patrick Chamoiseau, who also wrote Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, a vivid novel set in the marketplace of colonial Martinique.
Phyllis Ahand Allfrey’s The Orchid House is the story of three sisters growing up on the island of Dominica, all of whom fall in love with the same man.
The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke (which won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada region), set on a fictional island that is clearly Clarke’s native Barbados, is told in the form of a monologue by Mary-Mathilda, who over the course of one day confesses to the murder of the manager of a sugar plantation, whose unwilling mistress she was for more than three decades.
Other good novels about the Caribbean include Roslyn Carrington’s A Thirst forRain, chronicling the loves and losses of three intertwined characters in a rural Trinidadian neighborhood, and Jamaica Kincaid’s beautifully written coming-of-age novel AnnieJohn, in which the title character quietly rebels against her loving parents on Antigua.
For more fiction and nonfiction about the Caribbean, see the “Cuba Sí!” section in Book Lust.
COZIES
Sometimes you just don’t want to read about dysfunctional families, you don’t want sadness, you don’t want to wonder whodunit, and you don’t, for heaven’s sake, want to read about sex or violence. Instead, what you want is the literary equivalent of a warm (not hot) bubble bath. If that’s the mood you’re in, try these.
For years and years, Gladys Taber wrote a column called “Butternut Wisdom”in Family Circle magazine,in which she shared with readers recipes and stories of her life in an old farmhouse in Connecticut that was filled with dogs and cats. Portions of her columns were compiled into such nonfiction titles as The Stillmeadow Road; Especially Dogs . . . Especially at Stillmeadow; and (my favorite) the novel Mrs. Daffodil, an affectionate fictional self-portrait.
Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel The Country of the Pointed Firs explores the life of a young woman writer who has come to live in the small town of Dunnet Landing. Originally published in 1896, Jewett’s novel is the perfect choice when you’re feeling overwhelmed with the weight of the contemporary world.
Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books is a loving memoir of the months Paul Collins, his wife, Jennifer, and young son, Morgan, spent living in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.Along with stories of the houses they tried to buy and Collins’s part-time job in the town’s biggest used bookstore are captivating accounts of books he discovered and ruminations on book titles, the vagaries of publishing, literary hoaxes, and the fate of the many unsung writers whose books never made the splash they deserved.
Daddy-Long-Legs, an epistolary novel written in 1912 by Jean Webster, is one of those books that’s good for girls between the ages of, say, 12 and 112. An anonymous benefactor, Daddy-Long-Legs, agrees to send orphan Jerusha “Judy” Abbott to college on the condition that she write to him once a month to let him know about her progress. Does she ever meet her secret friend? I’ll never tell—but keep in mind that Fred Astaire played opposite Leslie Caron in a 1955 movie adaptation.
Hilda Cole Espy’s Quiet, Yelled Mrs. Rabbit is the perfect read for any mother, especially for fans of Jean Kerr. Espy left her job as press agent for bandleader Fred Waring when her twins were born, and discovered that the traits that made her a good employee—flexibility and a great sense of humor—also enabled her to raise four daughters and one son happily.
Other writers of gentle reads are Elizabeth Goudge (try her novels Pilgrims Inn and Green Dolphin Street or, for a special treat, The Little White Horse); D. E. Stevenson (I’d suggest Anna and Her Daughters and The Young Clementina,and the four “Mrs.Tim” books,beginning with Mrs. Tim Christie); and Elizabeth Cadell (start with The Corner Shop, The Toy Sword, or Mrs. Westerby Changes Course).
CRIME IS A GLOBETROTTER
Crime occurs everywhere, from Alaska to Zambia. That makes mysteries a good way to travel around the world, since one of the best things about this genre is the authors’ skill in bringing to life the settings of their books.
Russia
No list of novels about crime fighters is complete without Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, in which Arkady Renko tries to figure out who or what is behind three mutilated corpses discovered in Moscow’s Gorky Park. In novels such as The Winter Queen and Murder on the Leviathan, both set in Czarist Russia, Boris Akunin assigns complicated cases to Erast Fandorin, a young detective in the Moscow police department.
Norway
Karin Fossum’s psychological and atmospheric series features Inspector Konrad Sejer, who, in the first of this series to be translated into English, Don’t Look Back, investigates the death of a teenage girl.
Sweden
Two good Swedish mysteries are Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman, a moody thriller about the death of two campers on the outskirts of a remote Swedish village, and Firewall, one of Henning Mankell’s superior police procedurals, in which Kurt Wallander’s squad confronts several disparate cases of murder and mayhem that, contrary to initial appearances, all seem to be part of one deadly plot.
Bosnia
Dan Fesperman’s Lie in the Dark and The Small Boat of Great Sorrows are the only two mysteries I know of that are set in the former Yugoslavia; both concern cases investigated by homicide detective Vl ado Petric.
Sicily
The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri takes Inspector Salvo Montalbano into a secret mountain grotto, where he discovers two embracing lovers who have been dead for fifty years, as well as a life-size terra-cotta dog.
China
Xiaolong Qiu’s Death of a Red Heroine has Inspector Cao Chen, the poetry-quoting intellectual of the Shanghai police force, investigating the death of a Chinese worker; in A Loyal Character Dancer, Chen puzzles out the fate of a missing woman; and in When Red Is Black, he and his associate, Guangming Yu, look into the murder of a woman writer.
Japan
Laura Joh Rowland’s The Concubine’s Tattoo, set in seventeenth-century Edo (Tokyo), is my favorite novel in the series about Sano Ichiro, the shogun’s Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People. In this case he is interrupted in the middle of his own wedding feast to investigate the death of a concubine in the Edo Castle’s women’s quarters.
Tibet
The best novel I’ve ever read about Tibet is the unforgettable The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison. The pleasures of watching Shan Tao Yun (formerly the inspector general of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing, now imprisoned in Tibet) unravel the mystery are equaled or exceeded by the opportunity to immerse yourself i
n Tibetan culture and religion.
Egypt
Michael Pearce has written a series of mysteries set in Egypt (nominally ruled by the Khedive, but really under the control of the British) in the first decade of the twentieth century. His detective is a Welshman named Gareth Owen who serves as chief of Cairo’s secret police, the mamur zapt. This is a series that is probably best read in order, beginning with The Mamur Zapt & the Return of the Carpet.
Elizabeth Peters’s delightful series of novels about amateur archaeologist (and amateur detective) Amelia Peabody takes place during the Victorian period. The series comprises more than a dozen mysteries, beginning with Crocodile on the Sandbank.This is definitely another series to read in chronological order.
Turkey
The multicultural aspects of contemporary Turkey are the subtext of Barbara Nadel’s Belshazzar’s Daughter:A Novel of Istanbul, in which Inspector Cetin Ikmen tries to uncover the motive and perpetrator in what appears to be a gruesome, racially motivated murder.