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

by Nancy Pearl

  Israel

  Batya Gur’s police procedurals—which include Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case;The Saturday Morning Murder: A Psychoanalytic Case; Literary Murder: A Critical Case; Murder Duet: A Musical Case; and Bethlehem Road Murder—are marked by psychological insights, strong character development, and a gift for portraying the complexity of Israeli society in the guise of a mystery novel. It’s best to read them in order, so that you can watch the characters, especially Michael Ohayon of the Jerusalem police department, develop throughout the books.

  DEWEY DECONSTRUCTED

  The heart of the new Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Public Library is a book spiral that gently winds from the sixth to the ninth levels, offering patrons a continuous run of the nonfiction collections in Dewey decimal order, from the government documents on level 6 (which have their own arcane classification system), up through the 900s and biographies on level 9. The book spiral makes for perfect browsing and the sort of reading serendipity that I thrive on.

  Melvil Dewey (1851-1931) is known as the father of librarianship. When he was just twenty-one, he came up with the Dewey Decimal Classification system, which assigns all of human knowledge to ten broad groups known as “centuries.” The DDC is used in most public libraries throughout the United States and Canada. Follow me, then, as we wend our way up through all of the Dewey centuries. (You’ll find some fascinating government documents in the “Your Tax Dollars at Work” section.)

  000s

  The Dewey naughts encompass an interesting hodgepodge. There are books about books, such as my own Book Lust;Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading,a collection of essays by a devoted reader that links experiences in her life to books that she’s read; Janice A. Radway’s A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire, which looks at how the Book-of-the-Month Club both interpreted and guided Americans’ desire for “culture”; and Noel Perrin’s wonderful collection of essays on children’s books, A Child’s Delight, which includes essays on books that he feels ought to be more widely read by children.

  But the 000s also include the encyclopedia collection (at 031, to be exact), and, if you’re extremely lucky, you might run across the set that many people have long considered the best encyclopedia ever published, the eleventh edition—all twenty-nine volumes and more than 44 million words—of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911. Approximately 1,500 authors contributed to its forty thousand or so articles, many of which were written by the leading experts of the day, who did not hesitate to voice their opinions in their essays. (In Another Part of the Wood: A Self Portrait,Sir Kenneth Clark’s memoir of his early, formative years, he wrote about his love for this edition: “[O]ne leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as much by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by the facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopedia in the tradition of Diderot which assumes that information can be made memorable only when it is slightly coloured by prejudice. When T. S. Eliot wrote ‘Soul curled up on the window seat reading the Encyclopedia’ he was certainly thinking of the eleventh edition.”)

  100s

  Within the 100s are books on philosophy and psychology, including lots of pop psychology and self-help tomes, astrology, demonology, logic, and ethics. The 100s include many books that I go back to frequently: for information, for sustenance, and for consolation.

  The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves by Annie Murphy Paul offers a fascinating look at just what value (or lack thereof) very popular tests (including such hoary standards as the Rorschach and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator tests) have in predicting behavior.

  I think a regular rereading of David D. Burns’s Feeling Good: The NewMood Therapy is a good tonic whenever one is hit with an attack of the blues. Burns’s advice—counterattack those automatic (and usually debilitating) negative feelings that arise, and do it immediately—is a useful part of his technique of cognitive therapy.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying grew out of a seminar in which she and others interviewed terminally ill patients. She describes the five stages of grief through which most dying people pass: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and, at last, acceptance.

  The Art of Dying: How to Leave This World with Dignity and Grace, at Peace with Yourself and Your Loved Ones by Patricia Weenolsen is a book everyone can benefit from reading. Both matter-of-fact and compassionate, ranging in subject matter from the spiritual to the practical, the author looks at the full range of issues surrounding death, including talking to the dying and living with a terminal disease.

  AlthoughWill Durant’s The Story of Philosophy is old (it was first published in 1926), and philosophy has inevitably taken itself in new (though not necessarily better) directions, I’ve never found a more clear and precise introduction to the major Western thinkers, from Socrates to John Dewey.

  Three other accessible philosophy books include Edward Craig’s Philosophy: AVery Short Introduction; Colin McGinn’s The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy; and Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy.

  David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World looks at the relationship between our way of experiencing our surroundings and our description of them in words. He concludes that language comes between us and the natural world in many deleterious ways.

  200s

  Dewey devoted the 200s to books on religion. I am particularly fond of John Bowker’s World Religions, because each chapter not only includes an overview of the history and belief system of a particular religion but also discusses its symbols, relationship to other religions, works of art, and more, all complemented by excellent illustrations, including a timeline.

  When Huston Smith published his comprehensive book on the seven major religions of the world in 1958, it was perfectly okay to title it The Religions of Man. In subsequent editions, the title morphed to the more politically correct The World’s Religions. And because we now live in a highly visual age, the middle 1990s saw The Illustrated World’s Religions: A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions, which added some spectacular art but took away a lot of Smith’s valuable text. It’s best to go back to the first edition, which has Smith’s original thoughts and words.

  God:A Biography by Jack Miles, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for biography, is scholarly, provocative, and thoroughly engaging. Miles, a former Jesuit priest, places God in the context of the Old Testament, where he is clearly the main character, and analyzes his relationships with Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and others.

  Lesley Hazleton’s Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother looks at a woman who is mentioned only briefly in the New Testament (which is essentially the biography of Jesus, her son). It’s illuminating, fascinating, and wide-ranging.

  I can’t praise Karen Armstrong’s books too highly: they are brilliant as well as brilliantly readable. In addition to the two books mentioned in Book Lust, one other is essential reading. The Battle for God is an incisive analysis of fundamentalist movements among the Israeli Jews, American Protestants, and Muslims from both Egypt and Iran. Here Armstrong contends that fundamentalism arose out of a reaction against and fear of modernity.

  300s

  The 300s seem to go on forever, including as they do all of the social sciences. (I could probably do a whole separate book of recommended readings on this Dewey century.) Although this is an information-heavy Dewey area, there is also some great reading to be found here. All the books I describe below are excellent choices for book discussion groups looking for meaty but eminently readable nonfiction.

  EdwardTenner’s Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences somewhat scarily opines that even the snazziest new inventions or life-prolonging medical techniques often result in problems t
hat were never anticipated by their creators.

  I enjoyed—and learned so much from—Geraldine Brooks’s Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women,in which she describes her experiences traveling throughout the Islamic world, talking to women from all walks of life and every political persuasion, from fundamentalists to feminists.

  David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace:The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East focuses on the region as a whole (and as such is required reading for anyone interested in that topic) but is also immensely valuable in trying to understand contemporary Iran and Iraq. Fromkin places their history in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonialism and World War I, and introduces a cast of characters who were instrumental in shaping the region into what it is today.

  In his controversial Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, Gerard Jones offers his theories on the benefits of violent cartoons and computer games for healthy child development, arguing that cartoons and games should be viewed from a child’s point of view rather than from an adult’s perspective.

  Bruno Bettelheim, in a related (though much older) title, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, argues that fairy tales are necessary to children’s healthy psychological development.

  Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy by Eric Hansen is a story of big business—in this case, the multibillion-dollar industry of orchid smuggling. Hansen encounters almost unbelievable characters in his journey through the underground world of these showy plants. (See Book Lust for a description of a similar account, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. The two books are complementary rather than repetitive.)

  The true-crime genre is one of the few book categories that I don’t much enjoy, save one notable exception: Shot in the Heart,a memoir by Mikal Gilmore about his (in)famous brother, convicted killer Gary Gilmore, and their horrific shared upbringing.

  Other books found in the 300s include Virginia Woolf ’s wonderful A Room of One’s Own, which describes how British society denied women writers the advantages and privileges afforded to their male counterparts;Tracy Kidder’s Old Friends, a respectful and loving look at elderly residents in a nursing home in Northampton, Massachusetts; and Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, which uses the history of the Educational Testing Service as a springboard for a discussion of elitism, civil rights, affirmative action, and education.

  The arguments expressed in political philosopher Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations have become part of the national dialogue about war (the book itself is used as a text at West Point).

  400s

  The 400s are all about language—from dictionaries and grammars of Austronesian to Yiddish, to books about words and punctuation, and everything in between.

  Simon Winchester is the sort of nonfiction writer who can’t write an uninteresting book, no matter the topic (he’s tackled everything from rivers to maps to murderers masquerading as lexicographers to volcanoes). In his best-seller The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Winchester explored the life of one of the oddest of the many contributors to the making of the OED. In a sort of follow-up, Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary focuses on OED editor James Murray, who devoted more than fifty years of his life to trying to bring this project to completion (he died before the book was finished). A good related book, by Murray’s granddaughter K. M. Elisabeth Murray, is Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, which is shelved in the biography section, following the 900s.

  “Sticklers Unite” is the motto of author Lynne Truss in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Guide to Punctuation. She delves into such topics as the history of typefaces (did you know someone actually invented italics?) as well as discussing the use of apostrophes, commas (did you know that Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang has no commas at all?), colons, semicolons, hyphens, and dashes.

  Christopher J. Moore’s In Other Words:A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World includes a selection of foreign words that are clearly le mot juste but defy easy translation. One of my favorites is the Russian razbliuto, which means “the confusing bundle of emotions felt by Russian males for their exgirlfriends.” Assuming that the bundle of emotions crosses cultures and sexes, it’s a very useful word.

  Other entertaining 400s include The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler, which supplies the reader with a myriad of hardly quotidian but perfectly wonderful words—just right to impress fellow workers, family, and friends; Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language, edited by Jack Lynch; and Descriptionary: A Thematic Dictionary by Marc McCutcheon. Divided into more than twenty subject categories, including Environment, Art, Weapons, Food and Drink, and Music, then subdivided further (into such niches as Keyboard Instruments, Vocals and Songs, and so on), this is an extremely useful book when you know the idea you want to express (e.g., a deep and powerful singing voice) but not the exact word for it (basso profundo).

  Take a look at the “Alphabet Soup” section for some of my other favorite books in the 400s.

  500s

  The 500s are another huge Dewey area. If you’re looking for good reading (as opposed to strictly information) on the natural sciences and mathematics, try these selections.

  Sharman Apt Russell’s An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect is designed to introduce readers to the (brief) life and behavior of one of the most varied, fascinating, and graceful creatures in the world. No one who reads this lovely book will remain unawed by the simple existence of such an insect.This is a good companion read with Robert Michael Pyle’s Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage, shelved close by.

  Aldo Leopold was widely regarded as the father of wildlife conservation, and his A Sand County Almanac is a beautifully written classic of the field that is as important and relevant today as when it was published in 1949, the year after his death. Leopold is passionate in reminding us of not only the beauty of the natural world, but also the need to maintain it in the face of developers and other business interests. There’s a transcendent section in which Leopold looks back on the events of the last two centuries as he saws, ring by ring, through a fallen oak tree on his property.

  Thomas Pakenham’s Meetings with Remarkable Trees and Remarkable Trees of the World drawour attention—in photographs, prose, and poetry—to these marvels of nature, which many of us would otherwise overlook.

  It’s in the 500s that you can find two of David Quammen’s well-written and always fascinating natural history books. Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind takes Quammen to four different regions of the world to study these fearsome beasts, and his discussions of them touch on everything from art to mythology to film. In The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction, he laments the increasing number of extinct species due to humans’ unceasing need to expand civilization into “uninhabited” regions of the world.

  It’s not hard to see why Dava Sobel’s unexpected best-seller Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time was the inspiration for a whole new genre of “microhistories.” Her lively writing about the unheralded (and almost uneducated) John Harrison, who invented the chronometer, is mesmerizing.

  In the beautifully written The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson not only presents the facts about oceans (tides and currents, how they came to be, how life began, and so on), but conveys the majesty and power of flowing water.

  Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History is just one of his
many accessible and informative books about the natural world.

  In The Periodic Kingdom:A Journey into the Land of the Chemical Elements, Peter Atkins asks readers to “accompany [him] on a journey of imagination through the austere navigation chart of chemistry.” Along this journey he discusses the ways in which the periodic table assists us in making sense of the world around us, the origins of the elements, and the scientists who charted the building blocks of chemistry.

  David Bodanis dissects what is arguably the most famous equa tion in history, in E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation, by offering historical and biographical information about each element in the equation.

  In The Joy of π, David Blatner discusses the mathematical symbol that, as every good student knows, begins with 3.14 and then continues on, up to more than 8 billion digits, with no end in sight. Why is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter so fascinating? Fear not, Blatner explains all, in prose aimed at the interested non-mathematician, like me.