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

by Nancy Pearl

  600s

  The 600s are devoted to technology and applied sciences. This is where you can find, among many other topics, all you ever wanted to know about diseases (the 616s), cooking (641.5), and business (generally the 650s).

  Jeff Taylor’s Tools of the Trade: The Art and Craft of Carpentry is a collection of essays on twenty-five different tools, beautifully written by a man in love with his profession. It could be subtitled “The Zen of Carpentry.”

  Not content with his appearance in the 500s, David Bodanis can also be found here! His The Secret Family:Twenty-four Hours Inside the Mysterious World of Our Minds and Bodies elicits an uneasy combination of laughter, nausea (are there really 40,000 -plus mites in the pillowcase on which I lay my head each night?), and amazement at just what goes on inside and around us every minute of every day.

  Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography takes readers on an excursion through all aspects of the anatomy and physiology of women, from breast milk to menstruation to exercise to hormones to childbirth, and does it all in totally accessible prose.

  It’s a fool’s game to try to make even a semi-definitive list of great cookbooks, especially if you’re basically a non-cook, as I am. But since I’m someone who rushes in where others fear to tread, here’s a sampling of my favorite cookbooks. First, of course, is Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker’s Joy of Cooking (but not the most recent edition). Try the oatmeal cookie recipe with orange peel or the baked macaroni and cheese when you want comfort food to go along with a cozy book.

  For me, the best part about baking bread is the upper-arm exercise involved with kneading the dough, and the times that you can curl up on the couch with a good book while the dough is rising. I’ve used Bernard Clayton’s bread books since the first one was published in 1973, and have never found a bad recipe. The most recent incarnation is Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads. But my new favorite is, hands down, The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature and the Passages That Feature Them by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen. What a great idea! Not only do you get introduced (and reintroduced) to works of fiction and nonfiction, but you get some awfully good-sounding recipes along the way. Where else can you find a pie crust recipe straight from a description by Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginnings, and a recipe for orange-almond bisque from Billie Letts’s novel Where the Heart Is? Not to mention recipes for empanadas (from Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune) and teacakes (based on a selection from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby).

  One of the books I treasure in my home library is the 1932 “complete new revised edition” of A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband with Bettina’s Best Recipes by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron. As they follow the first year in the married life of Bob and Bettina, the authors provide tips and tricks (and recipes) for keeping husbands happy. Chapters include “Home at Last,” “Bettina’s First Real Dinner” (the menu is pan-broiled steak, baking powder biscuits, new potatoes in cream butter, pea and celery salad, and strawberry shortcake with rhubarb sauce), “A Good-bye Luncheon for Bernadette,” and “The Dixons Come to Dinner”—each with its own vignette, followed by the menu and recipes. It’s a true nostalgia trip.

  Laura Shapiro’s two books on the social history of food, Perfection Salad:Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century and Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, are both entertaining and informative. From descriptions of early Pillsbury Bake-Offs to the frozen food industry’s all-consuming interest in decorating home freezers for every kitchen decor, from the history of the Boston Cooking School to an appreciation of Fannie Farmer, these books will change the way you look at food and its preparation.

  700s

  In the 700s you can pore over photos of the art in great museums that you may never have a chance to visit; you can read a history of the film industry; and you can learn to juggle or play bridge, poker, or backgammon.

  Since the Amon Carter Museum’s holdings showcase less well-known work by very well-known artists, a browse through An American Collection: Works from the Amon Carter Museum offers not only the pleasure of seeing excellent reproductions of works by Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and others, but also the sense that you’re enlarging your understanding of these artists’ work.

  In Vermeer in Bosnia: Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies, Lawrence Weschler offers readers the pleasure of his myriad interests, with penetrating and entertaining essays on subjects as diverse as Roman Polanski (“The Brat’s Tale”), theater (“Henry V at Srebrenica”), family relationships (“My Grandfather’s Last Tale”), and art (“True to Life: David Hockney’s Photocollages”).

  More than fifty years ago, general manager Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and that act, which broke the color barrier in professional baseball, changed the course of more than sports history. As Arnold Rampersad shows in Jackie Robinson: A Biography, Robinson was uniquely qualified to play the role he did, both on and off the field.

  Only a writer as good as David Remnick and a subject as complex as Muhammad Ali could make boxing interesting to me; King of the World is definitely not for sports fans only.

  Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game looks at the Oakland Athletics, one of the least wealthy teams in Major League Baseball, and analyzes why they win year after year. (This book turned me into a big fan of the Oakland A’s, which is not a good thing to be when you live in Seattle.)

  In the more than twenty years since Suzanne Gordon published Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet, not a lot appears to have changed: the beauty of classical dance as you watch it unfold on stage seems to have no connection with the blood, sweat, tears, and hours of work of the dancers themselves.

  800s

  Ah, at last we get to the truly literary part of Dewey. Don’t miss these gems!

  Randall Jarrell once said that he had “an uneasy respect” for a poem I had written. I didn’t realize what a compliment that was until I read No Other Book: Selected Essays, a treasure for anyone interested in literary issues. Precious few critics have ever equaled Jarrell’s incisive intelligence, wit, and plain old common sense. And editor Brad Leithauser’s introduction is, by itself, worth the price of the book. (A good companion read is Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell by his widow, Mary Jarrell.)

  In How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, Edward Hirsch demystifies the reading of poetry in a way that doesn’t talk down to readers. Even longtime lovers of poetry will find much to contemplate here.

  Stephen Greenblatt brings the foremost Elizabethan playwright to life in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; this is a biography that will inspire you to read (or reread) all the plays and sonnets.

  The first essay in poet Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory is about memoir, which she defines so thoughtfully as “that landscape bordered by memory and imagination.” Her other essays address such diverse subjects as her mother’s response to a poem about herself in Hampl’s first collection (“It is pointless to argue your First Amendment rights with your mother,” she writes), Anne Frank, and the philosopher and saint Edith Stein.

  Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist is Walter Bernstein’s account of his experiences during the 1950s as a victim of McCarthyism. He describes a Hollywood that was divided between those who cooperated with the FBI by naming names of colleagues, friends, and families, and those who chose to go to jail or lose their jobs rather than answer questions about their political beliefs from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bernstein wrote the screenplay for the movie The Front, which deals with this very topic.

  Award-winning University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson passionately argues for the benefits of reading great literature—the major one being that it helps people
change and develop their lives for the better—in the stimulating Why Read?

  Take a look at the “Poetry Pleasers” section for more good 800s reading.

  900s

  The 900s cover history and geography and are full of good choices for readers.

  The 1915 attack by a German submarine on the luxury liner Lusitania during a voyage from Liverpool to New York, and the resulting death of 1,200 of its civilian passengers (including more than 100 Americans), was key in bringing the United States into World War I. Diana Preston offers a fittingly moving account of the events surrounding the attack in Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy.

  Tony Perrottet had a great idea—to retrace the travels of the ancient Romans as they ventured throughout their empire from Pompeii to Egypt and beyond. As he follows in their footsteps two thousand years later with his pregnant girlfriend—in Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists—Perrottet compares the ancient cities and the modern ones, describing their inhabitants, their problems, and their entertainments, all the while interspersing delightfully prophetic quotes from ancient travelers. Classics majors will find this book heaven-sent, while travelers will delight in this guide with a twist.

  Stuart Stevens’s Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures along China’s Ancient Silk Road is the story of the author’s travels through the wilds of China. Stevens went to China along with three friends (one of them Mark Salzman of Iron & Silk fame—see“Mark Salzman: Too Good to Miss”) to replicate the famous 1936 journey of Peter Fleming and Ella K. Maillart, recounted by Fleming in News from Tartary and by Maillart in Forbidden Journey: From Peking to Kashmir. A sense of humor, a large tolerance for discomfort, and a willingness to appear foolish are prime requirements for a traveler, especially for someone who wants to write about his travels, and Stevens has those attributes in spades.

  Christiane Bird writes about the people she met in 2002 while traveling through Kurdistan,“a country that exists on few maps, but in many hearts,” in A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan.

  On a related subject, try Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. It reveals that there’s nothing new about the United States stepping in to force regime change in the Persian Gulf: fifty years ago, Britain and the United States engineered a coup that toppled the government of Iran’s popularly elected and very popular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and brought the shah back from exile in Paris. Kinzer’s account is a fascinating, cautionary, and fluidly written look back at these events. He explores the effect of the overthrow on both the country itself and its political relationships with the United States and Britain afterward.

  Although foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson reports regularly for The New Yorker from Afghanistan and Iraq, excerpts from The Fall of Baghdad, his new collection of stunning war reportage, have not appeared in the magazine.

  Many young readers—including me, some years ago—were thrilled by books about the fabulous discoveries of the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, whose love of Homer’s Iliad led him to dig up the ancient, long-lost city of Troy. Caroline Moorehead retells this story for adults in The Lost and Found: The 9,000 Treasures of Troy: Heinrich Schliemann and the Gold That Got Away.

  Although the length of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present might put you off at first, this is a most readable cultural history—almost like a conversation between you and the author, a longtime professor and historian.

  The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland by Jim DeFede describes what happened when U.S.-bound planes were grounded in tiny Gander, Newfoundland, and the passengers found themselves welcomed, aided, and consoled by the residents.

  In My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere, Susan Orlean brings together a varied collection of essays on an assortment of topics: fertility rites in Bhutan; climbing Mount Fuji; beauty pageants for little girls; and a taxidermy convention.

  DICK LIT

  Face it: If publishers had had the guts to call this subgenre what it really is—Dick Lit—rather than the wimpy-sounding Lad Lit, it might’ve had a chance to succeed. As it is, I have the distinct impression that Dick Lit has been written off, even as its distaff counterpart, Chick Lit, continues in all its glory, or at least in all its money-making potential.

  Of course, the major problem with Dick Lit is that Nick Hornby, in About a Boy and High Fidelity (both of which I reread fairly regularly), set the bar very high (and it didn’t hurt that both books were turned into very good and true-to-the-novel films).

  Even though I am clearly not in the right demographic for these books—being neither male, nor twenty- or thirty-somethingish, nor Manhattan- or London-based—I heartily recommend the following two works of fiction.

  If you can imagine A. S. Byatt writing a dick-lit novel, then you have a good idea of what The Calligrapher by Edward Docx is like. The hero—a twenty-something Brit—has two passions: women (Jasper’s the sort of guy who cheats on the women he’s cheating on other women with) and calligraphy, with his latest commission being to calligraph the songs and sonnets of John Donne (who was also a dedicated serial seducer). Jasper’s two passions are joined when he falls truly, madly, and deeply in love with the beautiful Madeleine.

  Although some might argue that David Schickler’s Kissing in Manhattan doesn’t belong in this category, these eleven linked stories do feature young, mostly upwardly mobile urban professionals (mostly men) who are all trying to connect with like-minded souls and are all looking for love in the same mysterious apartment building and in all the same Manhattan restaurants.

  DIGGING UP THE PAST THROUGH FICTION

  The reason I didn’t go ahead and earn a doctorate after getting my master’s degree in history was that I didn’t think any institution would accept a dissertation about novels any institution would accept a dissertation about novels that take readers back in time and make them believe that the world they’re reading about is the way the world really was back then. Here are some of the books and authors I would have discussed.

  When people talk about great writers of historical fiction, Dorothy Dunnett’s name is most often at the top of their list.And no wonder—her attention to detail, adroit use of both real and imagined characters, and intricate plots distinguish her from the many other historical-novelist wannabes. Of her two series, the Lymond Chronicles (set during the seventeenth century around the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots)—which consists of The Game of Kings, Queens’ Play, The Disorderly Knights, Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle, and Checkmate—is probably the most popular, but it would be a shame to miss out on her House of Niccolo series (set two centuries earlier, in what are now the Benelux countries of western Europe), composed of Niccolo Rising, The Spring of the Ram, Race of Scorpions, Scales of Gold, The Unicorn Hunt, To Lie with Lions, Caprice and Rondo, and Gemini.

  A writer who shares Dunnett’s enviable talent for exciting story-telling and accurate re-creations of history is Sharon Kay Penman. My favorites among her books are When Christ and His Saints Slept (about the struggle for control of England’s throne between Queen Maud and her cousin Stephen of Blois) and Time and Chance, her story of the tumultuous marriage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. (It would be hard to write a dull novel about this fascinating woman; one of the other good ones is a book for young people called A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by E. L. Konigsburg.) But my favorite Penman novel, and probably her greatest accomplishment, is The Sunne in Splendour, a novel about Richard III (who got a bad rap from Shakespeare, it appears, but was redeemed beautifully in Josephine Tey’s marvelous historical mystery, The Daughter of Time).

  Margaret George has written many superior historical novels—they’re really fictionalized biographies—including The Memoirs of Cleopatra and a remarkable portrait of the Tudor period, The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool
, Will Somers. (I’ve always wondered, though, how she imagined that Henry would ever have time to write an autobiography, given the numerous women he bedded, his many marriages, and all the subsequent beheadings and divorces.) George is a master at turning her subjects into living, breathing individuals.

  After the War by Richard Marius introduces readers to Paul Alexander, a Greek veteran of World War I, who crosses the Atlantic after his horrific wartime experiences in Belgium and ends up in Bourbonville, Tennessee, trying to find peace from the battlefield memories that still consume him. In this painstakingly realistic novel, Marius asks readers to think about how much of our life is determined by the decisions we make and how much is simply fate, or bad luck, or just chance.

  Barry Unsworth’s The Rage of the Vulture takes place during the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in the first decade of the twentieth century. It relates the story of Captain Robert Markham, an Englishman who comes to Constantinople as part of the British army but who considers his real job to be avenging the rape and murder of his Greek fiancée at the hands of the Turks a dozen years before.You will not want to miss Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger either, an intensely moving novel of the eighteenth-century slave trade.