More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason
Page 12
David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories: the title story and “Tapka”
Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago: “Blight” and “Hot Ice”
Joseph Epstein’s Fabulous Small Jews: “Artie Glick in a Family Way” and “The Executor” (the unusual title comes from a poem by Karl Shapiro called “Hospital”: “This is the Oxford of all sicknesses. / Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews / And actresses whose legs were always news.”)
Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls: Stories: “The Orphan” and “Outside the Eastern Gate”
Laura Furman’s Drinking with the Cook: the title story and “Hagalund”
Adrianne Harun’s The King of Limbo and Other Stories: “Lukudi”and “The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus”
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies: the title story and “A Temporary Matter”
Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America: “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” and “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens”
John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies: Stories:“Watson and the Shark” and the title story
Antonya Nelson’s In the Land of Men: the title story and “Goodbye, Midwest”
Ann Packer’s Mendocino and Other Stories: the title story and “Babies”
Tom Paine’s ScarVegas and Other Stories: “General Markman’s Last Stand” and “The Spoon Children”
J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories: all of them are classics, but perhaps the two best are “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”
Daniel Stolar’s The Middle of the Night: “Marriage Lessons” and “Jack Landers Is My Friend”
Hannah Tinti’s Animal Crackers: “How to Revitalize the Snake in Your Life”
David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion: Stories: “The Suffering Channel” and “Mr. Squishy”
Mark Winegardner’s That’s True of Everybody: “Thirty-Year-Old Women Do Not Always Come Home”
GRAPHICA
At first glance, graphic novels and memoirs might appear to be simply a collection of comic strips. Once you start reading the text, though, you discover that they offer a reading the text, though, you discover that they offer a great deal more.
Daniel Quinn’s The Man Who Grew Young (illustrated by Tim Eldred) is set in a universe where time runs backward and everyone lives their lives in reverse. People don’t die at the end of this backward life, but instead finally disappear into the bodies of their mothers. The only problem is, Adam Taylor doesn’t seem to have had a mother.
Joe Sacco’s The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo takes us to Sarajevo, where the past is never far from the present, and introduces us to an American war correspondent who leans heavily on a “fixer”—a person who helps Western journalists develop their heart-wrenching stories for public consumption. You might also want to look at his Palestine, winner of an American Book Award in 1996 (presented by the Before Columbus Foundation), a dark and unfortunately still relevant picture of Israeli-Palestinian relations in the early 1990s, and Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, an account of a prolonged attack by Serbian soldiers on a small Bosnian town during the war in the Balkans in the 1990s.
Lewis Trondheim’s funny and heartbreaking Mister O is a wordless novel in pictures about the adventures of a little man trying to find his way across a chasm.
Marjane Satrapi’s outstanding Persepolis:The Story of a Childhood relates the author’s experiences growing up as the daughter of Marxists in Iran, both before and after the revolution that toppled the shah and brought religious extremists into power. The sequel, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, describes the author’s late adolescence at school in Austria and later when she returns home to Iran.
Craig Thompson’s debut work was Good-bye,Chunky Rice,a touching parable about love and loss; the two main characters were Chunky Rice, a turtle, and his closest friend, a mouse named Dandel. Thompson’s next book, Blankets, revisits some of the same themes, as he remembers his own childhood and describes what it was like to grow up in rural Wisconsin in a family of rigid fundamentalists.
Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers is a visually arresting, angry, and moving account of his (and his family’s, and the country’s) experiences on the day of the attacks on the World Trade Center and in the days, weeks, months, and years that followed. (Perhaps the most striking image in the book is Spiegelman’s portrayal of the glowing “bones” of the twin towers as they burned.) A “Comics Supplement” at the end of the book presents a brief history of the funnies that began appearing in the Sunday supplements of newspapers in the early years of the twentieth century, as well as some reproductions of vintage comics from those long-ago, more innocent days.
THE GREAT PLAINS
According to the Center for Great Plains Studies, the area stretches from Edmonton, in the Canadian province of Alberta, all the way down to Fort Worth, Texas.These primarily barren and windswept lands form the backdrop for a number marily barren and windswept lands form the backdrop for a number of good novels. The cities seem not to have inspired novelists (yet), but the wilds . . . well, read for yourself.
The Dakotas
Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer takes place on a Sioux Indian reservation in North Dakota, and reading it is like participating in an archeological dig, in that each successive chapter takes you further back into the past.
Most of Louise Erdrich’s stories of American Indian life take place in North Dakota, including her three best: Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks, all of which are character-driven novels about love, friendship, and complicated family relationships.
Larry Woiwode set two of his most engrossing novels—Beyond the Bedroom Wall and Born Brothers—in his native North Dakota. Each explores the intricate nature of family relationships.
From the Black Hills by Judy Troy is the coming-of-age tale of eighteen-year-old Mike Newlin, who finds his life in turmoil when his father commits murder and disappears from their small South Dakota town.
In Leaving the Land, set just after World War II, Douglas Unger explores what happens when the children of longtime farm families, who want nothing more than to be forever finished with farming, begin to make their way in the larger world.
Mystery novelist Harold Adams set his long-running (more than a dozen novels) Carl Wilcox series in small-town, Depression-era South Dakota. Wilcox, an ex-cop, a sign painter, and an amateur detective, frequently stumbles onto interesting conundrums that he can’t resist trying to solve. Try The Man Who Was Taller Than God (which won the 1993 Shamus Award) or Hatchet Job.
Deadwood by Pete Dexter is a portrait of the last years of Wild Bill Hickok’s life—the late 1870s—as seen through the eyes of his partner in crime, Charles Utter. This book is as well written as Dexter’s other novels, but much funnier.
Kent Meyers’s The Work of Wolves is the story of three misfits who find that their culture and destiny are often intertwined, sometimes in sorrow-filled ways.
But I have to confess that my all-time favorite books set in the Great Plains states (in and near the town of De Smet, South Dakota) are the last four of the original Laura Ingalls Wilder series of books about her life: By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years. Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, also set some of her novels in the Dakotas, including Let the Hurricane Roar and Young Pioneers.
Nebraska
Willa Cather’s remarkable My Ántonia is perhaps the classic Nebraska novel. In it Jim Burden looks back on the life of his childhood friend, the high-spirited Ántonia Shimerda, who lived with her immigrant parents on a hardscrabble farm on the plains in the late nineteenth century.
To me, the classic Nebraska short story is Carl Sandburg’s wonderful tale “The Huckabuck Family and How They Raised Popcorn in Nebraska and Quit and Came Back,” which first appeared in his Rootabaga Stories. Its major characters are Jonas Jonas Huckabu
ck, his wife Mama Mama Huckabuck, and their pony-faced daughter, the star of the story, Pony Pony Huckabuck. This is a great read-aloud for families, but don’t forget to have the popcorn popped before you begin, because you’ll be laughing too hard by the end to do much of anything.
Over the course of her long life, Bess Streeter Aldrich wrote what seems like a gazillion books, but it was her 1928 novel, A Lantern in Her Hand, that cemented her reputation as a chronicler of the pioneer experience. It relates the experiences of Abbie Deal as she accompanies her husband, Will, from Iowa to a homestead in Nebraska in the 1880s, and was followed by a sequel, A White Bird Flying. A Lantern in Her Hand is still on many high school reading lists, and it’s a good choice for those of us (no matter our age) who loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder series.
Juvenile delinquent Randall Hunsucker ends up in a small town, where he tries—often unsuccessfully—to put his young life back together in Tom McNeal’s Goodnight, Nebraska.
Plains Song, for Female Voices was Wright Morris’s final novel in a writing career that spanned more than fifty years. It won the American Book Award in 1981, and was chosen that same year as an American Library Association Notable Book. The story is told mainly through the experiences of three women—matriarch Cora Atkins, her daughter, Madge, and her niece, Sharon. We read about their relationship to one another, to the men in their lives, and to their family farm on the Nebraska plains.
Jim Harrison’s Dalva contains at least two unforgettable characters. There is, of course, the eponymous main character, who in her middle age begins a search for her son, whom she gave away at birth almost three decades before; but there’s also a terrific portrayal—through his journals—of the life of her great-grandfather, who came to Nebraska as a missionary.
GROUP PORTRAITS
It’s hard enough to write a biography of one person, so consider the complications (not to mention the huge amount of work) that goes into writing a biography of two or more famous people. To succeed, you obviously need a theme, or a thread that binds the subjects together, so that the book doesn’t feel like separate chapters hitched uneasily together. I think the following writers overcame these problems and produced books that offer fascinating insights into their subjects.
Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage looks at the lives of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy through the prism of their Catholicism (they were known among their wide circle of interconnected friends as “The School of the Holy Ghost”). Elie manages to tell each of their stories fully, while at the same time showing the influences of one upon the other, as they individually and together struggled to understand what their religious convictions meant to them.
A work of great readability and historical importance, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power by Warren Zimmerman profiles five fascinating men (all close friends) whose vision and policies set the United States on an expansionist and imperialist course in the years between 1898 and 1903, during which time Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Guam came under our sway. The men who set this in motion and saw it through con brio included Theodore Roosevelt; Alfred T. Mahan, the great naval strategist; Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge; Roosevelt’s secretary of state, John Hay; and corporate lawyer Elihu Root, who ended up administering the whole imperial strategy.
When we think of wild women of the 1920s, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Dorothy Parker immediately come to mind, women whose audacious and frequently outrageous behavior caught the imagination of their own generation as well as every one since. Marion Meade’s Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties takes a look at the lives of these three, along with that of Edna Ferber. These women were not only muses, lovers, and wives to the men in their lives, but all (save Zelda) made a living writing novels, plays, poems, and short stories. Yet their lives (except perhaps Ferber’s) were anything but happy, and Meade perfectly catches their frantic and by and large futile attempts to stop drinking and carousing. Zelda was the saddest (Meade shows just how much Scott appropriated her life and writing in his hugely popular books); Dorothy was the wittiest (“Brevity is the soul of lingerie”is one of her bon mots);Edna St. Vincent Millay was the greatest sexual adventurer; and Edna Ferber was the most successful of this quartet of hard-living, hard-loving women. Two things struck me as I read: the amount of alcohol they consumed and just how brilliant Dorothy Parker was. Who else could have come up with a sentence, impromptu, using the word “horticulture”? (“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”)
David Laskin’s Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals explores the connections and differences among writers who were associated with Partisan Review magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, including Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, and Delmore Schwartz.
GUILT-INDUCING BOOKS
Some books make you feel guilty—about what you (or our society) have done in the past, what we’re doing right now, what we probably ought not do in the future, and how much more we should be doing with our lives. Read these books when you’re ready to believe that not only can you change and improve, but society can (and should) as well.
Jason DeParle’s American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Jennifer Gonnerman’s Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
William Greider’s The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains:The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer,A Man Who Would Cure the World
Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here:The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America
William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’sThe Ugly American (the only novel on this list)
Susan Linn’s Consuming Kids:The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (in the spirit of full disclosure, this is written by my sister)
Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature and Enough:Staying Human in an Engineered Age
Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Susan Sheehan’s Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Morgan Spurlock’s Don’t Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America
DAVID HALBERSTAM: TOO GOOD TO MISS
I’ve never read a dull book by David Halberstam—he’s certainly one of our best nonfiction storytellers. Even subjects that I’m not interested in make fascinating reading in Halberstam’s capable hands. He’s prolific, with large books seeming to alternate with shorter ones every few years, so you never have to wait too long for another “Halberstam” to arrive at a bookstore or library near you.
At the beginning of his career, Halberstam wrote two novels—The Noblest Roman (his first book) and One Very Hot Day—but then shifted exclusively to nonfiction. For much of the 1960s he was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and his experiences as a reporter in Vietnam led to two of his earliest books, The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era and The Best and the Brightest (for more about these two, see page 238 in Book Lust).
Following are some of his other books; I’ve put an asterisk by the ones that I particularly enjoyed.
The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal
* The Breaks of the Game
* The Children
* The Fifties
Firehouse
Ho
The Next Century
October 1964
Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made
* The Powers That Be
The Reckoning
* Summer of ’49
* The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy
* War in a Time of Pe
ace: Bush, Clinton,and the Generals
RUSSELL HOBAN: TOO GOOD TO MISS
What other author do you know who has written a series of successful picture books, collections of poems for children, books for middle school boys and girls, and several (very different from one another) novels for adult readers? Only Russell Hoban. And you shouldn’t miss reading him.
He’s probably best known for his picture books about a very young badger named Frances, including Bedtime for Frances, Bread and Jam for Frances, and A Baby Sister for Frances. With perfect illustrations by Garth Williams (the one showing Frances’s father in bed, opening one eye to look at Frances when she comes into the bedroom to tell her parents she can’t sleep, still makes me smile when I think about it), the series shows Frances in many situations that will be familiar to parents of young children: Frances refusing to go to sleep, Frances refusing to eat anything but bread and jam, Frances facing the arrival of a younger sister. All the stories are told in language that will satisfy both the adult reader and the child who is listening.