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

by Nancy Pearl

  LEGAL EAGLES IN NONFICTION

  Even though I have never had the least desire to become an attorney myself (imagine reading nothing but legal briefs all day, every day!), I’ve always enjoyed reading about the inner workings of the legal profession, whether in a history of the Supreme Court or in accounts of major battles over misdeeds, law, and legislation.

  Gideon’s Trumpet by Anthony Lewis was first published in 1964 and remains an important book in the field of legal history. It is the fascinating account of James Earl Gideon’s fight for the right to legal counsel—a landmark case decided in Gideon’s favor by the U.S. Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren. A must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in the law.

  A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr tells the long, tangled, and enthralling story of a lawsuit filed by a group of citizens in Woburn, Massachusetts, against W. R. Grace and the Beatrice Corporation for dumping cancer-causing solvents into the city’s water supply. Every player in the case—lawyers, plaintiffs, and defendants—is here, warts and all.

  Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality by Richard Kluger is a massive (and massively readable), wide-ranging history of the historic 1964 Supreme Court decision that made segregated schools illegal. Kluger includes descriptions of all the people involved, their roles in the case, and their places in history.

  If you’re looking for readable histories of the Supreme Court, take a look at Peter Irons’s A People’s History of the Supreme Court and The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong. Irons, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and director of the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project, describes the major cases, the plaintiffs, and the judges, from the court’s earliest days to the last decade of the twentieth century. Irons’s book focuses on Supreme Court cases involving individuals who believed their constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of religion, or other Bill of Rights protections had been denied.

  Woodward and Armstrong’s The Brethren (originally published in 1979) covers the years 1969 to 1975, the heyday of Warren Burger’s years as chief justice. During these politically and socially volatile years, the court considered cases dealing with abortion, race relations, censorship, and definitions of pornography and obscenity. This is valuable reading for anyone trying to understand the state of the Union today, because in so many ways we are still grappling with similar issues. The authors also go behind the scenes to describe the personal relationships among the nine justices.

  LEWIS AND CLARK: ADVENTURERS EXTRAORDINAIRE

  The years 2004-2007 mark the bicentennial of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s famous expedition to discover the Northwest Passage and to map the new territory just acquired from France. Their story never gets old—filled as it is with adventure, hardships, death, heartwarming friendships, good deeds, and, inevitably, heartbreak. In some ways, too, each succeeding generation has rethought the expedition in light of its own preoccupations and cultural beliefs, so that reading David Freeman Hawke’s Those Tremendous Mountains: The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1980) is qualitatively different from reading, say, Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage (1996). Neither is any less worthwhile to read; they just have different emphases and interpretations.

  If you’re going to read about these explorers, though, you need to begin with their own stories of the journey. Luckily, we don’t all have to go to the immense trouble of deciphering that nineteenth-century handwriting.We can turn instead to a book such as Bernard DeVoto’s The Journals of Lewis and Clark, which brings the journey to life in a way that even the best-written secondary accounts (and there are some great ones) cannot.

  Two of the best secondary accounts, besides those mentioned above, are by two of our best contemporary historians: David Lavender’s The Way to the Western Sea: Lewis and Clark Across the Continent and James P. Ronda’s Lewis and Clark Among the Indians.

  Castle McLaughlin’s Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis & Clark’s Indian Collection (with a general introduction by James Ronda) was written to commemorate the bicentennial. Page after page of fabulous reproductions demonstrate the breadth of the items (now at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University) that Lewis and Clark brought back from their travels.

  Gardeners will especially enjoy Common to This Country: Botanical Discoveries of Lewis and Clark by Susan H. Munger, with illustrations by Charlotte Staub Thomas, which discusses the more than two hundred plants that Lewis and Clark brought back from their trek. (You can still see some of them at the Lewis and Clark Herbarium in Philadelphia.)

  Three good novels about Lewis and Clark include Brian Hall’s I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, in which the story is told by multiple narrators; From Sea to Shining Sea by James Alexander Thom, which is much more about Clark’s family than about the expedition; and The True Account: A Novel of the Lewis & Clark & Kinneson Expeditions, a laugh-aloud comic novel by Howard Frank Mosher, in which a Vermont ex-soldier named True Teague Kinneson and his nephew Ticonderoga race Lewis and Clark to the Pacific (and win).

  LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANS

  Having spent the majority of my life inside a library, and most of my adult life as a librarian, I’m not surprised that I’m drawn to books in which libraries and librarians are featured prominently.

  Eleanor Estes won the Newbery Medal for her novel Ginger Pye, but my favorite Estes novels are The Moffats, The Middle Moffat, and Rufus M., whose characters all live in Cranbury, New Jersey, in the first decades of the twentieth century. In Rufus M. Estes has a rib-tickling, heartwarming chapter about young Rufus’s arduous attempts to get his own library card. Such perseverance! If only all kids wanted to use the library as much as Rufus did.

  Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family tells the story of a Jewish family struggling with poverty on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1912, just before the outbreak of World War I. It includes a lovely chapter about what happens when Sarah, one of five young sisters, loses a library book and has to confess it to her beloved library lady.

  The Grand Complication is Allen Kurzweil’s clever and witty novel about a reference librarian’s search for a watch that was supposedly made for Marie Antoinette. It’s filled with wordplay amid very funny scenes set in a library (including a contest to see who can attach the correct Dewey catalog number to the most abstruse subjects).

  Charity Blackstock wrote two great romantic suspense novels—The Foggy, Foggy Dew and Dewey Death. It’s the latter, of course, that’s set in a research library. It describes what happens when a young woman librarian falls deeply, desperately, and disastrously in love with the wrong man. He’s clearly—à la Lord Byron—mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But is he a murderer as well? Romance fans should not miss this, and suspense readers should hunt it down as well.

  Librarians play major roles in Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House, in which Cape Cod librarian Peggy Cort finds companionship and love in an unlikely relationship with James Sweatt, a teenager who has a growth disorder that eventually makes him the tallest man in the world; Larry Beinhart’s forthrightly titled The Librarian, which has academic librarian David Goldberg called upon to foil a dastardly plot to steal a presidential election; Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, the tale of young newlywed Carol Kennicott’s unhappiness in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota; Art Corriveau’s Housewrights, the story of an unusual love triangle; and Jincy Willett’s first novel, Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather, the tale of dissimilar twin sisters—librarian Dorcas and voluptuary Abigail—and the (loathsomely despicable) man who more or less falls in love with them both.

  LINES THAT LINGER; SENTENCES THAT STICK

  When I finished Book Lust, the first omissions I noticed were the favorite first lines I’d somehow neglected to include—the lines that kept waking me up at night, pleading to be shared sometime, somewh
ere. And then readers began to send me their own examples of wonderful lines that opened into wonderful books. Finally, I can share them—a win-win situation all around.

  First, here are the classic opening lines that simply slipped my mind:“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” opens Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

  “Call me Ishmael” begins Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

  “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” is the first line of Daphne du Maurier’s haunting Rebecca.

  And, from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

  Here are some more of my favorite lines—first and otherwise:

  The inimitable Rose Macaulay begins Told by an Idiot with this deliciously packed sentence: “One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, in brief, in the year 1879, Mrs. Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, ‘Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.’”

  Mary Roach’s hilarious and informative Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers begins with these arresting two lines: “The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back.”

  The Debut, Anita Brookner’s first novel published in the United States, begins with a line that every compulsive middle-aged reader can identify with: “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.”

  Hunter S. Thompson starts Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream with “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

  Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides begins this way: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

  In Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga begins provocatively: “I was not sorry when my brother died.”

  From Verlyn Klinkenborg’s The Last Fine Time: “Snow begins as a rumor in Buffalo, New York.”

  “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there,” opens one of the great but relatively unknown novels of the twentieth century, The Go-Between by L.P.Hartley.

  In Parnassus on Wheels, one of Christopher Morley’s two novels celebrating the love of books (the other is The Haunted Bookshop), Helen McGill, who has spent years tending to her brother Andrew’s needs on the family farm, impulsively buys a traveling bookstore from Professor Mifflin. In dismay and annoyance, Andrew chases after the couple and greets his sister with these memorable words: “Upon my soul you ought to have better sense—and at your age and weight!”

  The second chapter of Julia Blackburn’s The Emperor’s Last Island: A Journey to St. Helena begins, “St. Helena is further away from anywhere else than anywhere else in all the world.”

  The first paragraph of Michael Malone’s detective novel Uncivil Seasons begins, “Two things don’t happen very often in Hillston, North Carolina. We don’t get much snow, and we hardly ever murder one another. Suicide is more our style. . . .”

  You could almost believe that Gabriel García Márquez specialized in opening lines; The Autumn of the Patriarch begins, “Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows, and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.” One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to recall that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The first line of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is: “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming in.”

  Lee Smith begins Family Linen with this line: “Sybill parks carefully at the curb in front of the hypnotist’s house and stares at it for some time without getting out of the car, without even turning off the motor or the air conditioner.”

  And then there’s “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany,” the opening of A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

  Donna Tartt starts The Little Friend like this: “For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it.”

  “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last,” opens Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star-Gazer,Sena Jeter Naslund’s first novel.

  In Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon describes one of his characters like this: “[His overcoat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.”

  “The last camel collapsed at noon” opens Ken Follett’s best novel, The Key to Rebecca.

  From Brady Udall’s first novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, comes this great first line: “If I could tell you one thing about my life, it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.”

  James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss begins, “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

  “Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad” is how John le Carré describes his hero, George Smiley, in Call for the Dead.

  In The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean portrays the main character this way: “John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games.”

  LITERARY LIVES: THE AMERICANS

  If you want to know more about a writer, either before or after reading his or her books, here are some top-notch literary biographies.

  Ever since I first read R. W. B. Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Edith Wharton: A Biography many years ago, I’ve thought that it set the gold standard for biographies: intensely readable, a page-turner, and a wonderful way to broaden and deepen one’s appreciation of this marvelous writer. If you’ve never tried a Wharton novel or short story, then start with these: “Xingu,” a little gem of a story about a women’s book group, and her most famous novel, The Age of Innocence. Lewis also wrote a biography of Henry James and his family, The Jameses: A Family Narrative.

  But to learn the most about Henry James, you can’t do better than to read Leon Edel: either his magnificent five volumes about the author, or the one-volume abridgement, Henry James: A Life. The five are Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843-1870; Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870-1881; Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882-1895; Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895-1901; and Henry James:The Master, 1901-1916. Edel won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for the second and third volumes of his massive biography. (Henry James is also the subject of Colm Tóibín’s magnificent novel The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author.)

  Most people think of Nathaniel Hawthorne only in terms of The Scarlet Letter, a book they were probably forced to read in high school. That’s a shame, as Brenda Wineapple makes clear in her Hawthorne:
A Life, because Hawthorne was a complicated and complex individual who struggled with many contradictory impulses in his life: writing vs. a more public life, living in the North while supporting the South in the Civil War, and much more. He showed himself fully to no one, and died leaving many unanswered questions.

  Maybe A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey will revive interest in Yates’s spare and crystalline prose, seen to perfection in the novels The Easter Parade and Revolutionary Road. The life of this sad, self-destructive writer can be read as a how-not-to manual for those aspiring to a career in fiction, but his legacy—he influenced the entire minimalist school of writers, including Richard Ford, Mary Robison, and Raymond Carver—is lasting.

  Anyone who takes up the challenge of writing about a woman who changed lives and loves as fast and furiously as the writer Mary McCarthy did deserves a prize, so it’s fitting that Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World by Carol Brightman won the National Book Critics Award. (There’s more about McCarthy’s novels on pages 3 and 53 in Book Lust.)