More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason
Page 17
Iris Origo’s War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944 describes a momentous year late in the war, and concludes with a stirring description of her forced retreat across eight miles of heavily mined highway, shepherding sixty local and refugee children to what she hoped would be safety. (There’s also a grand biography of Iris Origo by Caroline Moorehead called Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia.)
Emily Hahn,a longtime New Yorker writer (her first article appeared in the magazine in 1929, and she continued her contributions for sixty-seven years) and an indefatigable traveler, first went to China in 1935 and remained there through most of World War II. She wrote about her experiences in China to Me, an eccentric look at an expatriate’s life during those difficult years. Particularly interesting is her description of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, which changed everyone’s lives dramatically and drastically, but especially her own: she was pregnant, and her lover was imprisoned by the invading army.
Three Came Home by Agnes Newton Keith is both an intensely moving story of her imprisonment, with her son, in a Japanese prison camp on Berhala Island on North Borneo during World War II, and a testament to her undying belief that it is war itself that is evil, not the men who are both its perpetrators and its victims. Despite the harsh treatment the British subjects received at the hands of their Japanese captors, Keith cannot find it in herself to hate them—only the circumstances that forced them to behave in inhumane ways. This is an invaluable record of what life was like in the prison camps. The movie version (which starred Claudette Colbert) isn’t half bad, either.
We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth is a biography of Jan Baalsrud, a member of the Norwegian resistance whose escape from the Nazis is a tale of courage and adventure.
LIVING YOUR DREAM
I think poet Philip Larkin said it best in two of his poems. In “Toads,” he writes, “Ah, were I courageous enough / To shout Stuff your pension! / But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff / That dreams are made on.” In “Poetry of Departures,” he writes: “Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, / As epitaph: / He chucked up everything / And just cleared off. . . .”Both poems describe the envy we feel when we hear about someone leaving their stodgy life and doing whatever it is they love best, be it building a medieval siege weapon, sailing around lush islands, or seeing more birds in one year than anyone else. Here are some good armchair dreaming books; perhaps they’ll inspire each of us to live dreams, as these people did.
In No Visible Horizon: Surviving the World’s Most Dangerous Sport by Joshua Cooper Ramo, the author meditates on the subject of extreme sports (with forays into Plato, the psychological theory of “flow,” and his own sport, aerial acrobatics) and the men and women who risk their lives in pursuit of . . . what? Perhaps a certain purity of purpose, a loss of control in the midst of perfect control, the mind-altering sensations of approaching danger and paralyzing fear—the last two being feelings that most of us run from, screaming.
John Pollack, author of Cork Boat, describes quitting his job in Washington, D.C., and following his boyhood dream of building a boat made entirely from wine corks (his ended up using 165,321 corks, all held together by rubber bands) and sailing it in unfamiliar waters, in this case the Douro River, from Spain through Portugal to the Atlantic Ocean.
Sometimes it’s enough to write about other people’s obsessions, as Mark Obmascik did in The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession. He recounts the 1998 North American Big Year—in which devoted birders dashed around the United States and Canada trying to become the person who sighted the most birds—from the perspectives of the three top finishers.
In Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon, Jim Paul describes what follows his realization that what he really wants to do in his life is build a catapult and shoot rocks into the Pacific Ocean. He enlists the help of his friend Harry, and the two begin the project. Ah, little does he realize all it will entail and where it will take him. . . .
AnnVanderhoof and her husband left their high-powered, tension-filled jobs in Toronto and spent four years sailing to the Caribbean and back. She describes their trip—from the sublime to the ordinary, from sunsets to haircuts and recipes—in An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude, which nearly had me quitting my job, learning to sail, and leaving drizzly Seattle (but I settled instead for listening to Jimmy Buffett).
Lynne Cox writes about her almost mystical love of long-distance swimming, in Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer, in much the same way that Joshua Cooper Ramo describes his attachment to aerial acrobatics. We learn all about the training, the endurance (Cox swam across the Bering Strait, around the Cape of Good Hope, and through the Strait of Messina), and, most importantly, the joy she takes in doing it.
MAIDEN VOYAGES
I’m struck by the number of first novels that reside on my bookshelves. I suspect there are so many because, for me, the only thing more satisfying than reading a wonderful first novel is to discover a writer in midcareer, which means I’ll not only have several books to go back to but I’ll have many more to look forward to as well. Believe me, though I will give you no hint as to what these first novels are about, they’re all wonderful books.
Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
Diana Atkinson’s Highways and Dancehalls
Ann Beattie’s Chilly Scenes of Winter
Liam Callanan’s The Cloud Atlas
Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
Julia Glass’s Three Junes
Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man
Seth Kantner’s Ordinary Wolves
Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist
Adam Langer’s Crossing California
Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake
Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees
Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief
David Maine’s The Preservationist
Renée Manfredi’s Above the Thunder
Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country
Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By
Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints
Cheryl Mendelson’s Morningside Heights
Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces
Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife
Kate Phillips’s White Rabbit
Jonathan Raymond’s The Half-Life
Michael Redhill’s Michael Sloane
Ben Rice’s Pobby and Dingan
Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Selling the Lite of Heaven
Aurelie Sheehan’s The Anxiety of Everyday Objects
Ira Sher’s Gentlemen of Space
Marisa Kantor Stark’s Bring Us the Old People
Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt
Debra Weinstein’s Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z
Jincy Willett’s Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
Lolly Winston’s Good Grief
MICHAEL MALONE: TOO GOOD TO MISS
One reads (and rereads) Michael Malone’s novels for the pure joy of these often funny, sometimes tragic, and always well-written books. His wide range of subject always well-written books. His wide range of subject matter makes him delightfully unpredictable, so that liking one novel doesn’t always guarantee that you’ll equally appreciate another. On the other hand, if one of his novels doesn’t strike your fancy, there’s a good chance another will.
For many years Malone was the head scriptwriter for the über- soap opera One Life to Live, and he’s written the über-novelistic soap opera in Dingley Falls, which includes among its many charms a lovely map of the eponymous town, where a plethora of eccentric people are involved in everything from love affairs to murders.
In Foolscap, or, The Stages of Love, Theo Ryan’s
relatively staid and sober existence as a professor of theater studies comes to a rapid end when he agrees to write the biography of a hard-living, alcoholic, womanizing playwright.
Handling Sin finds Raleigh Whittier Hayes racing down the highway to find his elderly and outlandish father, who has escaped from the hospital in a yellow convertible (along with a young nurse). His search runs into many roadblocks, including a motorcycle gang, an escaped convict, the Ku Klux Klan, and a search for buried treasure.
Two more of Malone’s best are Uncivil Seasons and Time’s Witness, both mysteries set in a small town in North Carolina. Uncivil Seasons introduces policemen Cuddy Mangum and Justin Savile; their crime solving is continued in Time’s Witness.
MARRIAGE BLUES
It was The Amateur Marriage, the title of Anne Tyler’s sad and wry novel about a spectacularly mismatched couple, that started me thinking that most, if not all, marriages (in fiction, at least) are amateur in nature: they are covenants between people who are inexperienced or unskilled in being part of a pair. This subject has been on Tyler’s mind for years; Earthly Possessions, a much earlier novel, describes Charlotte Emory’s decision to leave her husband after many years of marriage, and the complications that ensue as she attempts to do so.
Two of the best books about marriage are Evan S. Connell’s Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, which together are devastating in their realism, their honesty, and their ability to convey the lives and emotions of an upper-middle-class couple in 1930s Kansas City.The Bridges are two people more to be pitied than envied.
Few writers are as talented as Alison Lurie at capturing the emotional—or maybe “mercurial” would be a more accurate term—ups and downs of marriage and relationships. Three of her novels, originally published in the 1960s and ’70s (at the beginning of the sexual revolution), bring readers into the center of marriages that are on the verge of breaking up: Love and Friendship, The Nowhere City, and The War Between the Tates (probably her best known).
Tabitha King’s The Book of Reuben is the story of a marriage gone bad and a man’s search for redemption.
Other novels about marriage include Light Years byJames Salter, one of the most painful to read and possibly the most realistic novel about the changes that married couples go through; Brian Moore’s sensitive and compulsively readable The Doctor’s Wife, in which a woman must choose between her husband and her lover; Cathie Pelletier’s A Marriage Made at Woodstock, an often laugh-out-loud picture of the dissolution of a longtime marriage; and Say When by Elizabeth Berg, which looks at both halves of a separated couple and relates what happens when Ellen tells Griffin that she’s in love with the teacher of her adult-ed class in basic auto mechanics and wants a divorce.
Alice Hoffman’s novel Illumination Night, which takes place in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, tells how lack of money and a teenager’s obsession come to threaten a marriage.
After reading all these relatively realistic novels, you might want some pure fun reading about a couple who seem to have no problems whatsoever, even though they’re involved in a dangerous search for a Nazi sympathizer. If so, I highly recommend Helen MacInnes’s Above Suspicion, a novel I reread regularly.
ME, ME, ME: AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS
W. H. Auden once wrote that “great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” If we substitute the word “memoir” for “art,” and add something about painful honesty, we get a good definition of the best of this genre.
In Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir, Cyra McFadden looks at her parents’ difficult marriage—they couldn’t stand living together but couldn’t bear to live apart—and her own relationship to each of them.
In Early Morning: Remembering My Father,William Stafford, Kim Stafford uses his own memories as well as excerpts from his father’s poetry and prose to give readers a picture of a prolific writer and popular teacher whose personal life was shaped by his early and lifelong commitment to pacifism. (Kim, his father’s literary executor, also edited a collection of his father’s writings called Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War, which includes much of Stafford’s antiwar writings.) Reading the son’s affectionate memoir should send you back to the library or bookstore shelves to acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with Stafford’s poetry (you might want to begin with The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems).
Sebastian Matthews wrote In My Father’s Footsteps as an attempt to understand his father, the poet William Matthews, who died suddenly at age fifty-five in 1997, and also to understand his father’s legacy to him: how much is he his father’s son, he asks.“A lush and a lech,” Matthews says one of his female students called his father, “without a trace of malice.” Drinker, womanizer, successful poet, and tenured professor at Cornell University, Williams was a thrice-divorced, difficult, often absent father who still played an enormous role in the lives of his sons. Read Search Party: Collected Poems to appreciate the depth and range of William Matthews’s talent.
Patrimony: A True Story, Philip Roth’s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir of his father, relates Herman Roth’s life and hard-fought death with sensitivity and great love, a quality of Roth-the-son and Roth-the-writer that we don’t often see.
Call me a romantic, but even though Diana Athill went on to write several interesting books about her career in the publishing industry (including Stet: An Editor’s Life), my favorite has always been her first memoir, Instead of a Letter,in which she describes the great lost love of her life.
Another heartbreaking and romantic memoir is Irish poet P. J. Kavanagh’s The Perfect Stranger,the story of his unexpected meeting with (and marriage to) Sally, “the perfect stranger.” The heartbreak comes at the end, and it is almost as difficult for the reader to bear as it was for the young man who lived through it.
American Childhood, Annie Dillard’s memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, is suffused with her discovery of the beauty beneath the everydayness of her life.
In Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes describes the highways and byways he traveled in the course of writing the lives of Samuel Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and tells the tales he couldn’t quite fit into the published biographies.
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village by Sarah Erdman is an insightful and thought-provoking memoir about the author’s experiences as a health care worker in a small West African village. She introduces American readers to a place, a people, and a way of life that most of us will never experience—an Africa that is both devoutly Muslim and devotedly animistic.
Marie Arana’s American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood, nominated for the National Book Award, is a beautifully written memoir about the difficulties and pleasures she experienced in moving between the cultures of her Peruvian father and her American mother.
London Times journalist Peter Godwin describes growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s in Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, a powerful and moving testament and tribute to a land and people he loves.
Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir is the story of reporter Neely Tucker (a white man from Mississippi) and his African American wife Vita’s attempts to adopt an abandoned baby in 1997 in AIDS-ravaged Zimbabwe, where their good intentions were thwarted at every turn by cultural biases and bureaucratic nightmares.
For more than thirty years, M. E. Kerr has been writing great novels for teens (I still think the best is Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!). Her memoir of her own teen years, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me: Not a Novel, not only recounts that period but also suggests how she used her own experiences to inform her novels.
Two wonderful memoirs set in the Persian Gulf are Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, which tells of the author’s experiences in Iran with a group of women students using literature to explore their own lives and the political realities of their country during the rule of Islamic fundamentalists; and Roya Hakakian’s Journey from the Land o
f No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, which offers a moving portrait of growing up Jewish after the fall of the shah—the parallels to Nazi Germany are chilling.
Jay Neugeboren’s Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival: A Memoir is a loving book about the author’s brother, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager. Paul Fussell’s intense and angry memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic is about how being an infantryman in World War II turned him into the man he is today—someone disinclined to take orders from anyone. In Blue Blood, Edward Conlon tells of graduating from Harvard and returning home to join the New York Police Department as a housing-authority cop. Katy Lederer’s Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers is a fascinating memoir of life in a highly dysfunctional, poker-playing family. In Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family, Stephen J. Dubner writes about his strongly Catholic upbringing as the youngest of eight children and his decision as an adult to convert to Judaism, the religion that his parents had given up years before. Cider with Rosie is an affectionate memoir by Laurie Lee of growing up in the Cotswolds in the years following World War I.And Margot Adler’s Heretic Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution includes this wonderful tribute to the author’s mother: “[S]he was at home with physical affection and a wide range of emotions and was so absolutely and totally unconditional in her love that it sometimes still takes my breath away.”