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

by Nancy Pearl

  MEN CHANNELING WOMEN

  Even though I know that the best writers can and usually do create characters who are very different from themselves, I am still shocked (or at least surprised) when a male author can get inside a woman’s head and write so persuasively, so authentically, that I find myself frequently turning to the back cover to see if it is, indeed, a man who wrote the book. Of course, the classic novels in this category (as in the “Wayward Wives” section) are Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, but here are some others.

  The Darling by Russell Banks

  Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

  Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

  A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris

  Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

  The Saskiad by Brian Hall

  Dalva by Jim Harrison

  Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price

  Mating by Norman Rush

  I Heard My Sister Speak My Name by Thomas Savage

  The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

  MIDCENTURY: FROM WORLD WAR II TO VIETNAM

  Even though, at well over eight hundred pages, this is a hefty book by anyone’s standards, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, Robert Lovett, Averell Harriman, John McCloy by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas makes for fascinating and informative reading. Exploring the lives (minimally) and contributions (maximally) of the men who (arguably) had the most impact on both foreign and domestic policy from the 1930s onward,Thomas and Isaacson (both writers for Time magazine) illuminate much of the inside-the-Beltway (indeed, inside the State Department) thinking that led us through the Cold War and into the quagmire in Vietnam.This is required reading for anyone interested in American politics and policy of the mid- to late twentieth century.

  You will find all six of these men cropping up in most books about U.S. foreign policy, and their own accounts of their lives in government service are also well worth reading. George F. Kennan’s two-volume set of memoirs covers the years 1925 to 1963, but the best place to begin an encounter with Kennan’s wit and sharp intelligence is in Sketches from a Life, which starts at his first diplomatic posting in 1927 and continues through the 1980s. The others’ accounts include Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department; Clark Clifford’s Counsel to the President; Charles E. Bohlen’s Witness to History, 1929-1969; and W. Averell Harriman’s America and Russia in a Changing World: A Half Century of Personal Observation.

  The president under whom these men served is given a lengthy but highly readable profile by David McCullough in Truman, which deservedly won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

  Another excellent group biography that focuses on the leaders of this era is In the Time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur—The Generation That Changed America’s Role in the World by David Fromkin. Like all of Fromkin’s books, this is chock-full of facts, interpretations, and thought-provoking ideas.

  WALTER MOSLEY: TOO GOOD TO MISS

  Walter Mosley hit the ground running with his first published Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990, and hasn’t stopped since. Mosley’s series of mysteries featuring Rawlins—almost all with a color in the title—are much more than simple whodunits. The novels take place in the black ghetto of East Los Angeles during the middle decades of the last century, against the background of the great black migration north in the 1940s to the riots in Watts in the 1960s. Rawlins, divorced, father to two unofficially adopted kids, is always (though usually reluctantly) drawn into solving crimes within the black community. Mosley offers readers a unique “everyman” view of the black experience as experienced from Rawlins’s perspective. In Mosley’s tight, lucid descriptions, realistic dialogue, and uncanny ability to immediately draw readers into the world he’s created, his writing is not unlike that of Raymond Chandler’s novels about Philip Marlowe.

  In addition to the fine quality of Mosley’s writing, what I most admire about his books is that he’s impossible to pigeonhole as this or that kind of writer: in the last decade and a half he’s written mysteries, literary fiction, and science fiction (Blue Light).

  Here are the Easy Rawlins books, in the order in which you should read them: Devil in a Blue Dress

  A Red Death

  White Butterfly

  Black Betty

  A Little Yellow Dog

  Gone Fishin’ (the prequel to the series)

  Bad Boy Brawly Brown

  Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories

  Little Scarlet

  Mosley has another series too, about a black bookstore owner in 1950s Los Angeles who is writing about the exploits of his best friend, Fearless Jones:Fearless Jones

  Fear Itself

  Then there are his stand-alone collections of stories and novels:Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

  Blue Light

  The Man in My Basement

  R L’s Dream (which received the 1996 Literary Award for Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association)

  MS. MYSTERY

  When mystery fans talk about their favorite female detectives, they always mention Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s sleuth; V. I. Warshawski, the main character in Sara Paretsky’s series; and Sharon McCone, Marcia Muller’s heroine. (We probably shouldn’t forget Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton, either, since they were the heroines of the first mysteries many of us ever read.) But female protagonists star in a wide range of good mystery novels—both stand-alones and books that are part of an ongoing series.Try a few of these while you’re waiting for the next Grafton, Paretsky, or Muller.

  Writer and scholar (as well as one-time murder suspect) Harriet Vane, the main character in four of Dorothy L. Sayers’s classic mysteries (Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon), is both a product of her time (the early 1920s) and far ahead of it (in her attitude toward love and marriage). Plot is probably the least of Sayers’s concerns—she was far more interested in the lives of her characters.

  Another novel set during the 1920s is Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs. Maisie’s first position was as a housemaid; she elevates herself to a career as a private investigator. Winspear, like Sayers, does an outstanding job of conveying post-World War I English society.

  The mysteries by Gillian Linscott that star Nell Bray (among the best are An Easy Day for a Lady and The Perfect Daughter) take place in pre-World War I England. Many of the subplots of the novels deal with Nell and her friends fighting for women’s rights in an inhospitable time and place.

  I love the Laurie R. King novels that feature Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, who meet in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, where Mary becomes Holmes’s student in detection. In subsequent books (A Monstrous Regiment of Women,for example) she becomes his partner, and finally (in The Moor and The Game) his wife.

  Mma Precious Ramotswe, the proprietor of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in the novel by Alexander McCall Smith, is less a detective than a folk hero. This delightfully intuitive sleuth in rural Botswana helps friends, neighbors, and relatives with twenty-two cases, each of which reveals another facet of both Africa and Precious Ramotswe herself. It’s followed up with Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls,The Kalahari Typing School for Men,and The Full Cupboard of Life.

  You can’t exactly label as mysteries the hilarious series by Janet Evanovich about the beautiful, raunchy former discount lingerie buyer turned bounty hunter Stephanie Plum (from Trenton, New Jersey), although that’s where you’ll find them shelved in bookstores and libraries. They’re better described, I think, as irresistible romps through the world of lowlifes. Begin with One for the Money and continue, laughing all the way, through Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly, Four to Score, High Five, Hot Six, Seven Up, Hard Eight,To the Nines, and Ten Big Ones.

  Other contemporary series
featuring female sleuths include Barbara Wilson’s Cassandra Reilly series (including The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman and Gaudí Afternoon); Lia Matera’s novels about lawyer/detective Willa Jansson (especially Prior Convictions); S. J. Rozan’s series about Lydia Chin and her occasional partner, Bill Smith (Mandarin Plaid and Reflecting the Sky are two good ones); Eleanor Taylor Bland’s series about Chicago-based African American detective Marti MacAlister (including Whispers in the Dark and Windy City Dying); Sujata Massey’s series featuring Japanese American antiques dealer Rei Shimura (my favorite is The Pearl Diver); J. S. Borthwick’s cozy series featuring teacher and sleuth Sarah Deane, including Murder in the Rough and The Bridled Groom; Laura Lippman’s grand (and multi-award-winning) series about Baltimore newspaperwoman turned P.I.Tess Monaghan (including Butchers Hill and By a Spider’s Thread); and Diane Mott Davidson’s series featuring caterer Goldy Bear Schulz, which begins with Catering to Nobody (in which Goldy meets her future husband while investigating the death of her former father-in-law).

  NAGGING MOTHERS, CRYING CHILDREN

  Some of the earliest accounts of the perils (many) and pleasures (somewhat fewer) of modern motherhood are still entertaining today. Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957) and Erma Bombeck’s Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own! (1971), Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (1983),and Family:The Ties That Bind—and Gag! (1987) all made a fine art of maternal kvetching.

  More recent authors have continued to bang the pots and pans of family life. Joyce Maynard’s Domestic Affairs: Enduring the Pleasures of Motherhood and Family Life, filled as it is with descriptions of family strife and just plain exhaustion, probably convinced many readers that they’d be better off childless.

  It’s hard to imagine that the true account of two Harvard academicians parenting a Down syndrome child can offer any humor, let alone be hysterically funny, but Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic by Martha Beck is a unique mixture of sophisticated humor, satire, self-deprecation, and spirituality.

  Lori Borgman, a nationally syndicated columnist, presents a collection of her columns in I Was a Better Mother Before I Had Kids, offering advice on everything from driving with your teenager to protecting against household hazards to keeping it all together.

  “Geezers with children” is columnist Judith Newman’s description of her husband and herself as they cope with their infant twin sons in You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother. This humorous look at late-in-life pregnancy and motherhood considers such profound questions as whether parenthood is worth $70,000 and eight months of throwing up.

  Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott depicts with unusual candor the frequent hilarity and exhaustion of single parenthood.

  Callie’s Tally: An Accounting of Baby’s First Year (Or What My Daughter Owes Me!) is another irreverent look at parenthood, this one in the form of a daily diary in which Betsy Howie itemizes the cost of her new daughter.

  Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother looks at her new experience of being a mother from the perspective of the psychological and emotional changes it brings, puncturing a few accepted truths (that new motherhood is an unalloyed joy, for instance) along the way.

  NATURE WRITING

  When a friend lent me her copy of Ann Zwinger’s Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, she apologized that it was in such bad shape—so warped and water-stained. It turned out that she’d taken it with her while rafting down the Colorado River and used it both as a guide and as pleasure reading. Even if you’re not actually going down the rapids on the Colorado, this book will make you feel as if you are.

  The Last Wild Edge: One Woman’s Journey from the Arctic Circle to the Olympic Rain Forest by Susan Zwinger, Ann’s daughter, includes descriptions of her travels “over twelve years and eighteen degrees latitude,” inviting readers to share her delight in the world around her.

  Kathleen Dean Moore is a philosopher, and her two award-winning collections of nature writing, Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water and Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World, connect readers with a world of beauty and grace.

  Green Treasury: A Journey through the World’s Great Nature Writing, edited by Edwin Way Teale, includes selections from writers from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Teale’s own love of nature is seen in a quartet of books about the journeys he and his wife took across the country: North with the Spring; Autumn Across America; Journey into Summer; and Wandering Through Winter. On their car trips,Teale noted not only the natural world about them but also the people they met and the experiences they had en route. Since these books were written more than fifty years ago, much has changed—there are interstates, for example, and “nature” is far less readily found—but these books beckon us to emulate Teale’s own travels, and they paint an enchanting portrait of a world that is, sadly, nearly lost to us.

  David James Duncan’s subtitle for My Story As Told by Water says a lot: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark. But even this seemingly comprehensive phrase does not fully convey the beauty of the writing and Duncan’s crusading spirit about the absolute necessity of keeping the wild, wild.

  When you’re looking for good books about the natural world, you’re bound to run into a worthy bird book or two or three, such as Candace Savage’s Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays; Robert Winkler’s Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness; and Alan Tennant’s On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon. Book Lust also has a section on birds and birding, called “Bird Brains.”

  NEAR NOVELS: LINKED SHORT STORIES

  What’s the appeal of a collection of linked short stories? Short-story aficionados will appreciate the fact that they get to spend more time with an especially loved character.And lovers of novels will feel that these stories have nearly the depth and expansiveness of a full-length fictional work. Here are some particularly good examples of the genre.

  Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919, is a chronicle of small-town life in Ohio.This collection of loosely connected short stories reveals the inner lives of a number of the town’s residents, and gives readers a sense of the range of secrets—from silly to profound—that we all keep hidden from even those closest to us.

  In 1930s Homewood, the black community of Pittsburgh, three generations are united by the music of Albert Wilkes in John Edgar Wideman’s collection of linked short stories, Sent for You Yesterday.

  Life on both sides of the racial divide in a small Ohio town is the subject of Lynn Lauber’s collection of linked stories, White Girls. She continued chronicling the lives of many of the same characters in 21 Sugar Street.

  Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil is a little less about the title characters, two people who eventually marry each other, than about the people surrounding them, especially O’Neil’s family. The stories focus on decisive moments in the lives of the characters: the unmarried Mary’s decision to have an abortion; the moment that O’Neil’s sister learns from her son that her husband is having an affair; a visit by O’Neil’s parents to meet his first serious girlfriend; Mary and O’Neil’s wedding day. The first story, especially, is heartbreaking and true.

  No Bones by Anna Burns is an edgy and surreal collection about Amelia, whom we meet as a young schoolgirl during Ireland’s “Troubles” and follow through her own internal troubles as well.

  “Quirky” is the best word to describe the life and adventures of the central character in Disappearing Ingenue: The Misadventures of Eleanor Stoddard by Melissa Pritchard. It’s also a good word to describe the book itself, as we discover that locations change, names are switched, marital status is uncertain, and careers are fuzzy. Throughout Eleanor’s life peo
ple deceive her—husbands, friends, students, parents—just as Eleanor’s life deceives the reader, who is always trying to figure out what is real.

  The stories in Island: The Complete Stories by Alistair MacLeod all take place on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and are marked by their observant and honest portrayals of human behavior, set against the pace and texture of rural life.