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

by Nancy Pearl

  The central character of The Elizabeth Stories by Isabel Huggan doesn’t fit into her family, her body, or her narrow-minded small town in 1950s Canada.

  The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman links the lives of a Jewish-American family, from grandmother Rose, who’s dealing with old age, loneliness, and widowhood by downing Percodan pills, to granddaughter Miriam, who shocks her secular parents with her desire to become an Orthodox Jew.

  Buddy comes of age in small-town New Jersey in Tom Perrotta’s heartfelt yet unsentimental Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies.

  Few fictional characters are as memorable as Rhoda Manning, a recurring character in Ellen Gilchrist’s writings (and, as we learn in the introduction to Rhoda: A Life in Stories, based at least some of the time on Gilchrist’s own life). She is Gilchrist’s most captivating, complex, and, as a child, precocious character—someone you can’t forget.

  Other notable near novels include Julie Hecht’s Do the Windows Open? and Bliss Broyard’s My Father, Dancing.

  NEW ENGLAND NOVELS

  New England is known for its long, harsh winters, its storied history, and the variety of its geography—from ocean to mountains, from small mill towns to vibrant big cities. All of which makes it a worthy setting for a lot of good fiction, including a hefty stack of mysteries.Try these:

  National politics in New Hampshire is the backdrop for Mark Costello’s Big If, a terrific character-driven novel, postmodernly big in scope but intimate in its depictions of a group of people whose lives converge during a primary presidential election campaign.

  New England mysteries include Robert B. Parker’s tough and atmospheric Spenser series (my two favorites are The Godwulf Manuscript and The Judas Goat) .Linda Barnes’s series of mysteries features private investigator Carlotta Carlyle, who operates out of Boston and environs; two recent chronicles of her exploits, The Big Dig and Flashpoint, are especially entertaining. Philip R. Craig (The Woman Who Walked into the Sea; Vineyard Blues) sets all his mysteries on Martha’s Vineyard. George V. Higgins, best known for his great use of dialogue to propel his plots forward, has been writing about Boston for more than a quarter of a century; his first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, is often cited as one of the seminal works of crime fiction. Margaret Lawrence’s Hearts and Bones is the first of a fine historical mystery series set in the post-Revolutionary War period, all featuring midwife Hannah Trevor.

  Although Elizabeth Gilbert is probably better known for her well-reviewed (and very interesting) biography The Last American Man, I took more pleasure from her entertaining character-driven first novel, Stern Men. Set in the 1970s, it’s the story of the longtime rivalry between families of lobstermen living on two fictitious islands off the Maine coast, and the young woman who somehow brings them together. This is a good choice for readers who like quirky characters and interesting settings.

  Other good novels set in New England include John Gardner’s October Light, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Bret Lott’s The Man Who Owned Vermont, Howard Frank Mosher’s A Stranger in the Kingdom and other novels, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Lynn Stegner’s novella, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, Douglas Hobbie’s This Time Last Year, Alix Wilber’s The Wives’ Tale, Don Metz’s King of the Mountain, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. And don’t miss Judevine, David Budbill’s collection of narrative poems that capture the hardscrabble life in Vermont.

  THE 1960S IN FACT AND FICTION

  I’m a product of the 1960s; I think that’s why I’m drawn to the books in this section.

  Three novels about the lives of political radicals of the 1960s (à la the Weather Underground) make for good reading indeed. Vida, the eponymous main character of Marge Piercy’s best novel, went underground during the late 1960s and is still living in fear of being captured by the government a decade later. Her claustrophobic and panicky life is both vividly drawn and unforgettable. Vida was published in 1979, so it is more contemporaneous with the events it’s describing than is Susan Choi’s American Woman or Neil Gordon’s The Company You Keep, which were published almost a quarter of a century later. Taken together, these three novels convey the essence of 1960s radicalism (and its consequences).

  Reading David Hajdu’s group biography Positively 4th Street:The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña brought back all the hours and hours of music that gave me such pleasure throughout the 1960s. (Richard Fariña was himself the author of a novel set during the late 1950s, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.)

  Mark Kurlansky looks at a crucial year in 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. He covers not just the United States (where the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and the violent demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago occurred) but also events in France, Vietnam, and Prague, to name just a few places. Like all of Kurlansky’s books, this is compulsively interesting reading. Clark Clifford, a quintessential Washington, D. C., political animal, called 1968 “the year that everything went wrong,” and when you read this book you’ll understand the truth of that statement. (For lots more about Mark Kurlansky’s books, see “Mark Kurlansky: Too Good to Miss” in Book Lust.)

  A copy of Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS: Ten Years Toward a Revolution is expensive these days, but it’s worth every dollar if you have any interest in the 1960s.This is the still-unsurpassed history of Students for a Democratic Society, from the organization’s formation in 1960 to its split into two separate groups competing for the soul of the American New Left in 1972. Another, complementary perspective on SDS is offered by James Miller, in Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, while Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage is written from an insider’s perspective: Gitlin was elected president of SDS in 1963.

  No discussion of books about the 1960s would be complete without a mention of the books written about a 1964 cross-country trip that the Merry Pranksters, a group led by Ken Kesey, took in Kesey’s psychedelically painted 1939 International Harvester school bus called Further. Read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Paul Perry’s On the Bus, and Ken Kesey’s own The Further Inquiry.

  OH, BROTHER!

  Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Seth and Osiris, Eteocles and Polyneices, and Jacob and Esau—brothers have loved and hated one another (sometimes at the same time) throughout history. And they provide a fertile subject for writers, as seen below:Russell Banks’s Affliction

  James Carlos Blake’s In the Rogue Blood

  Ethan Canin’s Blue River

  Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me

  Pete Dexter’s The Paperboy

  Ivan Doig’s Bucking the Sun

  Tim Gautreaux’s The Clearing

  Sherwood Kiraly’s Big Babies (the only even marginally humorous book in this list)

  Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True

  J. Robert Lennon’s On the Night Plain

  Martin Quigley’s Winners and Losers

  Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog

  John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

  Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing

  Larry Watson’s Montana 1948

  Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth

  Larry Woiwode’s Born Brothers

  OTHER PEOPLE’S SHOES

  There are some books—both fiction and nonfiction—that ucceed in putting you inside the main character’s head in such a way that you experience the world as they do. And when their experiences are colored by psychological or physical disorders, we are privileged to know exactly what it must be like to live differently in the world. I found each of these books both eye-opening and deeply moving.

  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is a terrific novel about fifteen-year-old Christopher, who has Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism), and his decision to find out who murdered the dog next door. A memoir about the experience of Asperger’s is Dawn Prince-Hughes’s S
ongs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, in which the author describes how her autism went undiagnosed throughout her childhood; not until she was a young woman working with gorillas at the zoo did she begin to be able to connect to the world beyond herself.

  Two good books about stuttering are Dead Languages, an autobiographical novel by David Shields, and Marty Jezer’s memoir Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words.

  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death by Jean-Dominique Bauby shows just how strong the human spirit can be in overcoming seemingly insurmountable injuries. Bauby, who was the editor of Elle France, suffered a stroke that left him unable to communicate except by moving his left eyelid; painstakingly, blink by blink, he wrote this moving memoir (and died two days after the book was published in France).

  Reading about the people whom Oliver Sacks describes so compassionately in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales makes us painfully aware of the mysteries of the mind and the nervous system, and how quickly our lives can be turned upside down by chance or bad luck or perhaps a rogue gene.

  When you finish Sacks, read Floyd Skloot’s collection of essays, In the Shadow of Memory, a moving account of his life after he contracted a virus in 1988 that caused profound neurological damage to his brain, but also a thought-provoking discussion of how the brain operates (or doesn’t) in people suffering from Alzheimer’s or other brain injuries.

  Other good nonfiction written from the inside out includes As I Live and Breathe: Notes of a Patient-Doctor by Jamie Weisman, a physician suffering from a congenital autoimmune deficiency disorder; Breathing for a Living by Laura Rothenberg, the story of a young woman with cystic fibrosis (be sure to read this during a happy period in your life, and not during the oppressive darkness of winter); and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, about growing up with a deformed face (due to cancer of the jaw at the age of nine) in a society that seems to value physical beauty above all else. (And when you’re done with that, read Ann Patchett’s moving memoir of her relationship with Lucy, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship.)

  Two compelling books about life in a wheelchair are Nancy Mairs’s Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled and John Hockenberry’s Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence.

  Two novels about the experience of being deaf are Canadian author Frances Itani’s Deafening and Joanne Greenberg’s In This Sign.

  PARROTS

  I think the first parrot I ever met in fiction was Polynesia, the good Doctor Dolittle’s right-hand man—er, bird—in Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle. Then I discovered Kiki, who accompanies the children in Enid Blyton’s Adventure series (e.g., The Island of Adventure) on their various adventures. So, fond as I am of Iris Murdoch, I was pleased to discover a parrot in The Book and the Brotherhood and then to find other tales in which parrots play a significant role.

  Those include The Loop by Joe Coomer; Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution: A Story of Detection; Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (although one of them is stuffed); Jim Paul’s Elsewhere in the Land of Parrots; “Birdland,” one of the stories in Michael Knight’s Goodnight, Nobody, about pet parrots let loose in Rhode Island who spend their winters in Elbow, Alabama; and Bill Richardson’s Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book, throughout which the delightful parrot Mrs. Rochester mutters darkly.

  PLOTS FOR PLOTZING

  Some novels’ plots are so bizarre, so off-the-wall, so quirky, that they almost beggar description. Whenever I encounter one of these books, I cannot fathom how someone came up with the idea, let alone carried it through with such panache. Try these, and you’ll see what I mean.

  Gilligan’s Wake by Tom Carson is a postmodern romp through the last half of the twentieth century, narrated in turn by the seven characters who were marooned, with Gilligan, on the television show Gilligan’sIsland. The Professor, Ginger, Mrs. Howell, and all the rest interact with the likes of Robert Oppenheimer, John Kennedy, Alger Hiss, Sammy Davis Jr., and fictional entities such as Daisy Buchanan. At least read the chapter narrated by the Professor—which all by itself is worth the price of the book.

  In Gentlemen of Space, George Finch looks back, from the perspective of adulthood, on the central event of his childhood: in 1976 his father, science teacher Jerry Finch, won a contest to be the first civilian to go to the moon with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. (It was Apollo 19, in case you don’t remember.) Unlike the two “professional” astronauts, Jerry Finch decides to remain there, high above earth, regularly updating his son with phone calls from the moon. The real subjects of Ira Sher’s tender and imaginative novel are the trickiness and slippery nature of memory and all our protective self-deceptions.

  Okay, take a libido-driven liberal president dying under suspicious (but clearly sexual) circumstances in the apartment of a beautiful young woman from Texas, throw in a cokehead vice president, a grieving but realistic widow, a recently fired newspaperman, a homeless poet who spiraled into mental illness after a bad review many years back by book critic Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post,a certifiably stupid Mafia bagman on the run from both the Secret Service and the Mafia with $656,000 and the president’s head in an attaché case, a gay football player, an aging Mafia don, his impressionable grandson, and several White House staffers (some crooked and conniving, others just conniving), and you have all the ingredients that make Tim Sandlin’s Honey Don’t so much fun to read.

  The engaging and frequently chuckle-inducing The Underground Man by Mick Jackson was a finalist for the 1997 Booker Prize (losing out to Jim Crace’s Quarantine) and is loosely drawn from the life of one of the most outlandish members of the Victorian-era peerage. It’s written in the form of a journal so that we watch, firsthand, as the fictional duke is—as he fears—losing his mind. (Mystery writer Ross MacDonald wrote a mystery with the same title, so don’t pick up the wrong one; MacDonald’s is also great, but different.)

  Clearly, Mark Dunn’s imagination knows no bounds—consider both Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable and Ibid: A Life. The former, whose subtitle is “A Novel in Letters,” is laugh-out-loud funny (but also thought provoking). In order to find the solution to a nightmarish situation, the citizens of Nollup must construct a sentence of thirty-two letters or less that includes every letter in the alphabet. The latter is, as its title might imply,a novel written entirely in footnotes.

  If you’re looking for an adrenaline rush of a read, pick up Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, a stylish mixture of hardboiled mystery and high-tech science fiction. It’s set in a very realistic twentyfifthcentury world (in Morgan’s capable hands, that’s no oxymoron) in which hotels pack lethal weapons, the essence of humans is the digital pack that contains all of their memories and personality (and that can be downloaded into new body after new body), and life is dirt cheap.There’s plenty of graphic violence, several scenes of drug-enhanced sex, and enough going on to entice even the most jaded reader. The second in the series, BrokenAngels, is no less imaginative but a whole lot darker.

  Some of the most interesting stories are those in which the author begins with real events and takes off from them, as Elwood Reid does in D.B., a reimagining of the mysterious case of D. B. Cooper, who in 1971 hijacked an eastbound Northwest Airlines 727 from Portland, Oregon, and threatened to blow it up unless he received $200,000 in cash and two parachutes. What we know is that after his demands were met, he jumped from the plane somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and was never seen or heard from again. Reid’s prose is uncluttered, his characters are three-dimensional, and the plot is resolved brilliantly, all adding up to one great read.

  If you can imagine Stephen King writing satirical fiction, then Kings of Infinite Space by James Hynes is just the book for you. A devilishly vindictive cat named Charlotte, zombies, a human cog in a bureaucratic machine, and an attractive mailwoman who wants to better her life all come together to force Pau
l Trilby (first met in Hynes’s Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror) into a decision worthy of Faust.

  Max Barry’s satirical writing is both very funny and extremely scary.In Jennifer Government, a fast-moving, cautionary tale of the near future, the world is run by competing corporations, the NRA and the police force are publicly traded companies, crimes get investigated only if the victim can afford to pay the bill, and everyone’s last name indicates their employer. Hack Nike is hired by two shadowy figures way up on the corporate ladder to commit murder in order to increase the popularity—that is, to develop the street cred—of the company’s new line of $2,500 (per pair) sneakers. Enter Jennifer Government (who has a barcode tattooed under her eye), determined to bring the wrongdoers to their knees and avenge herself on John Nike, one of the men who hired Hack. It’s chill-inducing, pointed, and a picture of an oh-so-possible future.

  Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a winsome example of an “alternative history” that falls in the fantasy and science fiction genre. (This means that fans of historical fiction will find it in the sci-fi/fantasy section of bookstores and libraries.) Set in the early 1800s in a perfectly plausible though imagined England, Clarke’s novel tells the story of two warring magicians who come up against the sinister and even more powerful magical machinations of the Raven King, who has ruled his kingdom for more than three hundred years. Clarke uses period language, tone, and even spellings to successfully persuade the reader that what she’s conjured up is absolutely true. She’s even included footnotes to “refresh” the memories of readers who might have forgotten some of the more arcane events of the magical past. The Napoleonic Wars are raging, people can be brought back from the dead (though at a price), and magic is alive in the world—what could be more real than that?