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

by Nancy Pearl

  POETRY PLEASERS

  When I read through Book Lust months after it was published, I realized that it included very little poetry. Because poetry is one of my most enjoyable reading experiences and I participate in a weekly poetry discussion group, I found this surprising. So I determined that More Book Lust would have a lot more poetry.

  Each week I am confirmed in my belief that reading aloud and discussing a work of poetry—considering the two halves of a poem, as Laurence Perrine suggested in Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry—deepens most people’s appreciation for the work itself. It certainly deepens mine. Of course, in reading, discussing, or thinking about a poem, you don’t want to get into the sort of situation that Billy Collins describes in his wonderfully sly poem “Introduction to Poetry”:I want them to waterski

  across the surface of a poem

  waving at the author’s name on shore.

  But all they want to do

  is tie the poem to a chair with rope

  and torture a confession out of it.

  Here are some poems that not only make for wonderful reading but also have the potential to generate great discussions. Most can be found in the poets’ collected works, or you can ask your friendly librarian to help you track them down. (There are many, many more poems—and poets—that I’d have liked to include, but space constraints prevented it.)

  W. H. Auden—“Musée des Beaux Arts” and “As I Walked Out One Evening”

  Raymond Carver—“What the Doctor Said”

  Almost everything by Billy Collins, including “Forgetfulness”and “Workshop”

  Countee Cullen—“Yet Do I Marvel” and “Incident”

  ee cummings—“anyone lived in a pretty how town”

  Carl Dennis—“ Prophet”

  Stephen Dunn—“A Secret Life”

  Cornelius Eady—“Why Do So Few Blacks Study Creative Writing?”

  T.S. Eliot—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

  Almost all of Robert Frost, especially “Provide,Provide”and “The Oven Bird”

  Louise Glück—“Celestial Music”

  Edward Hirsch—“The Welcoming” and “Colette”

  Jane Hirshfield—“Rebus”

  Gerard Manley Hopkins—“Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”

  Ted Hughes—“Wind”

  Randall Jarrell—“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (there is so much feeling and meaning compressed into this five-line poem)

  Jane Kenyon—“Happiness”

  All of David Kirby’s poems, especially “The Search for Baby Combover,” “The Elephant of the Sea,” and “The Ha-Ha, Part II: I Cry My Heart, Antonio”

  Philip Larkin—“I Remember, I Remember” or “Church Going” or, really, anything he or “Church Going” or, really, anything he wrote

  Philip Levine—“The Mercy” and “Clouds Above the Sea”

  Heather McHugh—“What He Thought”

  Sharon Olds—“ Go Back to May 1937”

  Mary Oliver—“Wild Geese”

  Wilfred Owen—“Dulce et Decorum Est”

  Carl Phillips—“Luncheon on the Grass”

  Katha Pollitt—“The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers”

  Marie Ponsot—“Winter”

  William Stafford—“The Discovery of Daily Experience”

  Wallace Stevens—“Table Talk”

  Michael Swift’s mysterious “At Marlborough House”

  Wislawa Szymborska—“Funeral (II)” and “The End and the Beginning”

  James Tate—“The Blind Heron”

  Dylan Thomas—“In My Craft or Sullen Art”

  William Carlos Williams—“Tract”

  Terence Winch—“The Bells Are Ringing for Me and Chagall”

  QUEEN VICTORIA AND HER TIMES

  Queen Victoria ascended to the throne of England in 1837, when she was only eighteen, and ruled Britannia (which ruled the waves) until her death in 1901. We tend to think of Victorian England as being a time of repression (in dress, libido, and social mores), but it seems to have been quite the opposite, seething with emotions and outré behaviors. Here are some good choices among the many available histories, biographies, and memoirs of this incredibly rich period—a time that encompassed the Industrial Revolution and produced such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Rudyard Kipling, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Hardy, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  Gwen Raverat, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, writes enchantingly about growing up in Cambridge, England, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in her memoir Period Piece:A Victorian Childhood. It’s filled with genuine characters—Cambridge dons, her American mother, her many cousins, her various aunts and uncles—and much affection for that time and place. There’s a smile to be had on every page, and it’s an indispensable read for anyone interested in that time period.

  A. N. Wilson’s The Victorians surveys the age and is replete with mini-biographies of the leading figures and their accomplishments, while Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet debunks all the received truths about the Victorian age. (You just know, reading Sweet, how much he enjoyed writing this book.)

  Lytton Strachey, one of the leading Bloomsberries (that group of writers and artists whose best-known member is Virginia Woolf), disliked the whole Victorian aesthetic. In Eminent Victorians, he had a lot of fun debunking the myths surrounding the period’s most well-known figures: Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, Dr. Arnold (the headmaster of Rugby School), and Charles George Gordon, who died at Khartoum.

  Strachey also wrote Queen Victoria, and even though he was not her biggest fan, he produced what is arguably one of the better biographies of her. Other biographies not to be missed by Anglophiles are Christopher Hibbert’s Queen Victoria: A Personal History and Elizabeth Longford’s compact Queen Victoria, which is perfect for those who want to decide whether they’re interested in reading deeper into the topic.

  There’s also a whole group of novels that fall under the heading of “Faux Victoriana.”They’re the work of contemporary writers who re-create the Victorian era: novels in which you can hear the horses’ hooves striking the cobblestones and the hiss of gas lamps being lit, and feel immersed in the chill of the London fogs. So when you’ve done Dickens to death, try these novels.

  Rose by Martin Cruz Smith is quite a departure from his best-known novel, Gorky Park. Jonathan Blair, an adventurer down on his luck who was kicked out of Africa for misbehavior, and who is suffering from both malaria and an overdependence on gin, arrives in a mining town in England, where’s he’s been hired by a bishop to locate his daughter Charlotte’s missing fiancé, a young cleric.

  Maurice Edelman’s two biographical novels about the great prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, Disraeli in Love and Disraeli Rising, illuminate the politics of the nineteenth century and the Jewish Disraeli’s particularly anomalous position in society.

  Anne Perry has been producing solidly enjoyable and true-to-the-times mysteries for more than a quarter of a century. She writes two different series, both set in Victorian England. One features Inspector Thomas Pitt and his wife, Charlotte; my favorites are Resurrection Road and Bedford Square, but you can’t go wrong with any of them.The other series is about private “enquiry agent” (i.e.,investigator) William Monk; try The Shifting Tide and Death of a Stranger. Neither series must absolutely be read in order, but you may enjoy them a bit more if you begin at the beginning with Pitt’s first adventure, The Cater Street Hangman, and Monk’s first, The Face of a Stranger.

  READY, SET, LIFTOFF: BOOKS TO IGNITE DISCUSSION

  I think the best books for groups to discuss are those in which the ending is deliberately ambiguous, so that every reader will have a different answer to the question “Well, what really did happen?” Or books in which the main character is faced with a difficult choice that resonates with readers no matter their age or race or ethnicity. Here are some that I’ve found work extremely w
ell in generating heated discussion among book group participants.

  Deborah Schupack’s The Boy on the Bus begins with every parent’s worst nightmare—the disappearance of your child. Only in this case, a boy who looks a lot like Meg’s eight-year-old son, Charlie, gets off the school bus at the end of the day.The problem is, he seems to be very different from the real Charlie in some definable ways (he doesn’t have asthma and Charlie did) and in some indefinable ways (Meg just knows it’s not her son). Many readers will no doubt wonder why the family doesn’t just do a DNA test to find out, but the questions the novel raises about identity are fascinating.

  First-time novelist Ann Packer’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier asks readers to consider the following question: what do we owe those we love, and what do we owe ourselves? Or, in plainer language, how much sacrifice is too much? When Carrie’s fiancé, with whom she’s just about fallen out of love, dives off the pier on Memorial Day into water that is much too shallow, he breaks his neck and will be paralyzed for the rest of his life. What should Carrie do? Readers everywhere react to twenty-something Carrie’s choice differently—some with frustration (I know someone who actually threw the book across the room in disgust when she read what Carrie decided to do), with applause, or with tears.

  The paperback edition of Leah Hager Cohen’s novel Heart, You Bully, You Punk has a wonderful cover. What makes it perfect for a book group is that it poses an interesting dilemma: when your head tells you one thing and your heart another, which one should you listen to? The answer to this conundrum will change the lives of the three main characters: a teenage girl, her father, and her math teacher at the private school she attends. One question to begin with is “What does the novelist think about the role of the heart in decision making?”

  Barbara Gowdy’s The Romantic asks us to consider yet another human dilemma—what it means to try to save the person we love best from destroying themselves, while knowing full well that they’re hell-bent on making that task impossible for us. Louise, who has loved Abel since both were children, must decide how much responsibility she has for ensuring his well-being when she realizes that Abel is becoming increasingly self-destructive and seems determined to drink himself to death.

  Two novels by Anne Ursu make for wonderful discussions. In the first, Spilling Clarence, a chemical that causes people to remember everything in their lives infects a city’s population—and everyone has a different reaction to being bombarded by their memories. Some characters are comforted, while others find the return of the past too difficult to bear.The second, The Disapparation of James, has an inconclusive and mysterious ending that will drive some readers crazy. Physician Hannah and stay-at-home dad Justin Woodrow take their children—Greta, seven, and James, five—to the circus for Greta’s birthday; everyone in the family is thrilled when James is selected to appear on stage as part of the last act of the evening. The magician’s final stunt is supposed to make James disappear, but it backfires horribly when James actually does disappear. Ursu takes us inside the lives of all the characters, including the magician, the policeman who is assigned to the case, and of course James’s immediate family, offering parallel realities and alternative possibilities of what really happened.

  For some good nonfiction selections for your book group, see the “Dewey Deconstructed” section.

  MARK SALZMAN: TOO GOOD TO MISS

  I usually make it a point not to go to readings by writers I really like, because what if I find them disagreeable or, worse, pretentious ? Then, too, after I hear authors read, I can no longer read their books without their voice or public persona coming between me and the words on the page. Horrors! But I have to say that when I interviewed Mark Salzman, I found him to be unaffected, verbally adroit, and very, very funny—all the qualities one looks for in an interviewee.And—it probably goes without saying—he’s an awfully good writer of both fiction and nonfiction.

  His novels include The Soloist, in which former child prodigy Renne Sundheimer comes up against two events that will change his life: he is on a jury considering the murder of a Zen master, and he reluctantly agrees to teach a brilliant child cellist; and Lying Awake, the story of a cloistered nun whose gift of mystical visions comes with a price: severe headaches that seem to be due to a mild form of epilepsy. Should she take a chance on surgery, if its success at easing her pain may also mean that she will never experience that spiritual union with God again?

  Salzman’s memoirs include Iron & Silk, an account of teaching English in China right after college, and of his classes in the martial arts with one of the leading Chinese teachers; Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia, a funny, self-deprecating, and totally irresistible story of growing up as the oldest child of three in a middle-class Connecticut family; and True Notebooks: A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall, about teaching creative writing at a detention center for “high risk” juveniles outside Los Angeles.

  SCIENCE 101

  Most colleges offer some good science courses aimed specifically at non-scientists (“Physics for Poets” was my own personal favorite). There are also many very readable books written for non-scientists, and even non-science majors. Here’s a diverse list of good popular science reading.

  Barbara Freese’s Coal: A Human History looks at the rise and fall of this black mineral, discussing both its history and related environmental concerns.

  Hannah Holmes’s The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things studies something that most of us brush off as insignificant.

  The molecule as hero or villain in various historical events is the subject of Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny LeCouteur and Jay Burreson.

  David Foster Wallace considers the two-thousand-year quest to understand infinity in Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity; even though it’s compact, it’s not always easy reading, but it’s certainly fascinating.

  Jay Ingram’s entertaining The Science of Everyday Life covers everything from the creation of the universe to why, when you chew them in the dark, there’s a bluish green light emanating from wintergreen-flavored LifeSavers candies.

  Donna Shirley describes her childhood as a space-crazy kid, her education as the only woman in the engineering program at the University of Oklahoma, and her management of the Mars Exploration Project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which sent Pathfinder and the rover Sojourner to Mars, in Managing Martians.

  Dr. Tatiana (aka evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson) offers answers to all manner of sexual questions from non-human creatures great and small, in Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. Imagine Dr. Ruth answering questions from the likes of sticklebugs and katydids, and you’ll have a good picture of this book.

  Bill McKibben makes a plea for restraint in Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age,arguing, “We need to do an unlikely thing: We need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough.”

  Amir D. Aczel’s Pendulum: Léon Foucault and the Triumph of Science offers a biography of a brilliant scientist who had almost no formal education, and explains how he proved that the earth actually does rotate on its axis.

  CAROL SHIELDS: TOO GOOD TO MISS

  Carol Shields won many literary awards over the course of a life cut tragically short (she died in 2003 at age sixtyeight, after a courageous five-year struggle with breast cancer that metastasized to her liver). She is probably best known for The Stone Diaries, which won both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It’s the story of the long life of an ordinary woman, Daisy Stone, seen through a collage of letters, newspaper clippings, and straight narrative told in multiple voices. But my three favorite Shields novels are probably among her lesser known: The Republic of Love, Larry’s Party, and Swann (which I read somewhere was her own favorite of her books).

  In The Republic of Love, Fay McLeod, a never-married researcher of mermaids in her midthirties, and Tom Avery, the t
hrice-married (though now single) host of a late-night talk show at a local Winnipeg radio station, fall in love. These two unlikely lovers alternate in telling us the story of their developing relationship.