by Nancy Pearl
Although you probably won’t laugh out loud, I guarantee that reading Leo Bruce’s Case for Three Detectives, a mystery that seems to be written for the express joy of mystery fans everywhere, will elicit a quiet chuckle or two.Three famous British detectives, Simon Plimsoll,Amer Picon, and Monsignor Smith, try to solve the murder of Mrs. Hurston. These detectives are thinly disguised portraits of the well-known fictional detectives Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, and Father Brown. The fun comes in watching as they each go about solving the crime in their own eccentric way, only to find that their (very different) versions of what happened are demolished when the stolid Sergeant Beef listens to their explanations and then lays out the truth.
One of the funniest writers of the 1940s through the 1960s—at least one whose humor hasn’t become dated and staid—is H. Allen Smith. His work appeared in the major magazines of the time—everywhere from Playboy to Saturday Review. Whether he’s writing about the history of fingers, his boyhood in Indiana, or his neighbor Avery, you’ll find yourself guffawing continually. It hardly matters which of his many collections of humorous essays you first pick up (from the library, if you’re lucky, or through an Internet search, if necessary), but To Hell in a Handbasket is simply spectacularly funny.
Just hearing the names of Stephen Potter’s books can give you a good idea of the pleasure you’re in for when you read him: The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or, the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating; Lifemanship: Or, the Art of Getting Away with It Without Being an Absolute Plonk; One-Upmanship: Being Some Account of the Activities and Teachings of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of One-Upness and Games Lifemastery; and Anti-Woo, the First Lifemanship Guide:The Lifeman’s Improved Primer for Non-lovers, with Special Chapters on Who Not to Love, Falling Out of Love, Avoidance Gambits, and Coad-Sanderson’s Scale of Progressive Rifts.They’re all subversive little instructions for succeeding in life without actually doing anything. I’ve always felt that Bertie Wooster (of P. G.Wodehouse fame) was familiar with Potter’s theories of how to live best in this world.
When newly widowed Julia Piper pulls the emergency brake on her commuter train to save an upended sheep from certain death, she catches the attention of two men: the mild and divorced Sylvester Wykes and the bird-watching bounder Maurice Benson, in Mary Wesley’s An Imaginative Experience.
Other books that have made me laugh out loud are George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody, still humorous after more than one hundred years (it was originally published in 1892); Peter DeVries’s sexy and very funny I Hear America Swinging and Consenting Adults, or The Duchess Will Be Furious; William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (funnyand sweet but not cloying); Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals and Birds, Beasts, and Relatives; and Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater, the plot of which includes a failed poet who was a Rowing Blue at Cambridge, the pub of the title, false names, an abduction, thievery, love, and what must be the greatest car chase in literature. (Poet’s Pub was one of the first ten books reprinted by Penguin in 1935, then a brand-new English paperback publisher. The other nine—some still well known, others far less so—were André Maurois’s Ariel: The Life of Shelley; Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; Susan Ertz’s Madame Claire; Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles; Beverley Nichols’s Twenty-Five; E. H.Young’s William; Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth; and Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival.)
TIME TRAVEL
Who hasn’t thought at one time or another about how exciting it would be to travel through time? And who, following that thought, hasn’t come face to face with the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in time travel? Like, if your father dies sometime in his childhood, does that mean you won’t be born? Or would you just not be you? Or if one thing in the past is changed—one simple thing, as in Ray Bradbury’s remarkable short story “A Sound of Thunder”—is the present altered irrevocably?
Writers have explored these questions ever since H. G.Wells published his classic time-travel novel The Time Machine and Mark Twain took his Connecticut Yankee and put him in King Arthur’s court, but here are some others you might enjoy as well:Philip E. Baruth’s The X President
Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back
Octavia Butler’s Kindred
Charles Dickinson’s A Shortcut in Time
Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand
Jack Finney’s Time and Again (I’ve never met anyone who didn’t love this novel)
Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander
Ken Grimwood’s Replay
Robert A. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars and The Door into Summer (have you ever wondered how Leonardo da Vinci dreamed up ideas that it wouldn’t be practical to implement until hundreds of years after his death? Think about a misplaced time traveler named Leonard Vincent. . . )
Richard Matheson’s Somewherein Time
Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time
John Varley’s Millennium
Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog
Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths
If short stories are more what you’re looking for, don’t miss Time Machines: The Best Time Travel Stories Ever Written, edited by Bill Adler, Jr., with stories by Jack Finney, Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, and contemporary authors such as Larry Niven and Harry Turtledove, master of the alternate-reality genre.Another excellent choice is The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, edited by Harry Turtledove with Martin H. Greenburg, which includes works by Connie Willis, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and Poul Anderson.
TRICKY, TRICKY
There comes a time in each of the following novels when you realize that the author has played a trick on you—employed an elaborate sleight-of-hand so cunning, so daring, that it’s hard not to be a bit awestruck, even as you’re feeling a little betrayed and annoyed by the deception. And it’s a testament to the skill of these writers that despite your dismay, you’re still impressed....
Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Anita Shreve’s The Last Time They Met
Connie Willis’s Passage
There’s also Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the mystery that caused literary critic Edmund Wilson to ask testily in print, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” It is perhaps the only mystery ever to be explicated by a French psychoanalyst, Pierre Bayard, who offers an interpretation of the crime that differs from that of Christie’s well-known detective, Hercule Poirot, in Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery.
TRUE ADVENTURES
If these books won’t cause the ordinary reader to become schizophrenic, I don’t know what will. After reading them, you’ll want to charge out and duplicate the authors’ adventures. But at the same time, you’ll ask yourself,“Do I really want to risk life and limb, as these men and women did?” It all seemed so simple at first. . . .
Touching My Father’s Soul:A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest is written by Jamling Tenzing Norgay, son of Tenzing Norgay, one of the Sherpas who accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary on the first Everest ascent in 1953.The way Norgay weaves together the tragic climbing summer of 1996, memories of his father, and his Buddhist beliefs is unforgettable.
Robert Kurson’s Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II introduces readers to Rich Kohler and John Chatterton, who spent seven years trying to identify the wreckage of a World War II U-boat off the coast of New Jersey, eventually establishing that it was a German boat long thought to have sunk off Gibraltar’s coast in the last year of the war.Thrilling, scary, and sad, all at the same time.
In addition to being a darned good adventure story, Shooting the Boh: A Woman’s Voyage Down the Wildest River in Borneo by Tracy Johnston can also be read as a cautiona
ry tale about knowing what you’re signing up for. Johnston’s lost luggage (before the trip even begins) is the least of it.
Borneo is one fascinating place, and in addition to Johnston’s book you might try Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo. From its enormously funny first chapter through the actual trip itself, this is a wildly entertaining ride.
In Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness, Jeffrey Tayler attempts to re-create the trip of famed explorer Henry Stanley (yes, he of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame) down the Congo River in the nineteenth century.
Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines was his last book before his death at the age of forty-eight. It’s an account of his travels across the Australian outback, following the trails of aboriginal culture. If you enjoy this, you’ll also want to check out Chatwin’s In Patagonia and The Viceroy of Ouidah.
In Search of King Solomon’s Mines is a story told by Tahir Shah, a native Afghani who grew up in England. After a visit to the Middle East, he found himself compelled to locate the mines of the biblical King Solomon. The journey eventually took him across Ethiopia into the (mostly illegal) gold-mining camps as he followed the route of legendary explorer Frank Hayter, who searched for those same mines in the 1920s.
You might also take a look at the “Adventure by the Book: Nonfiction” section in Book Lust, which offers many more suggestions for reading in this area.
BARBARA W. TUCHMAN: TOO GOOD TO MISS
If history’s your thing, and you aren’t acquainted with the writings of Barbara W.Tuchman, you’re in for a real treat.Tuchman writes totally readable narrative histories, replete with colorful characters and just enough detail to assure you that she knows what she’s talking about but not so much that it reads like an academic treatise. Her ability to evoke time, place, and character has been rewarded by a slew of awards. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for The Guns of August, about the first weeks of World War I, and another in 1972 for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45, a biography of General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, commander of the U.S. forces and Allied chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek in 1942-1944. She received the National Book Award for history in 1980 for A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, in which she finds many parallels between that century and the twentieth. Tuchman explains her thoughts about her craft in Practicing History: Selected Essays.
Other necessary reading for any self-respecting history buff includes the following:
The Zimmermann Telegram is about the telegram from Germany that promised Mexico part of the American Southwest if that country would come into World War I on the side of the Germans—a blunder on Germany’s part, since it brought the United States into the war.
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890- 1914 is the story of the events that led, directly and indirectly, to World War I.
In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Tuchman looks at four mistakes that occurred in the past, and how they changed history: Troy’s decision to bring the wooden horse inside their city; the outrageous lives of the Renaissance popes, which helped to bring about Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation; England’s intransigent attitudes toward its American colonies; and, finally, America’s decision to go to war against North Vietnam.
TWO, OR THREE, ARE BETTER THAN ONE
As I noted in Book Lust’s “Companion Reads” section some books simply beg to be read together. Each book seems to reflect and refract the writing of the other(s), making the experience of reading them all greater than that of reading each one separately.
The lives of women are examined:Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson
Our Kind: A Novel in Stories by Kate Walbert
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
The life of a fascinating woman is told in both fiction and her own memoir:Fanny: A Fiction by Edmund White
Domestic Manners of the Americans by Fanny Trollope
Shtetl life in Eastern Europe is described:Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Your Mouth Is Lovely by Nancy Richler
An excellent look at women’s roles in the Middle East and India:Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India by Elizabeth Bumiller
Teenage girls’ problems with both society and themselves are described and discussed:The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap by Peggy Orenstein
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher
Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, & Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman
VIRAGOS
In the 1980s Dial Press reprinted a series of British novels under the general title of Virago Modern Classics. They had distinctive covers (originally black, later dark green backgrounds with fetching illustrations taken from nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings) and thoughtful introductions by a variety of contemporary writers and critics. Most importantly, the series introduced readers to an exciting selection of mostly unread women novelists (many of them unknown to all but a few feminist scholars), whose fictional subjects were the lives of women from the Victorian period through the 1970s. Here are some of the best.
In the category “The (Book) Lusts of Others,” I mentioned how much I enjoyed Noel Perrin’s A Reader’s Delight, in which he calls Emily Eden’s The Semi-Attached Couple the answer to the question of what to read after finishing all of Jane Austen.And of course, he’s right. Published in 1860 but written in the 1830s, when Eden was in India with her brother, the newly named British governor-general there (see also“Central Asia:Crossroads of Empires,Cauldron of War”), this story of a marriage between an eighteen-year-old girl and the man who swept her off her feet is a scrumptious read, filled with a large cast of characters. It’s witty, intelligent, and richly sentimental. Not too surprising that it was the first of the Virago series to appear here in the United States.
Antonia White’s Frost in May, with its young heroine, the Catholic convert Nanda Grey, was first published in the 1930s, but takes place from 1908 to 1912. This ultimately tragic tale of a young and impressionable girl’s four years—from age nine to thirteen—at a Catholic boarding school just outside London probes the petty tyrannies and great cruelties that follow any breaking of the rules in the cloistered community.
The life of a gifted and intelligent woman in a Victorian household was not easy, as it was a time and place in which a brilliant woman was not particularly valued; charm and beauty were considered much more important. Such is the plight of the eponymous heroine of Mary Olivier: A Life by May Sinclair,who discovers that sacrifice, not intelligence, is the name of the game.
I love Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot, the story of three generations of the Garden family. Spanning the years of the Victorian era to the 1920s, the novel presents each member of the family as a fully drawn individual, yet one who represents the prevailing social and cultural winds of the times. All of their experiences are watched by the memorable Rome, who participates in nothing save an attempted single great love affair.
Other Virago novels not to miss are E. H. Young’s Miss Mole; Ada Leverson’s The Little Ottleys; Barbara Comyns’s Our Spoons Came from Woolworths; Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Harriet Hume;Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom;E. Arnot Robertson’s Four Frightened People; and Margaret Kennedy’s The Ladies of Lyndon.
VOICE
A long with a book’s first few lines, I think it’s the narrator’s voice that determines whether I’ll be drawn into reading a book. Do you remember the dog in the old RCA Victor ads—I think his name was Nipper—whose head was cocked in amazement as he listened to what issued from that phonograph horn? That’s just how I feel when I first encounter a
true storyteller, someone whose voice is distinct, fresh, and utterly compelling.
The unnamed narrator of Julie Hecht’s Do the Windows Open? is winsomely neurotic (she’s afraid of almost anything you can name, from tall buildings to bus trips to dentists) and devoted to organic food, her friends, and her weirdly cheerful life. Here’s a great sample (with my apologies to dentists everywhere): “I went this once to a very mean dentist, who seemed to be a man on the verge of suicide. You’ve read that dentists have the highest suicide rate? Not high enough,I say.”