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

by Nancy Pearl

  The hero (antihero, really) of Karoo by Steve Tesich, best known for penning the screenplay of the movie Breaking Away, is a script doctor who’s unable to fix his own life. The self-destructive Saul Karoo is a character you’ll never forget. He seems to become a different person with everyone he knows, from his almost-ex-wife, Dianah, to his son, Billy, to Jay Cromwell, the diabolical producer who frequently calls on his writing talents. (My psychologist friend says Karoo is what’s known in her field as a “borderline.”) Here’s how the novel opens, in Karoo’s unmistakable voice: “It was the night after Christmas and we were all chatting merrily about the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu.”

  Two novels that are narrated by a group of people all speaking in one voice are Our Kind: A Novel in Stories by Kate Walbert and The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Our Kind is about a group of upper-class women who came of age in the 1950s and are reaping the consequences in the 1990s of their inevitable aging. Here’s one example of the narrator’s voice: “Years ago we were led down the primrose lane, then abandoned somewhere near the carp pond.” The chapter called “Sick Chicks,” which describes a book discussion group that meets in a local hospice (in this particular case, they’retalking about Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs.Dalloway), is worth the price of the book.

  The voice of The Virgin Suicides is that of a group of middle-aged men looking back twenty years on the seminal event (and obsession) of their adolescence: the suicides, one after another, of their classmates, the five mysterious and beautiful Lisbon sisters.

  I can’t understand why more people didn’t read and rave about The Confession of a Child of the Century, by Samuel Heather by Thomas Rogers when it was first published in 1972. It’s a terrifically funny bildungsroman, the story of a son, the narrator Samuel Heather, trying (and consistently failing) to please his father, who happens to be a professional father—the Episcopal bishop of Kansas City. Father and son disagree on every conceivable subject, from sex to the Korean War, from Harry Truman to Karl Marx. Don’t miss reading this—among other gems, there’s an unforgettable scene of Harry Truman taking a bath at the White House and deciding how to handle the prisoner-of-war issue at the same time.

  WAYWARD WIVES

  From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter to Gustave Flaubert’s and Leo Tolstoy’s respective eponymous heroines, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, women in fiction have always fallen in love with men who just happen not to be their husbands.These relationships almost always end in tragedy (especially in novels written before the late twentieth century).

  The affair that Laura falls into in Tom Perrotta’s Little Children frees her from a husband who’s addicted to Internet porn, but doesn’t in the end bring her much happiness.

  When Jane decides to leave her husband and become a nanny, she can’t predict the complications that will follow, especially when she falls in love with her employer in Crane Spreads Wings: A Bigamist’s Story by Susan Trott.

  Marian Thurm’s Walking Distance is about a seemingly happy wife and mother who becomes involved with another man—who just happens to be dying of cancer.

  Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin explores the question of whether a successful marriage can be compatible with adultery, as does The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman by Alice Mattison.

  Carol Clewlow’s A Woman’s Guide to Adultery chronicles the experiences of four friends as they each embark on a series of affairs.

  Other tales of adultery and its consequences include the following:Honeymoon: A Romantic Rampage by Amy Jenkins

  Instances of the Number 3 by Salley Vickers

  Le Divorce and Le Mariage by Diane Johnson

  Love and Friendship by Alison Lurie

  My Russian by Deirdre McNamer

  The Road to Lichfield by Penelope Lively

  The Sex Life of My Aunt by Mavis Cheek

  She Is Me by Cathleen Schine

  A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer

  What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

  While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

  A Widow for One Year by John Irving (although her husband was the cad first)

  And don’t forget Hedda Gabler, the title character of Henrik Ibsen’s play, although it’s unclear just how unfaithful she’s been; and also poor Edna Pontellier, Kate Chopin’s unfortunate heroine in The Awakening, who doesn’t actually do anything but suffers the consequences anyway, as does Lady Rice in Fay Weldon’s astringent Splitting, when her personality splits into four parts after her husband accuses her of adultery (unjustly) and demands a divorce.

  JONATHAN WEINER: TOO GOOD TO MISS

  Jonathan Weiner is a non-science major’s dream, because he’s able to take complicated scientific ideas and theories and make them entirely understandable to the interested lay reader. He’s also an intensely compassionate writer, whose affection for the friends he makes while researching and writing his books is eminently evident in the finished product.

  His books include Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction), about Seymour Benzerone, who used fruit flies to test his theories of the relationship between genetics and behavior—now we can blame our parents for the manner in which we laugh; the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, about evolutionary biology as played out on an island in the Galápagos; and His Brother’s Keeper: A Story from the Edge of Medicine, about the many ethical issues that all of us (including medical professionals) must confront in light of the new gene therapies being developed. How much tinkering with life (and death) should society be allowed to do? Are the risks (and costs) of gene therapy worth it? How much is one human life worth? Should scientists and doctors profit (to the tune of millions of dollars) from their discoveries? And Weiner’s own question: How can a writer remain impartial about his subjects when he grows to care for them deeply?

  P. G. WODEHOUSE: TOO GOOD TO MISS

  If you can ignore his somewhat rummy behavior during World War II (he did a series of radio broadcasts from Berlin in 1942 after being interned for eleven months by the Germans), you will have to admit that Wodehouse was one of the great humorists of the twentieth century. Of course, ignoring his actions may be hard to do for those, like me, who wonder how rotten-behaving or wrong-thinking people can produce such sublime works (Ezra Pound is another example of that sort of writer).

  In any case, it’s hard to imagine anyone not marveling at Wodehouse’s twisted plots, zany characters, and brilliant use of the English language. Evelyn Waugh, no slouch at writing himself, averred “One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page.” Other fans include Anthony Lane, writer and columnist for The New Yorker and tens of thousands of readers.You’ll want to join them, I know, as you make your way through Wodehouse’s ninety-two comic novels and collections of short stories.

  Before diving headfirst into Wodehouse’s oeuvre, though, you may want to start with Richard Usborne’s ultradelightful Plum Sauce: A P. G. Wodehouse Companion. He begins his book (after a helpful introduction) with a list of “thirty postulates for relaxed reading of P. G. Wodehouse,” including number 13 (“Watch out for girls with two-syllable masculine-sounding shortenings of their Christian names [Bobbie Wickham, Corky Pirbright, Nobby Hopwood, Stiffy Byng]. They get the good man of their choice in the end, but they spread havoc on the way”) and number 24 (“Chorus girls are all right and earls [Marshmoreton] and nephews of earls [Ronnie Fish] are very lucky to marry them”). Usborne also includes some prime examples of Wodehouse’s writing:“Bingo laughed in an unpleasant, hacking manner as if he were missing one tonsil”;“He resembled a frog that had been looking on the dark side since it was a slip of a tadpole”; and “Her face was shining like the seat of a bus-driver’s trousers.”

  I could go on quoting Usborne quoting Wodehouse forever, but it’sl
ikely best to get to the books themselves.

  These are a few of my top choices—I urge you, if you have any desire to escape from the cares of the world, to read them all.

  Books featuring Bertie and Jeeves: These are Wodehouse’s best known characters. Bertie is a man about town and Jeeves, his butler, runs his life.

  Carry on, Jeeves

  The Inimitable Jeeves

  Bertie Wooster Sees It Through

  Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

  Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen

  Right Ho, Jeeves (The favorite novel of the definitive biography of Wodehouse by Frances Donaldson, called, quite simply, P.G. Wodehouse: A Biography.)

  The Blandings books:Blandings is a castle owned by the Emsworth clan, filled with various servants and hangers-on.

  Pigs Have Wings

  Uncle Fred in the Springtime

  A Pelican at Blandings

  The Psmith Books: Psmith worked as a newspaperman but, being incurably lazy, is essentially most fond of sleeping. Note that the “P” is silent.

  Leave It to Psmith

  Psmith in the City

  And more:Bachelors Anonymous

  The Heart of a Goof (maybe the funniest golf novel ever written—read it before the British Open)

  The Most of P. G. Wodehouse (a collection of short stories that feature all of Wodehouse’s best-known characters, as well as a short novel called Quick Service, which was Wodehouse’s personal favorite among all his works)

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT

  Those interested in writing as a career should read these books, but devoted readers will also appreciate them for the insights they give into literature and the writing life. the insights they give into literature and the writing life.

  Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster’s classic work, is a collection of a series of lectures he gave at Cambridge University in 1927. In it he defines his topic as “any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words,” and in the most welcoming of tones discusses the elements that go into crafting a work of fiction: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. It’s great fun to read because of Forster’s candidness and dry sense of humor, viz:“Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.”

  In On Moral Fiction,John Gardner writes passionately (and controversially) of his belief that literature contains truths about the way we live and ought to live, and that novel writing must not be about the triumph of style over substance. Another book by Gardner about the writer’s craft is The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, in which he reiterates his belief in the validity and seriousness of the writer’s craft, offers writing exercises to improve one’s writing, and stresses again and again the importance of writers reading the best of literature, past and present.

  In Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, he describes the two historically opposed views of what “style” means in literature. On one hand is the classic view of Strunk and White, who believed that writing with clarity—transparency—was the correct way to write. The opposite view is best demonstrated by the works of writers such as Dave Eggers or Jonathan Franzen. Yagoda suggests combining the two into a “middle style,” using the best of both approaches. He intersperses interviews with writers (Cynthia Ozick, Harold Bloom, and Elizabeth McCracken, among others) with a discussion of what makes for good reading.

  Since I am a big fan of Janet Burroway’s novels (especially Raw Silk and Opening Nights),I found that her Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, although it was aimed at college students and not necessarily the casual reader/writer, offered an excellent approach to issues of craft and style, especially (but not exclusively) in relation to literary fiction.

  YOU CAN’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

  We’re always being told that you can’t—or shouldn’t—judge a book by its cover, but in fact we all do exactly that. Often the single motivating factor in deciding whether to pick up a particular book is how we respond to the cover. But there are some books—perhaps especially novels—that are so complex and challenging to describe that it’s difficult to imagine the right cover for them, one that draws the reader in, hinting at the particular gifts that the book offers. Here are some of my very favorite novels that I’m glad I didn’t judge by their covers.

  For me, the wickedly leering doll on the cover of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend didn’t convey the strengths of this coming-of-age novel, which features Harriet Dufresnes, a gutsy twelve-year-old kid on the cusp of adolescence—think Scout Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Frankie, the heroine of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding—who decides she is going to track down the person who murdered her older brother, Robin, twelve years before.

  The cover of Fool by Frederick G. Dillen doesn’t give much sense of the unexpected treat awaiting readers of this quirky novel about Barnaby Griswold, a middle-aged man who has consistently made all the wrong decisions—in both his public and private lives—and who at last realizes that it’s finally time to grow up.

  The cover gives little hint of the charms of John Griesemer’s No One Thinks of Greenland, but this novel about Rudy Spruance, a young army corporal who is sent as punishment to an army base in Greenland (where the six months of winter are known as the “stark, raving dark”), and who finds his loyalties tested when he starts uncovering secrets that his superior officers would rather keep hidden, is a treasure.

  In Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design,Alan Powers reminds us of the power of book jackets to sell books (or, conversely, to influence us not to buy or even borrow and read a book). Although it’s decidedly Britishcentric, most of the books whose covers are shown will be recognizable to American readers—William Faulkner’s Light in August, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Philip Roth’s Goodbye,Columbus,and novels by P. D. James, Agatha Christie, James Baldwin, and Dick Francis, among many others. There’s also a picture of the wonderful cover done in England for one of my favorite novels, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.

  YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: GOOD READING FROM THE GOVERNMENT (REALLY!)

  At one of the Illinois stops on my Book Lust tour,a librarian in the audience asked if I had included any government documents. I admitted that I had somehow never thought of “gov docs” (as they’re known in Libraryland) as pleasure reading, just as sources of information. But I agreed that if she could come up with some documents that I enjoyed reading, I would include them in More Book Lust. She did, and here they are.

  United States Army in World War 2, War in the Pacific, Fall of the Philippines by Louis Morton

  Language of the Land: The Library of Congress Book of Literary Maps by Martha Hopkins and Michael Buscher

  Mud & Guts: A Look at the Common Soldier of the American Revolution by Bill Mauldin

  Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service, edited by Suzy Platt

  The Openhearted Audience: Ten Authors Talk about Writing for Children, edited by Virginia Haviland

  Venona:Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957, edited by Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner

  WRA:A Story of Human Conservation (the WRA was the War Relocation Authority,and “human conservation” was the removal of Japanese Americans from their homes to internment camps during World War II)

  You can get many of these through the U.S. Government Printing Office, and all of them at any public or academic library that’s designated as a federal depository for government documents.

  Copyright ©2005 by Nancy Pearl

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Da
ta

  Pearl, Nancy.

  More book lust : recommended reading for every mood, moment, and reason / by Nancy

  Pearl.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  eISBN : 978-1-570-61655-6

  1. Best books. 2. Books and reading—United States. I.Title.

  Z1035.9.P38 2005

  011’.73—dc22

  2004066292

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