Book Rec of the Day 3/2-3/8/2008

“This novel perfectly captures . . . the potency, skewed perceptions, and just plain weirdness of being alive at the age of ten. . . . Doyle has created a small, resonant masterpiece.”—Entertainment Weekly

In Barrytown, a Dublin working-class neighborhood, ten-year-old Patrick plays boyish havoc with his friends and tries to make sense of the world. Realizing that his parents’ marriage is coming apart, he stays up all night trying to find a way to keep them together. Doyle brilliantly reveals to us the boy’s mind, and in it we find a world of laughter and heartache. This bestselling novel won the 1993 Man Booker Prize.

PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA, by Roddy Doyle (Penguin, 1995)

A HARMLESS DRUDGE

Though Samuel Johnson’s was not the first English dictionary, it so far surpassed what had come before that it became the standard for more than 100 years. Even the first Oxford English Dictionary (1928) used nearly 2,000 definitions from Johnson’s great work. Hitchings’s engaging book is a biography, a discourse on lexicography, a social history, and an appreciation of the great influence this dictionary had on succeeding generations.

DEFINING THE WORLD: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF DR. JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY, by Henry Hitchings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

The book contains violence without end and perhaps the most heinous, evil, morally grotesque character in all of American literature: Judge Holden. It is a work of high art, literature with a capital L, as ambitious as Moby Dick or anything by Faulkner. Yet, at the same time, it is a compelling page-turner about the American Southwest in the mid-19th century. Its truly unforgettable characters, scenes, and ideas stay with you long after you put the book down. Not for the squeamish, but if you can handle a Quentin Tarantino movie, you can handle Blood Meridian.

BLOOD MERIDIAN: OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST, by Cormac McCarthy (1985; Vintage, 1992)

WHAT IS WOMAN?

Go with writer and feminist Griffiths on her nonlinear, unscientific, quirky journey through nontime and unspace, or dip in randomly for sparkles of insight and musings. Poet Gary Snyder, quoted on the book jacket, calls it “an exercise indeed in Dharma, Poetry, and Philosophy.” More a way of unraveling what we think we know than an attempt to explain what we don’t know, A Sideways Look at Time is not really about time but about received notions and how we can give them the slip.

A SIDEWAYS LOOK AT TIME, by Jay Griffiths (Tarcher, 2004)

THRILLER FICTION

In her 13th novel, Picoult paints a fresh hell. Dante’s Hell finally stopped at the fourth ring of the ninth circle. Here in the tenth circle, graphic novelist Daniel Stone (whose wife, Laura, is a Dante scholar) must go through all the circles to save his marriage and find his teenage daughter, Trixie, in the aftermath of a horrible event that threatens their present way of life and makes the past and future a torment to contemplate. An interesting feature: illustrations by Dustin Weaver, supposedly from Stone’s graphic novel.

THE TENTH CIRCLE, by Jodi Picoult (Atria, 2006)

LOVE STORY

Nathan, a sophomore in high school, is the son of an alcoholic, abusive, Bible-thumping father and a mother who is hardly there. He falls in love with the boy next door, Roy, a senior and a baseball star. Roy reciprocates. Everyone and everything are against them, and the heartache and longing of each boy’s situation is beautifully depicted by Grimsley in this tender coming-of-age/first-love novel. Publishers Weekly called it a “singular display of literary craftsmanship.”

DREAM BOY, by Jim Grimsley (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995)

Toobin is a superb analyst of legal issues, managing to be both exciting and fair, fanning the flames of indignation yet remaining outside the fray. Almost no one gets off scot-free in the story of perhaps the most infamous political scandal of our time. Gore seems weak, Bush unscrupulous, and Rehnquist’s Supreme Court grotesquely tainted. It’s still a jaw-droppingly compelling story, told by the best man for the job, hands down.

TOO CLOSE TO CALL: THE THIRTY-SIX-DAY BATTLE TO DECIDE THE 2000 ELECTION, by Jeffrey Toobin (Random House, 2001)