Book Recs 5/2-5/6

YOU GOTTA LAUGH

A hilarious corporate spoof composed entirely of the e-mails of Martin Lukes, the chief personal ethics champion of fictional company A-B Global, a character dreamed up by Lucy Kellaway in her weekly column on management for the Financial Times. Martin blunders and blusters his way through life coaching, rebranding, and outsourcing in a pyrotechnical display of bureaucratic idiocy.

WHO MOVED MY BLACKBERRY? by Lucy Kellaway (Hyperion, 2006)

LOOK AT ME

Updike deserves to be better known as a nonfiction writer. His writerly gift is perhaps most impressive in his essays, describing with clarity and vigor the complex emotions, sensations, and esthetic processes that occur when he contemplates the works of Hopper, Sloan, Stieglitz, and others. A good way to gently exercise your mind while you lie in the hammock on a fine May morning.

STILL LOOKING: ESSAYS ON AMERICAN ART, by John Updike (Knopf, 2005)

SIDESPLITTER

This is the original. The later books in the series don’t have quite the same punch, but this one really could change your life if you let it. It’s a sort of postmodern self-help book (a self-help book and a parody of a self-help book, all in one), and only those totally immune to whimsy could resist the zest for life that emanates from Benrik’s 365 suggestions, or dares, or maybe they’re Zen exercises: write only with your left hand, propose to a stranger, invent a new color . . . go on, get a life.

THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE, by Benrik (Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag) (Plume, 2003)

IT’S DARK IN HERE

In this sequel to Brucker’s 1987 The Longest Cave, written with Richard Watson, the two authors go farther into Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave region, chipping away at all obstacles—local politics, rival spelunkers, exhaustion—as they delve into some of the last mysteries left on Earth. True adventure: man versus cave. Includes photographs, maps by Patricia Kambesis, and original line drawings by well-known illustrator Linda Heslop.

BEYOND MAMMOTH CAVE: A TALE OF OBSESSION IN THE WORLD’S LONGEST CAVE, by James D. Borden and Roger W. Brucker (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000)

 

BOOK LOVERS FICTION

In her sixth novel, Kathryn Davis’s gorgeous prose carries us to Varennes, a fictional town near the Canadian border where magical things are happening because of a thinning of the atmosphere. Mees is a 12-year-old who has psychic abilities; 92-year-old Helen has opinions on everything, and her son, Piet, is searching for a fifth wife; Billie is a newcomer who understands the strange goings-on and uses the redemptive power of love to stave off the evil that threatens the town. Davis’s masterful novel slips like quicksilver between reality and magic, gentle ribaldry and philosophical reflection.

THE THIN PLACE, by Kathryn Davis (Little, Brown, 2006)