Book Recs of the Day 8/14-9/3/2008
We’ve barely read a fraction of all the books we want to read. And yet one trembles in frustration at the thought of all the books that disappeared when the Library of Alexandria went up in flames, and all the books that have been lost since then: Nabokov’s Speak, America, which he didn’t live long enough to write; Shakespeare’s Loves Labours Won; the lost pages of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which were stolen by Algerian street urchins. All have disappeared, or, in some cases, never came to be; but at least Stuart Kelly has gathered all this nothingness together to show us what we’ve missed.
| THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS: AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF ALL THE GREAT BOOKS YOU’LL NEVER READ, by Stuart Kelly (Random House, 2006) |
This is Scott Smith’s first novel since his bestselling A Simple Plan, which Stephen King named the best suspense novel of the 1990s. In The Ruins, four young Americans on vacation in Cancún meet a German tourist named Mathias who persuades them to go with him in search of his brother, last seen heading for Mayan ruins in the jungle. The book is a page-turning tale of relentless, creeping suspense and continuing, building, screaming horror.
| THE RUINS, by Scott Smith (Knopf, 2006) |
THUMBS DOWN
Well-written scripts, nuanced acting, brilliant direction—who cares. Nothing is so satisfying as watching the slow-motion train wreck of Hollywood failure. In Fiasco, James Robert Parish tells the stories of 15 stupefying flops, starting with Cleopatra and ending with Town & Country, an $80-million loser starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. Remember The Postman and Waterworld? Ishtar and Battlefield Earth? How did they get made? How did Hollywood’s superstars and megadirectors not see disaster ahead? Parish serves up the gossip and the facts, the egos and the cost overruns, and the fallout these bombs rained on the careers of those involved.
| FIASCO: A HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD’S ICONIC FLOPS, by James Robert Parish (Wiley, 2006) |
FAVORITE AUTHOR
“[A] big, juicy middle-American apple pie of a book, sometimes tart but mostly sweet.”—Los Angeles Times
The author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café paints a portrait of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, from the 1940s through the 1990s. Flagg knows small-town America, and she knows how to create fascinating and colorful characters: Neighbor Dorothy, a local radio personality; her son, Cub Scout Bobby, who wins the annual bubble gum-blowing contest; Minnie Oatman, leader of the Oatman Family Southern Gospel Singers; mortician Cecil Figgs, who has a secret life. Standing in the Rainbow is a saga that is both heartfelt and humorous.
| STANDING IN THE RAINBOW, by Fannie Flagg (Ballantine Books, 2004) |
RETRIBUTION
Life is hard enough without those damned reply cards that fall out of your magazines, blaring car radios, Internet spam, and not being able to talk to an actual person when you call just about any business establishment. Ian Urbina’s collection of anecdotes about what the fed up have done to get a little retribution provides some gleeful amusement and a certain vicarious pleasure. It can also start a person thinking about what he can do to fight his own small battles.
| LIFE’S LITTLE ANNOYANCES: TRUE TALES OF PEOPLE WHO JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE, by Ian Urbina (Times Books, 2005) |
HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL
“I would welcome a friendship with Lynne Hinton. I would welcome an invitation to sit down at her table, but mostly I would welcome her next book.”—Maya Angelou
Here are five women who belong to the Hope Springs Community Church: There’s the self-doubting pastor; the town busybody; the one who has carried a torch for another woman; the only African-American in the church; and the pragmatic lady in whom everyone in town confides. They form a committee to make the church cookbook and in the process create a bond of love among themselves.
| FRIENDSHIP CAKE, by Lynne Hinton (HarperSanFrancisco, 2002) |
STRAVINSKY’S WAY
“Walsh, an academic musicologist who writes with the verve of a first-rate critic, never loses sight of the incandescent figure at its center.’”—The New Yorker
Though much has been written about this man, one of the 20th century’s greatest composers, this is the first truly definitive biography. Walsh’s research is thorough, and he includes much previously overlooked Russian-language material that helps us better understand Stravinsky’s influences.
| STRAVINSKY: A CREATIVE SPRING: RUSSIA AND FRANCE, 1882-1934, by Stephen Walsh (Knopf, 1999) | |
| STRAVINSKY: THE SECOND EXILE: FRANCE AND AMERICA, 1934-1971, by Stephen Walsh (Knopf, 2006) |
SCHOOL DAZE
Following on the huge success of Election, a darkly humorous tale of high-school politics, Joe College perfectly captures college life in the 1980s. Danny is a junior at Yale, though his life is far from cushy. He has to help his father operate the Roach Coach, a snackmobile, and they’re being harassed by the New Haven Mafia. Back home in New Jersey, sweet girlfriend Cindy is pregnant with his baby, while his sophisticated Yale honey is two-timing him with a professor. Jodie Foster sightings; bong hits and all-night philosophical bull sessions; bad food, too much beer, and way too much George Eliot still to read—Danny handles it all with understated heroism, and we’re cheering for him all the way.
| JOE COLLEGE, by Tom Perrotta (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001) |
POLYMATH
The title of this fascinating biography of Paul Erdős refers to the itinerant mathematician’s habit of traveling to colleagues’ homes and announcing, “My brain is open,” which meant he would be staying for a few weeks to gab about math before moving on to his next stop. Erdős grew up happily immersed in the elegant language of numbers in a culture that put a high value on such endeavors. Having escaped Hungary during the Holocaust, the prodigy, though employed for a time at Princeton along with Einstein, never settled down. He simply continued life as he knew it—one long conversation about his favorite subject. My Brain Is Open is an eminently readable, fascinating peek into a brilliant mind.
| MY BRAIN IS OPEN: THE MATHEMATICAL JOURNEYS OF PAUL ERDŐS, by Bruce Schechter (Simon & Schuster, 2000) |
OTHER WORLDS
Scottish author Hal Duncan weaves an epic story of a battle between good and evil spanning many centuries and several alternate realities. The Vellum is a sacred book that contains the keys to power and creation through a magical language that can scar the skin as well as the soul of the acolyte. What makes Vellum stand out from all the other fantasies about sacred books is Duncan’s truly mesmerizing, incantatory prose style and his firm grasp of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian myth, which holds everything together and taps into our collective archetypes.
| VELLUM: THE BOOK OF ALL HOURS, by Hal Duncan (Del Rey, 2006) |
UP MY SLEEVE
Author Jim Steinmeyer has designed some of the great stage illusions of our time for performers David Copperfield, The Pendragons, Doug Henning, and many others. He is also an indefatigable student of the history of magic and an engaging writer on the subject. In Art and Artifice, he combines history, biography, and technology to discuss how illusions are products of their time, reflecting current fashions and interests, as well as the personalities of their creators. Steele MacKaye, P. T. Selbit, and Charles Morritt are just a few of the illusionists discussed.
| ART AND ARTIFICE: AND OTHER ESSAYS OF ILLUSION, by Jim Steinmeyer; introduction by Neil Gaiman (Carroll & Graf, 2006) |
IT’S MAGIC
First-time author Susanna Clarke creates a world teeming with fantasy, magic, and history. Mr. Norrell is a scholar with a library of books on the lost fairy magic of England, and he’s determined to bring back their powers. He’s having some success—he’s even using his knowledge to help Wellington beat back Napoleon—when the charismatic and reckless Jonathan Strange appears with his own brand of magic. The odd pair join forces, but soon their differences pull them apart, and the elements they have unleashed make Napoleon’s evil look like child’s play.
| JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL, by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury USA, 2004) |
ROCK ME
Coleman makes a convincing and lively case that the “Fat Man,” with “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill,” was the real father of rock and roll—not the “King,” with “That’s All Right.” Race and pop-music history, New Orleans and Domino’s infectious spirit are intertwined in this story of music, women, gambling, and more music, written by a man who loves New Orleans and Domino almost equally. Biographies like this one keep great men, music, and cities alive in our memories.
| BLUE MONDAY: FATS DOMINO AND THE LOST DAWN OF ROCK ’N ROLL, by Rick Coleman (Da Capo Press, 2006) |
Suite Française has only two of five pieces that the author mapped out just months before her death in Auschwitz in 1942. Némirovsky, a Russian Jew who fled the Bolsheviks as a teen and became a respected novelist in France, intended the work to imitate the structure of a musical suite. Now, 60 years later, these two “movements” are being published with the author’s notebooks as an appendix.
| SUITE FRANÇAISE, by Irène Némirovsky; translated by Sandra Smith (Knopf, 2006) |
TRUE CRIME
Book lovers love true crime stories that involve forgeries and literary hoaxes, and this is one of the best. Sotheby’s offers a previously undiscovered poem of Emily Dickinson, and soon after a library buys it, it is exposed as a fake. The expert forger’s work had passed carbon-14 dating tests, but all his meticulous work can’t prevent his being charged with two murders committed in the pursuit of his strange craft. Worrall keeps us interested at every turn, using all the latest forensic and psychological tools in his arsenal.
| THE POET AND THE MURDERER: A TRUE STORY OF LITERARY CRIME AND THE ART OF FORGERY, by Simon Worrall (Plume, 2003) |
IT’S A MYSTERY
Davidson caters to your every need for fun, food, and summer reading in her series of bestselling mysteries involving Goldy Schultz, a caterer with a tendency to get into trouble. In this, the latest, Goldy has a nice gig with a local law firm, but cooking soon turns to sleuthing when Dusty, a friend who’s a paralegal at the firm, is murdered. Goldy investigates, which of course leads her to her employers and into some very hot water. Along the way, she and her family provide enjoyable company and toothsome recipes.
| DARK TORT: A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE (GOLDY BEAR CULINARY MYSTERIES), by Diane Mott Davidson (William Morrow, 2006) |
THE LAST WESTERN
In Telegraph Days, the author of Lonesome Dove takes on the mythical West with a twinkle in his eye. The heroine, Nellie Courtright (“twenty-two, kissable, and of an independent disposition”), experiences—and triumphs over—the West of dime novels and Buffalo Bill. She faces down Jesse James and witnesses the gunfight at the OK Corral. And in the end she lives to see the bang-’em-up celebration of the epic American West in the movies.
| TELEGRAPH DAYS, by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster, 2006) |
OUR TIMES
In this examination of America’s working poor, Shipler shows us a problem that defies easy answers. The working poor live all around us, from factory workers in Vermont to illegal farmhands in California to stock clerks at Wal-Mart. These hardworking people are one small paycheck away from destitution. Shipley shows us their plight with both statistics and stories and offers much to think about in the way of solutions. A well-written, important book that cries out for the nation’s attention.
| THE WORKING POOR: INVISIBLE IN AMERICA, by David K. Shipler (Vintage, 2005) |
| PUPPETRY: A WORLD HISTORY, by Eileen Blumenthal (Harry N. Abrams, 2005) |
PETER RABBIT’S CREATOR
This classic biography was reissued in 2001 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 2002. The shy author-artist was self-taught, taking her inspiration from the English countryside where she grew up. Peter Rabbit first appeared in Potter’s picture-letters to nephews and nieces. When her work was rejected by publishers, she published it herself. Success followed slowly but surely. The late Margaret Lane was herself a notable writer, who wrote with a style and restraint seldom found in today’s biographies.
| THE TALE OF BEATRIX POTTER, by Margaret Lane (1946; Frederick Warne, 2001) |
“Collinsworth is a master of the tart putdown . . . and an ace tweaker of the conventions of the romance novel. This assured book works on so many levels.”—Booklist (starred review)
Isabel is a publishing prodigy at 28, thanks to her mentor (based on legendary literary agent Candida Donadio) and a childhood spent in the refuge of books. She pursues author James Willoughby in spite of his reputation as a world-class prick, and the novel opens with her telling her psychiatrist about her attempt to murder him after 12 years of marriage.
| IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN WHAT HE SAID, by Eden Collinsworth (Arcade Publishing, 2006) |
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