Category Archives: Book

Best Reads of 2014

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2015-01-04 10.28.26This is the season when the lists of “Best Books” published in the previous year sprout like mushrooms after a wet week, and the Wall Street Journal has produced a handy consolidated list in different categories. (Scrolling down that web page I encountered the surprising revelation that Lena Dunham is “friend” of the WSJ.) Other lists take into account that people actually read books in years other than the one in which they are published, and this is one of those. I read and listened to 56 books last year, and here are the 11 very best: Links below are to my full reviews.

The Cowboy and the Cossack by Clair Huffaker – I hope I’ve worn you down sufficiently in my praise of this novel to make you give up and read it for yourself. An adventure tale when life was, if not without complexity, less ambiguous. As refreshing for today’s reader as cool morning air after a sleepless night in a smoke-filled room.

Down by the River by Charles Bowden – this nonfiction book describes the failings of the U.S. War on Drugs and the consequent destruction of Mexican society. In the 12 years since the book was written, the situation has worsened. Bowden died last summer, and my review includes links to remarkable reminiscences about his work and fearless character.

Miracle Boy and Other Stories by Pinckney Benedict – a collection of amazing short stories by an author whom I met recently at a celebration for his former teacher, Joyce Carol Oates. (Got his autograph, too.) Benedict’s viewfinder is just one click away from reality as you see it. Unforgettable.

Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling – caught up in Monuments Men fever, I found this novel hit just the right note of adventure story, intellectual interest, and writing style. A bit of a sleeper.

His Excellency George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis – historian Ellis set out to write a readable, not over-long biography of Washington and for the first time succeeded in making him interesting—no, fascinating—to me.

The Fragrant Harbor by Vida Chu – I would read more poetry if it were as satisfying as the work in this slim volume. Poems to revisit and savor.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris – a novelization of the Dreyfus case, in which anti-Semitism ran amok in late 19th c. France. I never could keep straight what this case was all about. I’ve got it now.

The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor – having spent so much time in Upper Canada (Ontario), I was captivated by historian Taylor’s descriptions of the motivations and tactics of people on both sides of the St. Lawrence. A much more interesting war than you probably think (!).

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy – To preserve my mental health, I allow myself only one Cormac McCarthy novel per year, given his bleak plots and searing (here’s a case when that word legitimately applies) writing style. Wouldn’t have missed it.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – Some readers found this novel hard to follow. I listened to it, which can make continuity problems even more difficult, but had no trouble. A contemplation on “how things might have been different,” from the perspective of a hall of mirrors. The author must have cornered her local market in post-it notes.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – OK, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has received mixed reactions, and it’s the only Big Book on this list (Big also in terms of its 775 pages). I’ve read and liked her other books, and I liked this one a lot. Especially Boris. See if you don’t end up speaking with a Russian accent . . .

Off to a great reading start in 2015, with four new book reviews to post soon.

The Book Behind The Imitation Game

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Benedict Cumberbatch, Enigma, The Imitation GameIn wide release this Christmas will be the new film The Imitation Game (trailer), eagerly awaited by all serious fans of cryptography, World War II history-Bletchley Park division, spy stories, the invention of computers, and Benedict Cumberbatch. (My review of the movie.)Last week the author of the book on which the movie is based, Andrew Hodges, spoke here in Princeton. Hodges’s book—“one of the finest biographies of a scientific genius ever written,” said the Los Angeles Times reviewer—is Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film “The Imitation Game” published in 1983 by Princeton University Press, which is congratulating itself heartily over its three-decades’-ago decision.

As you may recall, Alan Turing was the young British scientist (incorrect to label him a mathematical genius, because part of his brilliance was in blending fields—logic, engineering, biology, and mathematics) who led the successful efforts to break the Nazi naval codes in World War II. The machine created to do this was an early computer, and a paper Turing wrote in 1936 laid the foundation for the theory of computer science, by imagining a field that previously did not exist.

In Princeton in 1936-38, he worked on speech-scrambling technology. His interest in these diverse topics led him to an interest in ciphers and artificial intelligence, and these interests led not just to the Turing Test (“the imitation game”), but to Bletchley Park and the team of scientists there. Turing’s pivotal role in the Allied accomplishment, like most information about the unraveling of the Germans’ Enigma machine, was not revealed until the 1970s. Hodges said some of his theories about the connection between mathematics and biology were so advanced they are only now receiving attention in science.

Turing’s homosexuality caused few problems in the tolerant environment of King’s College, Oxford, but after the war, that changed. He held vast amounts of wartime secrets in his head, and it was a period of intense anti-Soviet paranoia. The authorities worried about his vulnerability. He died at age 42 of cyanide poisoning, and Hodges believes the coroner’s conclusion that his death was suicide, although the pressure that may have been brought to bear on him is unknown. He left just enough mystery about his death that his mother could console herself it was one of his science experiments gone wrong and conspiracy speculators could ever since consider it part of the enigma.

***Blood, Bones & Butter

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Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood Bones & Butter

(photo: author)

By Gabrielle Hamilton – An engaging memoir that chronicles the author’s intense relationship with food, from her upbringing with a French mother and artist/set designer father, her falsifying her age to work in New Jersey kitchens starting at age 14, her drug-riddled stints as a bar waitress and catering kitchen dynamo, to the opening of her own restaurant in the East Village. That restaurant became the mini-phenomenon known as Prune, helped bring home-style cooking into vogue. In 2011, Hamilton received the James Beard award as New York City’s best chef.

The book describes Hamilton’s difficult relations with her mother and husband, but it’s never clear what the source of these difficulties is, why the relationships deteriorated as they did, or, rather, why she let them drift. Her essential alone-ness appears to be the strongest strain in her character.

I enjoyed this book’s lack of typical foodie descriptions, though it is over-the-top in its own way, determined not to, ahem, sugar-coat kitchen proceedings. She’s a compelling writer, with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and winner of the James Beard book award for writing and literature in 2012. Power on the page gets you past some of the unsavory spots, and it was well received. Legendary chef Anthony Bourdain calls the book “simply the best memoir by a chef ever.”

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Winners’ Circle Too Tight?

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Japanese print, road, stream

Flanagan’s book’s title is from a 17th c. Japanese epic poem (photo: wikimedia.org)

The day after the U.K.’s prestigious Man Booker Prize longlist was announced last summer, UK publisher Tom Chalmers expressed his doubts. While he noted the importance of book prizes as “an increasingly key route through which to discover and champion the best writers, to elevate and highlight the brilliant above the masses of books now being published every year,” they too often fall short, he thinks, by making safe choices.

Still, he pointed to a couple of happy exceptions: the 2013 Costa Book of the Year Award that went to The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer and the Bailey’s Women Prize for Fiction that went to A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride.

Unfortunately, this year’s Man Booker longlist caused him to make “a quick check of the calendar to confirm I was still in 2014. In fact, in this Millennium.” Last year’s Man Booker prize was the 826-page doorstop The Luminaries, by Elizabeth Catton, while the big U.S. prize, the Pulitzer, went to Donna Tartt’s 784-page The Goldfinch, an award promptly subjected to rampant second-guessing (though not as much as the consternation in the U.S. literary world in 2012, when the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded no fiction prize at all). I read and liked both of these Big Books, anomalous as they are in a world where 350 pages seems the upper limit on publishers’ risk-taking.

As for the Booker, Chalmers doesn’t object to the new addition of U.S. authors to the pool of potential longlistees—though some of the prize-winning authors do, feeling people from smaller Commonwealth nations will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Americans. Case in point: The 2014 winner, Richard Flanagan, is from Tasmania, which most Americans couldn’t find on a map. He won with a book about World War II, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, based on his father’s experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war. (Flanagan dedicated the book to his father, who died the day he was told the book was finally finished.)

Chalmers does object to the rules change that allows automatic entries for previous winners. And he notes the selection committee’s neglect of independent publishers. These factors shift the prize toward the familiar, the safe, when it should be “discovering and highlighting the most exciting, dynamic and talented writing.” I want the winnowing role played by awards judges to help me find the best-written books. It will be disappointing if it becomes just an insiders’ club.

Halloween Reads

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pumpkin, Halloween

(photo: pixabay)

Book lovers have been compiling their favorite scary reads for this season, and here are 10 culled from Book Riot and various other sources:

  • Snowblind by Christopher Golden – phone calls from dead people, missing children
  • The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon (this one was on some other lists, too) – poor housing choice
  • The Woman in Black by Susan Hill – (film starred Daniel Radcliffe) stay away from Eel Marsh House
  • The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero– from gothic to “wickedly twisted treasure hunt”
  • Booster & Reeves: The Night of the Revenants by Troy Blackford – both terrifying and laugh-out-loud funny
  • We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory – a support group of survivors of stuff “too crazy to be true”
  • The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers – classic inspiration for much that has come after, including last spring’s tv series True Detective
  • Song of Kali by Dan Simmons – on several lists, takes place in the dark (in every sense) setting of Calcutta
  • The Boy Who Drew Monsters by Keith Donohue – art not only imitates but becomes life
  • Pet Sematary by Stephen King – a horror classic; even King thought it “too scary”
  • And here’s a bonus link to Neil Gaiman talking about the value of scary stories

The links are to Amazon.com for convenience, but, as always, I encourage you to do business with your local independent bookstore!

11-1-14 A Mysterious Conversation

10-28-14 ****Bastard Out of Carolina

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Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison, Southern gothicBy Dorothy Allison – The West Windsor Library’s annual book sale is where I stock up on books I should have read a long time ago. Set in Greenville, South Carolina, this debut novel, published in 1992, was probably somewhat more shocking as a tale of parental oversight and abuse at the time, and so beautifully written it’s no surprise it was a National Book Award finalist. It remains a powerful and empathetic portrayal of class and gender differences in the 1950’s.

Prior to this book, Allison had published two volumes of poetry sharing the same main title, The Women Who Hate Me, and it’s interesting how she’s able to tamp that back and stay in the voice of the pre-teen first-person narrator, Ruth Anne Boatwright, whom everyone calls Bone, even as she reveals great depth and precision of language. Bone both lovingly and mercilessly describes the hard-drinking, violence-prone Boatwright men and the frustrated and hard-working Boatwright women. They may be poor—“trash” people call them and they call themselves—but they are tender toward Bone and her only thin protection against her mother’s new husband.

You may be familiar with the 1996 movie version of the novel, but I haven’t seen it. Anjelica Huston directed, and it starred Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ron Eldard, Christina Ricci, and Dermot Mulroney. Jena Malone played Bone. A 100% critics rating from Rotten Tomatoes!

10-24-14 ***Still Life with Bread Crumbs

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Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread CrumbsBy Anna Quindlen (2014). Unanimity in my first book club meeting about this book—thin, unrevealing, wish fulfillment for 60-year-olds. This was my first Quindlen, so I was glad to hear from others who’ve read many more of her books that this one is an aberration. It’s the story of a dyed-in-the-wool Manhattan photographer, age 60, who moves to an upstate New York cabin to save money while she sublets her apartment.

The man who comes to evict the raccoons in her attic happens to be very handy around the house, in more ways than one, and her biggest quandary is whether to succumb to someone 15 years her junior. There are a few more plot elements, most of which lack believability, as does the portrayal of small-town life. But it’s well-written and an easy read for a day when you’re not up to much of a challenge.

I don’t scoff at reading for entertainment, but the “everything tied up neatly at the end with a bow on it” resolution strained my patience. The book group debated whether this was pure chick lit—I say “yes.”

Mysteriously, it was well reviewed. NPR said Quindlen “still has her finger firmly planted on the pulse of her generation.” Not so the 20 members of her generation in my book club. They were particularly riled by Joanna Rakoff’s New York Times review, which called the book “a feminist novel for a post-feminist age.” What could that possibly mean? Especially applied to a character notable for not taking charge of her life in any plausible way.

This is a book you can skim. It’s kind of like eating a Dunkin Donuts cruller. You know there’s no sustenance there, but if you’re in the right mood, it might taste pretty good.

****Alice

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Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Stacy CorderyBy Stacy A. Cordery – Drawing on diaries and personal papers previously unavailable to biographers and scholars, this detailed portrait of Alice Roosevelt Longworth reveals a woman passionate in her opinions who kept herself in the middle of Washington’s political scene for eight decades. Although she’s known as a wit and for her legendary skewering of political figures, especially her disdain for the Hyde Park Roosevelts—Franklin for his politics and Eleanor for, well, being Eleanor—it was her ability to converse on any subject, her vivacious style, and her political acumen that made her parties the refuge of Washingtonians in and out of office. When the Kennedys invited Pablo Casals to the White House, they seated Alice next to him, and the two talked about his previous visit there, in 1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was President.

Alice was 16 when her family moved into the White House in 1901, following the assassination of William McKinley. The media and the public fell in love with this high-spirited teenager and soon dubbed her Princess Alice. When Teddy Roosevelt received complaints about her behavior, he said, “I can be President of the United States—or—I can attend to Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” Nevertheless, when she was only twenty-one he sent her as a goodwill ambassador on a four-month East Asia trip where she impressed the 75-person U.S. delegation as well as the leaders of the countries visited. It was a remarkable transition from teenage party girl to trusted political adviser, a shift made in large part to gain the elusive attention of her adored father.

Ultimately she was just too smart to for him to ignore. And from Teddy Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter, few Presidents did, even when they disagreed with her strongly held views. For Republicans, as Cordery says, she was “part court jester, part Machiavelli.” Not surprisingly, Richard Nixon found her “the most fascinating conversationalist of our time.” An autodidact, she read incessantly, could recite poetry by the yard, and could converse easily about history, science, philosophy, and first, last, and always, politics. She opposed the League of Nations and entry into World War II, yet socially she was liberal. The famous needlepoint pillow that read, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me” shows she was good-humored about her jibes, and she did rip off some good one-liners. When told the nomination of Wendell Willkie as the Republican presidential candidate in 1940 came from the grassroots, she melded her quick wit and political savvy, saying, “Yes, from the grassroots of 10,000 country clubs.”

Unfortunately, the men in her life never achieved the high ambitions she had for them. Her father lost his 1912 presidential bid and died before he could make a comeback. Her brother Ted lost a close race for New York State governor, was appointed Governor of Puerto Rico and Governor-General of the Philippines, and died in France in World War II after heroic action on Utah Beach. Alice’s husband Nick was Speaker of the House, but further career advancement suffered from the combination of alcoholism and womanizing. And long-time lover Idaho Senator William Borah (father of Alice’s only child) repeatedly missed opportunities for national leadership through a stubbornness of personality. As Janet Maslin in her New York Times review put it, “However fraught her relationships with men may have been, politics remained her first love.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth died in 1980 at age 96.

Cordery chairs the history department at Monmouth College in Illinois and obtained access to the remarkable cache of personal documents that informed this biography through Alice’s granddaughter, with whom Alice had an unusually close relationship. This biography would appeal to anyone interested in 20th century U.S. political history or feisty women!

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**** The Golden Hour

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Todd Moss, diplomacy, thriller,The Golden HourBy Todd Moss (sounds like a nom de plume, doesn’t it?). Read by Peter Marek. This was the best, most realistic (to me!) political thriller I’ve read in recent months. For a first-time novel, impressive. I bought it after reading this Washington Post profile of Washington insider Moss. The book tells the story of an Amherst academic, Judd Ryker, who develops a theory that the period for action after a military coup is limited—just a few days—otherwise the usurpers will be too entrenched and it will be impossible to easily get rid of them and reestablish the (presumably) more legitimate government. He calls this period “the golden hour,” taking the name from emergency medicine and the limited period after a massive traumatic injury in which medical treatment is most likely to avoid death. Ryker is recruited by the State Department to test his theory in real life and promptly ignored.

The book is not only about a newbie in the shark tank of seasoned diplomats, a coup in Mali, the kidnapping of a powerful Senator’s daughter, and U.S. security imperatives, but also about finding out whom you can trust. I liked that the main character isn’t an armed-to-the-teeth master of 20 forms of martial arts. He’s just a guy, a very smart guy, using his wits. He doesn’t meet up with a woman character as a flimsy excuse for the author to write a couple of steamy sex scenes. He doesn’t make decisions that had me silently screaming, “Why are you DOING that?” He doesn’t fall predictably off the wagon–a dead giveaway that things are going to go very wrong. Instead, he goes quietly about his business, calls his wife, checks on his kids at the beach, and learns who his friends really are. When he makes one most fateful decision, you understand he makes it based on his principles, not the external exigencies of the author’s plot.

Thriller writer John Sandford called it “A tough, realistic, well-written tale of American diplomats scrambling to reverse an African coup amidst intense turf battles – State, Defense, White House, Congress, and CIA – and ever-shifting facts on the ground. Moss is an insider who knows how these things are really done – and how thin the line is between triumph and disaster.”

The narration may make Judd sound a drop more tentative than necessary, but Marek’s portrayal of the African characters and military were beautiful. Awesome first book by Todd Moss. First of a series.

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* The Highway

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By C.J. Box – I met this popular and award-winning thriller author at a conference two years ago, and he was so highly praised there, I figured I was missing something by CJ Box, The Highwaynot having read any of his books. I still am. Box, a Wyoming native, sets his books in the West, with his series character, Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden. This book (a gift) isn’t part of that series, and it was a real disappointment. The book is told through the eyes of several of the characters, including long-haul trucker Ronald Pergram, who calls himself the Lizard King, for his well developed schemes for trapping, torturing, and murdering “lot lizards,” the prostitutes who prowl the parking areas of the big Interstate truck stops—and any other women he comes across when the need to “go hunting” overtakes him.

Being inside the head of this character and privy to his disturbed (and not very original) thoughts is some especially sordid category of TMI. It’s a relief when Box switches to the point of view of the women in the story. We follow Cassie Dewell, a new Investigator for the Lewis and Clark County (Montana) Sheriff’s Department. Inexperienced and unsure of herself, she ends up alone on the trail of disappeared teen sisters—disappeared, as the reader knows, by Pergram. And parts of the story are told from the perspective of the younger of the sisters, sixteen-year-old Gracie Sullivan. Box handles girl teen-speak rather well, and the girls seem plausible enough, as is Cassie.

The book doesn’t lack for tension. During the early scenes in which Pergram is chasing down the girls’ little red car in his 80,000-pound Peterbilt (teach your daughters to pay attention to the “check engine” light!), I wasn’t sure I could keep reading. A number of Amazon readers’ comments show mine was a common reaction: “I almost took an early exit from ‘The Highway.’” “I hope that ‘The Highway’ was just the result of [Box] taking a wrong turn on a bad day.” “I love the Pickett series, but I just couldn’t stomach this one.” I may have to try again.

The West is a great place to live in, but Ronald Pergram’s head is not.