Reading List
No stars -- Skip it. One star -- Worth reading if you are interested in the
writer or subject.
Two stars -- I enjoyed it. Three stars -- Highly recommended. Four stars --
Read it now!
Five stars -- Shame on me for not having read this book before now.
J. G. Farrell – The Singapore
Grip****
Nuala O’Faolain –
Are You Somebody?***
Alexandra Fuller – Scribbling
the Cat***
Alberto Manguel -- The Library at Night***
E. L. Doctorow – The
March***
Robert Louis Stevenson
– Treasure Island (again)****
Alice Sebold – The
Almost Moon**
Anthony Doerr – The
Shell Collector***
Robert Stone – Prime
Green***
Anthony Doerr – About
Grace***
John Hollander – A
Draft of Light**
Duong Thu Huong –
Paradise of the Blind**
Cormac McCarthy – Blood
Meridian (second reading)****
Carl Hiassen – Skinny Dip**
Claire Messud – The
Emperor’s Childen**
Kiran Desai – The
Inheritance of Loss***
Margaret Atwood – The
Blind Assassin***
Thomas Pynchon –
Against the Day****
James Attlee –
Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey**
Gary Shteyngart –
Absurdistan***
Cormac McCarthy – The
Road****
Alan Greenspan – The
Age of Turbulence***
Italo Calvino – Mr.
Palomar****
Milan Kundera -- Life is Elsewhere***
Charlotte Bronte -- Villette****
Philip Roth -- Exit Ghost***
William Trevor -- Cheating at Canasta***
Ravi Howard -- Like Trees, Walking***
Kazuo Ishiguro -- Never Let Me Go***
Sara Gruen -- Water for Elephants**
Julia Glass -- Three Junes**
Will Allison -- What You Have Left**
Zadie Smith -- On Beauty***
Diane Setterfield -- The Thirteenth Tale**
Charles Portis -- Dog of the South**
Ellen Crosby -- The Merlot Murders**
Katherine Neville -- The Eight**
Anthony Doerr -- Four Seasons in Rome***
Aimee Bender -- An Invisible Sign of My Own***
James Deetz -- Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation
1619-1864***
Haruki Murakami -- After Dark***
Haruki Murakami -- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle****(second reading)
Michael Frayn -- Headlong**
Chaim Potok -- The Chosen***
Joshua Ferris -- And then We Came to the End**
Thomas Keneally -- Confederates**
Ted Sargent -- The Dance of the Molecules***
Beppe Severgnini -- La Bella Figura**
Suzanne Jones (ed.) -- Growing up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern
Literature***
Warren St. John -- Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer**
Bill Watterson -- The Complete Calvin and Hobbes****
E.O. Wilson -- Naturalist****
Glyn Maxwell -- The Breakage**
James Michener -- The Drifters**(first read 35 years ago)
P.D. James -- The Lighthouse**
Hampton Sides -- Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West**
Miltos Sachtouris -- Poems 1945-1971**
Karin Alvtegen -- Shame**
Allan Gurganus -- White People***
Thomas Hardy -- The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales***
T. C. Boyle -- A Friend of the Earth**
Colin Tudge -- The Tree***
Sam Harris -- Letter to a Christian Nation**
Zoe Heller -- What Was She Thinking?***
Joseph 0'Connor -- Star of the Sea**
Haruki Murakami -- Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman****
Louise Gluck -- The Seven Ages***
Jack Bass -- Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Frank M. Johnson, Jr.***
Mark Childress -- One Mississippi****
Marilynne Robinson -- Gilead****
Alexandra Fuller -- Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight***
Kingsley Amis -- The Anti-Death League***
Kingsley Amis -- That Uncertain Feeling***
Tim O'Brien -- The Things They Carried***
Ann Beattie -- Follies***
Edward St. Aubyn -- Mother's Milk***
Salman Rushdie -- Imaginary Homelands***
Edward St. Aubyn -- Never Mind/Bad News/Some Hope***
Honore de Balzac -- The Black Sheep****
Nicholson Baker -- U and I***
Mark Twain -- Innocents Abroad****
Jack Pendarvis -- The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure***
Nicholson Baker -- Checkpoint***
Brenda Wineapple -- Hawthorne: A Life***
James Fenton -- Out of Danger**
Thomas Rabbitt -- The Abandoned Country***
A. R. Ammons -- Bosh and Flapdoodle****
Nadine Gordimer -- Loot***
Khaled Hosseini -- The Kite Runner**
Dai Sijie -- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress**
Peter Carey -- True History of the Kelly Gang***
Phillip Roth -- The Plot Against America***
Cormac McCarthy -- No Country for Old Men****
Salman Rushdie -- Shalimar the Clown***
Andrzej Stasiuk -- Tales of Galicia***
Tom Wolfe -- I Am Charlotte Simmons**
Banana Yoshimoto -- Hardboiled & Hard Luck**
Orhan Pamuk -- Snow**
Ha Jin -- War Trash**
Mark Haddon -- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time**
Elmore Leonard -- Mr. Paradise**
Sue Miller -- Lost in the Forest**
Ian McEwan -- Saturday****
Erik Larson -- The Devil in the White City**
W. G. Sebald -- Campo Santo***
Nelson DeMille -- Night Fall*
Ian McEwan -- Atonement***
Joe Parisi (ed.) -- The Poetry Anthology (1912-2002)****
Toni Morrison -- Love***
Ward Just -- An Unfinished Season***
Alan Hollinghurst -- The Line of Beauty***
Haruki Murakami -- Kafka on the Shore****
Mark Helprin -- The Pacific and other Stories****
Helen Vendler -- Poets Thinking***
Philip Levine -- Breath***
Henry James -- The Ambassadors****
A bit closer in age to Lambert Strether than I was when I first read this
novel, I finally gave James's late novel the attention (and perhaps the
maturity) it deserves.
Julian Barnes -- Staring at the Sun**
Martin Amis -- Yellow Dog**
DBC Pierre -- Vernon God Little**
Silauro, Gleisner, Sitch -- Molvania**
Roger Collins -- Spain: Archaeological Guide***
Michael Knight -- Goodnight, Nobody**
Carlos Eire -- Waiting for Snow in Havana**
Tracy Chevalier -- Girl with the Pearl Earring**
Ezra Pound -- Poems and Translations***
Eudora Welty -- On William Faulkner***
John Brockman(ed.) -- Then New Humanists: science at the edge***
J.D. McClatchy (ed.) -- The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry***
T.C. Boyle -- Drop City**
Juan Enriquez -- As the Future Catches You**
Felix Dennis -- A Glass Half Full*
Virginia Postrel -- The Substance of Style*
Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code**
Caroline Moorehead -- Iris Origo**
Yann Martel -- Life of Pi***
June Osborne -- Urbino: The Story of a Renaissance City***
Haruki Murakami -- The Elephant Vanishes***
Ann Patchett -- Bel Canto**
Don DeLillo -- Cosmopolis**
W.G. Sebald -- On the Natural History of Destruction***
Joan Didion -- Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11***
Le Thi Diem Thuy -- The Gangster We Are All Looking For**
Meg Wolitzer -- The Wife**
Norman Rush -- Mortals****
Norman Rush -- Whites***
John Irving -- The Fourth Hand*
Jared Diamond -- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies***
Harrison Forman -- Through Forbidden Tibet**
J.M Coetzee -- Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999***
Vaclav Havel -- Letters to Olga**
Kazuo Ishiguro -- When We Were Orphans**
David Lodge -- Nice Work**
Haruki Murakami -- After the Quake***
James Ellroy -- The Cold Six Thousand**
Tim Parks -- A Season with Verona**
Hampton Sides -- Ghost Soldiers**
W.G. Sebald -- After Nature****
Alice Sebold -- The Lovely Bones**
Edna O'Brien -- Down by the River***
Iva Pekarkova -- Gimme the Money**
Beppe Severgnini -- Ciao, America!**
Douglas Adams -- The Salmon of Doubt**
Heinrich Boll -- Stories****
Iris Origo -- Leopardi: A Study in Solitude***
Ha Jin -- Wreckage***
Iva Pekarkova -- The World is Round**
Philip Roth -- The Prague Orgy***
Iva Pekarkova -- Truck Stop Rainbows***
Alison Weir -- Eleanor of Aquitaine**
Jonathan Franzen -- The Corrections**
Nelson DeMille -- Up Country**
Josef Skvorecky -- The Engineer of Human Souls****
Will Self -- Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys***
Bohumil Hrabal -- I Served the King of England****
Philip Roth -- The Human Stain****
Saul Bellow -- Ravelstein*
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- "We Never Make Mistakes": Two Short
Novels***
Evelyn Waugh -- Collected Stories***
W.G. Sebald -- The Emigrants****
W.G. Sebald -- Austerlitz****
Nadine Gordimer--The Pickup***
W.G. Sebald -- The Rings of Saturn****
W.G. Sebald -- Vertigo****
Robert Byron -- The Road to Oxiana****
Salman Rushdie -- Haroun and the Sea of Stories****
Nick Hornby -- How to be Good***
Adam Gopnik -- Paris to the Moon***
Michael Chabon -- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay***
James Merrill -- Collected Poems**
Wendell Berry -- Jayber Crow**
Janet Fitch -- White Oleander**
Salman Rushdie -- Fury***
Michael Cunningham -- The Hours***
Matthew Kneale -- English Passengers***
Anne Tyler -- Back When We Were Grownups**
Geoffrey Hill -- Speech! Speech!***
A. M. Homes -- Music For Torching**
Kate Daniels -- Four Testimonies***
Leonardo Sciascia -- To Each His Own***
Keith Ridgway -- Standard Time***
Philip Roth -- The Dying Animal***
Haruki Murakami -- Underground***
Jack Kerouac -- The Dharma Bums***
James Kelman -- The Good Life***
J. M. Coetzee -- Disgrace***
Haruki Murakami -- Sputnik Sweetheart****
Chris Ware -- Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth**
Hugh Ragsdale -- The Russian Tragedy: The Burden of History***
Haruki Murakami -- Hear the Wind Sing**
John David Morley -- The Anatomy Lesson***
Haruki Murakami -- Pinball, 1973***
Haruki Murakami -- Norwegian Wood****
A new translation of a major novel from the mid-80s
Sarah Bird -- The Yokota Officer's Club***
Tom Stoddard -- Turnaround: Bear Bryant's First Year at Alabama**
Anton Chekhov -- Seven Short Novels*****
Walter Pater -- Greek Studies***
Elizabeth Gaskell -- Ruth***
I've decided to fill in some gaps in my 19th-century reading for a while. My
favorite Gaskell works are Cranford, Cousin Phyllis, and Wives and Daughters.
Vladimir Nabokov -- Speak, Memory****
Salman Rushdie -- Shame****
Rushdie's great novel on Pakistan, written between Midnight's Children and
Satanic Verses.
Iain Pears -- Giotto's Hand*
Jane Hamilton -- Disobedience***
The Novellino, or One Hundred Ancient Tales (ed. Consoli)**
Italo Calvino -- The Road to San Giovanni***
Joanne Harris -- Chocolat**
Southerland and Brown -- The Federal Road**
Richard Hughes -- Fox in the Attic, The Wooden Shepherdess, High Wind in
Jamaica***
E. B. White -- Here is New York***
J. R. Ackerley -- Hindoo Holiday**
Ted Hughes (trans.) -- Tales from Ovid****
Mark Cocker -- Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conflict with Tribal
Peoples***
Seamus Heaney (trans.) -- Beowulf**
Robert Lacey -- The Year 1000**
Iris Murdoch -- Jackson's Dilemma**
A. S. Byatt -- Babel's Tower***
Tom Stoppard -- The Real Thing***
Louis de Bernieres -- Senor Vivo & the Coca Lord*
Anthony Bourdain -- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary
Underbelly*
Don DeLillo -- Mao II***
Iris Murdoch -- The Sandcastle**
An early novel I hadn't read before, about a schoolmaster tempted by a young
painter. My favorite Murdoch novels are The Sea, The Sea, Nuns and Soldiers,
and A Severed Head.
Kiran Desai -- Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard**
Ron Chernow -- Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.**
Thomas Friedman -- The Lexus and the Olive Tree***
Clyde Edgerton -- Where Trouble Sleeps**
Zadie Smith -- White Teeth***
John Bayley -- Iris and Her Friends**
James Ellroy -- The Black Dahlia*
Ha Jin -- Waiting***
Barry Unsworth -- After Hannibal**
Iain Sinclair -- Lights Out for the Territory**
Keith Ridgway -- The Long Falling***
Louis de Bernieres -- Corelli's Mandolin***
Alex Garland -- The Tesseract**
Hermann Broch -- The Sleepwalkers***
Paul Bowles -- The Sheltering Sky***
Nadine Gordimer -- The House Gun***
Samuel Butler -- The Way of All Flesh***
Geoffrey Scott -- The Architecture of Humanism**
Ford Madox Ford -- Return to Yesterday**
Robert Robinson -- Landscape with Dead Dons**
James Kelman -- How Late it Was, How Late****
Don DeLillo -- Underworld***
Carrie Brown -- Rose's Garden**
Paul Fussell -- The Anti-Egotist**
Carlo Levi -- Christ Stopped at Eboli**
Norman Lewis -- Naples '44**
Barry Unsworth -- Morality Play**
Alice McDermott -- Charming Billy***
Yasunari Kawabata -- The House of the Sleeping Beauties**
Iain Pears -- An Instance of the Fingerpost***
Cathleen Schine -- Rameau's Niece**
John Bayley -- Elegy for Iris ***
Melissa Bank -- The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing**
Cathleen Schine -- The Evolution of Jane**
Granta****
It bears repeating that this is my favorite journal, and I'm working my way
through the back issues of 1983-85, when I wasn't a subscriber. Grass,
Garcia-Marquez, Fenton, Gordimer, Kundera, and dozens of others, with essays
and stories that are amazingly timeless given the dramatic times in which they
were written.
Haruki Murakami -- South of the Border, West of the Sun****
Murakami hit his stride in the past two years. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is
his best novel so far, broader in historical scope than his previous novels,
but still uncompromisingly quirky, determined to stretch narrative boundaries.
This book, quiet, brief, melancholy, a story of love and self-knowledge,
reminds me of Kawabata at his best, and would be a good place to begin an
exploration of Murakami's work.
Arthur Golden -- Memoirs of a Geisha**
Robert Stone -- Damascus Gate***
Salman Rushdie -- The Ground Beneath Her Feet****
With this sprawling fantasy that somehow manages to sum up pretty much all
that has happened on the political and cultural fronts in the past forty years,
a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the world of rock and roll,
Rushdie cements for me his status as the finest novelist of the last quarter of
this century. No one attempts such grand enterprises with such playfulness. In
the four or five great novels Rushdie has written, he builds on the narrative
inventions and use of fantasy and myth of the modernists, Pynchon, and the
latin American magical realists. At his best, he achieves Coleridge's aim for
the use of imaginative literature--the power of the "secondary
imagination."
Fyodor Dostoevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov*****
Finally. For several years, I've said this is the only "great"
novel I've never been able to finish. So now I am fully educated. This book is
much odder, much less staid and didactic than the first 100 pages (and the
famously excerpted Grand Inquisitor section) lead you to expect. Opening myself
to the peculiar details, the side plots, the shifting viewpoints on character
and action, helped me really enjoy reading Dostoevsky for the first time.
Joe McGinniss -- The Miracle of Castel di Sangro**
A year in the life of an small town soccer team in Italy.
Martin Amis -- Night Train***
A startling departure for Amis, bringing together one of his best character
studies with one of his best meditations on the value of life versus the
entropic universe, all masked as a cop story.
Martin Amis -- Heavy Water**
Short stories, entertaining, original, but light compared to his fine recent
novels, The Information, London Fields, and Time's Arrow, which I highly
recommend.
Barbara Kingsolver -- The Poisonwood Bible***
An evangelist and his family in the Congo, told, for the most part, from the
viewpoint of the four daughters. Constantly surprising, and often revolutionary
in its politics, its view of family relations, and its ecology.
Lorrie Moore -- Birds of America**
Charles Frazier -- Cold Mountain***
Though bored with the Civil War, and deeply sceptical of Appalachian
Agrarian idylls, I found Frazier's work beautifully written and fresh in
characterization. Best, I think, is the Ruby subplot. Essentially creates a
female Huck and redeems old Pap.
Graham Greene -- The Quiet American**
Re-read as the Balkans war broke out. Not Greene's best (Heart of the
Matter, I think, is one of the century's wisest novels), but instructive in
these times.
Richard Ford -- The Sportswriter**
Ian McEwan -- Black Dogs*
Iris Origo -- Merchant of Prato****
Iris Origo -- Images and Shadows****
Iris Origo -- War Comes to the Val D'Orcia****
Michael Ennis -- Duchess of Milan**
Ian McEwan -- Enduring Love***
Ian McEwan -- Amsterdam**
Sheri Reynolds -- The Rapture of Canaan***
George Garrett -- Death of the Fox***
Tom Wolfe -- A Man in Full**
I can't remember reading a good book that falls apart so completely in its
final chapters. Lapses in editing throughout.
Tim O'Brien -- Tomcat in Love***
James Breslin -- Mark Rothko: A Biography***
Helen Fielding -- Bridget Jones's Diary**
John Irving -- A Widow for One Year***
Francine du Plessix Gray -- At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life***
James Jones -- From Here to Eternity***
Lorrie Moore -- Anagrams***
As you can tell, I've been on a binge reading of this author. I've always
liked Moore's stories as I've read them in journals, and was hooked after I
read Who Will Run the Frog Hospital a couple of years ago. I finally got
around to reading more of her this month. The novella that ends this volume,
"The Nun of That", will knock you for several loops.
Salman Rushdie -- The Jaguar Smile: a Nicaraguan Journey**
Lorrie Moore -- Like Life***
Tim Parks -- An Italian Education***
Lorrie Moore -- Self Help**
Tim Parks -- Europa***
Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain*****
I read this novel some 18 years ago for one of Tony Winner's marvelous
courses in the history of European fiction, but I must admit that I skimmed it,
found it less vital, less gripping than one of my favorite novels, Mann's
Buddenbrooks. On this reading, I took my time. Without a doubt, this is one of
the four or five major books of the century, though it will not be to every
taste. A brilliantly playful narrative point of view lays bare the history and
soul of Europe as it bears down on the frivolous horror of World War I.
Alternately hilarious and terrifying, lyrical and mystical, The Magic Mountain,
when savored slowly, transforms the genre of the bildungsroman forever.
Seamus Heaney -- The Spirit Level****
Naomi Wolf -- Promiscuities*
Haruki Murakami -- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle****
Nicholson Baker -- The Everlasting Story of Nory**
John Updike -- Toward the End of Time***
Peter Hoeg -- Woman and Ape***
Anna Quindlen -- One True Thing**
Charles Wright -- Black Zodiac***
A. R. Ammons -- Brink Road***
Milan Kundera--The Unbearable Lightness of Being*****
Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting is one of my favorite short novels
of the 80's, and the movie version of Lightness is one of my favorite films of
the 80's, but I never got around to reading the novel. I'm sure I would have
little to add to the praise it has received, except to praise the lightness of
touch in the final scenes, made all the more resonant by the associations with
Parmenides and Tolstoy.
Sheri Reynolds--A Gracious Plenty***
Wonderfully imagined. A burn victim cemetery custodian explores the natural
and emotional world between the living and the dead.
Bad Trips (ed. Keath Fraser)**
Various writers on being where they don't want to be.
Jim Grimsley--My Drowning****
Perhaps a bit less brutal, but more importantly, a bit less mannered than
his earlier books, this novel, Grimsley's first from a female viewpoint, is a
great achievement by an already great novelist.
Ha Jin--Under a Red Flag***
Quietly devastating stories of small town life during the Cultural
Revolution.
Fred Willard--Down on Ponce**
Intelligent brutality swirling around Atlanta's Fairmont Hotel. Willard's
criminals redeem themselves with repartee and revisionary ethics.
Bill Buford--Among the Thugs***
Soccer hooliganism from the inside. An important book about crowd behavior
and violent youth.
Bill Bryson--Notes from a Small Island**
Wandering around contemporary Britain with a knapsack overloaded with wit.
T. Coraghessan Boyle--Water Music***
Early novel by one of my favorite contemporary fiction writers. Follows
Mungo Park and his doppelganger through 18th century African and London
misadventures.
Margaret Atwood--Alias Grace**
Murder and madness in 19th century Canada.
Sheri Reynolds--Bitterroot Landing***
This first novel tells the harrowing story of the self-civilization of a
wild child. I'm looking forward to reading Reynolds' two most recent novels.
Jim Grimsley--Winter Birds and Dream Boy***
Two beautiful and painful short novels about growing up abused in the rural
south. While Grimsley's plots move from horror to horror, his protagonists grow
in emotional strength, and we come to understand the intricacies of love and
survival. Grimsley's warm, evocative prose keeps the reader entranced, and his
measured endings are among the fullest and most satisfying in recent fiction.
Joyce Carol Oates--Because it is Bitter, etc.*
I read a review of a recent Oates book that listed some of the Oates books I
have read and enjoyed (Blackwater, What I Lived For, Foxfire) as her minor
works, and put forward this one and a few others as in her major vein. I
disagree. This novel takes up major issues (race relations in the 50s,
alcoholic parents) but is surprisingly thin as a novel. Final third of novel
particularly weak in plotting and characterization.
Ford Madox Ford--Parade's End*****
About 20 years ago, led by admiration for Ford's The Good Soldier, I
read one of the middle works of this four novel series and was completely
baffled. So I didn't read any more Ford, other than rereading Good Soldier
a couple of times. This was a mistake. Taken together (and read in order), the
four novels that make up Parade's End seem to me the greatest work of
fiction set in wartime written between War and Peace and Gravity's
Rainbow. Tuned as well as Henry James's best work is to social detail and
emotional nuance, Ford's work also encompasses the broad sweep of political and
cultural change. The WWI scenes are restrained, yet harrowing. These four
novels are deeply affecting and immensely wise.
Valerie Sayers--Due East**
Philip Roth--American Pastoral***
Roth puts the easy swing of his prose to good use once more. Metafictive
elements are present, as always, but are here so deeply ingrained as to be nearly
transparent and all-consuming at the same time. By the way, it's a great story
about marriage and parenthood, and a wideranging portrait of American life in
the the last half of this century.
Kirsten Bakis--Lives of the Monster Dogs**
The central improbability of this novel about a race of dog men is very well
handled, but unnecessary minor improbabilities and a failure to fully develop
the best of her subplots make Bakis's highly original novel less satisfying
than it might have been.
A. R. Ammons--Tape for the Turn of the Year***
I need to read longer poems more often, and Ammon's book-length poem written
over the course of a month on a single roll of adding-machine tape was a good choice
to kick off this resolution. Ammons is one of my favorite contemporary poets,
and this poem offers many mind-stretching pleasures. Ammon's enterprise is
Romantic in that he seeks to express the place of mind in Nature. His
originality arises from his being true to the actual workings of the brain and
to a largely scientific view of the specifics of nature. Whitman meeets
Einstein. Stream of consciousness meets quantum theory, expressed with humor
and beauty. He is best in describing scenes of change-- seashores, storms,
flocks of birds forming and scattering--and great at finding ways to anchor
passing states of mind.
Katherine Anne Porter--Pale Horse, Pale Rider***
"Noon Wine" is still my favorite story of Porter's, but on this
rereading, I found the title story tighter, more tough-minded than I had
remembered.
Granta 60****
Granta has long been my journal of choice. In fact, in its early days it was
the only effective antidote I could find to the horrors of Reagan's America,
and I would drop whatever I was doing when it arrived and read it cover to
cover. No longer the social and intellectual power it once was, Granta still
offers consistently original stories, viewpoints, and reports from the interior
of out-of-the-way places.
Arundhati Roy--The God of Small Things****
Roy's plot is intricate without being precious, and she achieves the
wonderful effect of creating anticipation in a plot that is foreknown, even
fated. This beautiful, ambitious book is intensely political and intensely
musical, a rare combination.
Ann Thwaite (ed.)--My Oxford**
Good essays on Oxford throughout the 20th century. Nina Bawden's account of
wartime life in Somerville College is best, I think. John Mortimer, Alan Coren,
and Martin Amis also entertain.
Ron Rosenbaum--Rebirth of the Salesman*
An uneven collection of nonfiction pieces from the 70s. Best pieces are
those about Troy Donahue and Sarah Miles. Sordidly surprising.
Barry Hannah--High Lonesome***
No one writes a better short sentence than Barry Hannah. At his best, he
combines a poet's power of compression with equally tight storytelling. I think
this is his best book since The Tennis Handsome, and he avoids, for the most
part, his habitual excess of unearned epiphany. The title story is one of the
best brief memoirs I've ever read.
Daniel Robinson--Letters Home***(edited by Irene C. Perkins)
These letters written by one my great great great uncles to relatives in
Connecticut and Alabama offer a lively, sweet, and full picture of the grand
tour, as undertaken in the early 1840s by a man who had lost his wife and
children. Robinson is open-hearted, observant, warmly and fairly opinionated,
and curious about a wide range of experience in France, the Italian states,
Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and England. Uncle Daniel sees and writes
beautifully and brings to bear his reading in literature and the writings of
other travelers. Great passages on Naples and the Swiss Alps and Florence
(where he wanted to live out his life)--but there is something of interest on every
page. Perkins's limited edition offers an interesting introduction to the
Robinson family, and copious, useful notes.
Richard Russo--Straight Man**
Russo creates a fully human protagonist whose flaw is that he thinks of his
family members and his Podunk U colleagues as the flat characters one usually
finds in academic satires. They surprise him, and as he is disabused the novel
achieves the wit one expects of the genre as well as deeper tones produced by
this disequilbrium. The professed tutelary spirit for the novel is William of
Occam, but Henry IV lurks here, too.
Ferrol Sams--Run With the Horsemen***
All these years, I assumed this book was the opposite of what it is. Sams
destroys the Agrarian/old-home idealization of life in the rural south between
the wars, and then builds up a harder-won sense of what has been lost. He keeps
brilliantly close to the thought processes and vocabulary of a boy coming of
age, especially in the buried conflict with an alcoholic/hero father.
Colette--Break ofDay****
(Translated by Enid McLeod.) Colette's tone is light, her range is wide in
this memoir/novel of a middle-aged woman one summer in Provence. Wonderful use
of her mother's letters.
Richard Holmes--Shelley: The Pursuit*****
I've been meaning to read this book for 20 years, so I spent a good long
time with it. It is one of the best biographies I've ever read. Holmes's more
recent bio of Coleridge is also superb. His particular talent is for
integrating personal circumstances with intellectual development, telling
astounding stories along the way.
Norman Mailer -- The Gospel According to the Son***
Perfectly understated imaginary autobiography. After Gospel, if you
are in the mood for more Mailer and haven't read Harlot's Ghost, set
aside a couple of weeks and dig in.
Diane Johnson -- Le Divorce**
Elizabeth McCracken -- The Giant's House**
Matthew Spender -- Within Tuscany ***
A remarkable memoir built of cultural and emotional observations.
Redmond O'Hanlon -- In Trouble Again ***
O'Hanlon writes great books on travel to unpleasant places with reluctant
companions.
Pico Iyer -- Video Night in Kathmandu **
Lewis Nordan -- Lightning Song ***
His best book so far.
Gita Mehta -- Raj *
Begins brilliantly, disappointingly repetitive and dry in second half.
Pico Iyer -- Cuba and the Night**
Richard Collin -- The Man with Many Names**
Paul West -- Sporting with Amaryllis***
Milton meets his muse one day in London. Magnificently imagined and lustily
told.
Robert Stone -- A Hall of Mirrors****
I went on a Stone binge this summer. All of his books are strong. I like
this one,
Children of Light, and A Flag for Sunrise best.
Begun July 15, 1997