Book Corner

Although I consider myself a big reader, I have not found time for much more than magazines and online content since I got out of school, with novels or other books reserved for vacations. Due to my unusual living circumstances of the last six months, however (away from family during the week, less accessible TV, many airplane flights), I have resumed reading books with a vengeance. In fact, it is possible that I have never ready books as vigorously as I have recently. In view of the Professor's call for a book list, I provide below a brief commentary on some of the 33 books I have read over the last 25 weeks.

Get a cup of coffee; this is a long post.

I have bought some of the books I have read, but my sister-in-law (and current weekday landlord) belongs to a book club, so I have been the primary beneficiary of her participation in the club. It may just be the way of recent fiction, the proportion of female authors and/or female-centric stories in my sister-in-law's collection seems to be very high. Perhaps the facts that the club is based in San Francisco and, I think, involves mostly women have influenced the reading list. In any event, I have had the opportunity to sample a wide array of stories and storytelling talent.

By far the best book I have read is "In the Fall" by Jeffrey Lent. Lent is described as a successor to the stylistic traditions of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. He certainly writes in a dense, oblique style that brings those writers to mind. Run-on sentences and a vast vocabulary do not necessarily a superior author make, but Lent has the storytelling talent to go with the sophisticated technique. "In the Fall" is an epic tale expertly told. It is one of those books that so vividly conjures up its world that it allows me to forget that I am reading a book. I was so taken with "In the Fall" that I bought Lent's two other books, "Lost Nation" and "A Peculiar Grace." The latter, though still strong, was the most shallow of the three, the one that I could envision being made into a movie even as I read it. "Lost Nation" took a long time to hook me, but its brutal brilliance was something unique and powerful.

Speaking of McCarthy, I read "No Country for Old Men" before seeing the movie. Both are excellent, and if the movie is inscrutable, it is because it hews faithfully to the book. The book did not affect me as deeply as "The Road," but it an interesting and usually fast-paced book (for McCarthy, anyway).

"Songs in Ordinary Time," by Mary McGarry Morris, is a difficult book to recommend, even though it is ultimately rewarding to read for the sheer challenge of staying with it. I was tempted to put this book away many times over the course of reading it. It is well-written in that it creates a fully realized world, but it is inhabited almost entirely by unlikeable characters. Even the "good" people fail in ways that strip away the reader's sympathies. But Oprah said to read it, so what do I know.

"The Rule of Four," by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, was an interesting puzzle book in the manner of "The DaVinci Code," but its tone was that of a competent but not particularly gifted grad student. Actually, this is almost precisely what it was. The authors of the book, childhood friends, wrote it just after they graduated from their Ivy League schools. The book has little in the way of authorial craftsmanship, and amounts to a gauzy-focused love letter to Princeton. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the yarn, though. "The Piano Tuner," by Daniel Mason, is another book that suffers from being the first effort of a recent college graduate. It is an interesting tale that, in places, is written with style, but the book ultimately is less fulfilling than the promise of its beginning.

Ironically, and unbeknownst to me when I started it, the core of the puzzle in "The Rule of Four" is also at the center of "The Birth of Venus," by Sarah Dunant, a much more elegantly crafted work. Both of these books concern Renaissance Florence and the actions of the Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola, who introduced the world to the Bonfire of the Vanities.

"Body and Soul" by Frank Conroy is a book that I felt should have been just a bit better. It is another book that brings a period and its inhabitants to life, but somehow it lacked the dramatic tension that would have made it great. Much of the developments in the story were simply too easy. It is as good a portrayal of the inner workings of a musician as you will find anywhere, however. "The Time Traveler's Wife," by Audrey Niffenegger, suffers the same fate. It has a very interesting premise, of a man unstuck in time who returns again and again to the same woman as she grows up in a normal chronological manner. Although the book is enjoyable to read, I felt that this one, too, should have gone to another level in the last third. Interestingly, both of these authors are university professors. Perhaps as a direct result, both books are competently written, but seem to lack that essential spark of genius that differentiates the truly gifted from the merely talented.

I read a couple of Nick Hornby books ("High Fidelity," "About a Boy"), which are always a reliably enjoyable read. I cleansed my palate with conventional Stephen King thrillers, whom I have always liked, as well as a Michael Crichton book ("State of Fear") that was interesting but somewhat less fulfilling.

I have read some non-fiction as well, my usual non-magazine standby. The estate of Alistair Cooke recently released a collection of previously unpublished essays from a trip around America he took in the early part of World War II. "The American Home Front: 1941-1942" is a time capsule of American attitudes and habits that is fascinating for its lack of the filters and revisionist interpretations that are usually attached to what would now be considered a work of historical investigation. John Krakauer's "Into the Wild" is another of his reliably well-written man-versus-nature stories, about a tragically self-absorbed (although some would describe him as merely an idealist) recent college graduate, whose impressive improvisational survival skills ultimately cannot hold nature at bay. "The Devil in the White City," by Erik Larson, was a very interesting account of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, which captures much that characterized the beginning of the modern era in America.

These, and two dozen others, have made for very enriching evenings. Since we also read "To Kill a Mockingbird" with Kelly last fall, and are currently working our way through Jane Austen's "Persuasion," I am getting my fill of both current and past literature.

There has not been much scholarly reading among my selections, in contrast to the Professor, but as an English major, I find that connecting with literature is perfectly acceptable. It is also enlightening to get a feel for what novelists who aspire to create literature are doing with their talent. In contrast to what the collegiate world was telling us when we were in school, modern literature does not begin and end with Toni Morrison after all.