recommended books

I've been reading more books since I retired. I got to know a couple of the following titles earlier, but they fit here, and most of the following are ones I've read in the past year. Please see the note at the end about two books that are important to me but are not mentioned here (except in that p.s.).

Fiction: David Grossman, Someone to Run With. A hair-raising but hopeful story of how a relationship between young people from different communities might play out. It also has a dog who is a major character. I should read it again and write at more length and in more detail; I am making it sound kooky. I think it's a great book.
Helen Humphreys, Afterimage and The Lost Garden. HH lives in Canada but was born in the UK, where both of these novels are set, one in the early twentieth century and the other during WWII. I haven't often read two novels by the same writer unless I was reading for school. I'll read at least one of them again.
C.E. Morgan, All the Living. A first novel, published (by FSG) this year, by a Kentuckian with a degree from Harvard Divinity School. It is very original and frequently very compelling in its style and is also exceptionally interesting in the way it treats its characters, whom it respects but holds accountable for their substantial limitations and failings. The two main characters live together and eventually marry. One of the most striking things to me was the way Morgan places sexual explicitness within her larger concerns. That is, she isn't coy or evasive, but her main interest is in the way Aloma experiences her and Orren's lovemaking, if that's the word, in the context of their relationship and her emotional needs. Each of the two main characters is unable to recognize and honor the needs of the other until they have been through a time of violation and hurt. Then something better becomes possible. But first Morgan gives to characters she cares for a large license to experience and express self-pity, blind anger, and other products of isolation and grief. But summary distorts this book, slim as it is. It has a remarkable voice, a challenging logic, and a series of moments that would be worth reading it for even if the book weren't as strong overall as it is. I haven't even mentioned the minister who may be its most interesting character.
Laura Moriarty, The Center of Everything. This original, affecting story has a very young narrator, who is giving us her experience from when she is ten to her last year of high school. The narrator's voice is completely convincing. She has a lot of hard things to deal with, but her evolution into a promising adult is natural and unforced. There is quite a lot of humor, much of which the narrator seems unaware of, though it's hard to tell because she's smart and she works at being funny when she is with her friends. The humor is important to the tone of the novel, and it put me in mind of Moriarty's unimaginably wonderful 2001 non-fiction story in volume two of A Book of Meditations (Phillips Exeter Academy Press, 2005), since in that piece too she finds a healing humor in very difficult experiences without being sentimental or contrived. She's a terrific writer whose second novel has also been published; I look forward to reading it.
Also Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose and, even more, Crossing to Safety.



Non-fiction: Peter Hessler's two books on China, Rivertown and Oracle Bones. Either would have been a worthy recipient of major national prizes. A Peace Corps volunteer who stayed on to learn more and to report for the New Yorker and other publications, he is a wonderful observer, thinker, reporter, adventurer, student, and writer. He wouldn't claim to have inherited the mantle of his teacher and friend John McPhee, but his work has many of the same strengths, which are rare ones.
The more I read of Oracle Bones, the more dazzled I am. Among Hessler's many strengths, and many kinds of strengths, is an eye for irony that is both subtle and acute but that doesn't carry him toward the laziness of cynicism. He is a devotee of the concrete (as I am, or try to be) and I think he would view cynicism as an abstraction or even an ideology. For me one of the many pleasures of reading his work is that it never goes there (to cynicism), either as a tone or as an idea. But he doesn't go to sentimentality or naivete either. One curious effect on me of Oracle Bones is that it is nudging me back to de Tocqueville. I want to test my hypothesis that that is where you would have to go to see something this good in the way of cultural analysis written by a foreign national.

Irene Pepperberg, Alex and Me. An account of the learning, structured (in a lab) and otherwise, of a clever and opinionated African grey parrot. The bird is amazing, but apparently not atypical. Color me insensitive, but I found Alex's story more absorbing than the author's.

Stacey O'Brien, Wesley the Owl. The author claims not just intelligence for her bird but personal attachment, wisdom, and even something approaching spirituality. You'll see why. There is also a wonderful chapter on the culture of the community of research biologists at Cal Tech. The writing in the book as a whole is somewhat unsophisticated, but there are substantial strengths including one memorable scene where O'Brien is challenged in an isolated spot during the wee hours by an unpromising group of young people who seem perhaps ready to give her a hard time but are won over by her interest in Wesley.

Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies. Part birder's autobiography, part history, part meditation on the relationship between our species and the natural world as a whole, as seen through the history of exploitation and attempts at preservation. Rosen's own birding is mostly in Central Park and the mid-East, especially Israel. There are chapters on Audubon, Thoreau, Darwin, and Teddy Roosevelt. This is an original, thoughtful, convincing book, not least in its take on the debate over the possible survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Mark Doty, Dog Years. Like Rosen's, a book I will read again. It is part eulogy--not just to his two glorious dogs--, part celebration of dogs as human companions, and part meditation on mortality as seen through this lens. Doty is both a wonderful poet (see "New Dog" in Atlantis, e.g.) and a very strong prose writer; I think this is his fourth such volume, and I swear he writes beautifully and movingly about many things besides dogs.

P.S. I haven't said anything here about Kenji Yoshino's Covering or Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index. I reviewed both in print, in the Phillips Exeter Academy Bulletin, Covering I think in 2006 and The Suicide Index last year. Both are finding readers, I'm glad to say: Covering is required reading for incoming students at at least five colleges; and The Suicide Index was a finalist for the National Book Award.