Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood Moment and Reason Read online

  Alice Elliott Dark writes highly polished and controlled (but frequently emotionally charged) fiction, including the award-winning In the Gloaming: Stories (the title story was selected by John Updike as one of the best stories of the century), Naked to the Waist, and a novel, Think of England.

  Novelist Alice Hoffman is known for her magical realist fiction; she creates alternative universes rather than simply exploring everyday realities. Try an early novel, The Drowning Season, and then see how she’s developed through Illumination Night; Turtle Moon; and Blue Diary.

  Alice Mattison is a multitalented writer of short stories (Men Giving Money, Women Yelling: Intersecting Stories, which was a New York Times Notable Book), novels (The Book Borrower and Hilda and Pearl), and poetry (Animals). You’ll find that her writing is marked by a fine delineation of characters and a wonderful use of language.

  Among Alice McDermott’s award-winning novels exploring Irish-American Catholic family relationships are Child of My Heart; Charming Billy (which won the National Book Award); At Weddings and Wakes; A Bigamist’s Daughter; and That Night (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize).

  Canadian Alice Munro has been widely praised as one of the best contemporary short story writers; Cynthia Ozick described her as “our Chekhov.” In her collections such as Friend of My Youth: Stories, Open Secrets, and The Love of a Good Woman, she writes about the Lives of Girls and Women, which is the title of another of her collections.

  In her original and shocking first novel, the Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold tells the story of a murder (recounted by the teenage victim) and its after-math, as her devastated family tries to cope with their grief.

  Alice Walker writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She is probably best known for her Pulitzer Prize–and American Book Award–winning novel, The Color Purple, but readers shouldn’t miss her poetry (Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems) and her other novels Meridian (an autobiographical novel about of the early years of the civil rights movement and an interracial marriage) and Possessing the Secret of Joy.

  ACADEMIA: THE JOKE

  Reading these academic satires, it’s clear that the life of the mind is no match for all the jostling and jockeying for promotions and tenure and the intrigues of college politics. What with the incompetent administration and the egomaniacal faculty, there’s tons of great material available.

  Randall Jarrell took time away from his poetry and criticism to pen only one novel, but what a great novel it is. The witty and malicious Pictures from an Institution is the classic American academic satire, set at a progressive Eastern women’s college and featuring the unpleasant novelist Gertrude Johnson, who bears a striking resemblance to writer Mary McCarthy, no favorite of Jarrell’s.

  In Mary McCarthy’s own satire, The Groves of Academe, published in 1952, the plot might seem a bit dated (a professor professes to have been a communist so that his ultraliberal college won’t fire him), but the academic infighting feels completely contemporary.

  Jane Smiley’s Moo is a raucous romp through the affectionately nicknamed Moo U., a state university located somewhere in the Midwest. A large cast of characters, including members of the administration, faculty, and students, are their normal eccentric selves, even as the college undertakes a secret research project involving a large hog named Earl Butz.

  Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring relates the hilariously sad experiences of Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt, a very junior professor lusting after tenure, who becomes the head of the English department after his Japanese tutor buys the college.

  When the mysterious feminist scholar and novelist Olga Kaminska arrives to teach at a university awfully much like Stanford, where John L’Heureux, the author of The Handmaid of Desire, teaches, she immediately begins manipulating the lives of all her fellow academicians in an attempt to give them what they think they most want. But is it?

  And don’t forget David Lodge’s Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses; Small World: An Academic Romance; and Nice Work, which offer the British take on the academic follies; and Malcolm Bradbury’s five witty novels about scholarly infighting and love and lust on Britain’s red-brick campuses, which also include more than a few jabs at the pompous professorial types who populate these groves of academe (Eating People Is Wrong; Stepping Westward; The History Man; Rates of Exchange; and To the Hermitage); as well as Kingsley Amis’s classic Lucky Jim.

  ACADEMIC MYSTERIES

  Mysteries set in academia are a vital part of the mystery canon. Fans of “cozy” mysteries (the murder-in-a-teacup sort) and the classic whodunit type will usually find academic mysteries to their liking. There is rarely any graphic sex or violence (no doubt a reflection of the real world of academia!).

  In Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night (which is a rarity in that it is a mystery without a murder), Harriet Vane goes back to her Oxford college for a reunion (known as a “gaudy”), where she confronts a series of malicious and threatening anonymous notes and pranks and also her feelings for the dashing, wealthy, and brilliant Lord Peter Wimsey.

  Kate Fansler, an English professor like her creator Carolyn Heilbrun (writing as Amanda Cross), was introduced in In the Last Analysis. A former student of Kate’s is found stabbed to death on the couch in her psychiatrist’s office, and Kate feels compelled to investigate whodunit. Other good books in this series are The Theban Mysteries and The James Joyce Murder.

  Alfred Alcorn’s Murder in the Museum of Man is the only academic mystery that I know of in which cannibalism is important to the plot.

  Michael Innes’s classic mystery, Death at the President’s Lodging, features his regular sleuth, Inspector John Appleby, who investigates a murder at an Oxford college. The catch is that Appleby has only a few suspects from among whom to deduce the killer.

  ACTION HEROINES

  While the distaff side more than holds its own when it comes to mysteries (think of Kinsey Millhone or V. I. Warshawski or Carlotta Carlyle), there aren’t too many action or suspense novels in which women have the lead role. In most adventure fiction women at best appear as sidekicks to the male hero and at worst merely provide the love or, more usually, the sex interest. There are, though, a few good adventure novels with women as protagonists. (Interestingly, they are usually written by men. Is this wish fulfillment [the women are unfailingly gorgeous, sexy, and brilliant], or what?) You go, girl!

  Paul Eddy’s Flint is a complicated thriller filled with dastardly villains who traffic in treachery. London police inspector Grace Flint is the victim of a sting operation that goes terribly awry—she is badly hurt (the descriptions of her attack are difficult to read) and determined to track down the man responsible, who happens to be involved in a high-level money-laundering operation. As Flint hunts down her man, risking life and limb, and not knowing whom to trust, British intelligence hunts for her, and the chase is on. Following with the almost equally good Flint’s Law. Eddy is a writer to watch.

  When Susan Van Meter’s federal narcotics investigator husband is found murdered while in hot pursuit of a drug kingpin, she leaves her research position and takes on the task of tracking down and bringing to justice the murderer in Saint Mike by Jerry Oster.

  Peter O’Donnell introduced Modesty Blaise, originally created as a comic strip, in the 1950s and has continued to showcase her talents in his over-the-top novels, which to my delight appear fairly frequently. Along with her longtime partner Willie Garvin, Modesty fights crime anywhere it shows its rotten head. A good introduction are the six stories that make up Pieces of Modesty, but you won’t want to miss Dragon’s Claw.

  If you’re willing to move away from the strictly realistic (as if the others in this list are realistic!) and into the realm of science fiction/fantasy, you can read about the exploits of Thursday Next, the intrepid literary detective heroine of Jasper Fforde’s inventive and entertaining novels. Thursday must try to best the fiendish Acheron Hades, who has had
the temerity to kidnap Jane Eyre out of the pages of Brontë’s novel, in The Eyre Affair, the first in the series.

  ADVENTURE BY THE BOOK: FICTION

  Ah, the lure of the open road, or the open water, or simply the great unknown. Adventure fiction can be even more powerful than nonfiction (the best of which is plenty powerfully exciting) because novelists who tackle the genre have far more latitude than writers describing an actual event.

  Although coming-of-age novels like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped could rightly be considered adventure novels, as could many thrillers, I’m limiting this list to accounts of man (and/or woman) against nature.

  Based on an actual event, Lisa Michaels’s haunting Grand Ambition is the story of a honeymooning couple whose decision to raft down the Colorado River in 1928 ends in disaster.

  The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge relates the exhilarating and poignant last days of the doomed 1912 Robert Falcon Scott–led Antarctic expedition that ended in the deaths of all five members of the group.

  Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition in 1914 is the subject of Melinda Mueller’s What the Ice Gets—an epic poem told in the varied voices of members of Shackleton’s crew and Shackleton himself.

  An assignment to photograph bears in the Arctic wilderness turns into a struggle for survival for Beryl, the heroine of The Cage, by Audrey Schulman.

  Two teenage adventure novels that make good reading for adults, too, are James Ramsey Ullman’s long-out-of-print Banner in the Sky, in which a young Swiss boy is determined to climb the mountain on which his father died, and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, a multi-award-winning story about a teenager surviving alone in the wilderness after an airplane crash.

  ADVENTURE BY THE BOOK: NONFICTION

  White knuckles and fear gnawing at the pit of your stomach: If you can’t walk the walk (or climb the climb or sail the sea), at least you can read all about it.

  Points Unknown: A Century of Great Exploration, edited by David Roberts, is a fabulous collection of classic adventure literature, from the famous (Robert Falcon Scott) to the perhaps less well known (Eric Newby, Francis Chichester, Joshua Slocum).

  National Geographic Expeditions Atlas is less an atlas than a chronicle of adventures and a stunning compilation of the Society’s trademark maps and photographs from expeditions that took place over the last 100-plus years. The diverse list of contributors includes Mary Leakey, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Glenn.

  Although Jon Krakauer’s devastating Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster sets the standard for personal adventure books, other climbers also wrote movingly about the same 1996 tragic climb, as in Matt Dickinson’s The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm, Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest, and Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest by Beck Weathers.

  The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la by Todd Balf is the story of the disastrous 1998 trip by a highly skilled and gung-ho group of white-water kayakers on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet.

  Fergus Fleming’s chatty, entertaining, and historically accurate Barrow’s Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy relates the experiences of the British explorers who searched in the first half of the nineteenth century for the Northwest Passage and, in Africa, sought the location of the fabled Timbuktu and searched for the mouth of the Niger River. Fleming’s Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole is another wonderful study of the brave and often misguided men who undertook dangerous journeys to satisfy their yearning for fame and adventure (or had a definite death wish!).

  Derek Lundy’s Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World’s Most Dangerous Waters is the story of the 1996–97 Vendée Globe race, in which each of sixteen sailors attempted to sail single-handedly around the world (about 13,000 miles) through the world’s most dangerous waters.

  AFRICA: TODAY AND YESTERDAY

  One of the best books to read in order to understand Africa is Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912, which describes how various colonial powers like France, England, and Belgium carved up a continent in a way that almost guaranteed the disasters and tragedies marking Africa’s contemporary experiences.

  The desert blooms in Sahara: A Natural History by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle, which brings to life the history, geography, legends, lore, and people of the great African desert, which was called The Endless Emptiness and The Great Nothing by early explorers.

  A staff writer for The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch visited Rwanda over a period of years to write what is perhaps the most personal and heart-wrenching account of genocide in the modern world, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.

  King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild is an account of the grim history of the Belgian Congo (the setting for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), under its plundering ruler-from-afar, the king of Belgium, who used “his” African colony to make himself wealthy beyond measure.

  In In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Kenya, Michela Wrong tries to make sense of the senseless: the economic failure of one of Africa’s most blessed countries in terms of its natural resources. Wrong lays much blame at the feet of the Congo’s ruler of thirty years, Mobutu Sese Seko, but blame can also be assigned to the United States and other countries that turned a blind eye—as is too often the case—to what was going on.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun is an intelligent and accessible collection of impressions gathered over forty years of covering postcolonial Africa for a variety of European publications.

  AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION: HE SAY

  One of the earliest African American male novelists (he also wrote exceptional essays; check out Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time), James Baldwin, who always mixed elements of autobiography in his fiction, explored black life in America in novels like Go Tell It on the Mountain and If Beale Street Could Talk. He was also one of the best-known twentieth-century writers who dealt openly with issues of homosexuality in his fiction, most notably in Giovanni’s Room. But in the nearly two decades since Baldwin’s death, a whole new—and widely diverse—group of writers have written some terrific novels.

  Two savagely funny novels explore the racial divide in decidedly unpolitically correct terms: Ishmael Reed’s postmodern Mumbo Jumbo (with its indescribable plot, which involves the rise of black music and dancing even among the white middle class) and Percival Everett’s Erasure, in which the determinedly upper-middle-class, unsuccessful African American writer Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, tiring of his literary fiction and nonfiction being ignored by the reading public, changes gears and pens a life-in-da-ghetto novel that, embarrassingly, catapults him to the top of his profession.

  Ernest Gaines consistently writes brilliant, thought-provoking fiction. Two of his best are A Lesson Before Dying, which takes place in Louisiana in the 1940s and tells the story of a young man convicted and sentenced to die for a crime he didn’t commit, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the fictional memoirs of a former slave.

  In High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney, the protagonist (who bears a strong resemblance to the author) attempts to understand what it means to be a black man, both in the United States and as an expatriate in France in the 1960s.

  Until The Emperor of Ocean Park was published in 2002, Stephen Carter was best known as a Yale law professor and author of several well-regarded nonfiction books, including Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby and The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. In his first novel Carter explores the world of upper-class African Americans, specifically a family coping with the mysteries resulting from the death of its patriarch, a conservative judge.

  Other good examples of
African American fiction by men include David Haynes’s Live at Five; Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist and John Henry Days; Bil Wright’s Sunday You Learn How to Box; Not a Day Goes By by E. Lynn Harris; Eric Jerome Dickey’s Liar’s Game and Milk in My Coffee; Omar Tyree’s For the Love of Money and A Do Right Man; and John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities and Sent For You Yesterday.

  AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION: SHE SAY

  Although fiction fans are probably familiar with the painful realities of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and the magical realism of Toni Morrison’s Beloved or the jazzy syncopation of Jazz, and know that Terry McMillan writes hip and sexy novels like Waiting to Exhale; A Day Late and a Dollar Short; and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, there’s a whole new group of African American women writers who are writing about male/female relationships, women’s friendships, and the plight of the upwardly mobile black woman.