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

  In What You Owe Me, Bebe Moore Campbell sensitively explores the unlikely friendship between a refugee Jewish woman and a young black woman as it plays out over three generations and fifty years. Campbell’s other novels include Brothers and Sisters and Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine.

  A convicted murderer and a woman infected with HIV fall reluctantly in love in Pearl Cleage’s issue-filled and thoroughly enjoyable What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day.

  Breezy and chatty, He Say, She Say by Yolanda Joe looks at relationships through the eyes of four narrators: two men and two women. Joe’s other novels include The Hatwearer’s Lesson; Bebe’s by Golly Wow; and This Just In . . .

  The heroine of Benilde Little’s The Itch gradually realizes that, despite her Ivy League education and wealthy husband, something important is missing from her life.

  Verdi, the main character in Blues Dancing by Diane McKinney-Whetstone, is jolted from her sedate middle-class existence and thrust back into old passions by the sudden reappearance of a former lover from her college days. McKinney-Whetstone is also the author of Tumbling.

  When her decade-old marriage ends, the main character in Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do discovers that although change is difficult, it’s not always bad.

  And consider these for your reading list as well: Tina McElroy Ansa’s Baby of the Family and The Hand I Fan With; Connie Briscoe’s A Long Way from Home; Big Girls Don’t Cry; and Sisters & Lovers; Anita Bunkley’s Wild Embers; Starlight Passage; and Black Gold; Lorene Cary’s Pride; Erika Ellis’s Good Fences; Gayl Jones’s The Healing; Corregidora; and Mosquito; Kristin Hunter Lattany’s Do Unto Others; Helen Elaine Lee’s The Serpent’s Gift and Water Marked; Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Bailey’s Cafe; Connie Porter’s All-Bright Court; Dori Sanders’s Her Own Place and Clover; and A. J. Verdelle’s The Good Negress.

  AFRICAN COLONIALISM: FICTION

  Europeans in Africa provide a terrific subject for fiction. Writers can explore not only the inevitable clashes of the cultures, but also the inscrutability of the land and its varied peoples. In many of the novels set in Africa, the characters go there to escape boredom or tragedy at home, and to search for new vistas and different lives.

  In a sense, all novels about Africa are measured against one of the most powerful and affecting novels ever written by a non-African about Africa: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It’s the story of Marlow’s journey into the heart of Africa in search of Kurtz, who originally came to Africa to “civilize” the natives.

  A Scottish doctor’s desire for adventure places him in 1970s Uganda, working for the Ministry of Health and then as personal physician to dictator Idi Amin, in The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden.

  Francesca Marciano’s Rules of the Wild is a love story set among the world of expatriates in Nairobi, Kenya, in the 1990s—a group notorious for their life of indolence, addiction to pleasure, and lack of connection with and knowledge about black Africa and Africans.

  When the other British colonial families leave newly independent Tanzania, Dr. Antonia Redmond, Africa-born and Harvard-trained, remains behind with one of her African patients, in Maria Thomas’s Antonia Saw the Oryx First.

  Two satirical novels about the culture clash in Africa are White Man’s Grave by Richard Dooling (a young American goes to Sierra Leone in search of his missing best friend, a Peace Corps volunteer) and Darkest England, Christopher Hope’s very funny novel about an African bushman who travels to London to confront Queen Elizabeth with the promises that Queen Victoria made to the Africans a century before.

  Colonialism and cultural conflicts are the themes of M. G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets, in which a diary written seventy years before is discovered in 1980s Dar es Salaam, and a retired schoolteacher tries to uncover the mystery it represents.

  British ecologist Hope Clearwater goes to Africa both to escape a bad marriage and to study chimpanzees with a famous scientist in Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd.

  In Ronan Bennett’s political thriller The Catastrophist, Irish novelist James Gillespie arrives in the Congo in 1959 to woo back his former lover, now a follower of Patrice Lumumba, who became the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and was assassinated a short time later.

  A nice companion read to The Catastrophist is The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, which is the story of an evangelical Baptist minister who, along with his wife and four daughters, comes to the Congo in 1959 in order to convert the heathen Africans.

  AFRICAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

  Novels by Africans, like the fiction of Latin American writers, seem always to combine the personal and the political—ordinary lives coming up against the tragedy of colonial and postcolonial political reality. There is no escaping Africa’s past in these novels, which gives a depth and resonance often lacking in American and British fiction.

  Probably the best author with whom to begin reading African literature is Chinua Achebe, and the novel most emblematic of his overarching themes is his masterful Things Fall Apart, a book about British colonialism in Achebe’s home country of Nigeria.

  Ben Okri, one of the best of a new generation of African writers, won the Booker Prize for his novel The Famished Road, the story of the child Azaro, who endures the impoverishments and political upheavals in Nigeria while experiencing the wonders and terrors of a spirit world that only he can see.

  In Nervous Conditions, set in Zimbabwe in the 1950s, Tsitsi Dangarembga describes the life of Tambu, who awakens to the realization of the possibilities beyond the limited (and limiting) expectations of her family and society.

  In The Rape of Shavi, another Nigerian writer, Buchi Emecheta, tells the story of what happens when a group of Europeans, fleeing from what they believe is a nuclear holocaust, crash their plane near a desert tribe in Africa, and change the Shavi people’s way of life forever.

  A Senegalese woman reflects on her life, her marriage, and her place in society after her husband decides to take a second wife, in Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter.

  In J. Nozipo Maraire’s Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter, a mother in Zimbabwe tries to remind her daughter (in school in the United States) of their cultural heritage and their country’s long political struggles.

  Sembène Ousmane has written a deeply moving and tragic political novel of the struggle against French colonialism in Senegal, in God’s Bits of Woods.

  A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiongó is a novel about the human price of revolution, as Kenyans struggle to shake off the yoke of British colonialism.

  AGING

  There are many nonfiction books that purport to explain and help the reader understand the process of getting old and all its atten dant ills—a saggy body and less agile mind among them. But I find that good fiction on the subject of aging offers a more meaningful and moving experience. Here are the two best novels I’ve read on the topic:Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers

  Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

  (no, this Taylor is not Michael Jackson’s pal)

  ALASKA

  As Michelle Shocked says in her song “Anchorage,” “You know you’re in the largest state in the Union when you’re anchored down in Anchorage.” And the best books about Alaska (both fiction and nonfiction) acknowledge its sheer immensity and unforgiving nature.

  Margaret E. Murie arrived in Alaska as a nine-year-old in 1911 (her stepfather was an assistant district attorney sent there from Seattle) and grew up in frontier Alaska before it became a state. As an adult, she and her husband Olaus devoted their lives to preserving the wilderness, an experience she shares in vivid detail in Two in the Far North, a wonderful introduction to the land and people of Alaska and to the heart of a remarkable woman who had enormous influence on the present-day conservation movement.

  The poet, writer, and teacher Sheila Nickerson opens Disappearance: A Map: A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes with this stun
ning sentence: “I live in a place where people disappear.” She goes on to discuss what it means to live in a place where disappearances of people—of colleagues, friends of friends, hikers, pilots, tourists, thrill seekers—are common. She describes the ongoing erosion of the culture of the first peoples of Alaska, which is a constant troubling reminder of how “civilized” societies frequently treat groups of people whose oil they covet or whose wilderness they wish to tame.

  One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read is Natalie Kusz’s Road Song, which describes the life she and her family lived when they moved from Los Angeles to homestead in Fairbanks in 1969 and found that the challenges they faced (including crushing poverty and Natalie’s being attacked by a neighbor’s sled dog and losing an eye) only made them more determined to survive.

  On a somewhat lighter note, there are several mystery writers who live, work, and set their novels in Alaska, including Dana Stabenow, Sue Henry, and John Straley. The central character in all the books by these writers is really Alaska itself—and despite the amount of crime that their protagonists have to cope with, it’s hard to read them without wanting to call a travel agent immediately and book the next flight north.

  Stabenow’s best-known mystery series features former Anchorage district attorney, now turned private investigator, Aleut Kate Shugak, a fiercely independent and somewhat prickly young woman (similar in many respects to Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone). My favorite Shugak mystery is A Cold-Blooded Business, set way off the beaten track in the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle and home to an oil company in trouble.

  Sue Henry’s first mystery, Murder on the Iditarod Trail, deservedly won two major mystery awards; in it she introduces her main series character, Jessie Arnold, who trains sled dogs and is Alaska’s best-known female “musher.” Henry’s subsequent books only confirmed her talent for combining suspense-filled plots with vivid descriptive writing.

  The main character in Straley’s mystery series (which began with a doozy, The Woman Who Married a Bear), is Cecil Younger, a (somewhat troubled) private investigator in Sitka, a town he loves and that you will come to love, too.

  Dorothy M. Jones was a professor of sociology at the University of Alaska for a number of years, and her heartfelt novel Tatiana is the moving story of the eponymous heroine attempting to remain true to herself and her heritage during the tumultuous twentieth century, a time that found great changes coming to Native Alaskan villages, particularly during World War II.

  AMERICAN HISTORY: NONFICTION

  Books about American history are probably a dime a dozen, from the high school textbooks we all groaned over to the quickie analyses of each presidential race that appear almost as soon as a winner is announced. But there are also some outstanding works, which appear far too infrequently, that help us understand the past and navigate the present. These books (all eminently, not to say compulsively, readable) encourage us to think about how we have been shaped by the past, personally as well as politically.

  Whenever I ask a group of people about their favorite books, inevitably someone will rave about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Originally published in 1980, and frequently revised and updated, A People’s History approaches its subject through an examination of the role of those who often did not appear in history books before: women, blacks, American Indians, and, especially, the working classes. Revolutionary when it first appeared, Zinn’s work has been the model for many works of history ever since.

  The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H. W. Brands is a wide-ranging and engaging history of the 1848 watershed event that drew people to California from all over the world and redefined how Americans thought about success. It’s important when you’re reading this book to be close to a library or bookstore, since you’ll find yourself going down various fascinating byways and wanting to read more about them, too.

  There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America by Vincent Harding recounts the struggle against slavery and racism, beginning in West Africa with the first slave ships in the very early years of the seventeenth century, and continuing through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

  Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner is still considered the best book ever written about water issues in the arid western United States. Reisner is fascinated with geopolitics and discusses, among other topics: western history; the role of John Wesley Powell, the developers, and the environmentalists who continue to try to conserve the depleting water resources of our nation; and the largely horrifying position of many U.S. leaders toward the problems of aridity and shrinking aquifers.

  The two classic, immensely readable books about the American Indian experience are Dee Brown’s 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West and The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indian by Ralph K. Andrist, which was originally published in 1964. Both books influenced later scholarship and the way Americans thought about the native population. Brown offers a well-documented (but quite controversial when first published) overview of the thirty dreadful years between 1860 and 1890, from the time of the Long Walk of the Navajos from their homelands to a reservation in New Mexico, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Andrist lays out, in starkly evocative prose, the sorry plight of the Plains Indians as they were forced by the United States government to retreat in the face of western expansion.

  AMERICAN HISTORY: FICTION

  Kevin Baker, a crackerjack researcher (he worked on Harold Evans’s The American Century) and writer for American Heritage, makes great use of his talents in two novels. Dreamland vividly describes the lives of poor immigrant families on the Lower East Side of New York City, circa 1910, who find their lives made somewhat more bearable by the promise and excitement of Coney Island. Paradise Alley recounts the riots in New York City in 1863 that followed President Lincoln’s decision to institute a draft to get soldiers to fight in the Civil War.

  In the Fall by Jeffrey Lent charts the lives of the Pelham family after the Civil War, when young Norman comes home to Vermont having married Leah, a runaway slave. Lent’s novel shows how no one can ever escape the effects of slavery—not the slave owners, nor the slaves themselves, nor the descendants of either.

  With liberal doses of romance and mystery woven into the plot, it’s easy to overlook the historical basis for Lauren Belfer’s City of Light. Set during the Buffalo, New York, Pan-American Exposition in 1901, Belfer’s novel looks at the early years of the skirmish between conservationists and the developers of natural resources in the Northeast. You’ll never look at Niagara Falls the same way again after reading this novel.

  In Underworld Don DeLillo explores, through multiple voices and psyches, the last half of the twentieth century, beginning with Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run that propelled the New York Baseball Giants into the World Series in the same year as the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb.

  Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector, set in the years after the Civil War, follows the experiences of a horribly scarred (in both body and mind) Union veteran as he makes his way through the dark and menacing streets of New York.

  E. L. Doctorow has a fictional family in Ragtime interacting with many of the most famous and infamous people of the first years of the twentieth century, including Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, and Booker T. Washington.

  AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE

  American Indian literature began coming into its own in the 1960s, and the succeeding decades saw the publication of a number of new writers as well as renewed interest in older ones. Check out these anthologies for a good introduction to new writers as well as to reacquaint yourself with those who have made it into the literary mainstream:

  Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America, edited by Joy Harjo; Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion, edited by Joseph Bruchac et al.;
Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers; and Voices Under One Sky: Contemporary Native Literature, edited by Trish Fox Roman. Take a look, too, at Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism by Craig S. Womack, a thoughtful assessment of the state of Native American literature today.

  My favorites among American Indian writers include Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony and others); D’Arcy McNickle (Wind from an Enemy Sky); Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine and others); N. Scott Momaday (House Made of Dawn and others); Michael Dorris (A Yellow Raft in Blue Water); as well as Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer; Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Truth & Bright Water; Diane Glancy’s Flutie; Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (don’t miss Alexie’s poetry, which is sharp, bitter, and often very funny); James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk; Louis Owens’s The Sharpest Sight; and Debra Magpie Earling’s magnificent first novel Perma Red.