Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood Moment and Reason Page 5

  No list of good bicycling books is at all complete without a mention of the unquenchable Dervla Murphy, who describes her bike trip across two continents in the frigid winter of 1961 in Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle. Murphy’s many other bicycle adventures are recounted in books like The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe and Wheels Within Wheels.

  French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France by thirty-six-year-old Tim Moore is a very funny account of his experiences while trying to ride all 2,256 miles of the Tour de France several weeks before the real race began.

  Many people were first inspired to travel by bicycle by Miles from Nowhere: A Round-the-World Bicycle Adventure, Barbara Savage’s now classic story of a two-year trip that took her and her husband from their home in Santa Barbara, California, to the far corners of the world.

  American Erika Warmbrunn spent eight months cycling from Siberia to Saigon in Where the Pavement Ends: One Woman’s Bicycle Trip Through Mongolia, China & Vietnam. Her memoir is striking not only because of her description of the difficulties inherent in such a journey, but because of her appreciation for the people and places she encounters.

  Back when bicycling was still in its infancy, Evelyn McDaniel Gibb’s father and his best friend—both teenagers—set off on an amazing two-wheeled trip: riding north from Santa Rosa, California, up to Seattle for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. In Two Wheels North: Bicycling the West Coast in 1909, Gibb retells her father’s grand adventure.

  Goran Kropp describes his bicycle trip from Sweden to Nepal in Ultimate High: My Everest Odyssey. (Following this event-studded bike trip, Kropp went on to climb Everest alone, without supplemental oxygen or help from a Sherpa to carry his equipment, and bicycled on home!)

  Two Wheels in the Dust: From Kathmandu to Kandy, by English senior citizen Anne Mustoe, details her spiritual pilgrimage from Nepal to Sri Lanka as she follows in the footsteps of the main characters in the Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic.

  If you’re up for rough bicycling in an unfamiliar terrain, share Andrew X. Pham’s experiences in Catfish and Mandala: A Two Wheeled-Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam.

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOVELS

  Most biographical novels mix imagined characters in with the real ones. This allows the author to follow Emily Dickinson’s dic tum: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” And that’s the reason I love good biographical novels: The subjects seem to me to be even more “real” than they do in a straight biography. I also frequently find myself, upon finishing a biographical novel, reading a biography of the person, then comparing the two. Here are some of the best biographical novels I’ve read:

  Amanda Burden looks back at her thirteenth year—when her stepmother was bludgeoned to death, and everyone’s favorite suspect was the family’s next-door neighbor, Lizzie Borden, who had been acquitted of the axe-murder of her own parents three decades before—in Miss Lizzie by Walter Satterthwait.

  The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory, vividly retells the story of the tempestuous marriage of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII from the point of view of Mary, Anne’s older sister and Henry’s mistress long before her sister caught the eye of the king.

  Janet Stevenson’s Weep No More illuminates the sad yet ultimately noble life of Elizabeth Van Lew, who disguised her activities as a Union spy in Richmond, Virginia, by appearing to be simply insane.

  The protagonist of The Untouchable, a wonderful character study by John Banville, is based on Sir Anthony Blunt, art historian, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, and one of the infamous group of Cambridge spies that included Kim Philby and Guy Burgess.

  Max Byrd’s Grant isn’t set during the Civil War, when Ulysses S. Grant distinguished himself on the battlefield (and accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox) or during his two presidential terms (marked by general ineptitude and scandals), but instead begins five years before Grant’s death, in 1885, from cancer of the throat. Byrd has also written outstanding biographical novels about Presidents Jefferson and Jackson.

  Two writers have tried to contain the great abolitionist and rabble-rouser John Brown within the confines of a novel with some degree of success, if only because the books are so well written. Read them together, because no single interpretation or point of view can do John Brown justice, if justice he deserves: Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter, told from the point of view of Owen Brown, John’s son, humanizes the leader of the attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and describes Brown as a difficult and demanding father. Bruce Olds’s Raising Holy Hell is a postmodern interpretation of Brown’s life and death, told from various points of view and written in the form of journal entries, letters, and interior monologues.

  The Last Canyon by John Vernon is a beautiful retelling of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 exploration of the Grand Canyon and his and his men’s inevitable and tragic clash with a tribe of Paiute Indians who lived on the canyon’s northern edge.

  Reading The Death of Ché Guevara by Jay Cantor makes it easy to see how charismatic Castro’s closest pal during the Cuban Revolution was. The book is fast moving and sympathetic to both Ché Guevara and the cause. Cantor was clearly as captivated by the energy and humanity of the man as were Ché’s many followers.

  BIRD BRAINS

  After reading Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s elegant meditation, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds: Notes from a Northwest Year, I found myself much more aware of the sights and sounds of the birds I saw and heard as I went through my ordinary activities and everyday life.

  Warm, humorous, and filled with (unobtrusively presented) information, Red-tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park, by Wall Street Journal columnist Marie Winn, relates the excitement in the New York birding community (and throughout the world) when two rare red-tail hawks are sighted in Central Park.

  Traveling to Iceland, the Galapagos, Texas, Alberta, and beyond, naturalist and nature photographer Tim Gallagher has observed and written about birds of prey (falcons, eagles, condors, and other raptors) and other birds for more than twenty years. The beautifully written essays that make up Parts Unknown: A Naturalist’s Journey in Search of Birds and Wild Places display Gallagher’s love and appreciation for these magnificent birds and the wild and untamed world in which they live.

  Birders: Tales of a Tribe by Mark Cocker distinguishes bird-watching (a rather passive activity) and birders (an active, aggressive, quirky lot of folks, which includes Cocker) and is a most entertaining look at what makes birders so passionate about their hobby that they’ll endure extremes of climate, put up with total discomfort, and even take risks to accomplish their sighting goals.

  Christopher Cokinos explores the last days of several different species of once-plentiful, now extinct birds, such as the passenger pigeon, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the great auk, the Labrador duck, and the Carolina parakeet in Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. (The title is based on a line by Emily Dickinson.)

  David Allen Sibley’s The Sibley Guide to Birds is a beautifully illustrated guide for birders and armchair bird enthusiasts by an author squarely in the tradition of such long-famous three-named bird fanciers as John James Audubon and Roger Tory Peterson, while The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior is an indispensable collection of essays by well-known avian experts, for those who want even more information on all aspects of the subject.

  In The Birds of Heaven: Travel with Cranes, Peter Matthiessen seeks out the world’s fifteen species of cranes—eleven of which fall into the endangered category. The book is beautifully illustrated by Robert Bateman.

  Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds by Chris Chester is his charming account of how an English sparrow changed his life.

  In The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, Jonathan Weiner writes about the scientists who are investigating successive generations of finches on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos.

  BLACK HUMOR

  I am not usually a fan of black humor, which seems to me to turn on the cruelty and nastiness of its characters. But for some reason, these three books—one very, very dark and the other two more a very pale shade of gray—are favorites of mine.

  In Lost by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, the eight-year-old German narrator records his conflicted feelings when he discovers that the older brother he always believed had died during World War II might actually be alive. His parents have identified an orphan as their likely son Arnold, and now they have to prove that the orphan actually is their son. This lands the family in a Kafkaesque world of institutes, mad doctors, and scientific testing to determine the true parentage of the perhaps-Arnold.

  The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes might best be described as comic horror. On the day that he is fired, Nelson Humboldt, a lecturer in the English department of a prestigious university (where his brand of academic investigation has fallen out of favor, replaced by the deconstructionists, the multiculturalists, the feminists, and countless other “ists”), severs his finger in a freak collision with a bicycle. After the finger is reattached, Nelson discovers that by merely touching people with it, he can bend them to his will. So what will he do with this newfound power? Just about anything to get back at his enemies.

  Terence Blacker’s Kill Your Darlings is blacker than black, complete with a slimy antihero. Gregory Keays’s failure to live up to his predicted career as a notable novelist stings particularly when he compares himself to the fabulously successful Martin Amis, who did live up to his promise. In addition, both his marriage (to the deliciously named Marigold, a fabulously successful feng shui practitioner) and his relationship with his teenage son have fallen apart. Sick of his life and his part-time gig teaching creative writing in a fifth-rate community college, Gregory decides t
o appropriate a novel written by one of his students, a young man who committed suicide after finishing the book, and use the manuscript to gain all the fame and fortune he feels he so richly deserves. This is a novel to love, with a main character to despise—an unreliable narrator to top all other unreliable narrators.

  BOMB MAKERS

  The making of the atom bomb and its subsequent use are the subject of some awfully interesting books.

  Richard Rhodes’s exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project is marked by Rhodes’s insightful studies of the complicated people who were most involved in the creation of the bomb, from Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes followed this book with Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

  In Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, Thomas Powers examines the life and work of the controversial German scientist who chose to remain in Germany after many of his physicist contemporaries had moved to the United States, and who led his country’s nuclear research efforts. Powers tries to answer the question of why Germany never developed a nuclear bomb.

  General Leslie Groves, who was put in charge of the Manhattan Project at its inception late in 1943, describes what went on from the time he set up the project through the bombing of Japan and the postwar years, in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project.

  Gregg Herken, in Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller, tells the history of the nuclear age through the intertwined biographies of three of the colleagues who were most involved in creating it. They began as friends yet ended up in strong disagreement about how the bomb should be used, both during the war and after.

  Sometimes fiction can be valuable for broadening and deepening one’s understanding of a difficult topic. In his Tony Award–winning play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn uses a (real) meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Denmark in 1941 to explore the way we interpret history.

  E. V. Cunningham’s Phyllis is one of the most moving novels set during the height of the Cold War, when the fear of nuclear spies was pervasive. In this story some missing uranium is traced to a physicist at a New York university. (E. V. Cunningham is the pseudonym for the blacklisted leftie Howard Fast.)

  BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS

  Bibliophiles love nothing better than making the acquaintance of other book lovers—especially between the pages of a book. Here are some people whose books about books I’ve especially enjoyed.

  Wendy Lesser writes about the joys of loving books in Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering.

  Those of us who grew up enchanted by the world of literature will particularly celebrate Francis Spufford’s The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading.

  Nicholas Basbanes explores the world of the book lover in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books and Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture.

  No real reader could resist a book with a title like A Passion for Books: A Book Lover’s Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books, edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, with a foreword by Ray Bradbury.

  It’s always interesting to read about the books loved by writers whom you love, and you can feast to your heart’s content in For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most by Ronald B. Shwartz.

  Novelist and essayist Anna Quindlen describes her relationship with books in How Reading Changed My Life.

  Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader is a particularly lovely collection of essays, including a priceless one on combining the libraries of two heavy-duty readers who are joined in marriage.

  Despite the title of her book, Fadiman is no common reader. Her father was the well-known writer, critic, book editor of The New Yorker, senior judge at the Book-of-the-Month Club, and all-around bookworm Clifton Fadiman, whose own book The Lifetime Reading Plan had enormous influence for more than forty years and is still worth looking at today.

  In Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books, novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz grapples with a question that I have long pondered: Is an addiction to reading—in which one prefers reading to real life—good or bad?

  Editor Steven Gilbar collected selections from writers like Stanley Elkins, Michel de Montaigne, John Fowles, and Vladimir Nabokov on the pleasures and perils of an addiction to books, in Reading in Bed: Personal Essays on the Glories of Reading.

  Fifty-seven writers (among them Sherman Alexie, Howard Norman, Larry Watson, Mona Simpson, and Nicholson Baker) share their recollections of the events and people that turned them into readers, in The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading, edited by Michael Dorris and Emilie Buchwald.

  BOYS COMING OF AGE

  Boys becoming men is an enduring theme in fiction. It’s difficult to find anyone who didn’t read at least one of the two best-known (and best) examples of the genre—John Knowles’s A Separate Peace and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—in high school or college (and sometimes in both). Coming-of-age novels describe a search for understanding, not only of oneself, but also of the often mysterious, contradictory, and sometimes frightening adult world. They help readers reflect on their own experiences and offer a (sometimes minimal) consolation that one’s feelings are not unique. Although many coming-of-age novels are, perforce, autobiographical in nature and earnest in tone (often overly so), many are filled with vivid characters and fresh insights.

  Cormac McCarthy’s novels are usually far too violent for me, but I found All the Pretty Horses difficult to put down. This gorgeously written contemporary classic, set in the late 1940s, is the story of John Grady Cole who, along with a friend, leaves his Texas home in search of adventure in Mexico, where he encounters experiences that turn him, unwillingly, into a man.

  In Testing the Current by William McPherson, Tommy McAllister grows up awfully quickly during his ninth year, when he becomes aware of the inconsistencies and outright lies in the lives of his parents and their friends.

  As an adult, Anton Steenwijk tries to come to terms with the 1945 murder near his childhood home of a Nazi collaborator, and the subsequent brutal retaliation suffered by his family, in Harry Mulisch’s The Assault.

  Alan Brown lays out a complicated childhood and difficult coming-of-age for his protagonist, Toshi, in Audrey Hepburn’s Neck. Toshi’s belated discovery of his mother’s awful past in war-torn Japan leads him finally to understand and, perhaps, forgive her for deserting him and his father.

  In Isaac and His Devils by Fernanda Eberstadt, young genius Isaac Hooker moves slowly toward adulthood, trying to balance the competing visions for his future of his overbearing mother and his passive father.

  In Nick Hornby’s lighthearted About a Boy, thirty-something, rich, selfish, and very hip Will Freeman finally grows up only after becoming involved in the lives of Fiona and Marcus, Fiona’s twelve-year-old son, who is solidly square and very unhappy.