Thanks for a great conversation around
Nobody's Fool last week and apologies, again, for the last minute change of date. We have about two months before our next meeting on Wednesday, August 31st when we will discuss
Barbarian Days: A Surfer's Life by William Finnegan. This memoir won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. "Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting." Finnegan is a staff writer for
The New Yorker, about my age, and grew up near my home town in Southern California and the same generation covered in
The Sellout. In
the NY Times Book Review's By the Book section Geoff Dyer described
Barbarian Days as the last great book he'd read because "it made me realize my whole life has been pretty much a waste. I suspected this anyway;
he explained why: because I’d not surfed."
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| My summer ambition |
Apart from our next read, several of you have asked for some summer reading suggestions. Wellesley Books publishes a Summer Reading pamphlet, available in the store, which features recommendations from our entire staff if you are interested in something beyond my narrow scope. Otherwise, here's what I'm thinking:
- The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan - Replace Texas with Kentucky and this is an epic on the scale of The Son. I'm just getting started but already enthralled.
- The One from the Other by Philip Kerr - After The Quiet Flame I read the Berlin Noir trilogy which contains the first 3 Bernie Gunther novels and I have to admit I'm hooked.
- Before the Fall by Noah Hawley - "The thriller of the year." When a private plane plunges into the ocean off Martha's Vineyard, the media and the government want answers.
- The Ginger Man by James Patrick Dunleavy - Never read it, just recently heard of it, but a classic contemporary of Lucky Jim.
- Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson - An editor's assistant is sent to act as caregiver to a reclusive novelist's quirky 9-year old son while she tries to finish her next novel. A whimsical page-turner in the spirit of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Where'd You Go, Bernadette.
- The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin - For those of you who haven't had enough dystopian drama. This is the third book of a trilogy. The first, The Passage, was a thrilling literary phenomenon. I felt the second was a bit of a plod, but this last has apparently returned to the level of the debut.
As always, I reserve the right to change my mind or head in a
different direction. Are you reading something good? Have other ideas or suggestions you think the group might like? Please respond or comment via the blog about books you plan to
read or have enjoyed over the Summer.
Have read a few good novels this summer even while enjoying Barbarian Days immensely. It's a long book—I figure about 50% more words per page than most, so really closer to 700 pages. But great. I read Jean Rhys for the first time - famous for Wide Sargasso Sea. The book is "Good Morning, Midnight", 1938, and I was blown away. She's an incredible writer, considered ahead of her time when first published with a style I can't quite describe, or at least, articulate why it's so brilliant. She led a rough, tumultuous life but lived to 85, dying in 1979, long enough to see herself acclaimed as a modern master. Like Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana", written in 1958 and with Castro's coming victory unstated but hanging over everything, one feels the lurking monster of WW II bearing down on Rhys's Paris. Another Paris novel I just finished I'd also highly recommend: "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Sara Houghteling, taking on the issue of looted art during World War II but focusing on strong characterizations. She's quite a good writer. On the "beach" side, I'm reading Christopher Reich—The Rules of Vengeance—courtesy of the Booksmith basement. Great page turner as were the two others of his I've read. On the non-fiction side, I recommend "Duel with the Devil" by Paul Collins, where the first sensational murder trial of the new Republic had Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton collaborating as defense attorneys! It was part of the lead-up to the duel as well. Takes place in NYC. And I'm reading a book by an old Stonybrook professor (I didn't take classes with him but a friend of mine's still in touch with him), "For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus" by Frederick Brown. Fills in an important part of European history—France in the decades just before and during the Dreyfus affair—that I didn't know much about and I found it resonant with the underlying tensions at play in our current election year.
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