The Homework: CL’s Summer Reading List
July 3rd, 2007 by Joel Rozen in BooksThis story will appear in tomorrow’s CL.
Let’s get Fun-damental!
Of the books below, all of which hit shelves recently, there’s something for everyone: beach thrillers to biographies, fluffy fiction to gripping accounts of fascism. Get your spectacles cleaned and your picnic baskets packed — it’s time to turn some pages.
NON-FICTION
Class Acts
Rachel Sherman (California)
The first outing of a young Yale sociology professor, Class Acts follows employees at two of the nation’s swankiest hotels as they puff pillows, fold linens, wheel in the room service and pet-sit. The whole thing is organized like an ethnography, but reads like any piece of quality narrative journalism: great quotes, great characters, oddball encounters galore.
Spymistress
William Stevenson (Arcade)
As this biography reveals, during World War II, the real-life British socialite Vera Atkins became one of the world’s great spies — and the raven-haired vixen whom James Bond creator Ian Fleming once respectfully called “the boss.â€
Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life
John Sellars (Simon & Schuster)
Part music guide, part fan memoir, this history of the indie scene — ’80s, ’90s and ’00s — is unpretentious enough to engage even those who don’t know their Spoon from their Sonic Youth. Hip and heartfelt.
Peeling the Onion
Günter Grass (Harcourt)
Turns out Grass served the Nazis as an SS fighter once, something the Nobel winner regretted but, for whatever reason, always downplayed in his lit career. A surprising read for those who grew up on his classic indictments of postwar German hypocrisy, but worthwhile even for those who didn’t.
Embark upon a jump for fictional pursuits…
FICTION
New England White
Stephen L. Carter (Knopf)
Carter’s literate first novel was a runaway bestseller; his second, a sort of spin-off with several repeat characters, is already halfway there. A whodunit murder mystery involving university politics, race relations and a troubled marriage, this stylish work makes other authors of campus killer stories seem like the real victims.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
Is there anything Chabon can’t do? Watch him blend WWII displacement, Jews in Alaska, murder, chess tourneys and crime-lord religious types together seamlessly in one big, handsome, offbeat package.
Little Stalker
Jennifer Belle (Riverhead)
If light and chick-littish is more your bag, you can always take this book about the Manhattan single life out for a night. You’ll hunt for men, revel in Little House on the Prairie reruns and laugh your head off with the protagonist as she finds a way to poke fun at her own brain tumor.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead)
Covering a friendship spanning 30 years of jihad, Taliban tyranny and cultural change, Splendid Suns is just as achingly vivid as Hosseini’s first book, Kite Runner. Some say more so.
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Great. As if I didn’t have enough books on the pile already.
In all seriousness, though, these look like some good titles I wouldn’t have necessarily found on my own.
July 4th, 2007 at 8:52 am
Although it doesn’t come out until September and therefore doesn’t really qualify as a summer read, the book I’ll be fiending for in upcoming months is Denis Johnson’s return to fiction, “Tree of Smoke” (http://www.amazon.com/Tree-Smoke-Novel-Denis-Johnson/dp/0374279128/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-4714868-0978366?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183556612&sr=1-1). Johnson’s first novel in six years sounds like a doozy: 624 pages on the Vietnam War between 1963 and 1970, published by FSG. Cannot freaking wait.
Rachel just finished the Chabon this morning and was underwhelmed: “For a detective novel it’s less than thrilling.” She praised the inventive language, though.
July 5th, 2007 at 11:13 am
anyone who does not read The Virgins Cage or Infidel by Ayaan Ali Hirsi
is a pinhead