{"id":17407,"date":"2016-07-06T15:05:01","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T19:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=17407"},"modified":"2016-08-03T11:28:14","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T15:28:14","slug":"summer-reading-call-in-let-the-reading-begin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2016\/07\/06\/summer-reading-call-in-let-the-reading-begin\/","title":{"rendered":"2016 Summer Reading List: Let the reading begin!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Marketa<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

>>Listen to the Summer Reading Call-in<\/a><\/h3>\n

Our annual summer reading call in once again produced an amazing list of titles. Thanks to regular co-hosts Chris Robinson and John Ernst, and special guest host Paul Graham, for bringing so much to the process. You’re in on the reading conspiracy, too! And, you can still add your recommendations in the comment section or email them to me at ellen@ncpr.org<\/a>\u00a0 Remember, we’re interested in every genre, classic or just off the presses.<\/p>\n

Ellen Rocco<\/strong>, NCPR Station Manager<\/p>\n

\"paulsbookcover\"<\/a>I don’t know about you, but my reading can be plotted on a sine curve. I will go weeks reading hardly anything other than work-related articles or six back issues of The New Yorker<\/em> or Atlantic<\/em> magazines. (Okay, and People<\/strong> in the dentist’s office.)<\/p>\n

Then, I’ll devour one book after another, drunk on fiction, non-fiction, poetry–stories and words.<\/p>\n

So, from my erratic reading of recent months, a few titles.<\/p>\n

First, a couple of titles by two writers who live and work in this region. Full disclosure: both are friends of mine.<\/p>\n

In Memory of Bread: A Memoir<\/em>, Paul Graham. Love beer and bread and pasta? Imagine a gluten-free life: not because it’s trendy but because you have celiac disease and gluten can kill you. Paul takes a deep dive into the place of gluten-rich foods in human history, provides the scientific underpinnings for gluten allergies and, more than anything, mourns and comes to terms with the elimination of all gluten from his diet. Don’t get the wrong idea: this book is for anyone interested in food and food history. It is beautifully written. Here’s a link to the very nice review<\/a> in The Washington Post.<\/p>\n

\"glennsbook\"<\/a>You may have heard about my other regional pick, Leaves Torn Asunder <\/em>by Glenn Pearsall. Todd Moe interviewed Glenn <\/a>about this volume of historical fiction–a first for Glenn, who in the past has published Adirondack history volumes.<\/p>\n

Among other recent reads I’d recommend:<\/p>\n

Hanya Yanagihari’s novel A Little Life<\/em>. The writing is insightful and fluid; the story follows the lives of four young men whose friendship and history with each other is surprisingly gripping. I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did.<\/p>\n

I believe Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania<\/em> by Erik Larson was recommended by John Ernst sometime in the past year. I finally got around to it this spring and liked the context–and personal stories of some passengers–he adds to the basic bit of history we all know. I’ve shared with several friends who are strictly non-fiction readers.<\/p>\n

And here are two from recent years that are worth your time if you missed them when they were making the circuit:<\/p>\n

The Goldfinch<\/em>, Donna Tartt<\/p>\n

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel<\/em>, Anthony Marra<\/p>\n

During the call in, we had a little conversation about good titles for summer book groups with a focus on the Adirondacks. Here are a few that were mentioned:<\/p>\n

An American Tragedy, <\/em>Theodore Dreiser. Perfect to pair with the more recent take on the classic American news story that became the basis for Dreiser’s iconic novel:<\/p>\n

A Northern Light<\/em>, Jennifer Donnelly<\/p>\n

An Adirondack Passage: The Cruise of the Canoe Sairy Gamp<\/em>, Christine Jerome<\/p>\n

Short Carries<\/em>, Elizabeth Folwell<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

John Ernst<\/strong>, Call in co-host, Elk Lake\/NY<\/p>\n

Dear Mr. You<\/em>, Mary-Louise Parker (2015) I\u2019ve been reading a lot of memoirs recently and Parker\u2019s reputation as an actress who has won a Tony, an Emmy, an Obie, and a Golden Globe Award drew me to this one. No names are named here. This is not a kiss-and-tell effort. Instead, Parker organizes her book as a series of letters to men \u2013- real, imagined and composite \u2013 who have played a role in her life. The result is a series of incandescent images of key moments and experiences and feelings rather than a start-to-finish slice of a life. Parker writes about the boyfriend from Hell, about a firefighter she met briefly after 9\/11, about the death of her father, about a priest who was important in her childhood. Her writing is direct, colloquial, and unstintingly revealing. At times it is funny. At times it brims with emotion. Can she write? You better believe it. In a jacket blurb Mary Karr says of this book, \u201cI drank it down in one gulp, then started back at page one again.\u201d I felt compelled to do the same thing. This is a unique, brave and completely personal book which has Parker\u2019s unique fingerprints all over it and shimmers with conviction and originality. Even if I weren\u2019t half in love with the author, I would have been impressed.<\/p>\n

A Rage for Order: The Middle East from Tahrir Square to Isis<\/em>, Robert F. Worth (2016)<\/p>\n

Bob Worth, a correspondent for The New York Times for 14 years was Beirut Bureau Chief from 2007-2011. He also has an Adirondack connection. His parents, Blaikie and Bob Worth, have been active in the Adirondack Explorer, the Adirondack Museum and many other organizations. In this riveting and timely book, Worth traces the events of the Arab Spring, from the self-immolation in Tunisia that was the initial spark, through the epicenter in Cairo\u2019s Tahrir Square, and on to Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Worth tells the story through the words and experiences of actual participants. The people come alive on the page, and they illuminate the complex cross-currents of culture, religion, and history at play in the region. It\u2019s a searing and saddening story. as in country after country the initial burst of democratic participation and national unity gives way to sectarian violence and the chaos of clashing militias. The strongest impression I took away from what Worth chronicles with great passion and skill, is how little that was really happening on the ground was reported and discussed in this country. The U.S. is barely mentioned here. This is not our story, although we continue to think that it is and that we can affect it, if not control it. If you care about the knowing the people and events that have shaped the Middle East over the past critical five years, I highly recommend that you read A RAGE FOR ORDER. It is a brilliant piece of work.<\/p>\n

Before the Fall<\/em> \u2013 Noah Hawley (2016) Also: The Good Father; The Punch; A Conspiracy of Tall Men<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a cracking good thriller by a novelist, screen-writer and producer who has won Emmy, Golden Globe, Pen, Critics\u2019 Choice and Peabody awards. He is currently executive producer and writer for the cable series, Fargo. It begins with the assembling on a private plane of a small group of the highly privileged, including the head of a Fox-like news network, an investment banker about to be indicted for money-laundering, their families, the plane\u2019s crew, and a down-and-out artist who has been offered a ride from Martha\u2019s Vineyard to New York City. 16 minutes after take-off, the plane disappears from radar and crashes into the North Atlantic. All aboard perish except the painter, who swims 25 miles to shore in the darkness, beating off sharks, towing the 4-year-old son of the broadcast executive. What follows is an investigation into the cause of the crash \u2013 terrorism, sabotage, mechanical failure, pilot error?\u00a0 — and a media riot examining under hot TV lights the personal lives of all on board. Hawley has a sharp understanding of the kind of news organization that believes its function is to create news rather than report it, and he is skilled at delineating recognizable characters with a few strokes. This is my top candidate for summer entertainment. It comes with a bracing view of the contemporary world at its ugliest and most vicious.<\/p>\n

Custer\u2019s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America<\/em>, T.S. Stiles (2015) Also: Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War; The First Tycoon: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt<\/em><\/p>\n

T.J. Stiles won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for his biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He has just picked up his second Pulitzer for this biography of a very different participant in post-Civil War America \u2013 George Armstong Custer. The trials of the title refer not only to the strains of life and war but to two courts martial within 6 years. To many people Custer is a romantic figure, with his flowing blond locks, his buckskin and velvet non-standard costumes and his genius for self-promotion. Custer was indeed a courageous and occasionally brilliant cavalry officer. He was also a wartime Southern sympathizer, a racist, a compulsive gambler, a womanizer, a toady to the famed and powerful and an inept political dabbler. His wife, the strong-minded Elizabeth, adored him, though he put her through years of uncertainty and jealousy. This is a fair and complete, warts and all biography of Custer. It is not the story of the Little Big Horn, the subject of a shelf of excellent books. The battle is treated concisely in an epilogue. Instead, this is the story of a changing America, when a romantic age was giving way to corporate power, political deal-making and wars of attrition. I found it never less than compelling reading.<\/p>\n

Fifteen Dogs: An Apologue<\/em> \u2013 Andre Alexis (2015) Also: Childhood; Asylum; Pastoral<\/em><\/p>\n

Occasionally a friend will suggest a title that comes completely out of the blue. In this case Nathalie Thill, Executive Director of the Adirondack Center for Writing, told me that this was the most impressive book that she had read all year, since Anthony Doerr\u2019s All the Light We Cannot\u00a0 See. Who could resist? Fifteen Dogs is a novel by an award-winning Canadian writer born in Trinidad. It is based on a most unusual premise. The gods Apollo and Hermes are having a few beers in a Toronto saloon when they decide to make a bet. The wager is that any animal would be even more unhappy than humans are if they had human intelligence. Instantly, 15 dogs staying overnight in a Toronto veterinary clinic find themselves capable of complex thought. Alexis calls his book an apologue, so we expect allegory. It traces what happens to the dogs as they divide into those capable of expressing canine language and even a range of human languages and poetry and those who revert to the rules of the pack and turn viciously on the outsiders.\u00a0 The author also intends to raise what Publisher\u2019s Weekly calls, \u201dan astonishing range of metaphysical questions.\u201d The simplest of these are: what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be a dog? Through the individual stories of the dogs endowed with intelligence, Alexis examines questions of dominance, food, sexuality and allegiance in humans and dogs. This quirky, stimulating book is one of a kind. After reading, it you may never be able to look at dogs in quite the same way again.<\/p>\n

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway,<\/em> Asne Seierstad (2013) Also: The Bookseller of Kabul; A Hundred and One Days; The Angel of Grozny<\/em><\/p>\n

On July 22, 2011, a 32-year-old Norwegian named Anders Breivik set off a home-made fertilizer bomb near the Prime Minister\u2019s office in Oslo, killing 8 people. He then proceeded to a small island, Utoya, just off the coast where the youth division of the Liberal Party were enjoying an annual summer outing. After landing on the island, Breivik methodically shot and killed 69 people, most of them teenagers, wounding and maiming numerous others.Who was Breivik and what was his motivation? Who were his victims? At his trial would he be judged sane and responsible for his acts or not? What were the after-effects on family and friends of the victims and on the small Norwegian democracy that had brought forth such a monster?These are the questions that veteran foreign correspondent Asne, Seierstad tackles calmly and intelligently through a massive research and interview effort. Her account is riveting \u2013 as close as we will ever get to the terrible hours of the killing and to the psychology of the killer, who considered himself the savior of Norway and of Europe from the threats of Islam, Liberalism and multiculturalism. This is truly a stunning book. As one reviewer wrote: \u201cWe\u2019ve been diverting ourselves\u2026with crime fiction making play with the eruption of evil into the apparently harmonious societies of Scandinavia. This is the real thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

LaRose<\/em>\u2013 Louise Erdrich (2016) Also: The Round House, The Plague of Doves, Love Medicine<\/em><\/p>\n

Following up on her National Book Award for The Round House<\/em>, Louise Erdrich\u2019s new novel is a strong, complex and compelling piece of work. At the center of the story is the accidental killing, in a hunting accident, of a five-year-old boy. The man who kills him is strongly linked to him. His wife is a half sister of the dead boy\u2019s mother The two boys were neighbors and best friends. The shooter, an Ojibwe fighting the shadows of addiction, decides to heal the wound in the traditional Native way. He gives his own five-year-old son, La Rose, to the bereaved family. The novel enfolds in a way that is so painful that it is sometimes difficult to read, but it rewards perseverance. Erdrich builds around the figure of LaRose who watches over the stricken and binds people together through his deeply humane nature. This is a layered portrayal of family, relationship, trust, betrayal and revenge. In this heightened atmosphere, a high school girls\u2019 volleyball game becomes a blood sport and a coming of age. Deceased ancestors appear, including the original LaRose, a woman generations removed from the present, a woman whose remains have been stolen by white officials for use in a study of tuberculosis, a woman who wants to come home. In a rapturous final scene \u2013 a backyard barbeque for a high school graduation \u2013 there is a coming together of people from on and off the reservation, of parents and children, of family and townspeople, of the living and the dead. It is a moving and convincing culmination of all that has come before, linking contemporary reservation life with Anishabee tradition and history and culture.<\/p>\n

H is for Hawk,<\/em> Helen Macdonald (2014) Helen Macdonald, a research scholar in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, had grown up with a keen interest in the practice and literature of falconry. A personal crisis brought on by her father\u2019s passing led to the urge to train a\u00a0 goshawk, a predator she describes as, \u201dthirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket.\u201d This is the chronicle of that training, in which Macdonald and her goshawk, named Mabel, overcome frustrating inexperience, agonizing miscommunication, and bloody engagements. Together they run the course from strong indifference, to learning, achievement, setbacks, playfulness, and ultimately, a kind of release. Macdonald\u2019s experience is shadowed by that of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King, whose book, The Goshawk, published in 1951, tells of a training gone terribly wrong and provides brutal insights into White\u2019s private life. But this is also a very personal memoir of a time when Macdonald describes her situation as, \u201cno father, no partner, no child, no job, no home.\u201d Her answer is to try in every way possible to become a hawk. It is obviously the wrong answer, but it makes for fascinating reading. Macdonald is a writer of rare talent. Her descriptions of landscapes are as compelling as I\u2019ve ever read. She uses the arcane vocabulary of falconry along with a slightly archaic diction to forge a personal style that is vivid and completely her own. This is a bravura performance.<\/p>\n

Our Souls At Night,<\/em> Kent Haruf (2015) This is a posthumously-published novel by the author of the much-admired Plainsong<\/em>. Haruf writes simple, declarative sentences that are as raw and stark as winter in the High Plains. But the story he tells here is full of tenderness and insight and compassion. A bald account of the premise doesn\u2019t do the novel justice. The setting is a small, bleak Colorado town called Holt, which is also the setting for Haruf\u2019s other work. A woman in her seventies whose husband has died visits a widower neighbor she doesn\u2019t know well and makes a bold proposal. Acknowledging their loneliness, they will spend the nights together to talk in the darkness and provide physical comfort. The development of the relationship, the reaction of the town and of family members, the lengthy visit of a 5-year-old grandchild whose parents are separating, these are the elements that make up the novel. The two main characters are ordinary people from a very ordinary town, but in Haruf\u2019s hands their story takes on a larger than life, almost a mythic aspect. This is a parting gift from a writer who earns our gratitude.<\/p>\n

The Master and Margarita<\/em>, Mikhail Bulgakov; translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1967) Also: The Heart of a Dog; The White Guard<\/em><\/p>\n

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891 and lived most of his adult life under a Stalinist regime that suppressed and banned his fiction and his writing for the theatre. This novel, completed in 1940, the year he died, was not published until 1967. Since then, it has been considered a masterpiece in Russia and has achieved cult status in the U.S. Now, with a new translation appearing, the novel is finding a wider audience in this country. This sprawling, brilliant work is split between the afterlife and its intersection with the present. The story defies summary. In 1930s Moscow, the devil appears, bearing the name Woland, and with his entourage, including a vodka-drinking tomcat, causes general chaos at a Moscow theatre. But the novel is also about Pontius Pilate, who gave the order for the crucifixion of Jesus, and about the Master, whose unpublished novel about Pilate earns him the devotion of the beautiful Margarita, inconveniently married to someone else. In this novel nothing is what it seems. Margarita joins the devil in a night of revelry and thereby rescues the Master from a mental hospital. The devil represents rough justice, perhaps linked to the only kind of justice available in the USSR. The real world is fantasy and dreams are reality. The shifting styles and narrative themes of the novel refract light like a dancehall crystal ball. Complex, yet with a narrative gripping enough to hold attention throughout, I suspect that this book has a different effect on every individual reader and even on every separate reading. It lives up to its growing reputation.<\/p>\n

The North Water<\/em>, Ian McGuire<\/p>\n

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Paul Graham<\/strong>, Guest co-host, SLU English Professor<\/p>\n

Pigtails: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat<\/em>, Barry Estabroo<\/p>\n

32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line<\/em>, Eric Ripert<\/p>\n

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot<\/em>, Mark Vanhoenacker<\/p>\n

The Sixth Extinction<\/em>, Elisabeth Kolbert
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Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays<\/em>, Cynthia Ozick<\/p>\n

Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America<\/em>, Calvin Trillin<\/p>\n

Burning the Days, and Life is Meals<\/em>, James Salter<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chris Robinson<\/strong>, Call in co-host, Clarkson University<\/p>\n

There\u2019s reading for information; reading for inspiration; and then there\u2019s reading for escape. I certainly have engaged in the latter. When the Bush Administration refused to heed the warnings and protests of peace activists and launched its illegal war in Iraq, I responded by reading deeply into what philosophers were saying about language in Cambridge and Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s. When I mourn the slow decline of my father, it is with fat novels in hand. This kind of reading is understandable, but it is also a luxury afforded to the few.<\/p>\n

The reading that needs to be done for the sake of being a better citizen and neighbor is the sort that informs and inspires. The level of misinformation that is passed around disguised as public discourse on social media and by \u201cthe commentariat\u201d is just stunning. Reading needs to be an antidote to the darkest distortions of this election year. We need to be a public informed on the science of global climate change, the pseudo-biology of racism, the extent of inequality and the utter misery it creates, and the fact that corporations are not people and that money is not speech. Reading for inspiration combats quietism and defeatism. If you find yourself thinking that another, more just and sustainable world is not possible, then turn to novels where alternative realities are what the art form is all about. Fiction can be more truthful than newspapers and political analyses in this regard.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I can recommend to feed your brain and your heart.<\/p>\n

Fiction <\/strong><\/p>\n