Book List

I recently received this book list naming the selections of a reading club for the upcoming year. I decided to add my two cents:

September: "A Widow for One Year," by John Irving. --I became an avid Irving fan long before any of his books reached the screen. But I must have grown tired of him after "A Prayer for Owen Meany," because I stopped reading him until this past year ("The Fourth Hand," which was decent), even though both Widow and "A Son of the Circus" sit unread on my bookshelf. Maybe it's time for a new season of Irving.

October: "Prey," by Michael Crichton. --How did I manage to miss this one? I usually enjoy Crichton's sci-fi plots, all the way back to "The Andromeda Strain," and I generally find him to be a quick read. I'm looking forward to reading, "Prey." (Real Crichton afficionados will have read the much older and largely overlooked, "Eaters of the Dead.")

November: "Founding Brothers," by Joseph Ellis. --Had never heard of it; not my typical choice. If it comes highly recommended, I'll give it a look.

December: "The Golden Compass," by Philip Pullman. --I read this one last year and enjoyed it, but not so much that I felt like completing the trilogy ("His Dark Materials") in one sitting. Nevertheless, it is imaginative and well-written and I enjoyed Pullman's descriptions of the personal daemons. It's usually shelved in the Young Adult section, but kids "reading up" may find parts of it too frightening.

January: "The Dew Breaker," by Edwidge Danticat. --Another that had not made it to my radar screen. Interesting premise: the tale of a Haitian immigrant to the U.S. who was a former prison guard skilled in torture. Maybe the interested reader might dare to couple it with "Time's Arrow," Martin Amis' postmodern story of an ex-Nazi doctor, Tod Friendly, whose life is played out in reverse--literally "reverse"--beginning with his death and progressing to the womb like a movie reel played backwards with characters walking backwards, water running up into showerheads, and thousands of Jews being returned to life.

February: "Little Children," by Tom Perrota. --(Hey, Tom, didn't you work at NUSC with this guy?) Wow! Here's how Publisher's Weekly summarizes the plot:

The characters in this intelligent, absorbing tale of suburban angst are constrained and defined by their relationship to children. There's Sarah, an erstwhile bisexual feminist who finds herself an unhappy mother and wife to a branding consultant addicted to Internet porn. There's Todd, a handsome ex-jock and stay-at-home dad known to neighborhood housewives as the Prom King, who finds in house-husbandry and reveries about his teenage glory days a comforting alternative to his wife's demands that he pass the bar and get on with a law career. There's Mary Ann, an uptight supermom who schedules sex with her husband every Tuesday at nine and already has her well-drilled four-year-old on the inside track to Harvard. And there's Ronnie, a pedophile whose return from prison throws the school district into an uproar, and his mother, May, who still harbors hopes that her son will turn out well after all.

What's not to like?

(And I thought the aforementioned Martin Amis was getting out there with "Yellow Dog.")

March: "This Boy's Life," by Tobias Wolff. --Good choice. Along with Mary Karr ("The Liars' Club," and later, "Cherry;" both excellent), Wolff is one of the names I most often hear credited with the resurging popularity for gritty memoirs.

April: "The Talented Mr. Ripley," by Patricia Highsmith. --I'm guessing that more than a few book club members are going to cheat and watch the movies, but I too wanted to pull out the book after seeing this one. Although I haven't read it yet, how convenient for me that it appears anthologized in one of the American Noir volumes from my Library of America collection.

May: "Things Fall Apart," by Chinua Achebe. --Good luck. I know absolutely nothing about it...except that there are Cliffs Notes. ;-)

June: "House of Sand and Fog," by Andre Dubus. --Good choice. Well-written, believable, symapthetic characters, a local setting (for me, anyway), and a tough climatic ending. I took Val to the movie and she felt sucker-punched.

All things considered, sounds like a damn fine list.