Beach Reading

September is the best beach month in Southern California: the water is warm, the days are long, the crowds are gone. I have seven books to recommend, five fiction, two nonfiction. Enjoy them on the beach, or wherever you like.

Fiction

American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins

A Mexican journalist and his family in Acapulco are targeted by the drug cartels during a celebration at their home. His wife, Lydia, and young son manage to survive the attack and plot their escape to the US, where she has an uncle living in Denver. Before the assault, Lydia owned a bookstore where she formed a romantic bond with a customer whom she later discovers is the kingpin of the cartel. The characters are not fully formed, but we care about, and are rooting for them, as the plot propels us along as they make their way north. This is apolitical, just a mother and her child fleeing a horrific event, although a story that is familiar to many migrants. The author was criticized for writing this book in 2020 for writing from the perspective of a Mexican mother while not being Mexican herself, which is absurd. Cummins gives us an important lesson about seeing people for whom they are, as individuals, in all the complexities of their world.

The Wren, The Wren, Anne Enright

A story of three generations of McDaraghs: a famous Irish poet, Phil, who abandons his family for a life (and wife) in America, his daughter, Nell, a lonely widower, and her daughter, Carmel, a new mother with a young son. Each generation faces a particular trauma, but only Nell, the center of the story, does so with the dry humor the Irish are known for. Enright beautifully captures the pain of neglect and loneliness, and the bonds, and joys, of family.

Twist, Colum McCann

An Irish journalist is given a long-essay assignment on board a vessel that repairs underseas cables. He travels to Cape Town to join the boat with its enigmatic captain by the name of Conway. After a two-week voyage of repairs along the west coast of Africa, when the boat is anchored off the Congo, the captain disappears. Over the ensuing year, cables around the world are sabotaged, and the journalist wonders if Conway is the culprit. McCann is a brilliant writer, and has woven a tale of lost loves that need mending, as do the cables that carry 99% of the world’s internet traffic. Or do they, the loves and the cables, need mending? Would we be better off without them?

The Tiger’s Wife, Tea Obrecht

In the war-torn Balkans, a young doctor pursues a humanitarian mission at an orphanage on the “other side” of the war. She learns that her grandfather, also a physician, dies while she was away, and memories of her time with him come flooding back. Among these memories is a folk tale about a tiger’s wife, which of course makes no sense, but is part of the mysticism and morals of a long ago world. The writing is mesmerizing and magical, spellbound in beauty.

10 Minutes Thirty-Eight Seconds, Elif Shafak

Death is not instantaneous, but a process that takes 10 minutes and 38 seconds, in the imagination of the author. In that time, the person continues to have thoughts, and in this case, they are flashbacks of the life of the woman who is dying, a prostitute, in a trash can, in Istanbul. The first half of the book draws the characters in rich detail, and the second half offers the plots of their lives. Shafak writes with compassion about a single soul, a small community, and the things that unite humanity.

Nonfiction

Time’s Echo, Jeremy Eichler

Eichler, music critic for the Boston Globe, considers how the horrors of war, the Second World War specifically, can be expressed through music by examining four works by four great composers. Most of the book focuses on Arnold Schoenberg and his A Survivor From Warsaw, but he also examines Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, Benjamin Brittan’s War Requiem and Dmitri Shostakovich’s 13^th Symphony (Babi Yar). This will be especially appealing to those familiar with this music, but Eichler reaches to the broader themes of how art expresses emotions, and in particular, how to convey the horrors of war with empathy but without being reductive, how to universalize these horrors while also respecting the specific conditions and victims of each experience.

Taking Manhattan, Russell Shorto

Shorto is the foremost historian on the beginnings of New York City. His 2001 book, The Island at the Center of the World, is the definitive work on the Dutch origins of the city. Taking Manhattan picks up the story with the transfer of New Amsterdam to New York, from the Dutch to the English. New York, as we all know, is a distinctive culture, apart from any other city in the country. Shorto makes the persuasive case that this is due to the Dutch origins that not only did not disappear when the English took over, but in many ways were adopted by the new owners and continued to characterize the people and the place. Shorto is an excellent historian and an excellent writer, and this is an outstanding example of both.

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