Beach Reading
We’re at the height of beach weather, so try to get there as often as you can, and bring a book with you! I have a new list of recommendations:
Fiction
Lost Lambs, Madeleine Cash
A zany novel of eccentric characters, filled with puns and pathos. With their marriage ossifying, the adults drift into adultery, with, of course, unintended consequences for each. But the three teenage girls are the center of the story: the oldest, and prettiest, hooks up with an army vet with PTSD. The middle child, seeking attention, falls in love online with an Islamic jihadist, and the youngest one, 12-years old and the smartest of them all, is bored with everything and teaches herself fluency in several languages. Their lives come together as they uncover a plot by the richest man in town. Very funny, highly entertaining reading.
Land, Maggie O’Farrell
A beautiful elegy to a place, a plot of land in Ireland, set mostly in the 1860s, in the aftermath of the Great Famine. The father is an occasional land surveyor for the hated English army, making maps that will allow them to divide his land, to his dismay and anger. He drinks from a hidden well that alters his perception of reality, leaving his family to struggle to survive. The children disperse, one to the Church and another to America, but each longs to return home. This is the story of how one, normal family faces the challenges of the harsh environment and poverty, colonial suppression and religious repression, and how their attachment to an ancient land runs through them at all times. A beautiful, magical, moving work.
A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler
Andreas lives alone on a mountain in Austria. He values his solitude and takes comfort in his intimate knowledge of his land. He reminisces about his life, his one love, and rues the approaching modernity coming to the village in the valley below, and how it will change his world. His life may not sound like much, but it meets all of Andreas’ needs. For him, it is a whole life, and this is a beautiful description of it. Andreas, through his example, asks of us what constitutes a whole life.
John of John, Douglas Stuart
John-Calum, “Cal,” to distinguish him from his father John, leaves his small island in the Hebrides to attend art school in Edinburgh, but is forced to return home when he can’t find a job. Cal is gay, a secret he keeps from his strict, Calvinist father, and from everyone else on the island, but it turns out that he is not the only one keeping secrets. At the heart of the book is the fraught father-son relationship, but then again, all the relationships here are unfulfilled. Redemption or tragedy is not fully resolved, but Stuart’s brilliant writing keeps us engaged in his characters to the end.
Attention-Seeking Behavior, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
The woman narrator of this novel is a sometime writer, sometime student, sometime personal assistant, and a congenital, habitual and pathological liar. But is everything she says a lie? She lies knowingly, but does she lie deliberately? Is she just seeking attention, is she just bored with life, or is there some ulterior motive to her lies (if they are lies)? On some level, it doesn’t matter because she is so funny, so clever, so entertaining that we can simply enjoy her company, even if everything is (or is not) a lie.
Seascraper, Benjamin Wood
Thomas is a 20-year old man in the north of England just after World War Two. He works his father’s trade, taking his horse and cart to the seashore every morning to scrape the bottom for shrimp. Others have embraced motorized vehicles, but Thomas prefers the traditional way. An American film producer arrives in the town looking for a location for his next Hollywood movie. He hires Thomas as his guide, and promises him an important role in the film. But the American is not all he seems, and the film project goes awry. For a brief moment, Thomas saw a future for himself beyond his seashore but must reconcile with his fate. A beautifully written story by a master novelist.
Nonfiction
Black Elk, Joe Jackson
Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota warrior and shaman, participated in some of the seminal events of the late 19th century. He fought at the Little Bighorn with his cousin Crazy Horse, and witnessed the massacre at Wounded Knee. He joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and was the leader of the Ghost Dance movement. He represents an important part of American history, and his is a unique perspective on the America of his time. Here is his definitive biography.
The Afterlife of Malcolm X, Mark Whitaker
Malcolm X is relevant today not only because racial tensions persist, but because his own evolution in his approach to these challenges and his journey of discovery, incomplete when he died, still resonate with us. He proposed separation, reparation, and self-reliance, but also internationalism and solidarity, an important shift in his thinking in the last year of his life after he left the Nation of Islam. Whitaker sketches his childhood for those who need a refresher, and spends too much time at the end of the book exonerating those (wrongly) convicted of his murder. But importantly, he shows us how Malcolm’s words and actions influenced countless activists and artists over the past 60 years. It is still remarkable that a petty criminal with little formal education became one of the most important thinkers of our time, relevant to this day.
