Fireside Reading

As we approach the holiday season, I hope everyone has time to spend with family and friends, and a good book. Not necessarily in that order. Here are my latest recommendations.

Fiction

Audition, Katie Kitamura

An acclaimed actress encounters a young man who thinks he may be her son. We learn of her past, her happy marriage, her earlier adulteries, and the abortion she had that means it is impossible for the young man to be her son.  Act 2 opens in a slightly different universe, where the young man is her son, and their relationship is very different. Kitamura challenges what we know of other people, what we know of ourselves, and the deceits that pervade our lives in this elegant, disconcerting book.

Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart

Vera is a precocious ten year-old child, living with her father, a Russian intellectual (a stand-in for the author) and his WASP-y wife. The plot centers around Vera’s search for her birth mother, a Korean woman whom she never knew and her father refuses to give her a name. As with Shteyngart novels, the plot is less important, it is the richly-drawn characters that capture us. Vera is smart, curious, wise, naïve and awkward, and we love her. The book is both tragedy and comedy, wholly enjoyable.

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

A scholarship student from California enrolls in an exclusive New England college and is drawn into a semi-secret world of elite students and their mysterious professor/mentor. A murder occurs, and the brilliance of this privileged group is no match for the consequences of this crime. Channeling Dostoevsky, this was Tartt’s debut novel from 30 years ago, and is still one of the best psychological thrillers ever written.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

A woman, unnamed and semi-isolated in her mountaintop home over the winter, muses about her life, her few neighbors, and small-town gossip. But a string of deaths occurs and she is the only one who believes they are connected. She hypothesizes that each was killed by the deer, or perhaps other animals, that inhabit the forest, in retaliation for encroaching and destroying their habitat. The deaths, or perhaps murders, are not really the point of this fable-like novel.  It is a philosophical tale of life and death and nature and our connection to it all. Tokarczuk is a Nobel laureate, and her lyrical writing shows why.

Nonfiction

There’s Always This Year, Hanif Abdurraqib

Meditations on life in the gritty part of Columbus, Ohio by channeling the rise and fall and rise of LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. This is not a book about basketball, although basketball, especially Ohio legend LeBron James provides the running theme; it is about home and family and the daily challenges of getting by in the ‘hood. Nonfiction that reads like fiction: a compelling, beautifully written memoir.

Four Shots in the Night, Henry Hemming

“Intelligence does not win wars, fighting wins wars,” is an old military adage. The Troubles in Northern Ireland may be the exception that proves this rule. Hemming describes the extraordinary success British intelligence had in infiltrating the highest levels of the IRA as he describes the lives and motives of some of the key informants. He makes the compelling case that the Good Friday accord that ended the Troubles was due in large part to this intelligence success. A thrilling story.

Waste Land, Robert Kaplan

The West is in decline, and technology is advancing faster than our capacity to use or control it. These were the themes, and title, of T.S. Eliot’s poem that Kaplan usurps for his analysis of contemporary geopolitics. But if the West is in decline, so is every other military power. Kaplan sees Xi as (re-)imposing a Maoist authoritarianism that is doomed to fail, and Russia as weak and in an accelerated state of rot. The notion that the US can isolate itself from the world’s problems is juvenile at best, and the most hopeful outcome would be for a rejuvenation of US leadership of the West that, unfortunately and quite likely, will not happen. Like Eliot’s poem, this is a pessimistic, cautionary and, sadly, realistic world outlook.

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• 2 Jun, 2017

  Job Growth is Falling. The Sky is Not.

  Today's jobs report was disappointing: only 138,000 net new jobs created in May (the consensus had it pegged at ...

• 22 Sep, 2017

  It's About Time

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