SALON

Summer reading

Saturday, May 29, 2004 8:00 PM UTC

Page turners with a brain

Dump "The Da Vinci Code" and break the "Rule of Four" -- our reading list for a hot season ventures from 1945 Barcelona to an English ghost story to a haunted Texas bureaucracy, all without insulting your intelligence.

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Readers of America, you have a choice. Although you wouldn’t know it to look at many of the titles jostling for slots on the bestseller lists, there’s no law dictating that if you want a book with an irresistible, crackerjack plot you also have to put up with crappy writing and tissue-paper-thin characters. Sure, millions of people proved themselves willing to choke down Dan Brown’s clunky prose in order to crack “The Da Vinci Code” (proof positive that everyone loves a good conspiracy theory), but why suffer if you don’t have to?

Page turners can be smart, as in really smart, and not just the pseudo-intelligence of the reviewers’ current darling, “The Rule of Four,” by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. With that novel, we were promised Donna Tartt meets Umberto Eco, and instead we got way too much turgid maundering on undergraduate life at Princeton and way too little of the fascinating real-life Renaissance book supposedly at the story’s center. Nowhere is it written that smart books must also be overwritten and difficult to follow, either. The hardest thing, after all, is to make it go down easy.

Determined to find unputdownable novels that didn’t make us wince or groan on every page, we plowed through publishers’ recent and forthcoming offerings for books guaranteed to shorten a long flight and make a sunbathing session even more pleasant. Some of these titles you may have already read about, others will be hitting the stores in a month or so. (They can also be ordered or pre-ordered from Powells.com.) All of them belong on the shopping list of readers who aren’t turning off their brains just because it’s June, but who don’t see a beach blanket as quite the right place to tackle a history of the Soviet gulags. We hope at least one of them makes your summer a little sunnier.

“The Narrows”
By Michael Connelly
405 pages
Little, Brown
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All the flaws of Michael Connelly’s writing are on display in “The Narrows”: the humorlessness, the sentimentality disguised as masculine stoicism, the moralistic attitude toward any vaguely disreputable pleasure. In other words, “The Narrows” is, for good and bad, representative of the current state of mainstream hard-boiled fiction in America.

But also on display are Connelly’s considerable talents as a plotter. Even that attribute is not without flaws. He has a tendency to go for one twist too many, pushing his stories over the line from ingenious to “Oh, come on.” Nowhere was that more evident than in “The Poet,” a genuinely creepy serial-killer thriller (as opposed to the showy Grand Guignol of the Thomas Harris school) and a brilliant piece of plotting — until Connelly went for that final twist that nearly made the entire book fall apart.

Still, “The Poet” was crafty enough for Connelly to guarantee a built-in audience for the sequel, which is what “The Narrows” is. It’s also the latest novel featuring Connelly’s now retired LAPD detective hero, Harry Bosch. And it’s the book that marks the end of Connelly’s tales of Terry McCaleb (who first appeared in “Blood Work”), the detective whose retirement was forced by his heart transplant. In other words, “The Narrows” is Connelly’s lollapalooza, a greatest-hits collection that is also a deck clearing, preparing the stage for the next portion of the Harry Bosch saga.

The parallel plots, which should be described as generally as possible, have to do with the return of the Poet and the female FBI agent who has been obsessed with catching him since he eluded her several years before, and with Harry’s investigation into the death of McCaleb, which appears to be from something other than McCaleb’s transplanted heart finally giving out. Connelly keeps a firm grip on the narrative even before the two stories converge, and through the book’s changing voice. Shifting from third-person to two first-person narrators (Harry and the Poet), Connelly doesn’t dilute his narrative drive or his ability to leave you hanging at the end of a chapter.

What is distracting and inescapable here are the patches of bad writing: “You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself.” Ewwww. As Bosch readers know, Harry found he had a 4-year-old daughter at the end of his last case, “Lost Light.” But that’s no excuse. (Ross Macdonald often talked about innocence corrupted without falling into that sort of squishiness.) If you’re a Bosch fan, that passage — and worse — aren’t going to matter. If you haven’t tried Connelly, all I can say is that as a storyteller, he’s good enough so that even crap like that isn’t enough to keep you from turning the pages.

– Charles Taylor

“The Ghost Writer”
By John Harwood
 384 pages
Harcourt
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You could label some elements of John Harwood’s ghost story hokey: It’s got veiled specters, accursed paintings, a big old deserted house with a sinister basement. But like one of those gifted cooks who can somehow turn a can of tuna and a handful of rice into a savory dish, Harwood knows how to spin shivers and nerves out of unpromisingly familiar material. “The Ghost Writer” is the first-person account of Gerard Freeman, who spends his 1960s boyhood in a remote Australian town plagued by millipedes and red dust, his father distant and his mother scared of her own shadow. The only time her apprehension lifts is when she’s telling Gerard tales about Staplefield, the stately English country house where she grew up with her beloved grandmother Viola, an exotic realm of chaffinches and hawthorn hedgerows. But even her stories dry up when she catches her son snooping in a secret drawer, where he discovers an old literary journal containing a ghost story written by someone called V.H. and a photograph of a beautiful, unnamed woman.

All this nostalgia and mystery pretty much guarantees that Gerard will get the yen to visit England, and when he becomes pen pals with Alice — an elusive English orphan whom he imagines to be a pre-Raphaelite-style beauty — the die is cast. After his mother’s death, when Gerard has become a quiet, recessive young man feeding off his own longings for faraway things, he heads back to the old country, searching for Staplefield and Alice. A series of short stories, written by Viola and published in various obscure reviews decades earlier, becomes part of the trail. At least one-half of “The Ghost Writer” is made up of Viola’s rich, supremely spooky yarns, all of which seem to involve young men who are martyrs to love and victims of supernatural forces. The stories are obscurely entwined with the fate of Gerard’s mother, whom he suspects of having been involved in a terrible crime. On her deathbed, when Gerard asks her about Viola’s stories, his mother will only tell him, “One came true.”

“The Ghost Writer” has a patchwork quality reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s “Possession”; each of the several voices (Gerard, Viola, Alice) is entirely distinct, as if the novel were assembled from documentary evidence. Byatt is only the most subterranean of allusions, however, for Harwood weaves many overt literary references — most notably to Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw” — into his book. This isn’t just postmodern cleverness; in fact, it isn’t postmodern at all. Instead, the technique shows Harwood’s keen understanding of how alternating the prosaic with the unreal can create a pervasive creepiness. It’s as if by reading about James’ haunted (or mad) governess, Gerard invites a similar fate. The heady, story-drugged atmosphere of Viola’s tales melts into Gerard’s fairly rational account of his quest, and where the two blur together is exactly the sort of place ghosts come from, the borderline between dream and waking.

Gerard’s investigation of his mother’s past takes him deep into a thicket of fact, fiction and lies that might be someone’s attempt to hide her guilt, but might also be a trap. Harwood’s plot is intricate — it may leave you puzzling out the finer points of the various twists on your own after you follow it breathlessly to its conclusion — but what lingers are Viola’s tales. Some are more inventive than others, particularly a story set in the Reading Room at the British Museum that gives a whole new meaning to the expression “a foggy day in London town.” But all of them have a hypnotic quality that oozes out beyond the solid structure of Harwood’s plot and in the end envelopes it. By the last page, all the loose ends have been tied up, but that aura of the uncanny still clings to everything. As with all the best ghost stories, you’re left feeling that the truth about what happened can never finally be pinned down.

– Laura Miller

“The Shadow of the Wind”
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translated by Lucia Graves
 Penguin Press
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The cover of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “Shadow of the Wind” sports an atmospheric photograph of a foggy European street at night, and the spine is made to suggest a leather-bound, gold-stamped volume from some venerable library. So you might reasonably guess that this novel is either 1) an evocation of “Casablanca”-style intrigue à la Alan Furst or 2) a bookish thriller in the mode of Arturo Pérez-Reverte. (Ruiz Zafón is Spanish, like Pérez-Reverte, and “The Shadow of the Wind” was a bestseller in his homeland.) It’s neither; Ruiz Zafón has revived the kind of full-blooded story of romance and mystery perfected by Victor Hugo.

“The Shadow of the Wind” has an innocence that doesn’t prevent it from being thoroughly enthralling; at heart, the novel is a story of star-crossed lovers, bold young heroes, their lovably eccentric sidekicks and a cruel, dastardly villain. There are no fiendishly clever twists or secret codes, but Ruiz Zafón doesn’t need them. He sweeps you along with the sheer riverine force of his sincerity and passion.

It’s 1945 in Barcelona, and the brutality of Spain’s recent civil war dominates everyone’s mood. (It’s fascinating to read a European novel in which World War II is a relatively distant conflagration.) The city hasn’t lost its beauty and charm — at least a dozen scenes take place in its famous cafes — but everyone is a little wobbly on their feet. “Wars have no memory and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened,” as one character puts it. A young boy, Daniel Sempere, is taken by his widower father, a book dealer, to a secret library called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and allowed to select one title to adopt and preserve. Daniel picks “The Shadow of the Wind,” by Julian Carax, and falls in love with the novel. He decides to find out more about its obscure author, and thereby hangs the tale.

Despite this bibliographic premise, “The Shadow of the Wind” isn’t really about books. Yes, Daniel does fend off a sinister disfigured man who covets his copy of the Carax novel, and later learns that someone using the name of a character in the book — an alias, in fact, of the devil — has been systematically burning Carax’s books. But we learn next to nothing about novel’s plot or about any of Carax’s other works. The secrets that Daniel seeks as he grows to adolescence all concern Carax himself, a dashing, handsome and intelligent young man whose history includes murky parentage, a generous patron, a doomed love affair, a flight to Paris, an artist’s garret and an ignominious death in a Barcelona alleyway. A sociopathic police inspector hovers over the proceedings, threatening the usual dire consequences for lads who stick their noses where they don’t belong.

The past tugs obscurely at the fabric of Daniel’s life; the further he immerses himself in Carax’s story, the more his own experiences seem to follow a similar pattern. Ruiz Zafón’s novel is elegantly constructed, but not self-consciously so, and there isn’t a speck of real cynicism in it, a refreshing change from the average thriller’s knee-jerk attempts at worldliness. “The Shadow of the Wind” believes in the power of youth to rebuild hope on the bitter, ash-strewn ground of history, and so powerful is the sway of this author’s storytelling, that, for 550 pages at least, he makes you believe it, too.

– Laura Miller

“Emma Brown: A Novel From the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë
By Clare Boylan
437 pages
Viking
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There is a strain of literature, both high and low, which can be summed up by the remark Thelma Ritter makes in “All About Eve”: “Everything but the hound dog yappin’ at her rear end.” Multiply the hound dog into a pack and reduce the rear end to a small one and you have an idea of the relentless misfortune at work in “Emma Brown.”

Clare Boylan’s novel is described as based on an “unfinished manuscript” by Charlotte Brontë. This is generous. What Brontë left behind amounts to 19 pages, the book’s first two chapters. Though Boylan has clearly attempted a work in the Brontëan spirit, incorporating lines from the writer’s letters, it’s Boylan who deserves credit for the heavy lifting here. She’s fashioned a gothic orphan saga from what amounts to a suggestion, one that gives no hint of the complications she has envisioned from it.

The orphan whose posterior proves so tempting to the literal and figurative hounds is Matilda. Left at a boarding school run by two respectably poverty-stricken sisters, the withdrawn child is favored and pampered in expectation of her tenure providing a steady income. When the sisters find out that the man who left her is not her father, and their dreams of financial security evaporate, Matilda, like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, is cast into the attic. She’s rescued temporarily by a local widow, Isabel Chalfont (who narrates part of the tale) and Isabel’s friend Mr. Ellin, a local gentleman who proves to be almost as mysterious as Matilda herself. The rescue is temporary, however, and Matilda is soon cast upon the cruelties of 19th century London.

At times Boylan writes as a retrospective muckraker, outraged at the treatment of women and the poor in this time, and at times she overdoes it, as when the doll that a street urchin plays with turns out to be an infant’s discarded corpse. That detail also suggests the perversity that is one of the strongest parts of “Emma Brown.”

Like many 19th century tales of the downtrodden, “Emma Brown” is a masochistic wallow. Only the masochism is so aggressive that the book feels like anything but a chronicle of passivity. Boylan’s tone combines the hot spiel of the pamphleteer with the slight distance of the social historian, all in the guise of crack storyteller. The result has a slightly guilt-inducing fascination (should we be hungry for stories that deal in misery the way this one does?). In “Emma Brown” Boylan speaks simultaneously from the soapbox and the easy chair in front of the fire.

– Charles Taylor

“Kings of Infinite Space”
By James Hynes
 362 pages
St. Martin’s Press
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A cubicled office in a mid-level civil service agency in a featureless central Texas town may sound like an odd place to set a supernatural thriller, but it’s part of the genius of James Hynes’ “Kings of Infinite Space” that he makes you see that it is, in fact, the perfect setting for such a story. Very few novels can manage to be both hilarious and creepy, but this one does. Fewer still can show off their smarts without slowing down the plot, but this one does that, too. Hynes manages to combine an overblown comic-book conspiracy plot with the excruciating social satire of the BBC sitcom “The Office,” and if you think that hybrid sounds unliterary, well, guess again.

Paul Trilby is a former literature postdoc (“almost a Fulbright,” he keeps telling himself) turned temp typist in the General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services, or GSD of TxDoGs, for short. The services provided by this department are, er, general. That is, they are vaguely delineated but have something to do with trucks. Paul lives in a residential motel and drives a decrepit Dodge Colt with no air conditioning, a purgatorial experience in a town where it hits 85 degrees by 8 a.m. He lives in dread of coming under the authority of Olivia, the ex-cheerleader occupying the cubicle across the aisle; as a vivid warning of what Olivia and TxDoGs can do to man, there’s the pitiful wretch one cube down, whom Paul thinks of only as “the dying tech writer.”

Paul’s fall from grace can be attributed to a single fact: He is a louse. He blew his academic career when he got caught cheating on his rising-star professor wife. Then the grad student he two-timed with left him for a TV weatherman, and two other women he was juggling found out about each other. Then he lost his job at a textbook publisher when he was discovered dropping racy literary allusions like “Vita showed Virginia a thing or two” into grammar exercises to mock his ill-read supervisor. He has hit bottom. And to top it off, he’s being haunted by his ex-wife’s dead cat, a phantom that bites his toes in the middle of the night, restricts his TV reception to cat-related programming, and stinks up his apartment with spectral piss.

Hynes’ previous novels have been academic satires, and at a time when postdocs and adjuncts are forced to flee the shriveled university job market, “Kings of Infinite Space” almost belongs in that category, too. Paul all too believably clings to his education as the last, flimsy shred of superiority he can claim over his co-workers, even the pretty mailroom staffer he discovers poring over the “Norton Anthology of English Literature” in the cafeteria. But the final challenge to Paul’s battered ego and chronic selfishness comes from a strange, pasty, Dilbert-like homeless guy who keeps popping up in unlikely places asking, “Are we not men?” and from a bunch of good ol’ boys from the office who manage to get a lot done without actually working. There are strange noises coming from behind the ceiling panels, Post-it notes that appear out of nowhere, and an aluminum-can recycling bin that periodically becomes bottomless. Something weird is going on at TxDoGs.

It gets a lot weirder, too, with secret societies and subterranean grottos, but bizarre as the main plot gets, Hynes keeps one foot on the ground. There’s a delicate romance kindled between Paul and Callie the mail girl, and some wicked philosophizing occasioned by a visit to a Hooters-style restaurant by the guys at the office. The big mystery, really, is whether Paul will ever grasp what a jerk he’s been and take a few halting steps in the general direction of decency. Years spent reading the cream of English literature couldn’t achieve such an enlightenment, but if a cannibal cult and some major turnover at the Texas Department of General Services can pull it off, that’s all in a day’s work.

– Laura Miller

“The Jane Austen Book Club”
By Karen Joy Fowler
304 pages
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
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Any novel titled “The Jane Austen Book Club” has enough intimations of tweeness without some reviewer making matters worse by calling it civilized. But there’s no escaping the adjective in describing Karen Joy Fowler’s novel. It’s not the thought of Jane Austen that might make some of us flee from what sounds like an unbearably homey premise — a group of women and one man in Central California meeting to discuss the novels of Jane Austen. It’s what some people have done with Austen, ignoring her sharpness and turning her into the literary equivalent of warm milk. Fowler, to her credit, has instead made a perfect glass of lemonade; every time you fear the concoction is turning too sweet, there’s a trace of tartness to keep things in balance.

You can read “The Jane Austen Book Club” for that balanced and sustained tone, or you can admire the book as a piece of comic structure so firm yet so submerged that it isn’t fully apparent until the end. Each chapter, in which the members of the club meet at someone’s house to discuss one of Austen’s novels, is Fowler’s jumping-off point for the backstory of that meeting’s host. These funny, shrewdly observed and sometimes surprisingly wounding segments might form a first-rate short-story collection (that is, if Fowler often didn’t leave you wanting more). But like her beloved Austen, Fowler uses the seemingly self-contained stories to lay the groundwork for the characters to form new alliances. When those alliances become clear, the effect is akin to seeing someone choreograph a comic ballet merely by twirling her fingers.

I must confess that part of the pleasure I took in “The Jane Austen Book Club” is because I’ve almost entirely given up on contemporary literary comedy. There are plenty of novelists who can make me laugh — but usually not the ones who are called comic novelists. Their comedy seems to require a fondness for coyness, or magic realism rendered as deadpan absurdist farce, or just pomo wiseass showing off. Just reading the flap copy exhausts me.

Fowler may succeed not only because she’s squarely in the mode of comic social novelist, but also because “The Jane Austen Book Club” is the work of someone who understands the mixture of surprise and recognition that novel readers crave. We want stories to surprise us and to confirm our experience, or nudge us to confirm what we may never have experienced but which is true. That’s what her Austen acolytes are looking for, and for all the fun she has with them, Fowler understands it’s not a sign of shallowness or of being literary lowbrows. She’s taken exactly the kind of characters it would have been easy to condescend to (or to flatter) and made what they want from novels — a simultaneous sense of comfort and adventure — seem something like a code all fiction readers share. How many novels have used the old phrase “gentle reader” to satirical effect? Reading “The Jane Austen Book Club,” you feel as if Fowler could use it and mean every syllable.

– Charles Taylor

“The Queen of the South”
By Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Translated by Andrew Hurley
 438 pages
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
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Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s new novel is a literary narcocorrido, the name given to popular Mexican songs celebrating the exploits of drug traffickers. What lends his subject to a 400-page book rather than a broadsheet ballad set to a polka beat is his protagonist, Teresa Mendoza, who at the peak of her power controls 70 percent of the drug-transport business in the southern Mediterranean. Teresa is no simple macho outlaw, braced to go out in a blaze of glory with an AK-47 in one hand and a bottle of tequila in the other — although she knows her way around both. Her story is necessarily a more complicated and contradictory one than can be squeezed into a song.

Pérez-Reverte, a journalist turned bestselling writer, takes leave of his usual fictional forte here. Instead of a Byzantine plot built around some evocative bit of historical arcana — rare books, nautical charts, fencing — “The Queen of the South” is a straightforward contemporary crime thriller with a reflective, moody soul. It begins with a ringing cellphone, the sound that marks the dividing line in Teresa’s life, between the relatively simple (though never innocent) girl she once was — a former money-changer from the Mexican state of Sinaloa who catches the eye and heart of Güero Dávila, a brash, handsome pilot running shipments for the local drug lords — and the woman she becomes — tough, smart and perpetually on the run. Güero has told her that if that phone ever rings, she should understand that he’s been killed, and that she is next.

Teresa flees to Spain, where she finds a different man who pursues a similar line of work around Gibraltar, where North Africa and Europe almost meet, separated by a narrow strip of water on which a guy with a very fast boat can make a very nice chunk of change. Teresa will learn the hard way, through a process that includes a stint in a Spanish prison, that she’s better off not depending on such men. She’s clever, with a good head for numbers, a knack for mechanics, and a hollow place deep inside her where most other people keep whatever it is they have to lose. These are the makings of a kingpin — make that a queenpin. Eventually she becomes fabulously wealthy and elegant, and is named one of the best-dressed women in Spain.

“The Queen of the South” proceeds according to an unusual rhythm; passages of gasping suspense alternate with brooding psychological rumination and meticulously detailed descriptions of how Teresa’s empire is built and run. Pérez-Reverte returns to his reportorial roots on the last count; he knows so much about drug running it’s gotta be illegal. (Several of the characters Pérez-Reverte portrays are real people, including the Mexican drug lord César “Batman” Güemes.) Then there’s a framing device that probably works better in the original version, in which a journalist putting together a book on Teresa’s life describes his interviews with her past associates. The contrast between his Castilian account and Teresa’s own story — written in a slangy Mexican idiom — has to be more evocative in Spanish.

If “The Queen of the South” were about a man, perhaps it would seem less distinctive; Teresa has many of the dissociative, isolated qualities of the stereotypical noir hero. But because she’s a woman, Pérez-Reverte can use her yearning for wholeness to scrutinize everything that’s stunted about this particular macho ideal. Yes, “The Queen of the South” is a kind of narcocorrido, but it’s also an anti-narcocorrido, an outsider’s inside account of a world in which people are all too willing to sacrifice their humanity for the kind of immortality embodied in a four-minute song.

– Laura Miller

More Salon's critics.

Saturday, Aug 27, 2011 7:01 PM UTC

What did you really read this summer?

As August ends, Arthur Phillips, Laura Hillenbrand, Lev Grossman and others reveal their reading records to Salon

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For readers, summer often starts with grand ambition. This will be the year we really tackle Roberto Bolaño or David Foster Wallace; it will be the summer of nothing but lemonade and Alice Munro. Or perhaps we’ll educate ourselves by delving deep into accounts of the financial crisis or the war on terror. Then the days turn lazy and even the most sincere intentions wilt in the heat.

With September looming, we thought it would be a good time to check in with some of our favorite authors — and some of the writers you’re likely to be reading this fall — to see what they really read this summer. Click through the following slide show to see what they had to say.

View the slide show

Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich. More Emma Mustich.

Monday, Jul 4, 2011 3:01 PM UTC

2011′s best — so far!

Check your cultural literacy -- and catch up on the best movies, TV, books, music and more you've missed SLIDE SHOW

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OK, it’s a little more than midyear at this point. The days are already getting shorter, and that stack of books on your nightstand is only getting taller as your DVR queue gets longer. It’s time to concentrate on what matters. So we’ve asked our crack culture team to pick what you need to experience to be the well-rounded, culturally fluent smarty you want to be, and ordered them by importance. See how many you’ve already checked out, and dive into the rest.

You’ll be better for it –  and seriously entertained.

URGENT (Do this right now!)

WATCH “Poetry,” directed by Lee Chang-dong. It’s taken some time, but word has gradually spread about this beautiful and moving story of death and life from Korean academic-turned-filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. With apologies to Terrence Malick’s many defenders, “Poetry” is the  movie released so far that has the pure cinematic craft, human appeal and  emotional depth to be called a masterpiece. You almost couldn’t invent a less sexy or less trendy film: “Poetry” is a leisurely character drama about a dotty, girlish 66-year-old woman who may have early-stage Alzheimer’s and her relationship to her rude and lumpish grandson, who may have committed a terrible crime. I won’t mislead you by claiming this is a thriller, but as this silly, vain and resolute grandma struggles to do the right thing and to write the first (and perhaps last) poem of her life, she seems to speak for all of us, caught between birth and death, remembering and forgetting, with only a few precious moments to grasp and then let go. –Andrew O’Hehir

READ “The Pale King,” by David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s third and final novel was unfinished at his death in 2008 and assembled from completed portions and notes by his longtime editor. You’d never know it. In Wallace’s earlier fiction, it could often be hard to pick out the figure in the carpet — and at the same time very easy to enjoy the individual sections. With “The Pale King,” the reader is off the hook, and free to take each part of this funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying and profound book as it comes. As has often been repeated, “The Pale King” is “about boredom,” although that is only where it starts. It’s also about the transformation of America from a stakeholder society in which citizens view themselves as active, responsible participants into a consumer market in which people simply demand value for money. And it’s about existential dread and loneliness, which the main character, “David Foster Wallace,” suspects of being the reason people fear boredom, and drives themselves to distraction, seeking “enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there … Right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size.” — Laura Miller

WATCH “Game of Thrones” (HBO). In retrospect it seems unthinkable that HBO’s lavish adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” debuted around the same time as AMC’s “The Killing,” a remake of a hit Danish procedural, but was taken far less seriously by critics. Why? Maybe because AMC’s series was set in something resembling “reality,” where “Thrones” unfolded along pop culture’s J.R.R. Tolkien/Dungeons and Dragons axis, upon which movies and TV series are still considered zit-inducing ComicCon crap no matter what their artistic pretensions. But where “Thrones” slowly kept a phenomenal number of characters, motivations and plotlines straight, sparking arguments about its sex scenes and narrative density, all the while building and building to a stunning finale, “The Killing” made hash of just one story, and eventually collapsed under the weight of its own bad-faith contrivances. “Thrones,” meanwhile, felt like fantasy fiction’s answer to the first two “Godfather” films, with bleak, often ironic commentary on love, sex, family and power, plus warring kingdoms, barbarian Bacchanals, secret incest, slumbering supernatural menaces, undead stalkers, assassinations, beheadings and dragons’ eggs that were ported about from episode to episode like big green plot grenades. — Matt Zoller Seitz

WATCH Melissa McCarthy in “Bridesmaids.” You’re already not having too shabby a year when you’re the titular costar of a hit sitcom. But with her scene stealing turn in “Bridesmaids,” “Mike and Molly” actress Melissa McCarthy took what could have been a one-note, horny big girl shtick and created a character who runs rings of sanity around Kristin Wiig’s self-loathing flake. No wonder she’s reportedly set to star with Jon Hamm in Judd Apatow and Paul Feig’s next comedy. Bonus: When asked about Maura Kelly’s hateful Marie Claire piece last year on TV “fatties,” she sagely told EW this spring, “I thought, what a sad, troubled person.” Score: match point to McCarthy. — Mary Elizabeth Williams

LISTEN “21,” Adele. The London crooner can seem old beyond her years, and her voice sounds like a tool from some forgotten age of pop music: a real instrument. Say the critics: “Adele … [towers] in the same landscape where some of her contemporaries, beehived or not, have lost all their bearings” (LAT); “Timeless” (EW); “[If] you’re looking for a record that’ll make you wanna trash your beloved’s belongings and have make-up sex amid the ruins, 21′s your jam” (Spin).

MANDATORY (Worth faking a sick day for)

READ “Townie,” by Andre Dubus III. The Avenues, the New England mill town neighborhood where Dubus — a novelist best-known for “The House of Sand and Fog” – grew up, was a domain of swaggering bullies and weak, negligent or absent authority figures. As a boy, he resolved to “get so big I scared people, bad people, people who could hurt you.” Dubus’ memoir, “Townie,” recounts his sojourn in the kingdom of violence, and its counterpoint, the time he spent with his father, Andre Dubus II, an acclaimed author of austerely beautiful short stories about the anguish of working-class life. For Dubus, salvation lay in getting at the stories imprisoned within a reality that at first seemed merely brutal and mindless. This is an unusual story of the making of a writer, and a completely unforgettable one. –LM

WATCH “The Tree of Life,” written and directed by Terrence Malick. From the origins of the universe to the first stirrings of prehistoric reptilian compassion (a phenomenon unknown to paleontologists) to a memorable portrait of a mid-century Texas family presided over by a severe but loving Brad Pitt (giving his greatest acting performance) to an almost alarming vision of the afterlife,  Malick’s long-long-gestating “Tree of Life” offers more to chew on and disagree about and be baffled by than any American film since “Mulholland Dr.” I’ve been publicly on the fence about “Tree of Life” since first seeing it, but I also don’t kid myself that I’ve mastered the film or that I’m done thinking about it or that I know what I’ll make of it in five or 10 years. –AOH

WATCH “These are the decisions that keep you alive”: Coverage of a natural disaster had never been more brutally captured by camera than when the 8.9 earthquake sparked a tsunami that swept into Japan. Perhaps the most mesmerizing video originating from Japanese network JNN, and recrafted by Britain’s TBC Channel 4, that showed the critical ways a news crew — and assorted other survivors including a father and his two small terrified children — managed to escape being swept away to a certain death in Sendai, Japan. — Kerry Lauerman

READ New York Post headlines on Weinergate. Give a Murdoch newspaper an unfortunately named Democrat and a tawdry sex scandal, and it’s like Christmas every day. –MEW

READ “It’s the Inequality, Stupid,” 11 charts by Mother Jones. Nothing fuels awareness of class inequity and the staggering gap between rich and poor than recessionary times. And nothing can fuel your understanding — or your rage — like this illuminating, handy breakdown by Mother Jones. –KL

WATCH “Friday,”  the Bob Dylan-spoof version. When Rebecca Black’s bubblegum pop anthem “Friday” hit YouTube  and became a sensation, parodies were inevitable; the best was surely New York singer-songwriter Mike Bauer’s version, arranged, performed and recorded in the style of Bob Dylan circa 1965. On top of its already formidable bona fides as a fetish object — check out the period-accurate Columbia Records 45 RPM logo! — it inspired what is, without question, the funniest and most imaginative YouTube comments thread of the year to date — an ongoing in-joke between the performer and the listeners, who play along with the ruse and insist that, yes, this really is a Dylan tune.

“I think what Dylan ment by ‘Friday’ was any means people use to escape the reality and avoid seeing the truth. For some it could be booze and for some it may be drugs. What Dylan wants, is us to stop. Do not let your personal ‘Friday’ to come.” “I was contemplating suicide when this version of ‘Friday’ came on the radio. I dropped the razor blades & started crying at the simplistic & awe-inspiring beauty of the lyrics.” “I remember returning from the Grenada war in 1983. This song was playing over the loud speaker at the airfield when the wheels of our C-130 touched˛ down in Homestead Florida. The war had been 2 hours and 28 minutes of sheer horror and all I could think about was those that I loved the most but I didn’twant to go home yet so I called a $5 hooker and enjoyed the beach, this song, and some pretty good ass for 10 days. I was so happy when I made it home to my wife. My sunburn was getting bad.”

–MZS

LISTEN “Anna Calvi,” Anna Calvi. “Sumptuous, seductive and a little bit scary, this velvety debut will stalk your dreams,” (NME).

 

ESSENTIAL (Skip “family time” if you have to)

WATCH “Southland” (TNT). This tough, smart series about beat cops interacting with the public in Los Angeles debuted on NBC in 2009, then got booted to cable to make room for Jay Leno’s disastrous prime-time talk show. Its large, ethnically diverse cast of beat cops, detectives, top brass, city officials, civilians and perps sparks fond memories of “Hill Street Blues,” the early seasons of “Homicide: Life on the Street” and the novels of Joseph Wambaugh (“The New Centurions,” “The Choirboys”). Granted, there are more altercations and chases than any real police force would ever see in a week, but in every other way, this is the most realistic cop series on American television. Its second season finale was one of most moving, horrifying, bleakly funny hours of TV in a very long time. Catch up now. — MZS

READ “The Tragedy of Arthur,” by Arthur Phillips. Like the narrator of this novel, the real-life Arthur Phillips has written a novel titled “Prague” and has the same editor, agent and publicist as his fictional doppelgänger. Presumably the real Phillips is not also the son of a small-time con man and the reluctant editor of a play that experts have anointed as a long-lost work by Shakespeare. Presented as Phillips’ skeptical introduction to the play, this treat of a book is an elegant tribute to Vladimir Nabokov (whose “Pale Fire” clearly inspired it) as well as the story of a man whose self-inflicted, tragicomic woes are as affecting and wincingly believable as those endured by the hero of any more conventional novel. — LM

READ “Obama’s Young Mother Abroad,” the New York Times Magazine. Janny Scott’s portrait of the president’s late mother (an excerpt from her book, “A Singular Woman”) is not only a story of the woman who gave birth to great hope and a million conspiracists, it’s the distinct story of a woman of her generation charting a fascinating, difficult and previously unimaginable new path for herself. — KL

SEE “The Book of Mormon,” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. A Broadway musical about America’s favorite homegrown brand of Christianity from the genius misfits of “South Park” and “Team America,” and Robert Lopez, the raunchy composer of “Avenue Q,” could be expected to be irreverent. But in the same season that the star-powered “Spider- Man” became the Great White Way’s biggest punch line, how did “The Book of Mormon” win over not just “South Park” fans, but the matinee-going out-of-towners, the New York Times and, ultimately, the Tonys?  It might mock the arbitrary absurdity of organized religion or the gruesomeness of a place where a cow carcass marks the town square, but it does so with all the abundant sweetness of a Latter Day Saint’s coffee hour. –MEW

READ “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology,” by Lawrence Wright,  Feb. 14, 2011, the New Yorker.

WATCH “The Lincoln Lawyer,” directed by Brad Furman. A would-be career-relaunch for star and producer Matthew McConaughey, “The Lincoln Lawyer” was a relative flop when it was released in March. But this stylish and gripping L.A. crime drama has steadily grown in the rearview mirror. There are even whispers that (gasp!) McConaughey’s performance as the sleazy, charming Mick Haller might sneak into the Oscar race. (The DVD comes out on July 12.) — AOH

WORTH IT (Neglect your Facebook and/or Twitter)

WATCH Margot Martindale as “Mags Bennet” on “Justified” (FX). FX’s modern western about a Kentucky-born U.S. marshal (Timothy Olyphant) investigating drug trafficking and racketeering in his kudzu-choked home county, is a terrific show in its own right. But the acting puts it over the top, and this season’s scary, lively, narcotics-smuggling bad guys, the Bennet clan, were truly memorable. But they are all overshadowed by their big, bad mama, Mags Bennet. She was a master of multitasking, playing a land-grabbing mining company against an environmentally skittish citizenry, plotting and executing complex criminal schemes, negotiating truces between rival crime organizations and her own squabbling sons, all while doting on her adopted granddaughter, the only child of a man she murdered with poisoned moonshine. As played by Margo Martindale, Mags was the best kind of villain: one who thinks she’s the hero, and conducts herself with a twisted sense of honor that demands wary respect even as it makes your blood run cold. — MZS

READ “State of Wonder,” by Ann Patchett. With audacity and ambition, Patchett has transfigured the story line of “Heart of Darkness” by setting it in the present day and turning both the seeker and the sought-after into women.  “State of Wonder” follows a Midwestern research pharmacologist who is sent up the Amazon to check on a brilliant and imperious doctor developing a fertility drug in a remote village where the women are reputedly able to bear children into old age. As with “Heart of Darkness,” the seductions and corruptions of power haunt this novel, but it is the power of the Bad Mother — in contrast to the Bad Father embodied by Conrad’s Kurtz. Maternity is the awesome totem at the book’s center, the dubious object of Swenson’s research and an elemental power, capable of possessing Patchett’s dueling doctors, compelling them to do terrible things. — LM

WATCH “Beginners,” written and directed by Mike Mills. Mills really did have a gay dad, who came out of the closet with mixed results and then died a few years later (he talked about it in this great “Fresh Air” interview) and that has resulted in the funniest and most loving portrayal of homosexuality ever created by a straight person. It’s rare to encounter a film that’s so formally audacious, so heartfelt and so beautifully acted, but this one’s three-for-three, anchored in hilarious but understated performances from Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer. Don’t even get me started on Mills’ slide show on the history of homosexuality in America, or the moody Jack Russell terrier who communicates with subtitles: “Tell her that the darkness is about to swallow us if we don’t do something.” — AOH

WATCH “Nuclear Boy,” by Kazuhiko Hachiya. A Japanese artist explains nuclear meltdown in the simplest terms possible for his littlest audience members: through poop and farts. — Drew Grant

WATCH “We need to go faster, it’s coming straight at us.” Home video of a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Ala. After watching the awe-inspiring footage taken by two teens in their car when the tornadoes touched down,  you’d be hard-pressed to find a more powerful example of nature’s terrifying thaumaturgy this year. — DG

LISTEN “Bon Iver,” Bon Iver.

EXTRA CREDIT (Better than anything on Bravo)

SEE “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. The unlikeliest hit of the season has already been seen by over 350,000 people who waited up to two hours to say they were there.  The stars? A bunch of dresses. Even before his suicide in 2010, Alexander McQueen could fascinate and exasperate with his provocative, highly charged approach to haute couture. He tattered and splattered his clothes, festooned them with horns and feathers, made them as torturous and romantic as a Byron poem. On display at the Metropolitan with Paul Treacy’s wild haberdashery — and featuring an audio tour that includes Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Burton and Naomi Campbell — his defining works prove the art of fashion, and create a glorious tribute to a sartorial one of a kind. — MEW

READ Roseanne Barr’s New York magazine essay on the continued sexism, classism and pure, nauseating awfulness of the TV industry.

WATCH Those twin babies, talking to one another. Seventeen-month-old twins Sam and Ren McEntee became YouTube stars after their parents put up a video of the two holding an intense conversation in baby talk, confirming our deeply held suspicion that babies know more than they are letting on. — DG

WATCH “Natalie Portman Cries a Lot,” Screenrant. This mashup was neck and neck with this year’s other big Natalie Portman viral video: a loop of her odd laugh during the Golden Globes. But ultimately Screenrant’s supercut of tears wins out, because once you watch it, you can never watch a Portman movie again without wondering when the waterworks start. — DG

WATCH “Portlandia,” IFC. The most outstanding Internet success story started as a series of viral videos for ThunderAnt, starring the unlikely duo of “Saturday Night Live’s” Fred Armisen and his friend, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein. IFC picked up “Portlandia” for six episodes. Cult classic from episode one. — DG

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Wednesday, Jun 30, 2010 4:45 PM UTC

“War and Peace” made easy

Finally get around to reading that classic novel this summer by listening to it instead

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A friend of mine has been vowing to read Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” every summer for the past several years. Yet once he nestles into his seat on the plane or flops down on the grass in the sun, he just can’t bring himself to crack open that hefty chunk of 20th-century German bildungsroman. The handful of times he has summoned the discipline to try, he found himself falling asleep or swiping a friend’s copy of the latest Michael Connelly mystery instead. After all, isn’t he supposed to be on vacation?

Many people swear that, come summer, they’ll finally get around to reading a classic work of literature they missed during their student years; “War and Peace” is a perennial candidate. For some, this is the intellectual equivalent of using a week of paid vacation to finish a big household project, like installing a patio. Others honestly believe that a 900-page Russian novel that seemed too daunting a prospect in November will somehow be easier to scale in a hammock. Too often, these grand plans end in shirking and a vague sense of failure. “Moby-Dick” the novel becomes almost as elusive as the white whale himself.

Here’s a modest proposal: Try listening to it instead. I first turned to audiobooks because I get motion sickness from reading in cars, buses and other moving vehicles. I soon graduated to listening as I cooked, cleaned house, ran errands, worked out and, of course, drove. As someone who reads for a living, I’m eager to get out of my armchair and give my eyes a break after a long day’s work, but with audiobooks I’ve been able to squeeze in a lot of recreational reading around the edges.

Audiobooks are, furthermore, an ideal way to finally get to those bypassed literary classics. I was never going to find the time to sit down and read all 1,072 pages of “Don Quixote,” but I listened to the whole thing over the course of a month’s worth of waiting in post-office lines and doing lat pulls. With the advent of downloadable digital audiobooks and portable MP3 players, it’s possible to keep recordings of several titles on hand at all times, snatching 15 minutes of Balzac here and there. Still, a long car trip accompanied by an audio version of a Dickens or Austen novel may be the most sublime use of the form.

It’s also the most summery. Listening is less work than reading from a page; it feels like a treat rather than an assignment, and treats are what vacations are all about. If your attention goes a little out of focus during a long paragraph of 19th-century landscape description, who’s to know?

There are a few important things to understand about audio recordings of classic novels. First, avoid abridged versions, which publishers seem to be phasing out anyway. Second, be sure to check out a sample of the recording before you buy. Many of the audio classics on the market are older recordings, with poor sound quality and unappealing narrators. (I can’t recommend the Oxbridge toff who read “Don Quixote” to me, for example, though the material did transcend his performance. And whose idea was it to have an American narrate Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” — a biography of the quintessential Londoner, written by a Scot — anyway?)

A talented narrator, however, can enrich your understanding of a novel. My late-blooming passion for the work of Anthony Trollope is partly due to the performances of Simon Vance and Timothy West. Disdained by modernist critics as an uninterestingly bourgeois Victorian novelist with an overly intrusive authorial persona, Trollope is rarely assigned to college students, but he has a devoted cult among common readers. Since driving from New York to Maine, blasting “Barchester Towers” all the way, a few years back, I’ve joined it. Trollope’s novels are primarily about class and, as read aloud by Vance, each character has a voice and accent that instantly conveys his or her social background.

Able, professional actors cost money, and that’s one reason why audiobooks can be pricey. However, there are economical ways to acquire them. Audible.com, which has practically cornered the retail market, offers a tiered membership plan that dispenses a certain number of credits monthly, with each credit good for one book. You can also buy books outright, at discounted member’s prices. It’s not the simplest system in the world, but it means that you can get decent audiobooks for $15 or less. And while the Audible site is not great, especially for browsers, the company is owned by and linked to Amazon, so you can cruise for titles using Amazon’s dense database of tags and customer referrals, then easily check to see if they’re available as audio downloads.

Sites and apps offering free audiobook downloads of public domain titles almost always use recordings made by LibriVox, the audio equivalent of Project Gutenberg. Volunteers record themselves reading chapters and submit them to Librivox, who distributes the files online for free. This is a noble, selfless project, and a boon to readers with visual impairments who want access to more obscure texts. But if you’re accustomed to professional narrators, chances are you’ll find the LibriVox recordings hard to listen to; many of the readers are wooden, others are outright grating. The recordings frequently switch narrators in the course of a book, which means that even when you find a narrator you like, chances are he or she won’t be sticking around for long.

Alternatively, many libraries loan out audiobook downloads as well as CD and cassette tape sets. (There are also software programs for converting CDs to digital audiobook files for MP3 players, but the process is time-consuming and a bit of a hassle.) Libraries use a service called OverDrive which may have the single worst support documentation I’ve ever encountered, so expect to invest some time in getting it set up. The idea is that you download OverDrive’s console software to your hard drive, then you download specific titles from your library’s website and can play them via the console for a limited period of time.

I have squandered hours of my life trying to figure out why so many of the New York Public Library’s downloadable audiobooks wouldn’t transfer to my iPod. I’ll try to save other Mac users the same frustration: Be aware that much of your local library’s collection simply can’t be played on any Apple device unless the file first goes through a Windows PC — presumably due to conflicts involving digital rights management. Only those audiobooks made available in MP3 format can be borrowed by Mac users; files in the WMA format, more than half of what my library carries, will not work. An OverDrive app recently released for the iPhone is affected by similar limitations. (I can’t testify to how smoothly OverDrive works on a Windows PC, so if you’ve tried it, please post a comment and tell us what you think.)

Finally, while the selection of audiobook classics in English is respectable, translation is another matter. Russian novels usually come in the much-derided Edwardian translations by Constance Garnett. With Proust, it’s C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s version from the 1920s. More recent translations are often still under the translator’s copyright, and publishers apparently think most buyers won’t know the difference, so why pay extra for the rights? It’s often impossible even to find out who the translator is from an audiobook’s product page.

That won’t be a concern for my friend, however: The only recording I’ve been able to find of “The Magic Mountain” is abridged and in Spanish, alas. Well, there’s always next summer.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Thursday, Jun 3, 2010 1:03 PM UTC

Your sons’ summer vacation reading list

From amphibian tales to sinister sci-fi, your guide to keeping your boys reading throughout the holiday months

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Last week, we hoped to spark conversation — and further suggestions — with a list of five amazing books to hand daughters this summer. We’re not leaving the boys behind. Here is our list of five great books for boys of all ages (books that will also, of course, appeal to girls, too). If your (or your kid’s) favorite book has been left off this list — John D. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Brain”? Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth”? The Lemony Snicket books? Or, for the sports-minded child, Dan Gutman’s Baseball Card Adventure Series, or Kadir Nelson’s remarkable “We Are the Ship”? — blog about it on Open Salon: Just make sure to tag your post “Building a bookworm,” and we’ll cross-post the best ones onto Salon itself.

And now for our list:

“Frog and Toad Are Friends” by Arnold Lobel (Ages 4-8)

The thing about Lobel’s Frog and Toad — see also the equally wonderful “Days With Frog and Toad,” “Frog and Toad All Year” and “Frog and Toad Together” — is that, despite the whole amphibian thing, they’re so damn human. Toad is crabby, self-doubting and, let’s face it, somewhat prone to depression. Frog has a sunny, can-do disposition. And they may be an odd couple, of the Oscar and Felix variety, but they are also kind, supportive, considerate, loving friends. And though these stories are, of course, beloved by children of both sexes, the way these two very different fellows take care of each other — and delight in each other’s company — seems like a particularly valuable example for young boys.

“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” by Jeff Kinney (Ages 9-12)

Kinney’s “Wimpy Kid” series may not be writing at its finest, but it has struck a major chord with boys, capturing the attention of even the most reluctant readers. Described as “a novel in cartoons” — with lots of drawn illustrations, a lined-paper format and a font that looks like handwriting — it has an undeniable charm, evoking the misery that is middle school in spare, deft strokes. Its beleaguered narrator, Greg Heffley, isn’t the most sympathetic character, selling out his best friend Rowley when the occasion suits him, but he has a keen eye for demoralizing details. Like the cheese that lies rotting and repulsive on his school blacktop, spawning the terrors of “Cheese Touch.” “It’s basically like the Cooties,” Greg explains. “If you get the Cheese Touch, you’re stuck with it until you pass it on to someone else. The only way to protect yourself from the Cheese Touch is to cross your fingers.” If that doesn’t take you right back to middle school, well, you’re luckier than some of us.

“Danny the Champion of the World” by Roald Dahl (Ages 9-12)

If there is a more moving depiction of the relationship between a son and his father in all of literature than the one in this rollicking adventure tale, we’d sure like to know about it. “It is impossible to tell you how much I loved my father,” Dahl’s narrator, Danny, tells us. “When he was sitting close to me on my bunk I would reach out and slide my hand into his, and then he would fold his long fingers around my fist, holding it tight.” But Danny’s love for his dad — a filling station owner and widower who is raising his only child in a gypsy caravan — is apparent in every line, every moment of this story. Danny’s dad, he tells us, is an “eye-smiler,” whose eyes flash and twinkle when he is amused, but who never much moves his mouth. “I was glad my father was an eye-smiler,” Danny writes, “because it is impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself.” This gentle, funny, genuinely wonderful book will leave boys (and their parents) eye-smiling and deliciously amused.

“The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan (Ages 9-12)

Start your son on this first book in Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and watch him read away his summer. When we first meet Percy, he just seems like a troubled kid on the verge of getting kicked out of yet another school. In fact, he’s gone through six schools in six years: Bad things just seem to keep happening to him. It isn’t long before Percy (short for Perseus), and we, learn that those strange things he thinks he’s been hallucinating are actually real. Mythological monsters and gods — satyrs, minotaurs, centaurs — really are populating his life and he himself is a half-blood: His father, whom he never knew and had been told had been “lost at sea,” is, in fact, Poseidon. This popular series is a great read for any myth-minded kid who cut his teeth on “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.” Come to think of it, it’s a great read for any kid. Come to think of it again, it’s just a great read.

“The Giver” by Lois Lowry (Young Adult)

This book about a futuristic world that initially seems utopian (no crime, no poverty, no illness, abundantly good manners), but, as it turns out, is less than ideal (no color, no music, no sunshine), is creepy yet altogether compelling. As it begins, 11-year-old Jonas is apprehensively anticipating his Ceremony of Twelve, when he will receive his adult Assignment from the Committee of Elders. Will he be a Nurturer or a judge, like the parents who are raising him? Will be a Caretaker of the Old, like his friend Fiona? But Jonas does not receive a conventional assignment: He is selected to become the community’s next Receiver of Memory, tasked absorbing the collective recollection of pain and pleasure, which the community has long since eschewed in pursuit of comfort, stability and Sameness. Jonas meets daily with the previous Receiver, now the Giver, and learns to appreciate a world with choice and compassion — and love.

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Wednesday, Jun 2, 2010 12:01 PM UTC

Book owners have smarter kids

When it comes to your children, the books in your house matter more than your education or income

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When I was 12 years old, I read most of the plays of George Bernard Shaw. That’s not to say that I understood the plays of George Bernard Shaw, or even that I passionately loved them. They just happened to be around the house, in a set of neat little green paperbacks left over from my father’s college days. I doubt that puzzling over the mysteries of “Pygmalion” taught me much about the British class system, but it definitely got me into the habit of searching for understanding in the pages of challenging books.

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.

According to USA Today, another study, to be published later this year in the journal Reading Psychology, found that simply giving low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation “may be as effective as summer school” in preventing “summer slide” — the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year. An experimental, federally funded program based on this research will be expanded to eight states this summer, aiming to give away 1.5 million books to disadvantaged kids.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the USA Today article comes at the very end, where one Chicago schoolteacher tells the reporter that the importance of getting books into the house “seems so simple, but parents see it differently.” They’re as “excited” as their kids are when the books come in the door. It’s not that the parents are hostile or even indifferent to books. Most likely, books and reading feel like the privilege and practice of an unfamiliar world: a resource that’s out there somewhere, but not entirely accessible.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books — a big outdoor fair held on the UCLA campus every April — is an annual reminder that lots of people are interested in books even if they may not feel at home in a bookstore or library. Over 130,000 attendees turned out for this year’s festival, a mix of races and classes that often astonishes the authors who trek in from out of town. “If only we could get all of them to come to bookstores,” one writer wistfully said to me.

Easier said than done. If you happen to be comfortable in bookstores or libraries — if you’ve been to them many times before and know what to expect, what you want and where to find it, or if you know whom and how to ask and feel entitled to bother the staff with your questions — it can be difficult to appreciate how intimidating these institutions of print culture can seem to someone who has little or no acquaintance with them. I didn’t quite get it until I found myself wheedling a comics-loving friend into picking up issues of a comic book I wanted. “I’m never going to go into the comic book store,” I told him. “They’re confusing and the people who work there are so unfriendly.”

Whether or not I was right about all comics stores, my past experience of them was discouraging enough to put me off. I’ve never even set foot in a gun shop, but it’s equally hard for me to imagine venturing into one. The people who work and shop in such stores may not mean to be unwelcoming, but the same thing that makes these places so inviting to the initiated — the innate clubbishness of human nature — can scare away novices. As homey as a bookstore or local library branch might feel to you or me, they can make other people feel insecure, out-of-place and clueless.

This is, of course, assuming that poor families have bookstores and libraries in their neighborhoods, and that it’s safe and easy for a child to walk to them alone. Furthermore, a single parent working two minimum-wage jobs to keep food on the table may not have the time or energy to make a special trip between shifts. One of the biggest success stories in children’s book publishing, after all, is the Little Golden Books: racks of inexpensive kids’ books cleverly placed near the registers in five-and-dime stores, where the harried working-class parents of the 1940s could pick them up on impulse while running other errands.

Lastly, poor parents may feel that they just can’t afford books. Of course, you don’t have to buy a book to read it, but the act of giving someone a book of his or her own has an undeniable, totemic power. As much as we love libraries, there is something in possessing a book that’s significantly different from borrowing it, especially for a child. You can write your name in it and keep it always. It transforms you into the kind of person who owns books, a member of the club, as well as part of a family that has them around the house. You’re no longer just a visitor to the realm of the written word: You’ve got a passport.

Referred to in this article: This USA Today story by Greg Toppo describes the book giveaway program being rolled out in nine states this summer. An abstract for “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations” by Evans, Kelley, Sikorac and Treimand in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. This blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education has a bit more detail on the study.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

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