Every June brings the tantalizing conundrum: what books to drip lemonade on this summer? At the start of the season, we imagine the weeks stretching languorously in front of us, and what could be better than to pass our days lounging at the beach, in the yard or at the pool with the perfect page-turner?
But what constitutes a great summer read? Every airport newsstand is teeming with generic potboilers and steamy tales of love lost and found. The real trick is scoring a book that engages your imagination just enough, but not so much that your brain’s gears start to grind.
Over the next four weeks, Salon’s staff will recommend a list of summer reads that won’t make you feel cheap and empty. (Or maybe they will, in the best possible way.) In the coming weeks we’ll spotlight a choice selection of mysteries, ch**k lit, fantasy, sports and memoirs.
This week’s list is killer thrillers: the quest for a lost Shakespeare manuscript, the case of a missing girl’s mysterious return, a dying man’s search for the truth about his ex-wife, an Australian detective whose time off turns grisly, and the mystery of a tattooed corpse. We hope these add sizzle to your long, sultry summer.
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“The Book of Air and Shadows”
By Michael Gruber
HarperCollins, $24.95
“The Da Vinci Code” may not be a very good book, but it has whetted the public’s appetite for literary thrillers, some of which, like Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 novel, “The Historian,” actually manage to be genuinely literary. Add Michael Gruber’s “The Book of Air and Shadows” to that list. It has car (and boat) chases, gunplay, femmes fatales, secret codes and Russian gangsters, not to mention the search for a long-lost manuscript by the greatest writer of all time. And it also has quirky, flawed characters, tricksy first-person narration, some knowing references to the cinematic nature of its own plot, and nimble, witty prose — a dash of Nabokov and a dollop of Amis. For all the faux-learning that often festoons this genre, Gruber is the real deal, but you’ll probably figure that out even before he name-checks the great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski on Page 250.
Part of the story is told by Jake Mishkin, a Manhattan intellectual property attorney who, despite being “loaded” (his own term for it), is a mess. His job bores him and his compulsive womanizing has ruined his marriage. Although he claims to be no great shakes as a writer, his readers will instantly know otherwise from sentences like “Villains are just there, like rust, dull and almost chemical in the stupid simplicity of their greed or pride.” When his best friend, a Shakespeare expert, refers a professorial colleague to his office and the man turns up petrified and babbling about discovering a 17th-century letter alluding to the hiding place of a previously unknown Shakespeare play about Mary Queen of Scots, Jake naturally dives right in. (It doesn’t hurt that there’s also a pretty woman involved.)
The other strand of the novel’s complex plot concerns movie geek Albert Crosetti, son of a cop, living with his mother in Queens and trying to scrape together enough money from his job at a rare book dealer to pay for the tuition at NYU film school. His crush on a frosty co-worker involves him in the discovery of the manuscript — the deathbed confession of a Jacobean spy who investigated Shakespeare and a sheaf of his encoded reports on the Bard. (Here Gruber’s fictional plot meshes with the real ongoing debate over the possibility that the Bard was a closet Catholic.) The writings of the spy, Richard Bracegirdle, make for the book’s third narrative strand, and while most contemporary novelists’ attempts to simulate antique writing tend to be painfully lame, Gruber’s Bracegirdle is so convincing I was tempted to Google the guy.
Little disquisitions on Shakespeare scholarship, bookbinding, cryptography and the deadly religious and political feuds of 17th-century England enrich “The Book of Air and Shadows” without weighing down the plot. And the minor characters in Gruber’s novel (Jake’s thug-turned-priest brother and his dissolute model sister; Crosetti’s Irish mom and her boyfriend, a saturnine Polish immigrant) have more life in them than the leads in most thrillers. This is a top-drawer romp for bookish (and filmish) readers by a talented writer (with a backlist!) who might not have come to our attention otherwise, and for that alone, we owe Dan Brown a vote of thanks.
– Laura Miller
“What the Dead Know”
By Laura Lippman
William Morrow, $24.95
Two sisters, 11 and 15, vanish from a suburban Baltimore shopping mall in 1975. Thirty years later, a disoriented woman picked up on a hit-and-run charge claims to be Heather, one of the missing “Bethany girls,” but refuses to say what she’s been doing since she and her sister Sunny disappeared so long ago. She’s damaged, erratic and manipulative, drawing a lawyer, a bookish social worker and a philandering cop into the toils of her personal drama. Is she really Heather Bethany? And if not, then who is she and what does she know about the lost girls?
That’s the premise of Laura Lippman’s “What the Dead Know,” a novel whose own snares are constituted of equal parts suspense, psychological realism and nostalgia. For crime fiction, “What the Dead Know” is daring; there isn’t exactly a main character, and large parts of the narrative take place in the past — they may or may not pertain to the identity of the woman Detective Kevin Infante insists on calling Jane Doe. The dark puzzle of what happened to Heather and Sunny is the steady pulse of the book, but along the way you may find yourself just as absorbed by the Bethany family’s internal dynamics. The father, Dave, is a slightly sanctimonious counterculture control freak who listens to jazz on headphones, forbids the girls any white sugar and follows a meditation practice called “the Five-Fold Path.” The mother, Miriam, is restless, unfaithful and capable of selling anything to anyone.
Lippman has also captured the treacherous politics of sisterhood. Despite being younger, the shrewd Heather (“11 going on 40,” according to her mother) usually gets the better of naive, dreamy, awkward Sunny, especially when it comes to negotiating their father’s many rules. Theirs is a world of Bonne Belle lip gloss, macramé and Jethro Tull albums; Lippman gets the flotsam and jetsam of mid-’70s girlhood just right. And the grown-up “Jane Doe” seems to remember it all so well herself — from the Karmelkorn stand at the mall to the defunct department store since replaced by a J.C. Penney to the blue denim purse with rickrack trim that Heather dropped in the parking lot before she vanished. Yet there are troubling gaps in her story, things the real Heather ought to know.
Lippman’s evocation of the Bethanys is so palpable that “What the Dead Know” carries a queasy charge; when characters feel this real, so do their sufferings, and the sickening horror of losing one’s child to an unknown but probably ghastly fate saturates this book. You may sit up late to finish it, but not with the compulsive, lightweight ease inspired by most thrillers. That’s a cost, I suppose, of reading crime fiction this believable, and in the case of “What the Dead Know,” it’s well worth paying.
– Laura Miller
“Nerve Damage”
By Peter Abrahams
William Morrow, $24.95
In tales of suspense, almost nobody can be trusted. The best friend, the high-school sweetheart, the authority figures and institutions we’re told to respect — any one of these at any point can (and probably will) turn out to be unreliable, treacherous or downright diabolical. The only one you can really count on is the hero. He (or she), with allowances for minor flaws, will always be resourceful, intrepid and act out of a fundamental integrity. Peter Abrahams’ manly protagonists don’t really depart from that norm, but this author has hit upon an unusual twist: What his heroes can’t trust is their own bodies.
In his 2005 novel, “Oblivion,” Abrahams’ hero is a hotshot private detective who has to re-create his own investigation halfway through the book when he suffers a stroke that wipes out selective parts of his memory. In his latest book, “Nerve Damage,” Roy Valois, one of those sculptors who works in monumental scrap metal and lives in rugged isolation in small-town Vermont, learns that he’s suffering from a fast-moving cancer linked to the summer he spent as a teenager demolishing an asbestos-stuffed building. An experimental drug trial offers some hope, but only the advent of mortality would prompt a man in his late 40s to hack into the New York Times’ obituary database on a dare from an old friend, wondering if the Times will mention his big score in a college hockey game.
Roy discovers what he thinks is a minor error in the piece; his beloved and much-mourned late wife, Delia, worked for a think tank, not the U.N. But when the obit writer he complains to has trouble establishing the facts, and then turns up murdered, Roy starts looking into her past himself. Have the think tank and Delia’s former boss simply evaporated from the face of the earth, or is Roy’s memory muddled by the exotic chemicals being piped into his veins? It would be a lot easier to investigate if he wasn’t falling asleep at odd moments or suddenly overcome by bouts of overwhelming weakness.
Roy’s search for the truth about Delia is suspenseful, all right, though her secret is fairly routine by the standards of today’s conspiracy fiction. What gives “Nerve Damage” its juice is the anxiety that arises from Roy’s unaccustomed and unpredictable physical vulnerability. He’s a man used to relying on his body — its strength, coordination and stamina — and perhaps his biggest challenge lies in recognizing that he can’t rely on it any longer. After a lifetime of stoic independence, can he figure out how to ask for help? If the drug trial doesn’t work, then time is fast running out in his quest to find out what really happened to Delia.
Roy’s condition imbues the book’s action sequences with an acute tension, but it also makes even an interstate road trip a source of potential peril. This sort of scenario invites authorial excess, but there’s not a speck of self-indulgence or sentimentality to be found in “Nerve Damage,” not even the boozy, bruised romanticism of noir. As ever, Abrahams’ wiry, disciplined prose keeps the novel sharpened to a needle’s point. That’s something he can always be counted on to deliver.
– Laura Miller
“The Broken Shore”
By Peter Temple
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25
It may be summertime in America, but it’s winter down under. In Peter Temple’s “The Broken Shore,” big-city detective Joe Cashin returns to his hometown on the South Australian coast to recover from a run-in with a felon that nearly claimed his life. He busies himself by playing with his dogs, taking walks in the country, and restoring the house his grandfather ruined when he blew himself up on the premises. This could be a novel in itself, with Cashin confronting the skeletons — literally — in his closet. But when a local millionaire is brutally assaulted and the three aboriginal youths accused of the crime die in quick succession, he is pulled back into the sleuthing biz.
Cashin is a wounded man. He is greeted by twinges of pain every morning and interrupts meetings to lie on the floor and rest his back. For most of the book, we have no idea what happened to him: Temple expertly ekes out the details of the detective’s life while keeping the book’s central mystery in motion.
“Broken Shore” veers into Dan Brown territory when Cashin finds a body in the rafters of an abandoned theater, hanging in front of a biblical backdrop. And did he really just spear that bad guy, vampire style, with a crucifix? No matter. Temple — author of eight crime novels, five of which have won Australia’s Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction — writes so beautifully that even the most ludicrous scenes can win you over. And his paeans to ordinary moments — sunlight streaming through Cashin’s windows, the joyfulness of his dogs — lend “Broken Shore” a realism that makes its improbable plot pretty darn believable. So much so that sitting in a 93 degree un-air-conditioned apartment, I could feel a winter’s chill.
– Dipayan Gupta
“The Grave Tattoo”
By Val McDermid
St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur, $24.95
Val McDermid is known for her hard-bitten, grisly crime novels — a critic friend describes her “A Place of Execution” as one of the scariest books he’s ever read — but despite its ominous title, “The Grave Tattoo” isn’t any such thing. Think of this book as a grown-up version of a Nancy Drew adventure, especially designed for English majors. McDermid’s heroine, an intrepid but impoverished Ph.D. named Jane Gresham, is hot on the trail of her pet theory. She thinks that the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth knew the infamous seaman Fletcher Christian (leader of the mutiny on the Bounty). The idea isn’t far-fetched: The two men grew up in England’s Lake District, went to the same grammar school, and Christian’s brother, a lawyer, represented the Wordsworth family in a lawsuit.
What’s less plausible is the second part of Jane’s theory, which ties into a long-standing Lake District legend that Christian wasn’t really killed in a battle on Pitcairn Island, as is generally thought, but actually snuck back to England and hid out near his childhood home. Jane has discovered a vague reference to a suppressed document in a letter Wordsworth’s widow wrote to one of their sons, and she’s convinced the document is a poem describing the mutiny from Christian’s perspective. It was destroyed or (she hopes) hidden in order to conceal the respectable poet’s friendship with a notorious felon and fugitive from the law.
What Jane’s academic friends call her “fantasy” gains some traction when an early 19th-century corpse turns up in a peat bog not far from her hometown. The chemicals in the bog can preserve flesh for years, and this body still has its skin — complete with South Sea Island-style tattoos. Jane hies it home from London, where she lives in a bleak housing project and mentors Tenille, a 13-year-old black girl with a headful of dreadlocks and a precocious love of Romantic poetry. Several other players — a sleazy ex-boyfriend, a gay pal and, eventually, Tenille herself — follow suit. Everyone, including Jane’s resentful, envious schoolteacher brother and a shadowy, possibly homicidal individual whose identity won’t be revealed until the book’s final pages, launches into a search for the lost manuscript.
Granted, there’s not much Wordsworthian lore in “The Grave Tattoo,” but then he wasn’t a very colorful character, and to judge by McDermid’s attempts to ventriloquize Fletcher Christian in some passages, historical verisimilitude isn’t her forte. Moody Lake District scenery and the gossipy, provincial society of its long-term residents provide most of the novel’s texture. The result is a sort of small-town free-for-all, with all the various sleuths rushing to be the first to sweet-talk this or that elderly local into handing over a half-forgotten cache of family papers. “A Grave Tattoo” is not so much gripping as beguiling, an amiable, old-fashioned detective yarn with enough modern touches to keep a reader on her toes and the perfect diversion for long, lazy afternoons on the porch.
– Laura Miller
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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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.
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.
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.
