Labor Day has come and gone and life returns to its old rhythm. The kids are back in school, and their teachers are asking them what books they read over the summer vacation.
One of the benefits of leaving home for a long holiday is you can get away from the distraction of all those weekly and monthly magazines with their colorful covers and 5-second write-bites. (OK, The New Yorker still writes long, but the rest are into gratifying the short attention span.) So, summer is the time to get down to some serious reading. I mean real books, the ones you bought last spring but just couldn’t get around to.
So here, Teacher, are the titles that kept me absorbed during the lazy days of summer. Actually, I’m cheating just a smidge and including a few I read earlier in the year, but didn’t find time to write about.
For suspense, it’s hard to beat Tom Sawyer’s “The Sixteenth Man” (iUniverse.com), a complex, brilliantly plotted thriller that brings a new dimension to the most compelling true murder mystery of the past century. Deftly juggling the JFK assassination with a present-day private eye on an entirely different assignment, Sawyer kept me turning pages even as I wanted to slow down, spot the clues, and try to figure out where and how these parallel stories were going to intersect. I gave up and surrendered to the blistering pace, time later to probe the structure.
For another view of the chaos of the sixties, L.A. Times columnist Al Martinez gives an inside look at a once glorious metropolitan newspaper on an unstoppable slide to its demise. “The Last City Room” (St. Martin’s Press) is fiction, but it could only have been written by a reporter who had lived and worked on a San Francisco daily during the years of anti-war protests. His experience informs this novel in a way no amount of research could. Today’s corporate media bear no resemblance to those fiercely independent publishers struggling against the changing tide.
In “The Poet” (Warner Books paperback), Edgar Award winner Michael Connelly puts aside Det. Harry Bosch to let crime reporter Jack McEvoy investigate the death of his twin brother, a homicide detective, in an apparent suicide. Murder was Jack’s beat, but when it strikes close to home, the roles are reversed. Now it’s a TV reporter shoving a microphone in his face and asking him how he feels. He’s sure his brother was murdered and turns detective to find the killer. The FBI is hunting a serial killer with a similar MO, but the last thing the agents want is a nosy reporter playing gumshoe. I was really paying attention and didn’t even get close to figuring this one out until the “gotcha” scene.
Still, I will most remember this summer as the one when I became a Barbara Kingsolver fan. Before July, I had read only her book of essays, “High Tide in Tucson” (HarperCollins), which I borrowed from my sister. I got on the library’s waiting list for her latest novel, “Prodigal Summer,” and it arrived the week before I left on vacation. I lugged it to Paris (the hardcover weighs several stones) but it was worth it. I didn’t read it so much as I became immersed in it, absorbing it slowly, layer by layer. I didn’t want it to end, but when it did, I went right to Brentano’s in Paris and bought “Pigs in Heaven.” When I finished that, I found “The Bean Trees,” which should be read first as it introduces the characters and the story that winds up in Heaven, the town of the book title. Taylor Greer is running, or driving, away from her poor Kentucky home to find youthful adventure and has motherhood thrust upon her, ready or not, in the form of an abused, 3-year-old Indian orphan girl. Outside an Oklahoma diner, the child’s aunt places the pink blanket-wrapped baby on the front seat of Taylor’s ’55 Volkswagen, the one with no starter, and says, “Take this baby.” The road trip from hell winds up in Arizona, territory Kingsolver knows well. She also knows her characters to the bone, knows them all by ear and by heart. The stories evolve with humor and love, desperation and serendipity.
“The Poisonwood Bible” — different characters and locale (the Belgian Congo in 1959) — is next on my list. I can’t wait to discover these people, in that time and place, through Kingsolver’s words.
“Prodigal Summer” has turned my summer, and autumn, to gentler and more insightful prose. It’s a different kind of thrill in Kingsolver country.