Cheryl Truman on books

Here we go, the first round of suggestions to break my book drought.

From Nancy Perry:

“Cheryl, have you tried nonfiction?” (In fact, I have, and am very fond of any book by Erik Larson, given the number of times I’ve tried to press Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History into the hands of strangers, and sometimes family members as well. Larson’s account of the 1900 Galveston hurricane is so richly observed that it could serve as an example of how to write nonfiction that reads even better than fiction. The Devil in the White City is similarly engrossing, because it will surely drive you to do more research on the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. … And about The Monster of Florence, I have not yet read it, but did see a documentary on the subject featuring Preston and contributing author Mario Spezi, a crime reporter, on MSNBC. The “monster” is like an Italian melding of the fictional Hannibal Lecter and the real-life Son of Sam.)

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba … and then lost it to the revolution, by T.J. English

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (essays)

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson (about the architecto of the Chicago World’s Fair and the serial killer who prospered near the far at the same time)

The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life, by David Carr (about his drug addiction)

The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi

Ladies & Gentlemen of the Jury: The Greatest Closing Arguments in Modern Law, by Michael S. Lief and H. Mitchell Caldwell

This column first appeared in the Nov. 30 Herald-Leader. Responses will appear in the blog and also in Sunday editions of the Herald-Leader. — Cheryl Truman

I’m in a reading drought. Can you help?

I didn’t read a book last weekend.

I might not read one next weekend, either.

I remember the moment when it hit me that maybe I had simply spent too much time reading, that I’d hit a patch when having all the books you can carry becomes no longer enough.

It was at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference on Sept. 12, right before Joyce Carol Oates stood up, and in that tiny crystalline voice of hers, held hundreds of audience members spellbound.

It was while novelist Laura Benedict was speaking. As Benedict spoke about her life and read the first chapter to her upcoming novel, Calling Mr. Lonelyhearts, I had a chance to wonder about the net effect of all those decades of reading.

I kept that fixed glaze of a smile on my face — I’m enjoying this, because I am a Thoughtful Literate Citizen! — but I was wondering: Have I lost my reading verve if I don’t want to read this book? In the first chapter, teen girls were behaving with raucous bad-girl abandon, and we saw some indication that said abandon would have Far-Reaching Consequences, the kind of consequences not apparent in a Single Thoughtless Moment When the Characters Are Oh-So-Young. Will there be Dean Koontz-style gore and vengeance?

Suddenly, the thought of reading another novel in which thoughtless behavior by finely etched batches of character traits affects countless lives seemed like a demand to sprint up the nearest mountain.

What did Benedict’s novel remind me of? John Irving? The Dive Off Clausen’s Pier? Ann Rule?

Or was it a movie: Mean Girls? The Craft?

It was a painful moment. (I would say a tipping point, after Malcolm Gladwell’s term for moments when a phenomenon gains enough steam to propel itself out of a niche and into the mainstream, but “tipping point” long ago reached the tipping point of being a cliché.)

So I fell into a reading depression. I continued to report and do some editing. But I was not a happy reader.

And then I fell ill for a few weeks, and I had the chance to wander through my house, tipping open the books I had scattered around the house for years and reading as a raspy chest and aching head would allow: This must be why I left Portrait of a Lady on a basement desk for nearly six years, collecting a patina of cat hair, Lysol and dust, for that serendipitous moment when I happened upon it just before I fell on the nearby floor to take a rest.

Still, it was reading in fits and starts — a best-of textbook for the middle-aged woman. Once the antibiotics kicked in, I was unhappily prowling again. Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar has been sitting on the bedside table for two years now: Geez, crack it open. One day, I thought the Girl With a Dragon Tattoo seemed like a full weekend of reading. I got over it.

I find myself looking back at the now-defunct Common Reader catalog, which had that snappy list of books for people who wanted to read-read: not read to please a constituency, or read to passive-aggressively taunt their peers, but to read because there’s joy in it.

I lost that joy, somewhere.

I’ve seen more books than any one person without an English major’s syllabus, or a full-time reviewing job, could absorb.

I’ve also had the responsibility of informing scads of people that, no matter how very well they think of themselves, their work, their personal history and their on-demand publisher, I can’t help them. Some insist that I don’t understand. If I understood, everyone would want to read their books. If I understood, America would know their names and maybe Oprah would hear about them, and then? The odds are like those in Powerball, except that Book Bingo requires a byline.

We tell ourselves that reading is everything. We go to bookstores and pose with books: Are these the right Birkenstocks for this book? Is my latte prominent enough? Are these reading glasses ironic, or is somebody going to mistake us for a Sarah Palin wannabe?

We leave books lying around that suggest that we have a depth that we do not. We nod at literary references when we only have the foggiest notion of what they mean: Voltaire, check. Chuck Palahniuk: Well, you saw Fight Club. Good enough.

And then, at the lowest point of a reading skid, we hit moments when we’re content to spend a season on the sofa, watching marathons of A&E’s Intervention and maybe something with Judi Dench in it, so that our intellectual teeth don’t rot. (And that’s on a good day: More often lately, I think that bourgy.com — slogan: “Where smart people dumb down” — has a point, and that as the economy flails, we all secretly want to watch the peroxide screech of low-rent conspirators. Or, as cable defines it, VH-1.)

I’m in a reading drought.

Where’s the book that will change my mind?

The author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter appears in the My Kind of Town feature. Edwards herself is seen posing before the horse sculpture installation/happy tourist stopoff called Thoroughbred Park, which  we at the Herald-Leader can see from our Midland Avenue-facing windows. It’s sunny where Kim is standing, but today, the park is dusted with snow, and looks winter-friendly against a generally modestly proportioned and walkable downtown. But there are plans to pitch that skyline higher, away from those swells and swales.

Anyway, Kim writes about Lexington as a non-native raising her children in a place they will remember as their hometown: “Place matters, as does a sense of history and a feeling of connection to the land.”

She observes that “sports matter,” which would seem on some days the kind of well-intentioned understatement that could compare with a visitor to town observing, with the detached good humor of someone whose flight leaves very soon, that Kentuckians “play a little basketball, and people speak animatedly about the results of the games.”

“Many Lexington natives believe they live in a special place, one impossible to leave,” Edwards writes. “i’m not so sure about that — or it’s more accurate to say I think a more general truth exists beneath it: the place you first call home stays with you always, whether you remain or go.”

I think the short summary is: Love the landscape you’re with.

Look, I’m inclined to be sympathetic to people writing about pets: The Truman household hosts five cats and one dog. Our house seems to draw random homeless cats, as if there’s a feline Internet somewhere that daily broadcasts our address with the bulletin: Show up here. They’re easy touches. Shedders and scratchers particularly welcome.

But I’ve not yet descended into Crazy Cat Lady status. I have abundant Lysol, four litter boxes and limits. One of those is that, Marley & Me and The Christmas Day Kitten aside, I’m not a fan of books that feature slobbering and shedding as plot points. When it comes to reading, I prefer your humans just about every time.

So it’s intriguing to go through the week’s haul of books and see how many of them are supposed to be comically endearing books about pets, pets attached to the latest bit of odd humor and pets for the holidays.

To wit:

Hip Hop for Dogs: From Bling to Phat, Your Dog Is One Cool Cat (by Janet Penn, Simon & Schuster, $12.95). No, my dog does not “represent,” and she doesn’t wear enormous tacky earrings that those who see her parade about can call her marginally defamatory names. Really, be grateful that your canine will never see or understand this book, and a little sorry that you will. There’s a line between light-spirited and laborious, and this book is miles beyond that line.

A Dog Named Christmas: A Novel by Greg Kincaid (Doubleday, $14.95). It’s a Lab! But a black Lab, so it’s not Marley! Really, this book has a heart of gold, in that it urges the adoption of shelter dogs in the holiday season, and it’s hard not to love a book that advocates spending a holiday season thinking about something besides the acquisition of more stuff. Still, it’s got rough sledding ahead, because it’s competing with …

Cat Capers: Catitude for Cat Lovers by Gandee Vasan. (Andrews McNeel, $24.99). If you have a great gaping hole waiting for a coffee table book that is largely photos of cats with definitions such as “The cat is not evil; she is badness enhanced,” this one’s waiting for you. Also: “The cat is not lazy; he is motivationally challenged.” You already see this kind of humor on icanhascheezburger.com, which of course is also offering its own book. Me, I am not buying: I am interest-challenged.

The Devious Book for Cats: A Parody (Villard, $16). It’s a parody of those books that purport to teach boys and girls everything they need to know, and which is of course no longer taught because we live in an age in which school children text and IM and live on Facebook and their parents are mindless drones who chaffeur them between select-league athletic events and SAT prep courses. If you understand why this is funny, you still won’t buy the book. Example: An Illustrated Guide to Napping, featuring snoozing, dozing, resting, getting some shut-eye and of course cat-napping. Really, that’s so dull I had to prop my own eyelids open to type to the end of the sentence. Parody is attempted. It is not achieved.

But there’s a bright spot: Michael Schaffer’s upcoming One Nation Under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food. It’s scheduled for release in March, 2009. We’ll be there.

Well, if not my life, at least my sanity.

Because all I can tell you about the last week, people is: Get your flu shot. None of this nonsense about how the shot makes you sicker than the flu. Because, folks, NOTHING makes you sicker than the flu.

Or the mysterious flu-like illness. Or whatever it was that hit me like a sack of bricks starting last Tuesday.

After the first few days, I found that no matter how bad you feel, you can indeed grow weary of those VH1 tart shows, and you can only watch on-demand South Park and Dave Chappelle reruns so much. Eventually the sound of the television makes you ears ache. (I am now told that was an ear infection.)

So I pulled out True Crime: An American Anthology (Libary of America, $40), edited by Harold Schecter, which was released in September. Starting with such writers as Benjamn Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, the book winds up with Dominic Dunne on the Menendez murders.

In between, there are numerous “trials of the century”: Turns out that many crimes you never heard of, and a few you have, were considered in their day to be the greatest crimes ever. One that you never heard of was the Cleveland serial killer in the ’30s who stalked hobos and those on society’s margins and was probably more sophisticated in his criminal pursuits than Jack the Ripper.

But the highlight of the collection for me was Damon Runyon. I’d read about Damon Runyon and yet never read anything by Damon Runyon. “The Eternal Blonde,” based on the case that inspired The Postman Always Rings Twice — basically, husband done in by conniving wife and her lover — is a treat. “He constantly belittled her. He threatened to blow out her brains. He was a good provider for herself and their nine-year-old daughter, but wouldn’t take her out — so she took to stepping out, as they say. An old, old yarn — Friend Husband is a non-stepper, Friend Wife full of go.”

I also got a fair amount read in The Guersey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and a few chapters in the new Maisie Dobbs mystery, and enough of Gina Kolata’s Flu to remind myself that at least I didn’t have the Spanish flu of 1918.

But Damon Runyon: Ah, there’s a keeper.

Final Theory is one of those novels that debuted under the radar and then caught a cult-like following of people who rave that it’s one of those books — the late and lamented Common Reader catalog used to call them “read-read” books that readers measure by the number of spellbound days it took them to finish it. (It’s generally two or fewer, just so you know.)

It’s about — wait for it — the notion of hiddey poetry within the equations of physicists. And it’s a thriller. A University of Kentucky press release says it “traces Albert Einstein’s Unified Field Theory through scientific ideas intertwined with FBI gun battles, car chases and a race to stop an experiment that would doom the world.”

Author Mark Alpert will speak at UK’s White Hall Classroom Building on Monday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. The event is free, open to the public, and presented by UK’s Gaines center for the Humanities.

The Narcotic Farm, the companion film for the book The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts (Abrams, $29.95), by Nancy D. Campbell, J.P. Olsen and Luke Walden, will air at 9 p.m. on November 3 on WKLE. KET1 is seen in Lexington on WKLE-TV, Channel 46, which is broadcast on Insight cable channel 12

For addition Kentucky airings of the film, which focuses on Lexington’s former “Narcotic Farm” prison on Leestown Road, go to http://www.itvs.org/shows/broadcast_results.php

Built at the height of the Great Depression for $4 million, “Narco,” a combination prison, rehabilitation center, work program and drug research lab, marked a shift in American thinking about addiction. It provided free, on-demand treatment, called its prisoners “patients” and began an on-site research program into how people become addicted and how drugs work on the brain.

To see my original article on the facility once known in Lexington as “the Narco,” and see a photo slide show, go to:

http://www.kentucky.com/211/story/538870.html

Lincoln books seem an infinitely renewable resource. So, when the time comes, skip the moisture-resistant shiny enclosure. Put a few Lincoln books below, a few above, then shovel some earth. Plant a tree. Play Bette Midler’s Shiver Me Timbers. I’ll go happy.

Really, the Lincoln biography industry seems to be one thing that’s booming in America. List it on the stock market, and you’d see investors come down quickly off this Apocalypse Dow mentality.

A few new contenders in the Lincoln literary sweepstakes:

–The children’s book Lincoln Shot: A President’s Life Remembered (by Barry Denenberg, illustrated by Christopher Bing, Fiewel and Friends, $24.95) is simply appealing as all get-out; if I were a child, or still had young children, I would read this every dya. And it wold be easy enough to find: It’s 17 inches tall. And although this is plainly schoolbook Lincoln for those who may have just graduated Sesame Street, it’s a guilty pleasure for adults as well. Key Lincoln quote: ” … It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a simple sentence … the short and simple annals of the poor.”

Nice touch: Four photos of Lincoln, 1860-1865, lined up on page 35. He begins looking rugged, and ends looking rugged and ghastly.

–The upcoming A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, upcoming in January, 2009), is being touted as the best biography of Lincoln since David Donald’s Lincoln, which is like saying that the gold standard is being updated. A lovely quote from the Chicago Press and Tribune teaches the always appropriate, always forgotten lesson that in politics, demise is a temporary phenomenon. It’s from November 10, 1858, when Lincoln was in fact far from finished, and it’s the sort of thing you think Hillary Clinton may have framed on a wall somewhere: “Mr. Lincoln is beaten. We know of no better time than the present to congratulate him on the memorable and brilliant canvas he has made. He has created for himself a national reputation that is both envied and deserved; and though he should hereafter fill no official station, he has done the cause of Truth and Justice what will always entitle him to the gratitude of his party … ”

–Who’s your phrasemaker? Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (HarperCollins, October 28 $27.95) by Fred Kaplan, falls more in the range of 2006’s Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words, by Douglas L. Wilson. It begins with little Abe attending his first school, in Hardin County, Kentucky. Kaplan takes no prisoners in his introduction, in which he observes that “Lincoln was also the last president whose character and standards in the use of language avoided the distortions and other dishonest uses of language that have done so much to undermine the credibility of national leaders.” Any citizen who has suffered through the verbal swill of this year’s campaigns, both national and state, can appreciate that. In Kentucky alone, our U.S. Senate ads are toxic enough that they will have to be eventually disposed of by hazmat teams.

Essayist David Sedaris — he of Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and When You Are Engulfed in Flames — is headed to the Singletary Center on Oct. 18. Tickets are $60 and available at www.singletarytickets.com.

Ronald Eller’s discussion of his new book Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (University Press of Kentucky), will be taped to air on C-Span’s Book TV. Eller, a University of Kentucky professor and former director of the Appalachian Center, will speak on Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. (Look for a Herald-Leader review by former host of Comment on Kentucky Al Smith on Oct. 19.)

Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series, is coming to Joseph-Beth on Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. to promote his new book Doomwyte (Philomel Books, $23.99). I’ll be interviewing Jacques by phone next Tuesday, and I don’t know how to begin to express my gratitude for the Redwall series. The books include all manner of conflict and evildoing and bloodshed, and yet there’s a wonderful kind of curl-up-by-the-fire side in which the forest animals care for each other, establish elaborate celebratory rituals and stage sumptuous feasts.

I was rarely more truly at one with my children than when I was reading aloud from Jacques, and to this day we quote a Jacques character whenever the first brisk Kentucky frost blows in: “Brr, zurr!” Probably you had to be there. But Jacques’ Redwall books are much like Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, pitched toward the elementary school set.

Liza Mundy is a staff writer for The Washington Post, and this is no People-magazine profile featuring a beaming happy family (effortless style! doting husband! adoring children!). The pictures aren’t the most flattering, although the one with Michelle Obama shooting silent death rays at Hillary Clinton is a classic.

The book (Simon & Schuster, $25) veers between slam and idealization. It’s odd, and a little painful, in its striving to put Michelle Obama into a mythological template: “She is outspoken likeable, grounded. She may indeed be quick to find fault — with bosses, with America, whatever — but she is also warm and loyal and, truth be told, not much of a rabble rouser.”

You’re left wondering what’s so bad about rabble-rousing, and why a potential First Lady shouldn’t speak, vigorously and whenever she feels like it, on the issues of the day. Taken out of the context of this being a Michelle Obama book, it’s hard to imagine how the same sentence wouldn’t cover Laura Bush. Or Nancy Reagan.
But then there is the other end of the admiration spectrum there is this, about Michelle Obama’s early legal career:

“At least one person, however, found Michelle a challenge to manage. The head of the marketing group was a partner named Quincy White, whom people in the group referred to, fondly, as “Q.” White, now retired, recalls that he recruited Michelle to the group and endeavored to give her the most interesting work he could find, in part because he wanted to do right by her and see her advance, but also because she seemed perennially dissatisfied.”

So really, she isn’t outspoken. Until she is.

The slim volume also includes a fair amount of amateur psychological analysis and wondering-aloud. This feels like lurching toward a point: “As Barack observed when he met her, Michelle does seem to harbor a sense that things could have so easily gone wrong for her, just as they went wrong for some of the people she grew up with — a sense that if she doesn’t work hard to hold it together, everything could still fall apart. She is also aware that things might have gone badly for Barack if he had done his youthful experimenting in a place other than Hawaii.”

Ah, Hawaii! If you’re going to corrupt your youth, best do it there. Or in Kentucky. We’re also often misportrayed as a land of bucolic simpletons. We can sympathize.

And if you’re feeling that things are bit cringe-y, consider this passage about Barack Obama’s rise to presidential candidacy, which feels as if someone is trying too hard for a transition paragraph in a political profile:

“It was more than a political rise; it was a political levitation. A political teleportation. Obama had been beamed up. He had ascended. Overnight he had become a household name. It’s hard to think of a precedent. What political wife has had to adjust to this much intense publicity and fame, this quickly?”

And the answer is: every single one.