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July 4, 2009: Weekend Reading
By
Published: Jun 30, 2009
Category:
Beyond Classification
“I read your reviews,” she wrote. “But there are so many, and I need to read over the weekend. Please give me some suggestions, and I’ll even click right through and buy them from Amazon.”
Darling, thanks. You don’t have to go that far. On the other hand, with One Click and two-day free delivery, you can make your life easier and help send my kid to camp.
For those who are new to my lists, I don’t presume to guess what you might want to read. I resist neat categories, as if readers who collect golf books couldn’t possibly read poetry. So I make it easy for myself: I only suggest books I’d like to be reading for the first time.
In short, subjectivity rules.
Thrillers? Love stories? Histories?
Another year, perhaps.
For now, I’m pushing these…
The Tender Bar
A father goes AWOL soon after his son’s birth, and the kid grows up on Long Island in a house of loving women and eccentric men — and in a local bar. A book with lots of surprises (the author ends up at Yale and, later, at The New York Times), artful writing, and more powerful and funny scenes than any memoir I’ve read in years.
Perfection
Another memoir, this time by a woman who learns, soon after her husband’s death, that her husband was sleeping with every woman who’d have him — including the mother of her daughter’s best friend. She seeks knowledge, so she finds these women and confronts them. Consumer warning: This book does not avoid sex.
The Queen’s Gambit
A novel about the Mozart of chess? Yes. And if you’re frowning, you are the reader who will probably be most thrilled by this book. It’s a great story. Really exciting. And it’s about chess in the same way that “Rocky” is about boxing — like not.
The House of Mirth
A classic is a best-seller that never stopped selling. And what’s more “now” than a novel about a woman who’s approaching her “sell-by” date — with no husband in sight?
The Quality of Life Report
New York career woman: yeah, if you can get off that hamster wheel, you might feel alive again. But in the Midwest? Dating guys who mean grain storage when they talk about “elevators”?
Shining City
The smartest, funniest novel set in LA in decades. A decent guy drowning in debt inherits his brother’s escort service. Raunchy, riotous, middle-class fun. Incorrect in every way, there’s a corpse. And some vivid sex.
Two memoirs, four novels — and the bulging archives. Yeah, you can make it until Monday, even if it rains and rains.
