Last week, my brother emailed me, asking for book recommendations.  I dashed off a reply with a few suggestions and comments, but then decided to expand upon it here.  I mean, who doesn’t like to hear book suggestions?  I certainly do.  (And if you saw my credit card statements, you’d say, Perhaps too much so.) 

But first, a digression. Yesterday, Laura Miller wrote a piece for Salon which made the oh-so-radical suggestion that novelists place a greater emphasis on plot and character.  According to the comments posted to her article – and I beg you, for the love of God and everything sane, when you’re not on OS, please don’t read the comments!, it’s like making eye contact with the guy on the subway carrying a jug of Thunderbird and muttering to himself – wait, what was I saying?  Oh, yeah, many pointy-headed snobs think it’s a Philistine idea to make the reader comfortable.  I used to be one of them, toting my Pynchon and my Barthelme – hell, I did my 12^th grade term paper on Ulysses – but then I got married, started a family, started a career, and after spending my evenings reading Green Eggs and Ham and (my favorite) Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree to my kids, I realized I no longer had the energy for difficult reads. My philosophy now is: Tell me an interesting story, give me characters that are going to make me feel something, or leave me alone, because I’ve got better things to do with my dwindling days than contemplate your “literary genius.”  (Since I am apparently the only person who disliked the all-prize-winning The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I’ve attached my parody below.)

OK, some fiction.  I always start by recommending Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, my favorite novel of the last few years and the only book that accurately describes what it’s like to work in a modern office (not to mention the shrinking economy).  I also love the works of Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-Indian woman who primarily writes about Indians trying to assimilate into America.  Not dry at all, very readable.  I haven’t read her latest yet, but her novel The Namesake and her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (which won a Pulitzer Prize) are both wonderful.

I just finished reading John Grisham’s collection of short stories, Ford County, and was surprised by how much I liked it, which shows I still have a twinge of snobbery in my bones.  Grisham was a lawyer?  Most of the villains in these stories are lawyers or the law profession itself. 

I had a brief spurt of reading thrillers recently and I really enjoyed one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series (Reacher is the kind of guy who throws out more fists than sentences).  The one I read was called Nothing to Lose, and it surprised me with some of the directions it went (spoiler: part of the plot involves Reacher helping GIs who don’t want to be shipped back to Iraq).

I shouldn’t have to mention Elmore Leonard. 

Speaking of cats, read Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper, especially since it originated as OS posts.  

Speaking of OS members, I can’t say enough about Dave Cullen’s Columbine, which will be in paperback next month.  It’s not only a great investigation of how the tragedy occurred, but it details how the media inevitably got the facts wrong. (And as I told my brother, “I always wanted to say this: Full disclosure – Cullen is a member of Open Salon and has commented on my work.  There, that made me feel important!”)

As an enthusiastic supporter of the Innocence Project, I highly recommend the double-memoir Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, who gives a vivid recounting of the utter humiliation of being a rape victim, and Ronald Cotton, the African-American man who spent 11 years in prison after she wrongly ID’d him. It recounts how easily anger can blind the justice system.  Remarkably, by the end, they’ve become friends who work together on justice issues.  It demonstrates the kind of grace people are capable of but so rarely strive for.

As an enthusiastic opponent of the death penalty, I was riveted by Thomas Cahill’s short but powerful A Saint on Death Row, which packs all of the arguments against capital punishment into one victim: a young man with a horrific background yet an eloquence that brought Bishop Desmond Tutu into his life; dubious evidence provided by accomplices with ulterior motives; victim’s relatives who believed he was innocent; clear racial bias in court and a listless, underfunded public defender.  No civilized state would have executed this young man.  Texas executed him.  If you can read this book without screaming, you’re more hard-hearted than I.

Enough about innocence, what about guilt?  Lisa R. Cohen’s After Etan revisits the horrible kidnapping – and undoubtedly, murder – of a small boy on a Greenwich Village street 30 years ago, a case no New Yorker could ever forget.  The book not only recounts the extensive investigation – they’ve pretty much known who committed the crime for 25 years, but they’ve never gotten more than a partial confession – but also recounts how the horror of the crime forever changed the way parents watch over their children.

Murat Kurnaz’ 5 Years of My Life tells the horrible story of being an innocent man imprisoned in Gitmo.  It’s violence porn – hardly a page goes by without Kurnaz or one of his neighbors being beaten or tortured.  It’s one of the few books I’ve read that made me ashamed of my country.

I’ll finish with some lighter fare: They Told Me There’d Be Cake is a breezy series of personal essays by a young lady named Sloane Crosley.  The book is like a good day at OS – except she got paid for it.  With spring training around the corner, if you’re a baseball fan, you’ll enjoy Bruce Weber’s As They See ‘Em, which gets up close and personal with the umpiring brethren.  I vowed I’d never yell at an umpire again.  The night after finishing the book, while watching a blatantly bad call go against my beloved Mets, I screamed out a bunch of R-rated epithets.  But at least I felt guilty afterwards.

Finally, I’ll mention one of my favorite books, Bill Bryson’s hilarious A Walk in the Woods, about two aging, out-of-shape guys – nothing at all like me, ahem – who try and mostly fail to walk the entirety of the Appalachian Trail.  I walked the Trail last year. Well, a mile and a half of it anyway.  Another thing off my bucket list!

Hey Dad we won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  And Entertainment Weekly called us the best book of the last 25 years.

            Don’t call me Dad. Call me Papa.

            Why do I have to call you Papa?

            Because Hemingway was called Papa and our narrator has a jones for Hemingway’s lean and muscular prose.

            His lean and musca-what?  Oh, wait, I read The Old Man and the Sea in school. It sounded just like this.

            Forget school. This is the apocalypse.

Will it ever stop raining Papa?

No.

            Will the skies ever brighten again?

            There’s no sunshine in the apocalypse.

            Papa what happened to Mama?

            She sacrificed her life for symbolism.  Besides we don’t need a woman softening this masculine prose.

            Papa what happened to the quotation marks?

            They were destroyed in the apocalypse.        

            Papa are you ever going to tell the reader what caused the apocalypse?

            They don’t need to know.  Now we must scavenge for food.

            But Papa it’s page 50 and we’ve already scavenged for food.  How are we going to keep the readers interested for the rest of the book?

            The readers must be horrified by the brutality of man.

Papa I’m a little kid but I’d already figured that out.

Hush. Keep walking.

            Why are we pushing a shopping cart?  Is there a Wal-Mart nearby?

            There’s no more Wal-Mart.  The cart is to carry our possessions so we can move faster and stay one step ahead of the cannibals.

            Like in that Woody Harrelson movie Zombieland.  That was funny.

            There’s nothing funny about the apocalypse.

            Papa is anything going to happen besides scavenging and sleeping?

Well right before I die I’ll decide that life is still worth living and I’ll let you live on.     

            Wait you were going to kill me before you died?

            Yes to keep you safe from the other scavengers who would kill you for food.

            That’s messed up.  Though now that you mention it, I’m hungry and you’re looking a little weak.  Do we have any ketchup?