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Book Recommendations

Here's some of the stuff I've liked recently.  I'll try to update this list!

Collected Poems – Philip Larkin

In Larkin the beauty is always earned; his vision of the world is desolate and yet never closed off to the possibility of the marvelous.  He makes other poets seem cloying.  There are poems of his that I dislike, but the dozen or so that I love most I consider timeless, equal to almost anybody’s best.  My life would be diminished without poems like Maiden Name, Church Going, Absences, Water, Dockery and Son, Afternoons, The Trees, High Windows, Sad Steps, Money, and Aubade.  Even if you only sit in a bookstore, read them.

Basket Case – Carl Hiaasen

I guess everybody loves Carl Hiaasen, but I sure feel like I’m in on the secret.  He’s so good!  And I like his Basket Case-style books – a central character, a basic mystery – more than the ones with huge casts of characters and outlandish coincidences.  Nobody writes sexier books, either, and in such a casual, honest way.  I think Hiassen’s best quality is that he’s so tolerant – he’s a bit like Orwell in that way.  As long as somebody is basically decent they’re fine, no matter what their foibles are.  And check out his children’s book, Hoot – you’ll love it.

The Devil’s Teardrop – Jeffrey Deaver

Just read this again, and in my opinion it’s Deaver’s best: an emotionless killing machine set loose on Washington D.C. on New Year’s Eve, with no way of stopping him.  A cameo from Lincoln Rhyme, an astonishing twist, this book really has everything.  I never miss Deaver’s latest, and there’s nobody who can keep me reading late into the night like him.  But I wish he would bring back Parker Kinkade!

Paris to the Moon – Adam Gopnik

I’ve lived in Paris, my favorite city in the world, for two extended periods of time, and each time this book was my companion.  It’s so much better than a guidebook if you’re going – it directs you to the places you really need to visit to live like a Parisian, places like Deyrolle, BHV, the Flore (NEVER the Deux Magots, god forbid), the ethereally beautiful Luxembourg Gardens, and the pool at the Ritz.  And as someone who has spent a lot of time living far away from home (from the age of 15 or so) it captures as well as any book the feeling of exile – half-thrilling, half-melancholy – which we all know.

Eugene Onegin – Alexander Pushkin

Like Einstein wasting his last years in the futile search for a unified field theory, Nabokov spent a lot of his prime relentlessly trying to translate Pushkin’s famously untranslatable poem, which is truly the basis for all of Russian literature – even, in a way, the basis for the Russian character.  The translation I like best (sheer bias – I don’t know any Russian) is Charles Johnston’s.  Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are two of my favorite writers, period.  But reading Pushkin and then Turgenev, from Onegin to Bazarov, presents a different line of Russian writing, more lyric, wittier, less daunting, lighter.  I leave them both with the feeling that in their brevity both writers leave some of the writing to the reader.