#fridayreads – Page 8 – The Great Gray Bridge

#FridayReads, August 17–‘Somebody Owes Me Money,’ Donald E. Westlake & Essays by Nicholson Baker

August 17, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, August 17–Somebody Owes Me Money, Donald E. Westlake’s enjoyable 1969 mystery narrated by Chet Conway, a wise-cracking cab driver. One day Chet gets an unusual tip from a fare–rather than a couple extra bucks for the ride, his customer offers a tip on a horse race: bet on Purple Pecunia to win. Chet does place a wager with his bookmaker, and the pony comes in, but when he goes to collect his winnings, the bookie’s been murdered. Chet wonders, who am I supposed collect from? Much delightful hilarity and chaos ensues, including a budding romance with Abbie, the daughter of the murdered man, and many clashes with rival gangs with an interest in the dead bookie’s clientele. A great reprint of a classic mystery, from the fun imprint Hard Case Crime.

Also reading Nicholson Baker’s new essay collection, The Way the World Works. He’s been one of my favorite writers ever since I read his first novel, The Mezzanine, in 1988. I met Baker when he won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award for for his book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and we’ve emailed each other periodically since. His attention-grabbing funny and frankly sexual novels, such as House of Holes, are what he’s best known for nowadays, but I really relish his essays, such as the 1997 collection, The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. Not to be overlooked is Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, a remarkable book of aggregated content not Baker’s own that approximates a pacifist history of the decades between World War I and World War II. In the new collection Baker–always a writer fascinated with the physicality of things and the visceral and corporeal in everyday life–examines airplane wings, coins, earplugs, and ereading devices.

#FridayReads, Aug. 10–“Under the Banner of Heaven,” Jon Krakauer

August 10, 2012/1 Comment/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, August 10–Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Jon Krakauer’s engrossing account of the blood-drenched history of Mormonism, from the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857 to the religious murders committed by the fundamentalist Lafferty brothers in American Fork, Utah, in 1984. The paranoid machinations of the founders of this cultish movement, and its zealous adherents, is startling, as is the secrecy that has attended it in more modern decades. I recommend this book for a greater understanding of the movement that animates Mitt Romney and his co-religionists. Photos of the front and back cover are from the copy I am reading.

Also, while driving on vacation recently we listened to the audio book of Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, read by the author. It was enormously enjoyable.

#FridayReads, July 27–“Two Lives” by Vikram Seth

July 27, 2012/2 Comments/in Books & Writing, Publishing & Bookselling /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, July 27–Two Lives, Vikram Seth’s fascinating family chronicle of the singular marriage between his Indian uncle, Shanti–an improbable, one-armed dentist–and his German-Jewish aunt, Henny Caro, a mixed couple who managed to build a life together despite the difficulties imposed by circumstance and society, amid WWII and the Holocaust. Seth begins the narrative near the end of their lives, in the 1980s, and then works his way forward and back in time, employing interviews he conducted with Shanti and documentary materials he discovers (letters, photos, school papers, etc.). This is a remarkable book, published in 2005.

N.B.: I first read and enjoyed Vikram Seth’s work years ago, when I read and at Undercover Books sold his debut, a brilliant travelogue about China and Tibet, From Heaven Lake. He went on to write a novel in verse, The Golden Gate, inspired he explains in Two Lives, by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. He is an inventive writer, who seems to never repeat himself.

This Week at The Great Gray Bridge

July 21, 2012/1 Comment/in Canada, Music, Bands & Radio, Philip Turner's Books & Writing, Sports /by Philip Turner

In the past week at this blog, I’ve written about the best TV ad of the presidential campaign thus far; a brave woman in Alaska who fended off an aggressive grizzly bear; the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema of Austin, TX, which is entering the NYC market only a couple blocks from my office; the great Canadian band Library Voices; Sarah Silverman’s bawdy video that pokes fun at right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; a new album from Bob Dylan; the award-winning CBC radio host, Jian Ghomeshi; Greenland’s worryingly shrinking Petermann Glacier; a young chess master and Franconia College classmate of mine who vanished in 1978 under mysterious circumstances; the late, great baseball writer, Robert Creamer, who chronicled the life of Babe Ruth; the sweet severance deal Mitt Romney arranged for himself from Bain Capital; the moving book I’ve been reading by Rob Sheffield, my #FridayReads yesterday; and my own personal history, including the story of how during a teenage road trip my brother Joel and I happened to adopt our longtime black lab Noah, pictured here with me.

#FridayReads, July 20–“Love is a Mix Tape”

July 20, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, July 20–Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, Rob Sheffield’s wrenching account of the five-year marriage he shared with his dear wife, Renée, who died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism at age 31. Sheffield tells their tale by opening each chapter of the book by naming the playlists on the many mix tapes that he and Renée made for each other in the time they were together. Sheffield, who is an editor at Rolling Stone, narrates this heartbreak tale in a sweet and disarming voice from a world where music is always on their lips, in their ears, and coursing through their hearts.

#FridayReads, July 13–“The Double Game” by Dan Fesperman

July 13, 2012/1 Comment/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, July 13–Finished The Double Game, a brilliant and compelling espionage novel by Dan Fesperman. I loved the end as much as the first half. The mark of quality here is defined by the appendix of 218 books at the back of Fesperman’s book that he read and drew from in writing his latest work. As I posted in my #FridayReads last week, “Terrific dialogue, characters, and use of dozens of classic espionage books as clues and plot points. Sonny Mehta’s letter on the back of the galley is right: ‘For anyone who loves a good spy thriller–and who has loved them for years–this will be a treat.’”

#FridayReads, July 6–“The Double Game,” Dan Fesperman

July 6, 2012/3 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, July 6–Reading a galley of “The Double Game,” Dan Fesperman’s terrific homage to spy fiction, a Knopf novel coming late August. Terrific dialogue, characters, and use of dozens of classic espionage books as clues and plot points. Sonny Mehta’s letter on the back is right: “For anyone who loves a good spy thriller–and who has loved them for years–this will be a treat.”

#FridayReads, June 29–“Brain on Fire,” Susannah Cahalan

June 29, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, June 29–Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, Susannah Cahalan’s frightening first-person account of the autoimmune disease that rendered her catatonic for a month, drove her nearly mad, and almost killed her. Riveting and disturbing, this was one of the books featured on the BEA Buzz panel at Book Expo America earlier this month. I’ve scanned the cover for this post, but I have a feeling that Free Press is still working on the jacket, because there seems no evidence of a final cover online. During the Buzz Panel I tweeted the message below.

Next up, Panorama City, a novel by Antoine Wilson, also one of the BEA Buzz books.

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