Reading List

I’m kind of a book junkie.  I’ve read some really good ones over the past year. 

 

Last week I finished one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve ever read, The Guns At Last Light by Rick Atkinson.  It’s the final book in his Liberation Trilogy about the Second World War’s Europe theatre.  (Spoiler alert: we won.)  The book is magnificent in how it brings to life the horror and humanity of war.  The writing is almost poetic, similar to one of my favorite novels, All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren. I haven’t read the first two books in the Liberation Trilogy but my parents-in-law just gave them to me.  I start on them today. 

Atkinson really pisses me off.  He’s a great writer.  He has a string of honors and awards, including two Pulitzers, one for investigative journalism and the other for the first book of the Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn.  As a reporter for the Washington Post he’s been on the front lines of history, covering a vast range of topics, including national defense, diplomacy, intelligence, national politics, the Persian Gulf War, the civil wars in Somalia and Bosnia, and Washington, D.C. politics.  Finally, the headshot on the dust jacket to The Guns At Last Light makes him look like he’s 40 (in fact, he’s 62.  I checked.)  There’s a lot to dislike.

Other than The Guns At Last Light, here’s a recap of the best books I read over the past year, by author.  Let me know what you’ve read that you can recommend….

 

Erik Larson—I've read three of his books recently: In the Garden of Beasts, Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck.  All are outstanding.  They are non-fictional accounts of real events--all the characters and quotes are real--but told using the techniques of a novel.  They are highly readable and engaging.  

 

In the Garden of Beasts looks at Hitler's coming to power in 1933-34 from the perspective of the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Devil in the White City is about the people who made happen the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, officially called the World’s Columbian Exposition, intertwined with the story of perhaps the first serial killer in the U.S., who was also in Chicago at that time.

Thunderstruck looks at Guglielmo Marconi, developer of wireless radio, and a murderer named Hawley Crippen, whose lives intersect.

 

John Le Carré— I also read a couple really good John Le Carré spy novels: The Looking Glass War and Our Kind of Traitor.  Le Carré served in Great Britain’s spy agency, MI5, in the 1950s and ‘60s before turning to fiction writing.  His first novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which was a huge success, depicted the British spy apparatus as very polished and professional.  

In Le Carré’s second work, The Looking Glass War, he wrote what he described as a more realistic view of spies: human beings, with their faults and deficiencies, personal and family issues to manage, and directed by those whose motives sometimes were driven more by the prospects of professional advancement than by the best interests of the state.

 

Our Kind of Traitor was written about 25 years after his first couple books and is also very good.  I had tried reading The Little Drummer Girl but couldn’t get past the first 20 or so pages.  It was a ponderous read.  In Our Kind of Traitor, Le Carré returns to his streamlined style of writing and to-the-point plot.  There’s not too much expository about things that don’t really contribute to the narrative or the character development.  And it’s a good story, looking at how brutal the business of information-gathering can be and the limits of trust.

 

Cormac McCarthy—I recently finished Cities of the Plain, the third book in the so-called Border Trilogy about cowboys in the 1940s and '50s by Cormac McCarthy, a favorite author of mine.  All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are the first two in the trilogy.   McCarthy, who also wrote The Road, writes in a style similar to Hemingway’s: He is a master of telling the reader a lot about a character through snippets of interaction. 

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald—A couple years ago Hollywood came out with a movie version of The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DeCaprio as Jay Gatsby.  The promotions for the movie pushed me to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, which I hadn’t read in probably 15 years or more.  He packs a lot into a very short novel.   It’s an amazing study not just in class and wealth, but in the way we recognize and rationalize our shortcomings and poor choices. 

 

A few weeks ago, while going through my old classics, I found Tender is the Night and decided to give that a whirl.  I don’t think I had read it since high school.  The book on my shelf says it is property of the library at Richard Montgomery High School, my alma mater.  The card in the back shows the last person to check out the book was not me, but Lynn Maroney, a girl in my class who I knew.  Maybe I borrowed it from her and forgot to return it.  Lynn, if you had to pay a fine for the book, please forgive me.  Tender is the Night is a challenging book and I’m surprised that it was in a high school curriculum.  The story is of a man who falls in love with, and marries, a woman who is in a mental institution after having been raped by her father.  Years later, while still married, he falls in love with a world-famous movie actress he and his wife meet in the French Riviera.  Fitzgerald’s writing style is pretty flowery, but the dynamics between characters he creates is really unmatched.


Adam Johnson—The Orphan Master's Son, for which Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is a terrifying novel about life in the repressive police state of North Korea.  For me it's a cautionary tale of the dystopia that could result from unchecked government surveillance.  I'm not kidding.  But a powerful, beguiling story. 





John O'Hara—Somehow I had missed reading Appointment in Samarra, O'Hara's classic take on country-club class, as an English major.  It's surprising how ribald the book is, considering it was published in 1934.  Great fun, even with the heavy pathos as Lute Fliegler, the main character, starts to lose it, and well crafted.