Our top picks to fill your mind and your time this season
Summertiiiiime, and the reading’s easy.
Whittling a list of must-read books, however, was not. The rise of the digital age has made the future of publishing uncertain; what remains undeniable is the quality of books being written today. For every book included below, there are 10 we had to leave out. Still, there is something for everyone in this year’s Summer Reading Guide: an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace; a treatise on art from Gregory Wolfe; a Dylan biography; a fascinating memoir about family, faith and the CIA; and many more. So settle into your hammock, open a book (or, if you have to, an e-reader) and enjoy!
FICTION & POETRY
Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books) is British author Carol Birch’s 11th novel, but it is her first to be published in the United States. It is the story of Jaffy Brown, a street kid whose run-in with an escaped tiger on the streets of London sets off a chain of events that takes him to unimaginable places. Birch paints with colors that are equal parts magical and Dickensian, starting with Mr. Jamrach (the owner of the tiger), who hires Jaffy to clean up after the animals he imports for the rich. At Jamrach’s, Jaffy meets Dan Rymer, an explorer and exotic animal supplier, who takes Jaffy on a whaling expedition that doubles as a quest to bring back a dragon for a wealthy patron. Alas, things do not go as planned. Birch’s sea tale echoes the story of the whale ship Essex, the true story that inspired Moby Dick and is recounted by Nathaniel Philbrick in his 2000 book, In the Heart of the Sea. In fact, that would be a pretty good summer reading list schedule: start with Melville, move on to Philbrick and finish with Birch’s wonder-full, lyrical novel.
The Pale King (Little, Brown and Company) by David Foster Wallace is not your typical summer read. It is populated by characters, including one named David Wallace, who process tax returns at an Internal Revenue Service office in Peoria, Ill. It is about boredom. And like Wallace’s monumental novel Infinite Jest, it is a difficult book with a fragmented narrative that resists easy summary. But no one writes as incisively or as attentively about what it is like to be alive in America better than David Foster Wallace. When Wallace himself died in September 2008, he left more than a thousand pages of manuscript that his editor Michael Pietsch shaped into a novel that has moments of (intentional?) tedium, but one that feels whole and is in many places as vibrant, almost buzzing, as anything Wallace had written. It is impossible to know how finished the book is or what Wallace would have published had he lived. Certainly it would have been different. But as Pietsch writes in a moving introduction, “An unfinished novel is what we have, and how can we not look? David, alas, isn’t here to stop us from reading, or to forgive us for wanting to.”
Billy Collins writes poetry for people who don’t read poetry. He is often funny, never intentionally obscure and always enjoyable. In Horoscopes for the Dead (Random House), his ninth collection, Collins continues to write poetry about everyday life (and death) that feels both effortless and surprising, as when he stands before his parents’ graves and asks, “What do you think of my new glasses?” And this, from the title poem: A dramatic rise in income may be a reason/ to treat yourself, but that would apply/ more to all the Pisces who are still alive,/ still swimming up and down the stream of life/ or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.
FAITH & SPIRITUALITY
We are living, as Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley has said, in the “age of memoir.” If anything, memoirs seem to be even more popular in Christian publishing than in the mainstream (maybe because we prize personal testimonies), and each year brings one or two excellent spiritual memoirs that refresh the genre, and sometimes even transcend it. Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me (Thomas Nelson), by Ian Morgan Cron, is one of those, as is Craig Goodwin’s Year of Plenty (Sparkhouse Press). Cron tells the incredible story of learning at age 16 that his stockbroker father was working for the CIA, of his father’s depression and alcoholism, his mother’s heroic efforts to save the family and Cron’s own journey from addiction to sobriety. This is a tale shot through with grace, a parable of the power of forgiveness and a vivid reminder that “love stoops.”
Craig Goodwin’s book recounts the year his family in suburban Spokane lived by four simple but radical rules: buy local, buy used, homegrown and homemade. Goodwin and his wife are Presbyterian pastors, and what sets this book apart from other “yearlong experiment” books is that it brings a deeper level of Christian engagement to the “growing movements that rebel against the consumption status quo and seek to craft a more holistic and sustainable way of living.” As Eugene Peterson writes in his foreword to the book, Year of Plenty is “a convincing witness to the sanctity of the everyday, the ordinary … which is to say, Jesus in our neighborhood.”
Let’s say you were born before 1985. You remember the world before the ubiquity of cell phones and the Internet, when you weren’t always instantly accessible and neither was the world’s store of information. At first the new technologies were cool, but the novelty has worn off (or rather, there is always something new to buy) and you are starting to feel overwhelmed by your inbox and the smart phone you just got or that you want to get or that you want tot hrow into the river. There has been a slew of recent books that document what these technologies are doing to our brains and to our relationships, and now Tim Challies, author and blogger, has written The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion (Zondervan), a valuable book examining the digital revolution from a faith perspective. For better or worse, these things are here, probably to stay, and Challies’ book will help you prayerfu lly consider how to “live in this new reality with character, virtue and wisdom” while fulfilling your God-given calling and purpose.
Americans are a first-half-of-life type of folk, which author and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr defines in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass) as the time when we establish “an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security and building a proper platform” for our lives. These are necessary, worthy pursuits; to use a Rohr metaphor, they form the vessel of our lives. But there is a second half to life that we often try to avoid. This further journey involves times of loss and failure, falling and suffering, which fill up our vessel in the richest sense of the word: a life without them is empty and deprived of meaning. Calling on works of theology, psychology and mythology, Rohr explores the paradoxes of Christianity that characterize life’s second half: that wisdom is found in the foolish and that life can only be gained when we choose to let it go.
NONFICTION & IDEAS
It was only last year, on April 20, 2010, that the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil well killed 11 men and, over three months, spilled an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, one year might as well be a lifetime ago. Fortunately, we have people like Antonia Juhasz. She is the director of the energy program at the human rights organization Global Exchange, and her previous book, The Tyranny of Oil, warned of an event like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill (Wiley), Juhasz introduces the reader to those whose negligence caused the disaster and those who live with the consequences. This is not old news and it is not irrelevant—unless we remember and repent, we will inevitably repeat the sins of our past.
Gregory Wolfe came of age as a culture warrior at a moment when conservatism seemed ascendant. But not long after the 1980 Reagan Revolution, Wolfe realized he had moved on. He ceased believing “the decadence of the West” could be reversed through politics and rhetoric, and became convinced that “authentic renewal can only emerge out of the imaginative visions of the artist and the mystic.” Hence, the provocative title of Wolfe’s new collection of essays, Beauty Will Save the World (Intercollegiate Studies Institute), which is borrowed from a line in Dostoevsky. Wolfe makes the case for cultivating “the spiritual and imaginative sources of our common life.” He also introduces us to modern artists whose work is animated by an incarnational vision Wolfe describes as Christian humanism. Wolfe is the founding editor of Image, a literary journal, and he directs the creative writing MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. If beauty will save the world, Gregory Wolfe is making an important contribution to that good work.
Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s self-titled first album. To date he has released 34 studio albums, 13 live albums and 14 compilations, and he has been touring almost continuously since the late 1980s. All this means that a biographer (or portraitist, as the case may be) is going to have to pick and choose his Dylan moments if he wants to keep his book to a reasonable size. This is exactly what poet and author Daniel Mark Epstein has done in The Ballad of Bob Dylan (Harper), his appreciation of the living legend. Epstein structures his book around four periods of Dylan’s career and looks at each through the lens of a single concert: Washington, D.C.’s Lisner Auditorium in 1963; Madison Square Garden in 1974; Tanglewood in ’97; and Aberdeen in 2009. Each marks a transition for Dylan—from obscurity to folk star, from folk to rock, from embarrassing afterthought to career revival and from the beginning to the present as Dylan continues to put out album after great album.
While we're pretty proud of this book guide, we realize this list isn't the final word on summer reading. What titles are on your bookshelf this season? Share your recommendations in the comments below.
These are just a few of the books RELEVANT recommends for your reading pleasure this summer. For the full list, check out the article in the July/August 2011 issue of RELEVANT magazine.
