Is That Legal?

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

A great biography -- the author uses Pepys's diary and a lot of other primary sources to give a vivid account of daily life in Restoration London. From the fights with his wife to his bureaucratic struggles, it's a great story.

A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute

I love John Dower's account of the American Occupation of Japan after World War II, Embracing Defeat. Its a great book of history, using the fact that most readers don't speak Japanese to use linguistic and cultural evidence, and its relevant in every way to thinking about the differences between the occupation of Iraq and the occupation of Japan.

Susan beat me to Embracing Defeat, so I'll switch gears and mention my favorite Chinese history book: Philip Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768. Harvard University Press. (1992 reissue edition)

It's a fantastic top-to-bottom examination of the functioning of the world's largest and most complex premodern government, as well as the culture of traditional china, at a time of crisis.

For fiction, I'm a huge fan of Murakami Haruki, Japan's preeminent surrealist. A Wild Sheep Chase is immensely entertaining; Windup Bird Chronicles is more mature work, and more historical.

Although I haven't read it yet, I plan to over the summer after seeing a glowing review online:

The Jasons, a history of the JASON program, a relatively-secret committee of top US scientists who provided (and still provide) advice to the US government on matters ranging from national security to energy policy.

"A Conspiracy of Paper" and its sequel "A Spectacle of Corruption" by David Liss (and a "prequel" entitled "The Coffee Trader" (see http://www.davidliss.com/)

I like everything I've read by J.M. Coetzee. His books are wonderfully written, though given the subjects I'm not sure that the reading can be called "easy". _Disgrace_ is the best that I've read, an extremely powerful book. I also liked _Waiting for the Barbarians_ quite a lot, though it was hard not to read it with today's events in mind, and that made it very unsettling. (It was written in the 80's, so obviously w/o today's events as such in mind, but it's still hard not to read it that way.)

Country of My Skull : Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, by Antjie Krog

Krog covered the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings for two grueling years. This is her very personal reflection on the process. It was compelling reading, and I thought the prose was beautiful.

I'm currently working my way through Diane Duane's experiment in self-publishing, The Big Meow. It's the third book in her Feline Wizards series, which is a spinoff from her Young Wizards series, so you might want to backtrack all the way to So You Want to Be a Wizard for good measure. :-)

If you want to read a fantasy retelling of the William Tell story, she's also self-publishing A Wind From the South. She sold it to a publisher, who decided the market for Alpine Fantasy wasn't what they thought it had been, so they returned it to her.

Verner Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky". I usually don't care for Sci-Fi, but those two books are excellent.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and Widow for a Year by John Irving are both excellent reads.

"Black Swan Green" by David Mitchell: A novel in which the 13-year-old British narrator describes a year of his life. Very well written, engaging, and get even better the deeper you get into it.

"Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" by Haruki Murakami: A novel that seems to tell two different stories in alternating chapters. Murakami's style, as translated by Alfred Birnbaum, is easy and addictive.

"The Bear Comes Home" by Rafi Zabor: A novel in which the protagonist is a walking-upright, talking, literature-reading, jazz-playing bear. Sounds ridiculous, but this was one of the best written and absorbing novels I read in the 1990s. I look forward to reading it again.

"Naked," "Me Talk Pretty One Day," and "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" by David Sedaris: Essay collections that are full of terrific comic moments and are impressively even in the high quality of their prose.

"The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness" by Karen Armstrong: A memoir by the British historian of religion that describes her personal spiritual development from her seven years as a nun to her lack of conventional religious belief today.

"The Fermata" by Nicholson Baker: Another novel of magical realism (as Zabor's above), only in this one the protagonist has the power to stop time; that is, to stop time for everyone else while he walks around among the stilled people and even raindrops braked in midflight. Baker is beautifully logical in laying out and following the rules for his protagnoist's gift. A very well written book.

"The Book of Evidence" by John Banville. The Man Booker Prize-winning author's best novel (in my opinion) in which a loathsome, despicable character tells the story of how he ended up in prison for murder. Banville's style is brilliant, and his insights into human nature show keen perception and even wisdom. I've read this novel twice, passages of it multiple times, and I'll read it again.

All of John Mortimer's "Rumpole of the Bailey" series: I've read more than a dozen of these and I'm still not bored. Mortimer is the perfect answer for when you're looking for a well told and intelligent--but not too intellectually demanding--story.

John Kenneth Galbraith's death reminded me that I first heard of Anthony Trollope in a Galbraith memoir. I ended up reading all the Palisir and Barsetshire novels. Start on Trollope and you won't need a new book for a long time.

Great novels:

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell.
Drop City, T.C. Boyle.
A Frolic of his Own, William Gaddis.

The Worst Hard Times, by Timothy Egan, about the Dust Bowl.
review:
http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2006/05/the_worst_hard_time.php

"Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World"
by Jack Weatherford. First rate history. Explains a lot about how many things in the modern world came to be. Very readable. Get the paperback. Weatherford has a bunch of histories that are worth reading. This is one of the best.

An absolutely amazing historical-fiction author is Bernard Cornwell. He's also prolific, so if you like him, you're in for a long spate of great books.

His 3 book series which takes place in the 100 Years War (Archer's Tale, Vagabond, Heretic) is not just entertaining and page turning, but also so meticulously well-researched that by the end, you'll find that you have, by osmosis, learned more about the details of the battles and politics of the day than you would in a bunch of history courses.

And as I said, he's got a ton of books out, in different eras, but all with the idea of high-adventure historical fiction that ends up immersing you in the time period.

You'll thank me, I swear.

oooh, another, if you've never read it: The Alienist, by Caleb Carr.

Set in Roosevelt's New York, this thing reads like a page-turning detective novel, but is SOO amazingly steeped in detail about the period. He wrote a sequel as well, which I think was called Angel of Darkness, which was fun, but not as good.

You're welcome to check out my reading list on my blog. The best books I've read recently have been baseball books, including a classic (Jim Brosnan's "The Long Season") and some new ones. I've also become a huge fan of James Sallis. Excellent psychological mysteries, tightly writtne. Also check out "Blink" by Malcom Caldwell, about how we make unconscious decisions. The mind is an amazing thing.

http://jiggle.anaze.us/archives/books/

If you're interested in African literature, you cannot miss Buchi Emecheta, especially "The Joys of Motherhood," in which Ememcheta explores the nature of womanhood in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. She is a good contrast to those who pine for pre-colonial days and exposes the ills of both pre and post-colonial paradigms from a Western feminist perspective. This has brought her both praise and criticism.

One of the finest 20th century African novels has to be "Matagari" by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. You will find it in translation. This Kenyan writer uses Western narrative styles but with an entirely African framework. Ngugi is not be missed.

Are you a poetry reader, Eric?

There was a time when I wasn't, but I've gotten increasingly poetic as I age. Poetry is hard work, but at its best it goes to the heart of the matter faster than any prose.

Two suggestions: Anything by Henry Lawson, the Australian poet and short-story writer (he's very comparable to some "Cowboy poets" but some of his stuff is just transcendantly true. It's a fantastic window into a different world, and beautiful, lively writing.

Second, I've been reading with my students the Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century translated and edited by Burton Watson. Poetic translation is hard, but this is a fantastic selection of what really is some of the very, very best of a great poetic tradition. The range of topics is fantastic (best title ever: "Shih-hou Pointed Out to Me that from Ancient Times There Had Never Been a Poem on the Subject of Lice, and Urged Me to Try Writing One") and though the beauty of the original language is lost, the translations are very readable and lively in their own right.

"Unhinged" by Michelle Malkin!

Nahh, just kidding!

I'll be interested in your take on Glenn Greenwald's forthcoming "How Would a Patriot Act?"

History:

William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain crosses the boundary between history and literature, with a multitude of voices, arguments, styles.

The Changing Faces of Jesus, by Geza Vermes, an academic expert on the languages and sources of the period, peels away revered layers of theological dogma and tendentious description to provide a closeup of the historical Jesus.

After the introductory section regarding putative history behind the formative myths of Norse culture, Heimskringla by the medieval Icelandic historian Snorre Sturlason paints a gripping picture of adventure and political intrigue. It includes many references to the origins of our own democratic politics. I like the Dover-published translation best.

S. D. Goitein's five volume treatment of the social history of the Jews based in Cairo during the Islamic high middle ages, A Mediterranean Society, based on some 12,000 secular documents surviving from the time, gives an extraordinarily rich and detailed view of life in a completely different environment with some curious echoes and reflections of our own in its entrepreneurial mobility and frequent divorces.

The Polish journalist and occasional New Yorker contributor Ryszard Kapuscinski specializes in reporting from third world countries in revolution. I was especially fascinated by The Emperor, a mordantly funny picture of the pre-revolutionary Ethiopian autocracy, and Another Day of Life, about Angola at the end of the Portuguese period.

Fiction:

Turgenev’s Sketches From A Hunter’s Album combines aristocratic privilege and detachment with a very observant eye, observing with equal clarity and rendering with equal vividness the hunstman’s pleasures and their rural social matrix.

Goethe’s Faust Part 1, in the very fluid translation published by New Directions, in which Faust challenges Mephistopheles to restore his faded interest in life’s experiences, combines an elevated moral tone, magnificent language and characterization, and a moving story.

Henry Green's Loving is an amazing below-stairs novel.

Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds is a hilarious travesty of Irish literary life in a language as honed as Samuel Beckett’s.

Robert Cook's translation of Njal's Saga vivifies this greatest of Icelandic Sagas, full of incident and character.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey adapts some of the feeling of an actual surviving Ned Kelly document into a more extensive and moving treatment.