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What is Nancy Reading?
January, 2007
[January 29, 2007, courtesy of KUOW 94.9 FM radio]
If you like to get in at the beginning of what promises to be a superior mystery series, check out Jack Fredrickson's first novel, A Safe Place for Dying (St. Martin's Minotaur, 2006). The detective, Dek Elstrom, is a down-on-his-luck, recently divorced investigator, who's asked to find the facts of a case involving an explosion that destroyed a multi-million dollar mansion in Crystal Waters, a gated, heavily secured community on the outskirts of Chicago. (Coincidentally, it's the place where he lived with his very wealthy wife during their brief marriage.) When Dek starts digging into who might be responsible, he begins to uncover clues that indicate that the roots of this crime lie more than 30 years in the past. In addition to Dek, who's satisfyingly complicated and comes with a solid back story, Fredrickson introduces some interesting secondary characters.
I feel as though Daniel J. Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton, 2006) is the book I've been waiting for all my life: the ABCs of music theory and appreciation, for those of us who know nothing about music but know what we like. Finally, someone to explain me why songs written in a major key tend to sound happy, while songs in a minor key are often hauntingly sad, and what the difference is between a major and minor key, for that matter. Levitin, before he became a neuroscientist (he now runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University), was a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, and he puts theory and practice together in a deft and fascinating manner. Beginning with the building blocks of music – tone, pitch, scale, timbre (pronounced TAM bor) – and proceeds to provide us with answers to questions that range from why bits of songs obsessively stick in our heads to whether or not a tree falling in the forest with no one around makes any sound. This is a book best read slowly, with a piano nearby, and access to all the examples he uses, which span from Wagner to Miles Davis, from Liszt to Ludacris, and everyone in between. [January 22, 2007 courtesy of KUOW 94.9 FM radio]
Max Boot’s Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today (Gotham, 2006) is one of those narrative histories so compulsively readable that as you’re taking in all the information you forget how long it is (454 pages of text, plus an epilogue, notes, and an awesome bibliography that will add years of reading matter to your "to read" list, altogether totaling 624 pages of almost solid text). Boot describes how technology – specifically technology either designed or adapted for warfare – has had a major impact on human history. In Boot’s view, "technology sets the parameters of the possible", but doesn’t determine it. In exploring his thesis, he describes four different periods, and how the war-related technological innovations of each one helped steer history along a particular pathway. He includes the age of gunpowder (1500-1700), the First Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century through the start of World War I, the Second Industrial Revolution (1917-1945), and the Information Revolution, from 1970 to the present (with its emphasis on stealth bombers, guided missiles, GPS devices, and the other major weapons systems that played such an important role in both the first and second Gulf Wars). Boot’s book is a must for war buffs, and a good choice for anyone looking for a thought-provoking look at history.
I’d have thought that a novel narrated by a dead man – a suicide, at that - would, perforce, be desperately sad. It’s true that David Long’s The Inhabited World (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) isn’t an entirely happy book, but it has many moments of transcendent joy. A decade after his death, Evan Malloy, still hanging around the house in which he died, attempts to understand the trajectory of his life: his journey from childhood to marriage, to divorce, and the depression that accompanied him every step of the way. While his deep despair waxed and waned, it never entirely disappeared, finally becoming simply too much for him to live with. In his words, "Mine was a surmountable despair. I just didn’t surmount it". As Evan tries to understand his life, he fears for the newest tenant in his old house, a young woman involved in an unhappy relationship, whose own depression is becoming more and more palpable. Gorgeously written and intensely moving, this is Long’s best work yet.[January 8, 2007, courtesy of KUOW 94.9 FM radio]
One of the best ways to discover new writers is to settle down with one or more of the books in the ongoing series' of Best American something or other (you fill in the blank – spiritual writing, poetry, stories, travel writing, etc.) Year after year, I come away from reading these collections, which are composed of contributions selected by a guest editor who's a leading practitioner of the genre, with a sense that I've read widely and well. And always, by the time I turn the last page, I've compiled a long list of books and authors I want to check out. This was definitely the case with The Best American Essays of 2006, edited by Lauren Slater (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). I was especially moved by Marjorie Williams’ "A Matter of Life and Death," (which first appeared in Vanity Fair and later, under the title "Hit By Lightning," in her collection of essays, The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate) her account of her life following a diagnosis of cancer. Lily Tuck's "Group Grief," about her experience with a support group following the death of her husband, will hit home with many readers. On a lighter note, try Michele Morano's "Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood," which will have you considering language and usage in a way you might have simply overlooked before.
When Classics major Nathaniel Fick applied for Officer Candidate School following his junior year at Dartmouth, it came as a shock to his friends, classmates, and family. Yet it made perfect sense to Fick. In One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (Mariner Books, 2006), he describes his yearning "to go on a great adventure, to prove myself, to serve my country." Almost a year later, following his graduation in 1999, he joined the Marines as a Second Lieutenant and was thrust into the fog of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fick uses words like "duty" and "justice," "courage" and "compassion without irony." At the same time, there’s no simple-minded patriotism or political message here. Fick says, "War for freedom, war for oil, philosophical disputes were a luxury I could not enjoy. War was what I had. We don't vote for it, authorize it, or declare it; we just had to fight it." Red state or blue state, any reader interested in the experience of an honorable, thoughtful man at war will be engaged by Fick's story.
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