I’ve been having a run of good books. One after another of books I need to read parts of aloud to anyone in the room—usually the indulgent Dr. D., who is usually doing reading of his own that I am interrupting. Book after book that rewards my time and attention and that I want to recommend to everyone I know.
Where to start? With a book I almost didn’t read. “You have to read it,” I kept hearing. “It’s about trees. It’s a novel.” Hmmm. Maybe not. Then I picked it up. Two pages into “The Overstory” I could hardly breathe for all its gorgeousness. I worried that this would be like Zadie Smith’s books, with so many delicious words that I just stop at some point because I’m full. “The Overstory,” by Richard Powers, has the delicious words, but somehow also the staying power, like his subject. Maybe it’s the sheer astounding mystery of reading about trees and then starting to look at them as beings I wish I knew better. So, yes, the novel about trees.
Then “The Flight Portfolio,” historical fiction about Varian Fry and if you don’t know who Varian Fry was—as I didn’t until just a year or two ago—you need to. Unlike “The Overstory,” this is not magnificently crafted prose, but simply a story well told. And it’s a story most of us have never heard. It’s a cautionary tale for this moment in history. And it’s also a reminder of the power of one person trying to live by his or her principles.
While I was reading these and several other books, I was also reading the new biography of Frederick Douglass, written by David Blight. Blight is a major authority on Douglass and he has won a shelf-full of awards for this, including the Pulitzer Prize. But I hated it. As I read it, I kept wishing Ron Chernow had written it. Chernow is, I think, the biographer Douglass deserves: someone who would fall in love with his subject and let us into his company, rather than keeping us fenced off while we take in an impressive load of facts. Show, don’t tell, I kept thinking. Blight tells.
So while I was reading that, I was also reading Douglass’s autobiographies. There are three, beginning with one written just a few years after he escaped slavery. While these may not include every fact, they show the passion and intellect not on view in Blight’s 900-plus pages.
Just the other day I practically inhaled Ruth Reichl’s newest memoir, “Save Me the Plums,” about her time at the late, lamented Gourmet Magazine. It’s a delicious, gossipy, fascinating read. With recipes! I gobbled it right up. There are also words of wisdom. On a budget trip to Paris, she and her staff—sophisticated eaters, all—rediscover the pleasures of more simple fare. As a wise and elderly Parisian tells her, “When you attain my age you will understand one of life’s great secrets: luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.”
And I am only a few chapters in to Jill Lepore’s “These Truths.” It’s very long and it’s going to be very slow going, not because it’s densely written, but because nearly every sentence is telling me something new, something I have to stop and think about. So, though it’s not lightweight either in message or poundage, that’s probably my summer reading.
Maybe one of these will be your next favorite!