Biblioracle: 3 best new books to mix up your reading diet
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Deciding to read a book by a particular author can be like choosing a restaurant.
In some cases, you know exactly what you want, and want a virtual certainty that you’ll get what you’re after. Like sometimes I must have McDonald’s french fries knowing exactly what I’m going to get no matter which restaurant I go to.
As a reader, this is akin to why I choose a Jack Reacher novel. Every Reacher story is going to be basically the same: Reacher shows up somewhere, gets tangled up with some very bad guys, and then dispatches the bad guys with great prejudice.
Satisfies every time, even as I recognize that a steady diet of fries (or Reacher novels) is not enough for full nourishment.
On the other pole is a novelist like Percival Everett, where you’re never quite sure what’s in store. One time you might get a deeply serious meditation on death and the nature of evil like “Telephone,” or a (somehow) both funny and disturbing look at America’s history of lynching couched in a detective story (“The Trees”). Everett is like a mad scientist in the kitchen, trying to cook up something you’ve never tasted before, daring you to give it a try.
There’s also a third category, the writers who are like chefs who work in the tradition of a particular cuisine. If you go to a Rick Bayless joint, you’re going to get Mexican flavors, but you’re still likely to be surprised by the specifics. This general familiarity can help create a strong feeling of anticipation, heightening the pleasure when you experience that sense of familiarity mixed with surprise.
As it so happens, there are three recently released books by authors who hit this particular sweet spot for me.
“Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club” is J. Ryan Stradal’s third novel, and like the previous two (“Kitchens of the Great Midwest” and “The Lager Queen of Minnesota”) they are about family and food‚ infused with a Midwestern spirit that speaks to my roots. And yet each book manages to deliver unique pleasures with the way Stradal mines the particulars of the individual human experience. If you want a writer who loves his characters, even as they’re given major challenges, Stradal is for you.
It is hard to say that I “enjoy” Megan Abbott’s books, given that I read them with my teeth clenched on a knife’s edge of tension the whole time, but I’ve read everything she’s published, including her just released “Beware the Woman.” Pregnant Jacy, who perhaps does not know her husband as well as she should, heads to the remote Michigan Upper Peninsula home of her father-in-law, Dr. Ash. There’s no cell service, Jacy has a health scare, and your brain is screaming “get the heck out of there!” for the entirety of a novel you can’t put down.
Dennis Lehane works in a number of different genres, but almost invariably he writes of characters who feel compelled to set a fallen world right, but pay a heavy toll in making the attempt. “Small Mercies” takes place in Lehane’s frequent backdrop of Boston, this time in 1974, with the busing crisis that will attempt to integrate public schools looming over the story. Mary Pat’s teenage daughter goes missing, and she has to confront the local mobsters to try to find her. Dark and real, you want Mary Pat to catch a break for maybe the first time in her life, but don’t count on it happening. Lehane knows how to immerse you in a specific time and place and set the wheels of the plot turning like few others.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “Slow Horses” by Mick Herron
2. “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
3. “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens
4. “The Last Thing He Told Me” by Laura Dave
5. “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin
— Beth P., New Orleans
“Valentine” by Elizabeth Wetmore is not for the faint of heart, but I think it’s a good fit for Beth.
1. “Camino Island” by John Grisham
2. “The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics” by Daniel James Brown
3. “The Lincoln Highway” by Amor Towles
4. “The Way I Heard It” by Mike Rowe
5. “Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors” by Stephen Ambrose
— Gene T., Chicago
I’m going to reach into the past for a book that gets at history but also ties us to character and situation in indelible ways, “The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje.
1. “Dr. No” by Percival Everett
2. “This Other Eden” by Paul Harding
3. “Toad” by Katherine Dunn
4. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez
5. “The General in His Labyrinth” by Gabriel García Márquez
— Luis M., Queens, New York
I think Luis is a good candidate for one of Colson Whitehead’s earlier, less heralded, perhaps weirder novels, “John Henry Days.”
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com
