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Books: Big Reads

My daughter accuses me of doing nothing at our summer house in Quebec. Ha! I practice yoga after breakfast, kayak late morning and swim fast to the island and back (about a mile) late afternoon.

alexball2In between: I read.

I read small books and big books, fiction and nonfiction, old books and those newly published. I read for hours at a time. If it’s hot, I strip down to my swim suit. surface dive into the black water, take a few strokes, float …and go straight back to my chair and my open book.

I guess that’s nothing to a ten year old. To me, it’s bliss. To read a “big” book without interruption, in the sun, beside a clear water lake.

Recently, these have been my favorite “big” reads, all consumed on that dock:

  • Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow, Vintage, $18.95. Sounds forbidding — and is, at 832 pages — but this is one of the most intimate biographies you’ll ever read. I learned more about U.S. business than from any text. Sounds dry? It’s not. A big life, a grand read.
  • The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, Vintage, $17. Want to know how Al Qaeda began? I did. Wright is a gifted storyteller, and his research astonishes. I even read the endnotes. A friend tried to read this going to and from work on the bus. Impossible. It is a complex read, and we know the ending. This one deserves your full attention.
  • A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle, Penguin, $15. A few pages into this epic, Greitja Morse stopped by the dock. “Ohhh,” she said knowingly, as though speaking of a former lover. “Doyle is so hard to give up.” Henry Smart comes of age, and plays a part, in the Irish Rebellion. A rollicking read. Doyle’s masterpiece.
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, Riverhead Trade, $14. My then 18 year-old-son read this in a single day on the dock, then slammed it down: “This should be taught in every U.S. high school.” A 21st century must-read, about Dominicans in the U.S. and back home. End is perfect, brutal, heart wrenching.

Also in the blog

Summer Reads

A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnes Varda, by Carrie Rickey  I receive countless pitches from book publicists. I rarely bite. When I saw this one, it was an immediate “yes, please.” I know and love Varda’s films (Cleo from 5 to 7, Vagabond) and remembered that Rickey had been a newspaper film

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Food: Meals in Paris, Part 2

With less than a week in Paris, we foodies needed to plan our meals well. Haute cuisine, “le fooding,” brasseries, bistros, Middle Eastern, Moroccan: how to get a taste of it all? We didn’t, but here’s three we’d go to again: Gaya par Pierre Gagnaire (44, rue du Bac). Don’t be put off by Gagnaire’s

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Reading the Literature of War: Daniel Anselme’s “On Leave”

The fight for Algerian independence from France began in November 1954. That brutal guerilla war would continue until 1961, when French president Charles de Gaulle gave up Algeria, an African colony France had ruled since 1830. Among the French, the war was unpopular and misunderstood. Still, they had as many as 450,000 soldiers in Algeria.

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