Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Book Fever is a new column of book recommendations covering categories ranging from contemporary and classic novels, Latin American authors, nonfiction, history, biography and memoir, and books about Mexico—novels, travel and history. Future columns will feature what San Miguel residents and visitors are reading. Once a month I’ll look at several works by the same author. I promise I’ll never give away the plot of a book; I’ll say nothing you won’t encounter in the first few pages. I refuse even to read the back cover or dust jacket because they tell me more than I want to know. I believe the author wants to unfold the plot.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

--Logan Pearsall Smith

I wasn’t born with Book Fever. I didn’t get it when my mother got me my first library card at the age of six. It was an adult-onset affliction. I was in my last eight weeks of college, taking a class in twentieth-century American history. The professor, one of the most famous in the university, had assigned a large history textbook and four paperbacks at the beginning of the semester. A young woman in the class asked which of the paperbacks we should be reading. He said you should have read all of them the first week; you should be going to the movies by now. Then he challenged us. “I’ll give you an A,” he said, “if you read 30 books in 30 days and can discuss them intelligently.” I went home, told my boyfriend I couldn’t see him for the next month, which he found unacceptable; we broke up. I called the professor for a reading list and set to work. I read 31 books in 30 days; I discussed them intelligently. I got one of the four As he’d given in his 11 years at the university. And I never stopped reading, though I slowed down some.

New Century Novels

I belong to a small book club that meets every week. We read fiction—everything from classics to contemporary novels. These are some twenty-first-century books we’ve read. All of these books are available in the Biblioteca. 

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, 2006. It’s not every day I find a book at once erudite, amusing and fresh, but this one is all of those. Blue van Meer, newly arrived in town with her professor father, Garth, is befriended by her high school teacher Hannah Schneider. Special Topics is full of wonderful metaphors and turns of phrase (“a collection of prescription bottles that made anything Judy Garland had popped in her glory days look like a few rolls of Smarties.” Or “Denial is like Versailles; it isn’t the easiest thing to maintain.”) Each chapter is titled from a book: Wuthering Heights, Brave New World; there are references to books and movies, and there’s a final exam at the end. This is an impressive first novel. I can’t wait to read her next one.

An excerpt: Across the parking lot on the hill slumped the restaurant, legally blind (three windows in the back boarded up) and seriously balding (roofing coming off in clumps). You couldn’t see much in the dimmed windows—a few shifts of tired color, a row of green lamps hanging down like moldy showerheads—but one didn’t have to go inside to know the menus were sticky, the tables seasoned with pie crumbs, the waitresses crabby, the clientele beefy. One definitely had to beat the saltshaker senseless—maggotlike grains of rice visible inside—to coax out a mere speck of salt. (“If they can’t do salt, I wonder what makes them think they can do chicken cacciatore,” Dad would say in such a place, holding the menu at a safe distance from his face in case it sprang to life.)

Arthur and George by Julian Banks, 2005. The Arthur referred to in the title is Arthur Conan Doyle; George is an obscure solicitor. I found Banks’ novel a fascinating look at the disparate upbringings of these two men and how their lives intertwine as adults. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Banks is the author of several novels, including Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.

From the first page: Arthur. A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wants to see.

He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, looked. There was nobody to observe him; he turned and walked away, carefully shutting the door behind him.

. . . George. George does not have a first memory, and by the time anyone suggests that it might be normal to have one, it is too late. He has no recollection obviously preceding all others—not of being picked up, cuddled, laughed at or chastised. He has an awareness of once having been an only child and a knowledge that there is now Horace as well, but no primal sense of being disturbingly presented with a brother, no expulsion from paradise. Neither a first sight, nor a first smell: whether of a scented mother or a carbolicy maid-of-all-work.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka, 2005. An engaging tale of a Ukrainian family living in England, a widower and his two grown daughters, one of whom narrates the book. I found the dialogue laugh-out-loud funny and the characters memorable. This novel, nominated for the Booker Prize and short-listed for the Orange Prize, is Lewycka’s first; she has a new one coming out.

First paragraph: Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.

Seven Types of Ambiguity by Eliot Perlman, 2003. Seven narrators discuss the events surrounding the kidnapping of a young boy by his mother’s former lover. Ignore the cover blurb that promises a Rashomon-like novel. It’s not, but it’s still an intriguing story by Australian writer Elliot Perlman. When I read it I thought it among the best books I’d read in the past 20 years.

The first paragraph: 1. He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time? He can. He imagines calling you or running into you by chance. Depending on the weather, he imagines you in one of those cotton dresses of yours with flowers on it or in faded blue jeans and a thick woolen button-up cardigan over a checked shirt, drinking coffee from a mug, looking through your tortoiseshell glasses at a book of poetry while it rains. He thinks of you with your hair tied back and that characteristic sweet scent on your neck. He imagines you this way when he is on the train, in the supermarket, at his parents’ house at night, alone, and when he is with a woman.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, 2006. The Road leapt off the page, grabbed me in the solar plexus and never let go. Even if you’re not a fan of McCarthy’s other books, try this post-apocalyptic story of a nameless father and son. His language is spare; he builds one true sentence after another. Only a seasoned writer could pull off this novel. Not as bleak as it sounds.

Opening: When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. . . .

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.

Next week, Book Fever looks at Philip Roth. The following week we’ll take a look at what others in San Miguel are reading in new-century fiction. Week four features five more twenty-first-century novels.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.