Texan authors too
From the world's best-known atheist to Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt insights: My10 must-read books for summer and fall
The mysteries of family history — and how to uncover it — is covered in ShakingThe Family Tree.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had a complex relationship to put it mildly.
The Help examines a time when African-American women were expected to raise thekids without living in the house.
Christopher Hitchens — arguably the world's best known atheist — has a new booktoo.
When I was book editor of the Houston Post, I was besieged with new books. Some 50 arrived every day from the publishers for possible review — at least 250 books a week!
With two pages to fill every Sunday, I tried to tell readers about the best of those books, but I didn’t have much time to read my personal favorites.
But now, as a freelance writer and reviewer, I can pick and choose.
Here are 10 books I want to read this summer, half for work — for review in publications — and the other half for pleasure.
10.) I love autobiographies by fascinating people, and one of the most talked-about memoirs in literary circles this summer is Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens. Perhaps best-known as the outrageous author of God is Not Great, a best-selling polemic against organized religion, Hitchens is one of the most hated political journalists in the world but very amusing to read.
9.) The Help, a national bestseller, is about a time (the early ‘60s) and place (Mississippi) when black women were expected to help raise white babies but couldn’t use the same bathroom as their employers. My book club members raved about it, but I didn’t have time to read it at the time and can’t wait to start it now.
8.) Amigoland is a debut novel by Brownsville native Oscar Casares, a 45-year-old assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Texas. The book is about two old codgers trying to maintain their dignity in a nursing home. Entertainment Weekly called it “just about perfect,” and Houston critic Edward Nawotka in The Dallas Morning News pronounced Casares a writer “with a big heart . . . and a big future.”
7.) The other fiction title on my list is The Pen/O.Henry Prize Stories 2010 edited by Laura Furman, another Texas novelist. Included among the authors in this 20-story collection are two of the best practitioners of the art: Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain, the short story that Larry McMurtry and his screenwriting partner turned into a terrific movie; and 82-year-old William Trevor, whose stories still appear regularly in The New Yorker.
6.) And here’s a just-published book I want to read by another Texan, Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, called Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. Ecklund interviewed 275 scientists and — contrary to what most people think — concludes that nearly half are religious. As a skeptic about organized religion, I have lots of questions I’d like to find answers for in Ecklund’s book.
5.) The next five are books I hope to review, probably from galleys because the hard copies don’t arrive in bookstores until late this summer or next fall.
As a journalist who doesn’t write fiction, I feel more qualified to review nonfiction, and the book on my list that sounds most provocative is The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women by James Elroy, who wrote American Tabloid and L.A. Confidential.
The Knopf catalog describes this September book as “a searing memoir” about the complicated role women played in the Los Angeles author’s life, beginning with his mother who was brutally murdered when he was 10 years old.
4.) Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson. The book, published this month by Viking, is about that terrible summer in 1964 when civil right workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered by white racists. As a native Mississippian who moved away years ago, I’m always drawn to serious writing about my home state and its troubled history.
3.) Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, by Hazel Rowley, explores how this partnership endured in spite of FDR’s lifelong romance with Lucy Mercer and Eleanor’s purported lesbianism. This is a November book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
2.) Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories is a November book from Grove Press by the late Barry Hannah, who was deeply mourned by the literary community when he died in March. A Mississippian who wrote about the New South in audacious, strikingly original language, Hannah has been called the literary heir of Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.
1.) And finally, the last title on my review list is Shaking the Family Tree: Blue Bloods, Black Sheep, and Other Obsessions of an Accidental Genealogist, a July book from Touchstone. Historian-author Buzzy Jackson writes about her personal search for answers, including a weeklong genealogy cruise in the Caribbean and submitting her DNA for testing.
In the process, she traced her roots back more than 250 years, something a lot of us would like to do if we had the time.
And speaking of which, isn’t it time to start your own list?
