eMusic » Elisa Ludwig

Interview: Eddie Huang

Elisa Ludwig — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:00:49 +0000

A Vice TV host with a law degree, a hip-hop obsession, and a NYC restaurant called Baohaus (serving Taiwanese buns, named for his favorite architects), Eddie Huang is a walking culture clash. In his memoir Fresh Off the Boat, he charts the circumstances that conspired to make it so: a Florida childhood in a soulless suburb, restrictive Asian-American stereotypes and repressive parenting, street fights, racism, football, drugs, trips to Taiwan, a family restaurant business and Tupac. His search for identity led him to law school, a stint as a streetwear impresario, and a trial run as a standup comic before he settled on food as his primary vehicle for expression.

Yet Fresh Off the Boat proves that what he has to say is just as compelling as the way he says it. In this surprisingly moving story of self-invention, Huang gives even the most familiar tropes of the American immigrant experience his own original flavor, spiced with equal dashes of ’90s hip-hop lyrics and postmodern literary references and finished with a huge dollop of swagu. While Huang admits that it’s all very “idiosyncratic and personal,” his singular voice is speaking to plenty of people: On the day he talked with eMusic contributor Elisa Ludwig, he’d just found out the book hit The New York Times extended bestseller list.

Huang also gave us a list of his top 5 hip-hop records of all time. Find out which ’90s album made him proud to be a Chinese hip-hop head here.

What were your inspirations for writing this book?

My main inspiration was that I didn’t think this story was getting told enough, and that includes the multiple parts of my identity. No. 1 was being Asian in America — there’s no [The Brief Wondrous Life of] Oscar Wao for Asian people, no coming-of-age story that represented what I went through. No. 2 was the whole hip-hop story — there are plenty of books and bad movies about the hip-hop generation, but none that represented what the music meant to me, how it got me through the tougher times in my life. I also just wanted to talk about identity politics and culture. Writing this book was like Professor X putting on the Cerebro to find the mutants — I’m trying to speak to the other people like me out there.

You mention Junot Diaz. Is there a particular literary tradition you’d like it to fit into?

I never read his work until I finished this book and my editor was like, “Dude, you should really check out Junot.” My writing is influenced by lyrics, by hip-hop more than anything, but it’s also influenced by Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. My audience tends to be people in their 20s, or at least those are the people that are coming out to events.

The cover of this book really sets it apart from just about anything out there. What’s the story behind it?

We worked on it for a long time. I brought in my boy Justin Thomas Kay to design it. I wanted it to be very ’90s hip-hop magazine-looking. We used the family photo to show the three generations of Chinese migration: my grandparents from China, my parents from Taiwan, and me and my brothers, American cats.

Your use of language is very fluid, mixing dialects and slang — is this true of your cooking, too?

If you’re a real artist, your personality permeates everything you do. If you come to my restaurant, it’s very loud and there’s always one of my playlists on. It’s rough around the edges, but everyone’s having a good time, telling jokes. Noise is important to me. I need fire trucks and cop cars and the TV in the background to sleep. My food is very soulful, in your face and full of flavor, and I think I write the same way — rhythmically, with a lot of flow and start and stop, a lot of movement in the words.

You can see that in the structure of the book; it’s not always linear.

For the most part we wanted it to be linear, but there are flashbacks, tangents and footnotes where I’m trying to connect the dots for readers. It’s a lot of vernacular that older people aren’t going to understand but I want them to be part of it, even if it’s not their language. My editor and I made the conscious decision not to clean up the slang or translate the Chinese or do anything that would disturb the flow. We wanted it to be unique and idiosyncratic; we didn’t want it to be about the “supposed-to’s.”

It’s obvious that the question of authenticity — in food, identity, culture — is an important one for you. How do you know when another chef’s food is for real?

When I say “authentic,” I’m not judging someone’s food, like, asking whether it’s what real Chinese people eat or whatever. I’m wondering whether the experience is authentic to this chef and if what he’s doing is telling his own story. Lots of restaurants I go to, it’s not necessarily for the food. I like the experience of eating there, the energy of the room. There might be a cat walking on the counter, but you feel like you’re home.

Between your blog and the book and your Vice show, you’re selling yourself as the product as much as the food — how much of that is deliberate?

I’ll be honest: I don’t think I actually market myself well. I mean, it’s not much of a strategy, trying to sell Eddie Huang, the short fat Chinaman. But the thing I do market is my ideology and opinions. I’m a very unlikely TV host, but on Vice I just try to drop a few gems in every episode and make people think about culture and the world. My generation, it’s like this embarrassment of riches, all the stuff we have: Internet and organic markets and wine and cheese shops on every corner. We could be doing more, but having everything at our fingertips desensitizes us and we’re letting other people do our thinking for us. I want to wake people up from the midsummer night’s slumber situation.

So is this it for you, the writer/chef/TV host niche? Or do you think you’ll continue to reinvent yourself?

I was just emailing my parents to tell them that I found out today that my book hit the bestseller list. That’s very fulfilling — when I think of everything I went through and all the people that counted me out, it’s like Tupac “Picture Me Rollin’.” But I’m 33 years old, and I’m really excited. I’m teaching a winter class at my old college, making sweatsuits with my friend for fun. I’m interested in film, so maybe I’ll do some screenwriting. I remember how big it was for me to read coming-of-age stories when I was a kid so if I wasn’t a chef or writing or hosting Vice TV, I’d go teach high school. I have no idea. But either way, people are going to be surprised.

Eddie Huang’s Top 5 Hip-Hop Albums

Elisa Ludwig — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:00:29 +0000

Eddie Huang, celebrity chef, TV host and author of the memoir Fresh Off the Boat, is pretty sure that hip-hop saved his life when he was a bullied, racially “other” kid growing up in Florida. Even now, the influence is obvious in everything from his restaurant’s playlists to the cover of his book to his Source-esque wardrobe.

Here, he shares the top five albums that got him through his formative SPAM-launching/skateboarding/security fence-hopping years.

Camp Lo, Uptown Saturday Night

Uptown Saturday Night

Camp Lo
1999 | Arista

I can't even explain it — this album is just my a-alike. From the first time I heard it, I never stopped listening to it, every week. It doesn't even speak to me as literally as it does subconsciously. I've listened to this album over and over, but I think the flow on the tracks just taps into my idle mind. A lot of the lyrics are nonsensical, but Cheeba and... Geechi just sound like two kids in high school, talkin' shit, and it transports me back to childhood.
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Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die

Ready To Die The Remaster

The Notorious B.I.G.
1994 | Bad Boy Records

Lyrically, this is my favorite album of all time (this and Illmatic). It's hard to say anything about B.I.G. that hasn't already been said. I related a lot to his story about coming up by any means, owning how he was a fat ass and still having more game than any pretty mofucker out there. "Heartthrob? Never! Black and ugly as ever! However, I stay Coogi down to the socks." I... mean, peep the rhyme scheme, the swag, and the Coogi.
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The Diplomats, Diplomatic Immunity

Cam'Ron Presents The Diplomats - Diplomatic Immunity

The Diplomats
2003 | Roc-A-Fella

"Put your two arms up/ Touchdown." The Ramones ran downtown NY in the '80s from Forest Hills; Diplomats ran it in the '00s all the way from uptown.

Wu Tang Clan, Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers)

Enter The Wu-Tang

Wu Tang Clan
1993 | RCA Records Label

I was never as proud to be Chinese as I was the day I heard Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). I was always a hip-hop head, but a lot of people tried to tell me I couldn't be part of the culture. When these brothers from Shaolin took over the game — with inspiration from Shaw Brothers Films — we felt like we belonged. THANK YOU, RZA.

Outkast, ATLiens

ATLiens

Outkast
1996 | Arista/LaFace Records

People know OutKast post-Stankonia, for the most part, but down South we were bumpin' Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and ATLiens. Outkast was the defining group from the Field that repped for flip-flops and socks and sweatpants. This was the perfect album to smoke to, listening to André and Daddy Fat Sax drop knowledge about Jazzy Belles and Elevators.

Discover: Historical Fiction

Elisa Ludwig — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:30:23 +0000

Why read historical fiction? For one thing, you can gain new insight on familiar events when seen through the eyes of made-up characters — the easiest and cheapest sort of time machine. Whether the protagonist of a novel goes out to fight a war or manages the rationed goods of the household, their point of view conjures an emotional reality that will never be available in a textbook. What’s more, historical fiction can give us an alternative narrative, with access to previously silenced perspectives — the poor, the oppressed, racial and ethnic minorities, or as in all of the books that follow, women.

Reaching us here in the present, memorable historical novels like these allow us to go back, revisit well-documented events and rethink our assumptions. Dive into these earlier worlds and you might find yourself reluctant to come back to this one.

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The Book Thief

Markus Zusak
2008 | Unabridged
Death narrates this now-iconic young adult novel about an illiterate young girl whose hunger for reading incites her to steal books, beginning with the gravedigger's manual she finds at the cemetery where her younger brother is buried. When the war begins, Liesel Meminger is sent to live with a foster family in the town of Molching. Her foster father teachers her to read and her new best friend (and would-be paramour) Rudy... Steiner assists her on her thieving missions – some designed to help themselves in wartime poverty, others to rebel against the atrocities of Nazism. In the meantime, Liesel's foster parents take in a Jew, hiding him in their basement from the S.S. As his relationship with Liesel warms, Max writes new books especially for her, painting over pages of Mein Kampf with his own illustrations. With Death as the storyteller and the Holocaust as the historical backdrop, the plot has a certain inevitability – we all know how this will end. Nevertheless, Zusak illuminates the humanity of his foul-mouthed, mostly well-meaning characters in their efforts to both resist and survive, and his lyrical writing gives new form to well-trodden subject matter.
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The Paris Wife

Paula McLain
2011 | Unabridged
This fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage, to Hadley Richardson from 1921-27, is a companion of sorts to his memoir A Moveable Feast. Only, McLain's book is told through the scorned wife's point of view. After meeting in Chicago through mutual friends, Hadley becomes Mrs. Hemingway and follows the aspiring author to Paris where they fall in with a coterie of bohemians, flappers, and artists, including Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Ezra... Pound, and others – the epicenter of Parisian artistic culture. The hard-drinking couple who call each other "Tatie" soon meet conflict in the form of Hemingway's temper, his frustrations with his career, and an ambivalence toward the arrival of their first child. But it's the machinations of a seductive fashion editor named Pauline Pfeiffer who tests their loyalty to one another. As Papa entrenches himself in the publishing firmament, Hadley – sweet and dignified to the last – loses her hold on her Paris husband. Strewn with clever references to Hemingway's and his friends' work, The Paris Wife is a fresh spin on literary history, giving the missus the last word.
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Away

Amy Bloom
2010 | Unabridged
After surviving the pogroms that killed her parents, husband, and child, 22-year-old Lillian Leyb has left Turov, Russia, for Ellis Island. The year is 1924, and a young woman on her own has to beg, borrow and steal to survive – or occasionally take well-to-do lovers. But Lillian's plans of assimilating into American life are complicated when a visiting cousin arrives and informs her that her daughter is still alive in Russia.... Lillian knows she must go back but without enough money to book a ship, she has no option but to head west to Alaska and then Siberia. Hiding in the locked closets of trains takes her to Seattle, where she meets a black prostitute who takes her in only to involve her in the murder of a pimp, and then to Canada, where she ends up in a correctional facility. From there it's onward into the frozen tundra. A psychotherapist, Bloom is brilliant at capturing the obscure and winding thoughts of her characters and their subtext-laden dialogue as well as the exacting detail that brings her heroine's unlikely journey into believable focus. What begins as a familiar immigrant story becomes something wholly unexpected – a smart, moving novel that boldly traipses into foreign territory.
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The Dovekeepers

Alice Hoffman
2011 | Unabridged
Reaching back to the first century, Hoffman offers a feminist retelling of the Roman siege of Masada – a grisly event that was documented by a single contemporary source. Each section of the novel is told by one of her four narrators, all women who are part of the band of religious zealots led by Eleazar ben Ya'ir that take up residence in Herod's old fortress. There's Yael, daughter of an assassin,... who has an affair with a soldier and gives birth out of wedlock in the desert. There's the "witch" of Moab, Shirah, a medicine woman who is romantically involved with ben Ya'ir, although he's married to someone else. Shirah's daughter Aziza poses as a man so she can take her brother's place in the war. Finally, there's Revka, who has lost her daughter to Roman soldiers and is now raising her two mute grandchildren. The women's stories eventually interlock as they each work in the fortress dovecote, producing fertilizer for the desert soil. As the final act of the battle with its dramatic mass suicide draws near, each must fight her individual struggle for independence and self-definition. Hoffman's novel is skillfully researched, poetically imagined, and epic in scope.
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Half Broke Horses

Jeannette Walls
2009 | Unabridged
Following up Walls' excellent family memoir The Glass Castle is a "true-life novel" that explores the story of her feisty maternal grandmother. Lily Casey was born in Texas in 1901 to an ex-convict and a God-fearing mother. As a child, she was taught how to break mustangs on her family ranch; later, the frontier woman with an adventurous streak would drive a taxi, play poker, sell bootleg hooch, and fly bush planes... when she wasn't raising two kids and teaching school. Casey's life is told here through her own words, with Walls enlisting a folksy-tough narrative voice drawn from oral history. She leaves Chicago after a disastrous marriage to a "crumb bum" and talks her way into a wartime teaching job in Arizona, despite having no real experience. But though Casey's hardscrabble journey takes place through the Depression and two World Wars, she is largely untouched by these forces, at least directly – in her desolate, tumbleweed-strewn landscape, the concerns of most Americans are less important to her than finding a good source of water to keep the ranch going. Self-reliant, thrifty, and fearless, Casey is an endearing proto-feminist heroine, ahead of her time yet nevertheless a product of her moment in history.
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The Girls of Slender Means

Muriel Spark
2008 | Unabridged
In this slim tale centered around a London ladies' hostel at the end of World War II, the titular girls are under thirty, working for a living, and waiting for their lives to start. The residents of the May of Teck Club include Selina Redwood, the local beauty with a heart of ice; Jane Martin, a brainy but overweight publishing professional who sells authors' letters on the black market; Joanna Childe, the... daughter of the country rector who now gives elocution lessons; and Pauline Fox, who dresses up in evening gowns and (delusionally) claims to have dinner with a famous actor every night. Times are tight: The girls share rationed soap and chocolate and pass around a single Elsa Schiaparelli dress. Years later, when a former hanger-on, the anarchist author Nicholas Farringdon, is discovered dead in Haiti, it is Jane who reconnects with her fellow residents to find out more about him and the incidents that lead to his death. With her minimal, playful, unsentimental writing style, Spark dances over the characters and their shared tenuous moment in time before a tragedy changes everything. Girls is filled with nostalgia for young unmarried women in a strange but hopeful era.
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Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means

Elisa Ludwig — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:11:07 +0000

A colorful cast of women share a moment in time in World War II London

In this slim tale centered around a London ladies’ hostel at the end of World War II, the titular girls are under thirty, working for a living, and waiting for their lives to start. The residents of the May of Teck Club include Selina Redwood, the local beauty with a heart of ice; Jane Martin, a brainy but overweight publishing professional who sells authors’ letters on the black market; Joanna Childe, the daughter of the country rector who now gives elocution lessons; and Pauline Fox, who dresses up in evening gowns and (delusionally) claims to have dinner with a famous actor every night. Times are tight: The girls share rationed soap and chocolate and pass around a single Elsa Schiaparelli dress. Years later, when a former hanger-on, the anarchist author Nicholas Farringdon, is discovered dead in Haiti, it is Jane who reconnects with her fellow residents to find out more about him, and the incidents that lead to his death. With her minimal, playful, unsentimental writing style, Spark dances over the characters and their shared tenuous moment in time before a tragedy will change everything. Girls is filled with nostalgia for young unmarried women in a strange but hopeful era.

Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers

Elisa Ludwig — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:06:24 +0000

An epic feminist retelling of a first-century siege on Israel

Reaching back to the first century, Hoffman offers a feminist retelling of the Roman siege of Masada — a grisly event that was documented by a single contemporary source. Each section of the novel is told by one of her four narrators, all women who are part of the band of religious zealots led by Eleazar ben Ya’ir that take up residence in Herod’s old fortress. There’s Yael, daughter of an assassin, who has an affair with a soldier and gives birth out of wedlock in the desert. There’s the “witch” of Moab, Shirah, a medicine woman who is romantically involved with ben Ya’ir, although he’s married to someone else. Shirah’s daughter Aziza poses as a man so she can take her brother’s place in the war. Finally, there’s Revka, who has lost her daughter to Roman soldiers and is now raising her two mute grandchildren. The women’s stories eventually interlock as they each work in the fortress dovecote, producing fertilizer for the desert soil. As the final act of the battle with its dramatic mass suicide draws near, each must fight her individual struggle for independence and self-definition. Hoffman’s novel is skillfully researched, poetically imagined, and epic in scope.

Amy Bloom, Away

Elisa Ludwig — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:59:45 +0000

A smart, moving novel that boldly traipses into foreign territory

After surviving the pogroms that killed her parents, husband, and child, 22-year-old Lillian Leyb has left Turov, Russia, for Ellis Island. The year is 1924, and a young woman on her own has to beg, borrow and steal to survive — or occasionally take well-to-do lovers. But Lillian’s plans of assimilating into American life are complicated when a visiting cousin arrives and informs her that her daughter is still alive in Russia. Lillian knows she must go back, but without enough money to book a ship, she has no option but to head west to Alaska and then Siberia. Hiding in the locked closets of trains takes her to Seattle, where she meets a black prostitute who takes her in only to involve her in the murder of a pimp, and then to Canada, where she ends up in a correctional facility. From there it’s onward into the frozen tundra. A psychotherapist, Bloom is brilliant at capturing the obscure and winding thoughts of her characters, their subtext-laden dialogue as well as the exacting detail that brings her heroine’s unlikely journey into believable focus. What begins as a familiar immigrant story becomes something wholly unexpected — a smart, moving novel that boldly traipses into foreign territory.

Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

Elisa Ludwig — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:53:02 +0000

Hemingway's first marriage â€” from her point of view

This fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson from 1921-27, is a companion of sorts to his memoir A Moveable Feast. Only, McLain’s book is told through the scorned wife’s point of view. After meeting in Chicago through mutual friends, Hadley becomes Mrs. Hemingway and follows the aspiring author to Paris, where they fall in with a coterie of bohemians, flappers, and artists, including Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Ezra Pound, and others — the epicenter of Parisian artistic culture. The hard-drinking couple, who call each other “Tatie,” soon meet conflict in the form of Hemingway’s temper, his frustrations with his career, and an ambivalence toward the arrival of their first child. But it’s the machinations of a seductive fashion editor named Pauline Pfeiffer who tests their loyalty to one another. As Papa entrenches himself in the publishing firmament, Hadley — sweet and dignified to the last — loses her hold on her Paris husband. Strewn with clever references to Hemingway’s and his friends’ work, The Paris Wife is a fresh spin on literary history, giving the missus the last word.

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Elisa Ludwig — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:46:39 +0000

Lyrical writing that gives new form to the well-trodden subject matter of the Holocaust

Death narrates this now-iconic young adult novel about an illiterate young girl whose hunger for reading incites her to steal books, beginning with the gravediggers manual she finds at the cemetery where her younger brother is buried. When the war begins, Liesel Meminger is sent to live with a foster family in the town of Molching. Her foster father teachers her to read and her new best friend (and would-be paramour) Rudy Steiner assists her on her thieving missions — some designed to help themselves in wartime poverty, others to rebel against the atrocities of Nazism. In the meantime, Liesel’s foster parents take in a Jew, hiding him in their basement from the S.S. As his relationship with Liesel warms, Max writes new books especially for her, painting over pages of Mein Kampf with his own illustrations. With Death as the storyteller and the Holocaust as the historical backdrop, the plot has a certain inevitability — we all know how this will end. Nevertheless, Zusak illuminates the humanity of his foul-mouthed, mostly well-meaning characters in their efforts to both resist and survive and his lyrical writing gives new form to well-trodden subject matter.

Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock

Elisa Ludwig — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 22:02:50 +0000

The escape to a better, imagined life, the poisoning influence of pride and the pretensions of class: Munro at her finest.
The queen of the deceptively gentle short story, Alice Munro has always mined her personal history for details and emotional cadence. With The View, though, she consciously turns her most intimate autobiographical moments into fiction for the first time. If you can get past the narrator’s irritating faux Scottish accents in the audiobook version, the first part of the book is a gripping exploration of her ancestors’ journey by boat from Scotland to North America and their early days settling into rural Ontario, as filtered through the actual writings Munro discovered. Many of the themes – the escape to a better, imagined life, the poisoning influence of pride and the pretensions of class – will be familiar to readers of Munro’s other books. Nobody does it better than Munro, and nobody else can render these experiences into words that are so precisely, devastatingly true.

Classic Teen Reads

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to believe, in this age of Twilight, The Hunger Games and a million imitations thereof, that books for teen readers haven’t always been so plentiful. Though coming-of-age stories and novels told from an adolescent point of view have been written and published throughout the history of modern literature, it wasn’t until the 1950s and ’60s that teens were considered an important demographic for booksellers. And it wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s that the YA genre as such took hold. So it’s important now, to revisit and remember the books that laid the foundation for our current YA publishing boom.

Whatever their subject matter, the classic teen reads from previous eras are the stories that spoke convincingly about the particular struggles of growing up. An early progenitor was Betty Smith, the social observer who catalogued her own urban childhood in the enduring A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Written in 1943 but set in the early century, it captured the difficulties of girlhood as a second-generation American. In the 1960s came Madeleine L’Engle, who unleashed her loveably rebellious Meg Murry on the world. A Wrinkle in Time and its quintet of fantasies gave teen readers a new kind of heroine — one who was smart and fearless, if a bit awkward.

In the early 1970s, Judy Blume broke new ground with her honest portrayal of Margaret Simon, a precocious preteen with a fixation on bras and periods. Decades later, countless homages, including a middle-aged comedienne’s memoir, would demonstrate its cultural impact.

Blume clearly understood that the search for identity is a perennial theme in real life as well as fiction, and it’s central to the great early YA books. Katherine Paterson’s Sara Louise, narrator of Jacob Have I Loved, is a kindred spirit of Margaret and Meg, a misfit struggling to redefine herself on her own terms. Likewise, Kit Gordy, the hapless boarding school student of Lois Duncan’s spooky Down a Dark Hall must speak out to save herself and her friends’ impressionable minds before they can be colonized by supernatural forces. Then, of course, there’s Nancy Garden’s 1980 landmark Annie on My Mind, which was way ahead of its time in its sensitive, almost matter-of-fact treatment of a budding lesbian relationship and a coming-out journey.

Despite their historical details, these books will inspire nods of uncanny recognition in today’s readers, because they get the gist, the pure essence of teenagehood so right. Whether you read them by flashlight under the covers or you simply never got to them, it’s time to rediscover the classics of teen fiction.

Lois Duncan, Down a Dark Hall

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The book that forged the teen suspense genre
Though Duncan has written multiple picture books and nonfiction works, she’s probably best known as the queen of teen suspense, forging the genre in the 1960s through the ’80s. (Her 1973 book I Know What You Did Last Summer was adapted for the big screen in 1997.) Duncan’s books were serious and scary enough to freak out her increasingly sophisticated readers, yet they also fulfilled an important tenant of children’s fiction by giving her characters safe, happy endings. In this spooky tale, young Kit Gordy is shipped off to Blackwood Hall, an isolated boarding school in upstate New York while her mother and her new and – of course – jerky stepdad cavort around Europe on their honeymoon. Once Kit gets there, she finds that she’s only one of four students in the creepy old mansion. Then she starts having persistent nightmares that make her suspicious about the school’s true purpose. This version of Down a Dark Hall, reissued with Duncan’s greatest hits in 2010, has been updated for today’s teens with references to cell phones and emails – though neither are accessible to the hopelessly isolated Kit. Ghosts and ESP and an evil headmistress abound, but the true horror Duncan gets at is the notion that Blackwood’s students are no longer in control of their brains, a fear that resonates with young readers in any era.

Six Degrees of The Great Gatsby

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

No book is a perfectly self-contained artifact. Books are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it’s not. It’s the very nature of literature — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic works and five other books we’ve deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the books are highly, highly recommended.

THE BOOK

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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald
2009 | Unabridged
In the most famous novel of the Jazz Age, Nick Carraway is a Midwest-born Yale graduate who arrives in New York to work in bond trading after serving in World War I. Nick rents a house in West Egg, a nouveau riche community on Long Island, and he's thrown into the upper echelons of society life when he reconnects with his cousin Daisy. Daisy has married Tom Buchanan, a white supremacist philanderer,... and they live nearby in the old money enclave of East Egg with their three-year-old daughter. Nick also strikes up a friendship with his next-door neighbor, the mysterious, fabulously wealthy Gatsby, who throws lavish nightly parties. Nick soon learns that Gatsby has been in love with Daisy since he met her years ago in Louisville he has bought his home in West Egg to be closer to her in the hopes that they can rekindle their romance now that he's made his fortune. Nick agrees to help them reconnect, inviting Daisy to Gatsby's house, and setting off a chain of events that will ultimately crush Gatsby's hopes and leave a wake of destruction. Fitzgerald's defining work was published in 1925 the original title, Trimalchio in West Egg didn't stick and in its day, it was largely regarded as a disappointment, at least compared to his two previous novels (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned). It wasn't until after Fitzgerald's death that Gatsby came to be regarded as one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, landing a permanent spot on high school reading lists. Equal parts mystery, romance and social commentary, The Great Gatsby is both an historical document and a tragedy with the staying power of Shakespeare. The Great Gatsby's impact on literature has been enormous. Its universal themes of class-consciousness, aspiration, love and the corrupting influence of money can be seen in the works of J.D. Salinger and John O'Hara, among many others in the generations that followed. Fitzgerald's personal associations with Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker (not to mention Ring Lardner, Edmund Wilson and Gertrude Stein) made for a mutual, if not entirely generous, exchange of influences. The book has served as a manual of sorts writers like Richard Yates have studied it for its economical use of dialogue and seamless plot construction. And Gatsby characters actually live on in Chris Bohjalian's contemporary novel The Double Bind. With its iconic characters, colorful setting and lyrical prose, Fitzgerald's extraordinary story is, nearly a century later, a part of our cultural legacy.
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THE DRINKING BUDDY

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A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway
2009 | Unabridged
Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were Midwesterners, passionate writers, and tragic figures of 20th Century literature, and as such, these contemporaries will in some ways forever be linked. This relationship has been well-chronicled, but perhaps nowhere as amusingly and pathetically as in A Moveable Feast. Hemingway's semi-fictionalized account of living in Paris in the 1920s recalls his run-ins with Fitzgerald, and his famously tormented wife, Zelda just after Gatsby was released. In one... memorable episode, the envious, ambitious Hemingway agrees to help the slightly elder and more famous Fitzgerald pick up his car in Lyon. The ill-fated, booze-soaked journey ends with Fitzgerald stuck in a hotel room convinced he's about to die, while Hemingway feasts alone in the downstairs dining room. A later scene in which Hemingway recalls Fitzgerald asking him to assess his manhood underscores Hemingway's shamelessness in exploiting his "friend." When Hemingway finally reads The Great Gatsby himself, he admits, in backhanded Hemingway-ese, that the book floors him with its genius. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald is credited with jumpstarting Hemingway's career, as he introduced Hemingway to his editor at Scribner's who later published The Sun Also Rises.
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THE LOVER

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The Portable Dorothy Parker

Marion Meade
2008 | Unabridged
Longtime friends, Parker and Fitzgerald met at the famed Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel in New York and were rumored to have had a fling in the 1920s, while both were married to other people. Parker was said to be an early supporter of Fitzgerald's work, though the slightly older Parker was by then a prominent literary figure in her own right. Including the original Portable Dorothy Parker as Parker edited... it in 1944 a selection of poems and short stories as well as essays, book and theater reviews and letters, this anthology covers the depth of her talents, which go well beyond her famous wit. Running through Parker's work, especially in stories like "The Big Blonde" and "The Standard of Living," is the same vein of social commentary one finds in Gatsby with special attention paid to race and class relations, the war between the sexes and the excesses of the era though, unsurprisingly, Parker is a more biting critic. The anthology is also an historical testament to their personal relationship, which continued on some level for decades, until they were both working as screenwriters in Hollywood: It includes an interview in which Parker alludes to Fitzgerald's work ethic and misfortunes, and a letter she sent to him in 1934. In the end, it was Parker, who at Fitzgerald's funeral in 1940, honored his great contribution to the literary world by repeating a line from Gatsby: "Poor son of a bitch."
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THE MASTER’S APPRENTICE

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Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates (2)
2008 | Unabridged
Like Fitzgerald, Richard Yates is held up as a great American novelist whose work was underappreciated in its day. (Fitzgerald, at least, has been canonized, while Yates is still considered a "writer's writer.") Yates wrote admiringly about Fitzgerald's influence on his work, revealing that he studied it relentlessly when teaching himself how to write. "The Great Gatsby turned out to be the most nourishing novel I read" he wrote in The New... York Times Book Review. "It gains range as it gathers momentum, until the end of it leaves you with a stunning illumination of the world." Yates' masterful Revolutionary Road, like Gatsby, is set in a post-war period of optimism, only in this case it's 30 years later, after World War Two. Frank and April Wheeler are a young couple who have moved to a Connecticut town to raise their children. But even as they self-consciously adopt the suburban lifestyle, they begin to suspect that it's a sham. The only thread holding the Wheelers' marriage together is the conviction that they're better, more bohemian and more interesting than their neighbors until they find themselves tragically entombed in their bourgeois roles. Yates's still-relevant book builds on Gatsby's themes of social mobility, self-made mythologies and the dark revelation that the American dream has been oversold.
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THE NEW YORK ACOLYTES

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Wonderful Town

John O'Hara
2008 | Abridged
Any number of short stories collected in the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker might qualify as Fitzgerald-inspired but there are two in particular that seem to echo Gatsby: John O'Hara's "Drawing Room B" and J.D. Salinger's "Slight Rebellion off Madison." O'Hara's story, written in 1947, concerns Leda Pentleigh, an aging actress on a train from New York to Chicago who is consumed with thoughts of her celebrity... (or current lack thereof). When a young actor approaches her for advice, her bruised ego stomps all over her best intentions. Published in 1946, "Slight Rebellion" features the pre-Catcher in the Rye debut of Holden Caulfield it would become the basis of Chapter 17 in the novel. Holden goes on a date with his girlfriend Sally. Depressed, he reveals his disillusionment with prep school and New York and urges her to run away with him. She refuses, and he later drunk-dials her and ends up alone and ashamed on Madison Avenue, waiting for the bus. O'Hara and Salinger each cited Fitzgerald as an important influence in their work and it shows: both stories concern characters whose authenticity is smothered by the constraints of class and status, both feature singular narrative styles, and both embody the spot-on dialogue and savvy commentary on social hypocrisies common in Fitzgerald's work.
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THE FICTIONAL “SEQUEL”

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The Double Bind

Chris Bohjalian
2007 | Abridged
While many other authors have heaped praise on The Great Gatsby, Chris Bohjalian goes a little further in this quirky mystery novel he writes its characters and plot into his own story. The plot concerns Laurel Estabrook, who, as a University of Vermont student, was assaulted while biking on a rural back road. Now an employee at a local homeless shelter in Burlington, she receives a box of photos from a former... resident, Bobbie Crocker, who has recently died. In the box, Laurel finds clues to Crocker's past he was apparently a successful photographer who fell on hard times due to mental illness. As she delves deeper, she's disturbed to find images of her hometown, West Egg, and one of herself that was taken, she suspects, on the very day she was attacked. Increasingly obsessed, Laurel starts to uncover connections to the Buchanan family and she becomes convinced that Bobbie was Daisy and Gatsby's long-lost illegitimate son. As far as homages go, The Double Bind's narrative style is uniquely Bohjalian's and its leitmotifs of self-invention and personal tragedy are only loosely connected to Gatsby's. Yet for fans of the original, The Double Bind offers a parallel universe in which Fitzgerald's fictions actually come off the page and mingle with reality.
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Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Unusual life and eatery experiences in compelling, well-paced morsels
New York chef Hamilton has built a career on feeding people small, meaningful meals at her beloved eatery Prune, and this bittersweet memoir doles out her unusual life experiences in equally compelling, well-paced morsels. After a magical, party-filled childhood in rural Pennsylvania with an exacting French ballet dancer mom, a whimsical set designer dad and four wild siblings, Hamilton’s fairy tale ended when her parents divorced. Abandoned and broke, the young teen found work in restaurants to support herself — and her precocious habits. Later on, the waitressing and catering jobs got her through a few failed runs at college, and finally, a graduate writing program. Despite her intention to become a published author, Hamilton’s passion for food — and for the ways food could convey emotion — drew her back to kitchens time and again. When she finally had the opportunity to open her own restaurant, she eagerly set about trying to recreate the cozy enclave of her lost youth, replete with bone marrow and sardine and Triscuit snacks. Her single-minded commitment brought in the crowds while alienating those closest to her. As a narrator, Hamilton is an alternately tough and vulnerable character whose difficult family life has led to ongoing personal disappointments, yet these very losses have also inspired culinary greatness. Her candid confessions, her obvious love for food and the sheer expressive force of her writing make Blood Bones & Butter a book to savor.

Benjamin Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Elisa Ludwig — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The autobiography of a chimp
In this audacious, gleeful debut, Benjamin Hale gives us the autobiography of the world’s first chimp to acquire human language skills. Bruno Littlemore is taken from his family home in the Lincoln Park Zoo at a young age to a University of Chicago laboratory. His caregiver, primatologist Lydia Littlemore, and her colleague, Norman Plumlee, begin a series of experiments to expand Bruno’s ability to communicate. Eventually Bruno goes home to live with Lydia where she encourages him to paint, speak, eat at the table and share her bed. As Bruno embarks on his journey of discovery, experiencing all of the pleasures of the human world for the first time, his relationship with Lydia deepens into a love affair. But even as Bruno evolves into a clothed biped that can quote Shakespeare and Milton, he can’t seem to control his animal id, and his wild behavior forces Lydia to move them to a Colorado reserve. From there, Bruno’s picaresque journey takes more twists and turns, including a stint in a New York subway theater troupe, before he lands in his current place of residence, the correctional facility from which he’s dictating his memoir. Hale takes on this rhetorical challenge with gusto, turning his lovelorn Bruno into a verbose, philosophical and at times unreliable narrator who is certain to be included among the most memorable characters in contemporary literature.

Six Degrees of Slaughterhouse-Five

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

THE BOOK

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Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut
2011 | Unabridged
In this absurdist sci-fi /military mashup, Billy Pilgrim is a world-weary optometrist living in Upstate New York during the prosperous years following World War II. Only he can't exactly enjoy the trappings of his suburban dream because a time-travel portal - revealed to him when he's kidnapped by a race of aliens called the Tralfamadorians - allows him to alternately revisit his past as a POW in Dresden, Germany, and his... future, where he is eventually assassinated by a war enemy.

Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five encapsulates Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner during the horrific bombing of Dresden, which killed 35,000 German civilians. Though he would continue to grapple with the enormity of the event in future writings, it was this book, his seventh, that established his signature storytelling style and proved to be his greatest critical and commercial success. Slaughterhouse-Five is widely considered one of the most influential novels of the 20th century and a cultural touchstone of its era. ("So it goes," the Tralfamadorian utterance that typifies the race's extraterrestrial-Buddhist attitude towards death and destruction, became a favorite catch phrase of Vietnam protestors.)

Vonnegut's voice, a blend of fanciful imaginings and plain-speaking prose, incisive political critique and unexpected emotional resonance, was drawn, in part, from his own influences, writers like Sinclair, Twain and Swift. As Vonnegut's status rose from cult favorite to bestselling author, his work rippled outward to touch generations of writers after him. While Vonnegut surely impacted his own writing students like Gail Godwin and John Irving, he's also the admitted inspiration for Ken Kalfus' sardonic social satires and even the unsparing comic monologues of Jon Stewart. With Vonnegut's death in 2007, many came forward to announce their admiration for the iconoclastic writer, and though he may never be truly imitated, the following books give us a glimpse at his long literary shadow.
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THE MORAL HUMORIST

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The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

Mark Twain
2007
As a pioneer of American humor writing, Twain was an enormous influence on young Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's love for the author was so great that he named his son after him. Later, with his pouf of hair, prodigious moustache and air of twinkling pessimism, Vonnegut even began to resemble his hero. But the legacy is most obvious in the work itself. In stories like his novella Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain called attention to... the injustices of social conventions - in this case, the arbitrary birthrights of race, as a slave's baby and master's baby are switched in their cribs. Twain's tongue-in-cheek wit, quirky characterization and ironic plot twists always cloaked a more serious message. Vonnegut discovered in his own writing that humor was sometimes the most effective device for depicting otherwise incomprehensible tragedy. Off the page, he borrowed Twain's penchant for well timed, wry observations to create an enduring cult of personality.
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THE COLLEAGUE

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Catch-22

Joseph Heller
2009 | Unabridged
Like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, Yossarian is a disillusioned soldier, questioning the rationality of a war that has killed off his fellow servicemen and friends. And like Pilgrim, Yossarian is forced to grapple with issues of free will in the face of what seems like inevitable, thoughtless destruction. Catch-22 predated Slaughterhouse-Five by eight years but its commentary on the atrocities of the Allies in World War II, its non-chronological narrative, and its acute... sense of irony (now widely used in contemporary vernacular, the book's term "catch-22" refers to the absurd bureaucratic rules that presented a no-win situation for the soldiers) have inspired paragraphs on many a compare-and-contrast term paper. In real life, Heller and Vonnegut were personal friends and neighbors on Long Island, and taken together, their most famous works are an essential part of the modern humanist canon.
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THE PROTEGE

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The World According to Garp

John Irving
2009 | Unabridged
As a student of the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1960s, John Irving directly learned his craft from Vonnegut, who was a writer in residence there for two years (at the very time he began writing Slaughterhouse-Five.) The two remained friends until Vonnegut's death in 2007, when Irving eulogized him by revealing that Vonnegut taught him to use fewer semicolons (which he called transvestites). More broadly, Vonnegut's influence is felt in the... random and occasionally cruel acts of plot that impact Irving's helpless characters, told with a "so it goes" detachment. The World According to Garp is his fourth novel, written after he met Vonnegut. Its protagonist, T.S. Garp, is brought into the world under unusual circumstances, and spends a lifetime contemplating its meaning and mysteries. Irving's affinity for braiding comedy and tragedy and both global and personal history shows that he learned much more from Vonnegut than semicolon placement.
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THE LITERARY SATIRIST

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A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

Ken Kalfus
2008 | Unabridged
Vonnegut's genius was that he could get laughs out of World War II's atrocities, and in this viciously dark comedy Ken Kalfus barrels through the reader's discomfort to satirize September 11. Marshall and Joyce are caught in the middle of a beyond-bitter divorce when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. He's disappointed that she wasn't, as scheduled, on the flight that hit the Pentagon and she's disturbed to learn that... he never made it up to his Trade Tower office and escapes unscathed. The domestic terrorism builds and implodes from there. Kalfus, a self-identified Vonnegut fan, makes the violence around his characters that much more horrific by emphasizing their bourgeois pettiness. Even as they're traumatized by a growing sense that New York is no longer safe for their children, they continue to savage one another in increasingly outlandish ways. In the inhuman, unrelenting world of this novel, Kalfus makes Vonnegut look like Suzy Sunbeam.
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THE CONTEMPORARY COMIC

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America (The Audiobook)

Jon Stewart
2007 | Abridged
Daily Show comedian Stewart has said that Vonnegut's books - and particularly Slaughterhouse-Five - made his adolescent life bearable. And in 2005, Vonnegut appeared on Stewart's show to promote his book A Man Without a Country, which he said he originally wanted to call The 51st State: The State of Denial. This might have been an equally fitting title for Stewart's America, a sly, cutting satire of our country's values and institutions... that would make Stewart's literary progenitor proud. ("From your morning hardcore pornography masturbation session, to your lunchtime abortion, right up through your twilight neo-Nazi march through a predominantly Jewish/black community, the judicial branch is there to make sure everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law...under God.") There are no sacred cows here, only the tasty hamburger of the Daily Show writers' critiques, dressed up as a faux civics textbook. But Stewart has a truly Vonnegutian, humanist point of view that makes America as compelling as it is hilarious.
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Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

Elisa Ludwig — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A charming contemporary retelling of a Jane Austen classic
Charm and wit abounds in Allegra Goodman’s mannerly tale of two young sisters living in California at the peak of the dot-com boom and beyond. Both Jessamine Bach, a philosophy student and activist, and Emily Bach, a CEO of an emerging company called Veritech, are kind and insightful. Despite their obvious differences, they share a warm relationship, a desire to hew to their ideals and a nagging curiosity about their deceased mother’s past. But Goodman’s deceptively quiet novel — a contemporary retelling of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility — grows more dramatic as Emily must balance a volatile stock market and an equally volatile, ambitious boyfriend running his own tech company on the East Coast. Jess, meanwhile, is working in an antiquarian bookstore when her wealthy, debonair boss makes the discovery of an ultra-rare and fascinating cookbook collection and charges her with the tempting mission of cataloguing it — a task at odds with her boyfriend’s Save the Trees mission. As the years tick by toward September 11 and a plummeting Nasdaq, Goodman’s characters become painfully aware of the transient nature of things — their fancy cars and homes, their speculative paper fortunes. Even the cookbooks, with their detailed engravings and ancient, exotic feasts, which delight everyone who encounters them, seem only to be a pale substitute for their readers’ real desires. Goodman’s romantic comedy seduces with its culinary pleasures, psychological charms and historic savvy, with a dose of weighty spiritual inquiry for good measure.

Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A comic yet cautionary tale about the casualties of sex unhinged from feeling This winking look at the Sexual Revolution and its aftermath centers around a group of British 20-somethings summering in an Italian castle in 1970. Amis’s protagonist Keith Nearing is a narcissistic literature student by turns obsessed with English novels and the preening breasts of his girlfriend Lily’s best friend Scheherazade. As his relationship with Lily becomes increasingly platonic, Nearing bumbles in his transparent efforts to get closer to Scheherazade. In the meantime, the women around him, from a prudish-seeming big-assed dancer to a libidinous friend lovingly referred to as The Dog, are exploring their own attitudes toward sex and relationships, and trying the predatory habits of men on for size. As we flash forward to his older years, Nearing himself is still caught between the quaint references to the women “falling” in his required reading, and a future in which shifted gender roles, liberating though they may be, result in a host of evils from serial marriages to Islamic resentment. The Pregnant Widow (the title referring to an Alexander Herzen quote about the gap between one social order and another) is a swansong to a summer of (potential) love and a comic yet cautionary tale about the casualties of sex unhinged from feeling.

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A tour de force novel based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville
Reading a Peter Carey novel should come with a warning to strap in and firmly secure one’s hands inside the cart — his narrative skills are so sure, his characters so unbelievably vivid and his plots so tightly schemed that the experience is the literary equivalent of a joyride. His 11th tour de force, loosely based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, is very much a typical Carey-esque epic. Standing in for de Tocqueville is Olivier de Garmont, a snobbish Bourbon noble whose interest in democracy at a time when the throne is being restored puts him at risk of death. In order to keep him alive, his mother arranges a trip to America to study prisons, and insists he take Parrot, a middle-aged Dickensian chap (who, unlike Olivier, has no basis in real life) along in his employ. The aristocracy is alive and well — on the voyage, at least — and Carey’s alternating takes from Olivier and Parrot’s points of view illuminate their resentment for one another. The unlikely pair goes on to explore the New World, finding romance, adventure and mutual admiration. If the big ideas this novel ambitiously tackles — Art, Capitalism, Morality, Democracy — are not enough to sustain reader interest, then Carey’s trademark humor and unrelentingly dazzling prose will do the job.

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Elisa Ludwig — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A death-defying feat of literary daring
Colum McCann’s death-defying feat of literary daring is set on August 7, 1974, the day a French high-wire artist walks a cable precisely strung between the towers of the World Trade Center. Below, going about their lives, are a radical Irish monk living in the Bronx projects and his brother, a newly-minted immigrant; a Guatemalan nurse in love with the monk; a Park Avenue mother grieving the loss of her son in Vietnam and her husband, an emotionally restrained judge; a 38-year-old grandmother and her daughter, both prostitutes; and an artist in town on a drug bender. Even though most of the characters don’t witness the event firsthand, the day of the walk is a fateful one for all of them. A non-linear narrative unfolds, each chapter homing in on a different character, with McCann assuming the voice or perspectives of each — including, in a fascinating central interlude, the wirewalker himself. With no unifying conflict, the momentum of this novel comes from a snowballing effect linking these disparate people and their individual struggles. The reader’s vantage point on the post-9/11 side of history brings an elegiac clarity to this sweeping, lyrical novel of loss. Meanwhile, McCann’s high-wire artist, based on the real-life Phillippe Petit, dances above.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Themes of race, class and the role of ethics in science at a seat-edger pace
This powerful narrative delves a serendipitous moment in a laboratory that transformed modern medicine — with a profoundly destructive impact on the lives that made it possible. In the 1950s, Johns Hopkins scientists successfully cultivated the first human cells to live for an extended period of time outside the body. The tissue came from a slave-descended black woman named Henrietta Lacks who had come to the hospital’s “colored ward” for cancer treatment. Because the era’s medical ethics didn’t demand it, Lacks’s doctors never sought consent for her tissue. She died shortly thereafter, but her cells lived on. Scientists lauded the stunning medical achievement: Not only did the revolutionary new process enable them to study diseases and treatments without using patients as guinea pigs, but the so-called HeLa cells continued to multiply at an incredible rate. Over decades they were used to study AIDS, cancer, the impact of the moon’s zero gravity on human visitors, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization, among others.

Meanwhile, Lacks’s family, impoverished and ridden with their own health problems, had no idea that any of this was happening until the 1970s, when journalists began to trace the cells back to their origin. But the revelation only brought nosy reporters, exploitative scientists and scam artists, and the lack of financial compensation and real recognition for Lacks’s contribution left the family embittered. Enter Skloot, a dogged science writer who spent 10 years finding out the true story of Henrietta Lacks. Her fascinating account manages to tackle the big themes — race, class, the idealistic march of progress and its inevitable commercialization, the role of ethics in science, and the need for privacy protections in an increasingly technological world — while never letting up its relentless, seat-edger pace.

Books That Thrill

Elisa Ludwig — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 10:23:07 +0000

You’ve seen them in airports, and on the morning commute. They’re littered along beaches, foiled letters glittering in the sun. A good thriller is its own kind of travel — all-consuming, briskly-paced and easily digested. Escapism.

Essentially, all thrillers are about a threat to human happiness, whether it’s grand government conspiracies, computer hackers, terrorist plots, serial killers or bitter ex-lovers. But if there’s one common characteristic in the genre, it’s the clever protagonist with a divorce/heartbreak or two under her belt and a general wariness toward potential lovers — which inevitably gets tested over the course of the narrative — along with the required degree of insanity required to put herself in harm’s way, time and again.

Viewed through the lens of an expert, the thriller becomes surprisingly informative. Through Mitch Rapp, the hero of Vince Flynn’s Separation of Power, for instance, we learn about the inner workings of the CIA and the darkest corners of political power. Patricia Cornwell’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta novels expose the daily life of a forensic scientist. In Along Came a Spider we travel alongside Alex Cross, a different kind of forensic specialist, one who specializes in the makings of a criminal mind. In The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly offers a window into the worlds of both of its main settings — a newsroom and an internet security firm.

2009 | Abridged

The third in a series of political thrillers starring CIA counterterrorism agent Mitch Rapp, Separation of Power begins as the CIA welcomes a new director, Irene Kennedy. Though she has the confidence and blessings of President Hayes, Kennedy's the target for many dissatisfied figures in Washington, including Senator Hank Clark, who would like to see her fail — or worse. Rapp, meanwhile, gets unwittingly drawn into the fray on a trip to... Italy when a former lover and accomplice, Donatella Rahn, is shot. Rapp begins to trace her would-be assassins and finds connections with Israel and the CIA. Kennedy, meanwhile, is fighting for her political life as she uncovers intelligence from the Israelis linking Saddam Hussein to nuclear weapons stored in a Baghdad hospital. Rapp is brought in to help the military stage an intervention, help Kennedy keep her job and serve up swift justice to the corrupt power dealers behind the scenes who have their next target stuck on his back. Flynn's conservative politics are on display as his hawkish characters seek to end terrorism at all costs but he paints a credible portrait of back-room dealings and ego trips gone psychotic in this complex, intricately plotted spy story.

Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Elisa Ludwig — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The proto-YA novel
Since it first appeared in 1970, Judy Blume’s third novel — technically classified as middle grade — has become the standard bearer for the confessional, first-person YA narrative. Margaret Simon is a sixth grader with a Jewish dad and Christian mom who is struggling to establish her own relationship with God — thus, the frequent direct addresses to the almighty. In the meantime, she’s also fretting about the development (or lack thereof) of her breasts, wondering when she’ll finally get her period and trying to find her voice among her group of friends. Though the novel was controversial in its day, it seems rather quiet by comparison to today’s stories of meth addiction, school shootings and the sexual escapades of Gossip Girl. Nevertheless, Margaret has inspired generations of writers for young readers to delve into the most personal, most excruciating aspects of adolescence, while simultaneously inspiring generations of readers to feel okay about their training bras.

Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved

Elisa Ludwig — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

insight into the teenage girl insecurity vortex
Right from the outset Sara Louise (a.k.a. Wheezy) is a lovable narrator — who wouldn’t sympathize with a girl who’s constantly overshadowed by Caroline, her perfect, beautiful, talented twin sister? Set in the 1940s on the fictional island of Rass in the Chesapeake Bay, Katherine Paterson’s 1981 novel follows Sara Louise as she navigates her small, seemingly stuck-in-time world. Though she dreams of going away to school, she ends up helping her father with his fishing business. In the meantime, her twin continues to steal everything Sara Louise values, including her best friend Call. Most hurtfully, their religious nut grandmother points out to Sara Louise that she’s like Esau, the unloved twin of biblical fame, while Caroline is like Jacob. Eventually, Sara Louise must find a way to leave Rass and forge a new identity of her own making. Paterson’s coming-of-age tale is both raw and poignant and her insight into the teenage girl insecurity vortex makes it a must-read for the ages.

A. J. Jacobs

2008 | Abridged

An agnostic Esquire writer with a penchant for extreme immersion journalism, Jacobs elected to follow the Bible's good words for a full year as a follow-up to his stunt book The Know-It-All (in which he read the Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end). What follows is a roundup of some of the Bible's best and worst injunctions. So while Jacobs learns to treat people with greater respect and cuts back on his... lying, he also avoids his wife during her period, starts honking on a shofar and eats insects. In the meantime, his wife attempts to help him "be fruitful and multiply" while, presumably, trying to explain to others why Jacobs is wandering around New York in a cloak with a ZZ Top beard. Jacobs comes away from the experience far more knowledgeable about Judeo-Christian values and he even cops to taking some of them to heart in his post-biblical life. The most valuable parts of his account, however, are actually the facts he uncovers about modern-day fundamentalists, from visits to Jerry Falwell's megachurch and a snake-handler prayer meeting to his research on the modern-day quest among American and Israeli cattle ranchers to breed a red heifer in order to become "spiritually clean." Ultimately these investigative segments tell the reader much more about the Bible's literalists than Jacob's own year of play-acting.