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Betty White, If You Ask Me

2011 | Publisher: Penguin Audio

02.15.12 Equal parts sweetness and saucy wit, with a pinch of kindly grandma thrown in

A brief list of Things That Betty White is Not Afraid Of would include death, sex, working in television at the age of 89, Robert Pattinson and cracking filthy jokes about baked goods on Saturday Night Live. For a longer list, you’ll have to consult If You Ask Me: (And Of Course You Won’t), the actress’s sixth book and a very good second-place substitute for those who would kill to spend a few hours with the classy babe herself. (Naturally, she narrates her own opus.)

If You Ask Me is also an excellent primer for anyone who finds herself mystified by White’s newfound It Girl status. That… more »

Tom Mueller, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

2011 | Publisher: Dreamscape

01.24.12 “A substance of such prestige and volume, the ancient world’s answer to sweet light crude, naturally attracted criminals.”

This is one of those books, you know the type. Maybe you’ve seen the ones about bananas, or tomatoes, or tea? It’s one of those fascinating “food biographies” so bursting with facts and vignettes that you adopt more than a newfound respect for the subject — you start to think it’s the most important thing in the history of the world. Okay, beg your pardon, that’s a wild hyperbole, but Tom Mueller’s sensuous storytelling stimulates the romantic mind. Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil makes the case that its slippery subject has been capturing imaginations and greasing the wheels… more »

Alex Ross, Listen to This

2011 | Publisher: Macmillan Audio

01.24.12 Introducing his subjects’ human side without straining for it

It’s hard to sound as learned and erudite as Alex Ross without seeming like an elitist and a snob, but Ross is neither of those things. “The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world,” he writes in the introduction of  Listen to This, a compendium of his work for The New Yorker, where he’s written primarily (but not only) about classical music since the mid ’90s.

That’s the balance of things here: Classical music is Ross’s root source, the music he immersed himself in until he turned 20 and experienced a punk rock epiphany in college radio, which he outlines entertainingly in that same… more »

Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

2011 | Publisher: Macmillan Audio

01.24.12 As much a puzzle of a marriage as a portrait

As a specialist in domestic dramas (A Home at the End of the World, The Hours) Michael Cunningham has a way of elevating dinner table conversation to Italian opera. Set in New York’s SoHo sometime in the mid-aughts, By Nightfall is the story of Peter and Rebecca Harris, an art dealer and magazine editor, respectively, who represent the staid yuppiedom we’re familiar with from Mia Farrow-era Woody Allen movies. Cunningham’s outsized references to Fellini and Thomas Mann help stir the Creuset, making for a page-turner that’s hard as hard to resist as a 2 a.m. Thai food delivery or a designer sample sale.

As the Harrises evaluate their long marriage, the already… more »