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The Howe Library Featured Reader Book Recommendations

Don Quixote (Miquel de Cervantes, 1605-15, translated by Edith Grossman 2003) (Reserve at The Howe)

For some time it was possible to excuse not reading the ur-novel of Western Literature because the existing translations were pretty iffy. But first Burton Raffel and then Edith Grossman produced new and eminently readable editions and now no one can wriggle off the hook. The first time reader will be staggered by the degree to which nearly every book and movie that followed is derivative to some extent from the adventures of the noble Don.

Quo Vadis? (Henry Sienkiewicz, translated by W. S. Kuniczak, 1997) (Reserve)

Despite winning one of the few well-deserved Nobel Prizes for Literature, Sienkiewicz sank into some obscurity among English readers until Hippocrene Books commissioned new translations of Quo Vadis? and of the Trilogy, which is the great novel of Poland.

Independent People: an epic (Halldor Laxness, 1946) (Reserve)

The novelist Brad Leithauser famously resurrected this novel by an Icelandic Nobel laureate in a New York Review of Books essay, appropriately titled "A Small Country's Great Book." It is a delicious irony that the socialist author wrote one of the great paeans to freedom.

The Roots of Heaven (Romain Gary, 1956) (Reserve)

One of the great underappreciated novels of the 20th Century, whose French protagonist, in fighting for the lives of elephants in Africa and for "a certain idea of decency," becomes "an Englishman without knowing it."

The Universal Baseball Association, inc., J. Henry Waugh, prop. (Robert Coover, 1968) (Reserve)

Though Mr. Coover loses control of his own narrative towards the end of his novel, what has come before -- in this tale of a man who imagines himself a god -- is brilliant. The combination of baseball and themes from Genesis makes for a profoundly American text.

Shoeless Joe (W.P. Kinsella, 1982) (Reserve)

The basis for the popular film, Field of Dreams, Mr. Kinsella's novel is even better and features J.D. Sallinger rather than the imaginary Terrence Mann as the author Ray "kidnaps."

Falls the Shadow (Sharon Kay Penman, 1988) (Reserve)

Before she got side-tracked into writing medieval mysteries, Ms Penman wrote a series of historical fictions that manage to combine romance, political intrigue, military action, and a rich stew of ideas. This novel, featuring the early democratizer Simon de Montfort, is her best.

March Violets (Philip Kerr, 1989) (Reserve)

Philip Kerr has written any number of excellent thrillers in a variety of genres, but far the best are the Bernie Gunther mysteries, in which he imagined how Raymond Chandler would have written if his private eye roamed the dark alleys of Nazi Berlin.

A Mapmaker's Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice (James D. Cowan, 1996) (Reserve)

Fra Mauro is a 15th Century Venetian cartographer who doesn't go anywhere himself but has explorers come to him and share their tales of discovery. Mr. Cowan, in turn, serves up a novel overflowing with ideas and his own meditation on the peculiarly Western attempt to systematize knowledge.

The Children of Men (P.D. James, 1993) (Reserve)

The recent movie version of this departure novel by the grand dame of British mystery apparently shied away from her main theme: "I thought, if there was no future, how would we behave?" The reason there is no future in the book is that Man has stopped reproducing and the answer to her question is: horribly. It's a powerful indictment of secular Europe that ends on a note, however unlikely, of hope.

Enigma (Robert Harris, 1995) (Reserve)

Before he turned to ancient Rome, Robert Harris wrote a series of gripping speculative thrillers. In this one a spy is loose among the British mathematicians and scientists trying to crack the Nazi codes, but it is the mole's motives thatmake for a must read.

A Noble Radiance ( Donna Leon, 1998) (Reserve)

There is a vogue these days for police procedurals set abroad and no one is writing them better than Donna Leon. Her Venetian policeman, Commissario Guido Brunetti, often seems the last righteous man in a Europe beset by intractable social pathologies and corruption.

The Witchfinder: an Amos Walker Mystery (Loren D. Estlemam, 1998) (Reserve)

While authors like Robert B. Parker and Robert Crais were ruining the private eye novel, by giving their detectives murderous sidekicks, steady squeezes, and policemen for pals, Mr. Estleman just kept cranking out classic hard-boiled fiction in the best tradition of Hammet, Chandler, and Ross MacDonald.

Prayers for the Assassin : a novel (Robert Ferrigno, 2006) (Reserve)

Mr. Ferrigno burst onto the scene with his crime thriller, The Horse Latitudes, several years ago. Here he bids fair to be the Orwell of the war on terror as he serves up the first dystopic novel about Islamicism.

Seven Days to the Sea : an epic novel of the Exodus (Rebecca Kohn, 2006) (Reserve)

Ms Kohn, a local author, does something ingenious here. at first it seems odd that so much of the main action is happening off-stage but that eventually brings us closer to the average Jews for whom the message that Moses brought was a literal test of faith.

Caesar : Life of a Colossus (Adrian Goldsworthy, 2006) (Reserve)

If you've been watching Rome on HBO and wondering just how closely it follows history, Mr. Goldsworthy's accessible biography is a terrific compliment. Meanwhile, the depiction of petty personal rivalry that the tv show does so well informs the more scholarly text.

Jonathan Edwards: A Life (George M. Marsden, 2003) (Reserve)

Most of us give little thought to Jonathan Edwards after being forced to read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in an American Literature course, but this award-winning biography will change that. The Edwards who emerges here is a very sympathetic figure and one whose ideas are central to the American Republic.

Washington's Crossing (David Hackett Fischer, 2004) (Reserve)

As David McCullough redeemed John Adams from the harsh judgments of 20th Century historians, so too does Mr. Fischer rescue George Washington and show us just how adept a military commander he actually was in what difficult circumstances.

A Peace to End All Peace : the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East (David Fromkin, 1989) (Reserve)

Mr. Fromkin's book is deeply depressing as the reader confronts the way the disastrous decisions about divvying up the globe after WWI have come back to haunt us in the modern Middle East.

The Russian Revolution (Richard Pipes, 1990) (Reserve)

As conventional Cold War wisdom congealed around the notion of a permanent and viable Soviet Union with which the West had to reach a detente, Mr. Pipes was one of the few men to grasp that the U.S.S.R. was instead doomed. Likewise, while most of his fellow academicians prattled on about how the Russian Revolution was a noble enterprise that was tragically corrupted, his masterwork convincingly demonstrates that it was evil from very nearly the start.

The Long Walk : The True Story of a Trek to Freedom (Slavomir Rawicz , 1956) (Reserve)

On Easter Sunday 1941, Rawicz and six other prisoners escaped from a Siberian prison camp and started walking South. They eventually traveled the length of Lake Baikal, through Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, through Tibet, and over the Himalayas, before arriving in British-controlled India, continually driven forward by a simple dream of freedom.

The Glory of Their Times : The Story of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It (Lawrence S. Ritter, 1966) (Reserve)

You may be familiar with Mr. Ritter's ground-breaking oral history of the Golden Age of baseball, but you may not know that The Howe has the audio version which features the original interviews.

The Crisis Years : Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (Michael Beschloss, 1991) (Reserve)

Mr. Beschloss is one of our most readable presidential historians and he here strips away much of the unfortunate mythos that surrounds JFK, replacing it with a devastating portrait of an inexperienced risk-taker who was in well over his head.

Case Closed : Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK (Gerald Posner, 1993) (Reserve)

There may be no topic about which more people believe more nonsense than the Kennedy assassination. Mr. Posner makes such mince meat of all the quack theories that no open-minded reader will come away from the book without being convinced that Oswald was indeed a lone gunman.

Modern Times : the World from the Twenties to the Eighties (Paul Johnson, 1983) (Reserve)

This delightfully contrarian history of the 20th Century challenges nearly everything your teachers told you in school.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2007 6:58 AM