I walked into the Tattered Cover recently to get a copy of “Public Enemies,” the book made into the Johnny Depp movie. It was only coincidence I was wearing a T-shirt that says, “MoviesRuining the Book Since 1920.”
I love movies. I just love books more. And if you walk into a bookstore these days, you can’t help but get depressed looking at the understocked shelves. It’s not just Amazon to blame here. In a recession, it turns out, some people may choose groceries over the latest best seller.
Still, I bought the book, turned the BlackBerry to silent, and 25 pages in — reading about Dillinger and Hoover and Baby Face Nelson and Bonnie and Clyde (if you’re thinking gangster glam: we learn that Bonnie rarely bathed) — I found the world to be a better place, if one with an improbable number of bullet holes.
But I wanted an even better place. It’s officially August, meaning I officially start dreaming of the beach, meaning a vacation spent doing absolutely nothing. Doing nothing is vastly underrated, particularly if you can do it with a beverage in one hand and a book in the other. If your recession means no beach, you can still have your book (at the library, they’re apparently free). And, as it happens, I’ve got a few destination- style reads to recommend.
The Beach
“Sag Harbor,” by Colson Whitehead
If you can’t get to the beach, get to the bookstore for the story of Benji who wants to be Ben, who goes to his family beach house every summer. There’s first love, or first kiss, there’s ice cream and there’s beer and there’s the twist you learn on the drive out from the city with a father who tunes the car radio to either the Carpenters or angry Afro-centric talk radio. This is the story of a black enclave on Long Island, where black doctors and lawyers spend their summers, where private-school black kids, circa 1985, learn the proper way to insult each other: “You bleepin’, Gorbachev-lookin’ bleeping-bleeper, with your monkey bleep.”
A Frozen Lake
“Black Swan Green,” by David Mitchell
If Whitehead is a candidate to write the next great American novel, Mitchell has already written a few great British ones. In “Black Swan Green,” where the joke is that there are no swans, Jason is a precocious 13-year-old battling a stutter he calls the hangman. He lives in a world of gypsies, frozen lakes, ghosts and beekeepers and with a dim understanding of the collapsing grown-up world around him. Try Mitchell’s brilliant “Cloud Atlas” next. If you read both in August, you might almost be ready for September.
A Swamp
“Shadow Country,” by Peter Matthiessen
This is a trilogy Matthiessen rewrote as a 900-page study of the life and especially death of Edgar Watson, the Gatsby-esque outlaw who lived in the Everglades at the turn of the 20th century in a world Faulkner would have imagined. This is a book examining legend, myth, Jamesian (Jesse, that is) logic, and in a setting where savagery and savage beauty face off. You can guess which wins.
An Island
“Netherland,” by Joseph O’Neill
O’Neill devised a 9/11 novel as played out, remarkably, on the New York City cricket fields. An unhappy Dutch Wall Street narrator brings us irrepressible Chuck Ramkissoon — a Trinidadian-Indian dreamer of Manhattan-sized dreams, a hustler who believes life trumps death, despite the evidence. Who better to tell us of New York than the immigrant who believes in the certainty of the American dream?
Every Man Is an Island
“Every Man Dies Alone,” by Hans Fallada
A “rediscovered” novel written in 1947 in 24 mad days, after the author was released from a Nazi asylum, the book is based on a true story of a nondescript German couple who lose a son in the war and decide to write anonymous postcards describing the Nazi evil. The Nazis relentlessly pursue the dissenters, whose risks come to nothing. OK, it’s not exactly a beach book, unless you like your calming waves disturbed by nightmarish reality. But it is astonishing.
A Desert
“2666,” by Roberto Bolaño
This was the hot literary book of 2008, the unfinished work of the Chilean novelist who died in 2003. Bolaño’s greatest topic was himself, the writer’s place in the world, and in “2666,” the search for the writer eventually takes us to a Mexican border town where hundreds of women have been raped and killed and whose fate is largely ignored. It’s a long and haunting book that is, in parts, tragic, funny, brilliant and confused, and did I say brilliant?
Home
“Then We Came to the End,” by Joshua Ferris
We’re back to reality — a book about life at the office, about gossip, furloughs, pink slips, the chair you took when the last guy got fired and how HR may now be coming after you. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to quit your job — and, if you’re like me, head directly to the beach.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
