Book on reading list is special (09/24/2008)

It was the annual meeting of the Indiana Public Radio advisory council about a month ago.

I'd barely arrived when Betsy Jeffries of Union City hit me with a question: "What have you been reading?"

Turns out that this year my answer is longer than normal. It's about as eclectic as possible, as well.

Though I didn't run down the list for Betsy, her question had me looking back over the reading year.

It started with things I'd received for Christmas, as is so often the case.

The first, as best I could recall, was a book called "World Without Borders," a collection of 28 pieces that had never before been published in English. They were short stories, poems, and essays from all over the world. In the introduction, I came across a fact that has colored my reading for all of 2008: "50 percent of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but only 6 percent are translated into English."

In other words, we're talking to the world. But we're not listening to the world.

Much of my year has been devoted to listening.

And the result has been an expansion of my understanding and an adjustment of my perspective. That doesn't mean that it's been dry as dust.

On the contrary, much of it has been fun. I continued my journey with "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia," a collection of short stories by Victor Pelevin. It, as you might suspect, is fantasy with an Eastern twist.

That was followed, I think (the sequence is blurry), by "A Free Life" by Ha Jin, one of my favorite Chinese writers. It's the story of a Chinese family's adjustment to life in the United States in the present day. While I enjoyed it, I'd recommend some of Ha Jin's other works first, especially his short stories, which are amazing.

Somewhere along the line, I also read William Trevor's newest collection of short stories, entitled "Cheating at Cards." Trevor, an Anglo-Irish writer now in his 80s, is a marvel.

Short stories also grabbed me in mid-summer, when I read Jhumpa Lahiri's marvelous collection "Unaccustomed Earth."

Not surprisingly, at least to those who know me, I dove pretty heavily into the Russian and post-Soviet end of the spectrum while I was "listening to the world."

I can heartily recommend Andrei Kurkov's "Death and the Penguin," the best post-Soviet novel I've read. Chilling and funny at the same time. A tougher but important read is Andrey Platonov's "Soul," which is available in a new, excellent translation. (I say "excellent" only because it reads well in English; I'm an idiot where Russian is concerned.)

To top it off, I finally addressed "The Master and Margarita" by Mihail Bulgakov, an amazing piece of fiction if only because Stalin didn't have Bulgakov executed. At some point, I also read "A Secret Life," a non-fiction account of a Polish military officer who spied for the U.S. during much of the Cold War and was invaluable to this country.

I went back to China with "Wolf Totem," a flawed but incredibly important novel that will be influential in that country for a generation.

In case you think I was stuck in that part of the world, I also went through a period where I devoured four novels by the British author Michael Frayn in quick succession. Frayn has the remarkable ability to write both serious stuff and works that are hysterically funny. As a playwright, he wrote both the farce "Noises Off" and the drama "Copenhagen."

And it wasn't all fiction. I've been recommending "Nudge," a book based upon the dry-sounding science of behavioral economics, to anyone who will listen. The library has it, and it's worth your time.

But of all those books, and others I have forgotten to mention, one gave me the most pleasure.

I read it last week.

And the author is my daughter Maggie.

Her mass-market paperback novel "Spiral Hunt" hits the bookstores in late January of next year, but she received five advance copies for reviewers and sent one to us.

If her mother and I are any measure, the reviews are bound to be raves.

It's about as different as the rest of my reading list as one could imagine. A fantasy thriller set in modern day Boston but with an undercurrent of magic beneath the surface, it's intense and it's great story-telling.

Sure, that's just one reader's opinion and that reader is her dad.

But trust me on this one. It's the real deal.[[In-content Ad]]