Still time to read a good book

July is suddenly upon us, but there’s still time to pick up some great new books for summer reading.
Here are some recent reads I’d recommend:
•“And the Mountains Echoed” by Khalid Hosseini is simply wonderful. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I would ever read a novel about Afghanistan, I would have said no. But “The Kite Runner” blew me away, and when Hosseini followed that book up with “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” I was hooked. His latest is a marvel, a tale of the love of parents for their children, sisters and brothers for one another, and the bonds that love brings with it.
The best way to understand a foreign country may be to read its best fiction. If you want to begin to understand Afghanistan, read Hosseini’s humanity enriching novels.
•“A Delicate Truth” by John LeCarre. The master still has it. The author of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” has written umpteen novels about espionage and the blurring of moral boundaries. This one stands up with his best. It’s a great read, and it will also make you think.
•“Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out” by Mo Yan. Chinese novelist Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, and like most folks I’d never heard of him. But I received this as a Christmas present and dove in. It took awhile to get into it, and it’s not for everybody. Mo Yan uses a story-telling method that traces its roots back to Chinese folk tales, and in this hefty novel he uses the device of multiple reincarnations — as a pig, as a dog, as a monkey, and more — to turn his spotlight on the follies of the Chinese Communist government in the middle of the 20th century. To give you some idea of what you’re getting into, the story begins in hell with the narrator arguing with the king of the underworld about whether he should be there. And then it starts getting a little unusual.
•“Skios” by Michael Frayn. I read this last year on my Nook and received a hardback copy for Christmas, which was great because it’s a book I’ll read again. Frayn is both a novelist and a playwright. He’s the genius behind the farce “Noises Off,” and “Skios” is a comic novel in the great farce tradition. Dozens of cases of mistaken identity and confusion leading to some great laughs. It’s simply a lot of fun.
•“The Black Count” by Tom Reiss. Everyone knows that Alexander Dumas wrote “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo,” but I didn’t know that his father was born in the Caribbean as the son of a slave and rose to be a general in the French army in the era of the revolution and Napoleon’s empire. Reiss is one of those biographers who keeps you wanting more.
•“The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” by Stephen Greenblatt. The author overreaches sometimes, but he unearths aspects of history I never knew a thing about. You’ll never look at the Middle Ages and the Renaissance quite the same way after reading “The Swerve.”
•“The Signal and the Noise” by Nate Silver. This is from the number-cruncher whose analysis of political polls has proved to be so on target. Silver provides real help in sorting out all the data and information that comes at us so we can find the signals in all that noise. It’s a little dry, but it’s good.
And that leaves me with the book I’m reading right now, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” by Ethan Zuckerman.
Ethan’s a family friend through our eldest daughters. He’s also brilliant and happens to be director of the MIT Center for Civic Media. I’m still sorting through his arguments, but he’s changing the way I view globalization, the Internet, and a host of other issues. Good stuff.
None of these suit your fancy? That’s fine.
But the library has plenty more where these came from, and there’s nothing better on a summer afternoon than to grab a good book and disappear between its covers.[[In-content Ad]]