It's summer. You promised to become computer literate, but suddenly you remember that even Bill Gates chose to write a book. You've struggled with virtual reality, but now you figure you'd rather relax with a novel. You've surfed the Internet, but you find yourself longing to read in a hammock.
Meanwhile, the best-seller list sounds more like the McLaughlin Group than the literary round table. The authors yell: "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot!" or "We're Right, They're Wrong!" And you can't believe that there are still two - count 'em, two - O.J. Simpson books in the top 10.Not to worry. As a public service, I once again offer an alternative and quirky list of books that have nothing in common except that I read and enjoyed them.
To begin with, "Snow Falling on Cedars" is as good a vehicle as any to help you out of the everyday speed zone. David Guterson sinks slowly into island life in midcentury Puget Sound. The backdrop of this story is a murder trial, but it evokes the deeper mysteries of a tightly knit and lethally divided community where "no one trod too easily on the emotions of another" until forced to.
There is a very different and deserted island setting for Amelia Earhart's posthumous life story. "I Was Amelia Earhart" opens in 1937 after the aviatrix's mysterious disappearance. But Jane Mendelsohn's reverie on the "loneliest of heroines" touches women of our own time who push at the edges of fame and expectations and only discover real life after they crash.
In some ways, Vienna Daniels, the heroine of Katherine Mosby's novel was also a deserted woman. "Private Altars" is the tale of an educated urban bride who arrived in a small West Virginia town in the late 1920s. This designated eccentric, a recluse with two children, is the central figure of a truly Gothic Southern story.
To complete this trilogy of women is the elderly Italian narrator in Susanna Tamaro's extended letter to an estranged granddaughter. "Follow Your Heart" trips sometimes over the threshold between sentiment and sentimentality. But the grandmother bequeaths a wisdom as earthy and well-tested as the family's cake pan.
Having wallowed happily in "The Stone Diaries" last year, I've begun working my way back through Carol Shields' earlier novels with delight. "The Republic of Love" is a thoroughly modern and, therefore, skeptical love story of a thrice-married 40-year-old DJ and a never-married folklorist.
This is "just a love story" the way "The Stone Diaries" was "just a life story." "Love," Shields writes, "belongs in an amateur operetta, on the inside of a jokey greeting card, or in the annals of an old-fashioned poetry society. . . It's the one thing in the world everyone wants, but for some reason people are obliged to pretend love is trifling and foolish. . . "
Love makes only the most cameo appearances on the nonfiction list this year, overwhelmed by scandal and celebrity, screeds and telltales. But there is good news as well.
There has been a renaissance of political books from the dormant left-of-center. One is E.J. Dionne's book on progressive politics, a treatise more thoughtful and certainly hopeful than its title: "They Only Look Dead."