Some Summer Reading Material

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Summertime, and the reading is easy. As we head to cooler climes for holiday, as the Brits say, here are a dozen books to fill those leisurely afternoons by the pool or wherever you choose to get some down time.

• My daughter Meredith, editorial director for the Birth.Movies.Death website (birthmoviesdeath.com) and for Alamo Drafthouse, sent my Beautiful Mystery Companion for Mother’s Day the first two novels in the Dublin Murder Squad series, by Tana French. I beat my BMC to the books and started with In The Woods. I was hooked. Each book has a different protagonist, but they all share a connection. Meredith just finished reading all six in the series. She hopes French is not stopping at six, as am I. The third novel, Faithful Place, will be in my carry-on luggage. Mere, who regularly reviews books and film for Birth.Movies.Death, wrote, “It is, without question, the best detective series I’ve read in years, perhaps ever.

Since I can’t put it any more eloquently than she did, here’s in part what Mere had to say: “The mysteries are wonderfully constructed, but most impressive here is French’s writing: elegant, atmospheric, even poetic. The characters are actualized and incredibly complicated, and thanks to French’s novel approach to protagonists, we see every character from multiple perspectives as they see themselves and as others see them.”

If you love a good mystery and fine writing, pick up a couple of the Dublin Murder Squad series.

• Switching gears, I recently finished Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell. This is a nicely nuanced biography of a complicated and tormented man. Nixon often was brilliant but absolutely unscrupulous at the same time. That helped him rise in just six years from an obscure congressman to vice president and, improbably, after his crushing loss to Kennedy, eight years later to president.

I collect modern-day presidential biographies, and this makes a half-dozen or so about Nixon, whose resignation I celebrated with cheap champagne in 1974. Farrell uses fresh reporting to produce the finest biography of Nixon yet, in my view.

• Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir by J.D. Vance, who returned to the poor Appalachian region from which he escaped after receiving a law degree from Yale. Vance’s people are among those who believe the American dream is no longer possible for them, in part because of economic injustice but also because of self-inflicted wounds: alcoholism, drug use, physical abuse. I read this right after the election to try to understand the group of voters that helped push Donald Trump to victory by winning the Midwest.

Vance still bears the baggage of his upbringing, despite his considerable success in escaping it. As he wrote, “For those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”

•  The Natchez Burning Trilogy by Greg Iles consists of more than 2,000 pages of suspense, drama and plot changes that will make your neck swivel. It is reportedly being made into an Amazon television series. I will be waiting. Set in Natchez, Mississippi, the protagonist is Penn Cage, a former prosecutor and best-selling novelist who is now the mayor of the city in which he was raised — and where his father is a beloved doctor. The series includes members of a violent racist cult that committed horrible crimes in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose violence continues into the present.

There are few multi-thousand page trilogies that can hold my interest for the entire time, but this trilogy is one of them. The latest, Mississippi Blood, has just been published. I knocked it out in three or four evenings. Unlike the Dublin Murder Squad series, one must read these books in order. First on the list is Natchez Burning. Bring sunscreen if you’re reading at the beach. You might not get up for a while.

• Finally, there is American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin, the story of the kidnapping, crimes and ultimate trial of Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress. Toobin, a staff writer for The New Yorker and legal analyst for CNN, recounts the saga that kept many us gripped to our televisions and avidly reading newspapers for months in 1974 and later, as Hearst went from being a victim to apparently — at least for a time — a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag collection of “revolutionaries” with violent tendencies. She was finally captured, tried and sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979. Hearst went back to being a society woman who raises high-dollar dogs.

I hope you check out some or all of these fine reads. Enjoy the rest of your summer.

 

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