Beach Books Reviewed

For vacation reading this year I took along the books listed below. I’ve annotated the list with my thoughts on each.

• In Fed We Trust by David Wessel. Recommended by son Josh so I could “understand what he writes about all day.”

  I have to admit I got this one mostly so I wouldn’t have to admit to son Josh I thought it sounded about as interesting as watching C-SPAN. But it was a surprisingly good read. Not a bated breath page turner by any means, but if you’d like to know what the current financial crisis is all about, it’s worth checking out.

• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Imagine the world without people.

  Didn’t get to this one.

• A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. Hornsby’s a good writer, always worth a read.

  It’d been a while since I’d read a Hornsby book and I’d forgotten what a stunningly good writer he is. A Long Way Down is narrated by four different characters, so it took me a while to remember who each character is when the narration switched. But once I got over that I was taken again with Hornsby’s writing ability. Time and again I would read a passage and think how he’s captured perfectly a thought or emotion. That was usually followed by blinding jealousy wishing I could write tone-perfect like that.

• The Great Gatsby. You know who wrote it. Son Josh is always quoting it at me, and it’s one of the many holes my reading of American Literature.

  I hate to be ignorant and uncultured, but I just don’t think Gatsby is all that good. Josh explained some of the themes to me. “Daisy represents every unobtainable desire you have.” Yeah, yeah, but Daisy is such an unattractive character to me, as are Nick, Tom, Gatsby, and practically everyone else in the book. I can’t get past my personal distaste of the characters.

• The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland. You can’t go wrong with Coupland.

  And you won’t go wrong with this one. Wow, what a good book. Like reading Nick Hornsby I just look up and think, “man, I wish I could write like that.”

• The Dead Hand by David Hoffman. Pulitzer Prize winning story about the Cold War. The success of this book is due in part to Josh Zumbrun, see page 486.

  If you’re like me you thought Ronald Reagan was a grinning dolt, but were never interested in politics enough to really read up on the Reagan years to find out. After reading Hoffman’s incredibly detailed book on the end of the Cold War, I’m convinced my opinion was right. Reagan was a complete and utter fool. Hoffman seems oddly to be pro-Reagan, which makes me think either Hoffman or I are missing something.
  

  Hoffman’s book is well-written. It’s not exactly a Tom Clancy page-turner, but it does hold your interest. Actually a lot of the topics are ones Clancy and others have fictionalized in novels. Like a Clancy novel, The Dead Hand is pretty long and dense, but it’s worth picking it up and plowing through at least part of it to have the horror of the Cold War made apparent, and to marvel that we managed not to destroy ourselves.
  

  I worked for years on some of the weapon systems described in Hoffman’s book. I’ve been out of that business for a few years now and I’m not going back. I ain’t gonna study war no more.

• A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke. An early Robicheaux novel that I haven’t read.

  Didn’t get to this one.

• The Blue Horse by Rick Bass. I have no idea what this is. It was on the new fiction shelf and had a cool cover. That’s much the same method I use to pick wine.

  The Blue Horse was lyrical and poetic and beautiful and evocative in places. In other places it was just obscure. And in other places it was as flat and wrong as me trying to sing (and that’s about as flat and wrong as you can get). Overall, I don’t want to work that hard when I read. What does the blue horse represent? Something I’m sure, but I don’t want to think hard enough to puzzle it out. What’s with the weird family that lets them hunt on their land? They’re an almost cartoonish depiction of a Mennonite community. His descriptions of them struck me as clumsy and tone deaf for whatever point he was trying to get across.
  

  I think a lot of it was about middle-aged men facing their mortality and the failures in their lives. If you know me, you’re thinking, “that’s a book about you Chuck!” And you’re right. I prefer to read Dave Barry, who covers the same topics, but makes you laugh out loud about it.

• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. What’s not to like about the memoirs of a befuddled, beer-swilling, travel writer? Seriously, Bryson is constantly amusing (and this book is often poignant as well), almost as amusing as:
• I’ll Mature When I’m Dead by Dave Barry. And there’s no one funnier than Dave Barry, so the list ends here.

This book didn’t disappoint. If you’re 50-ish and feeling it, read this one. It’ll make you laugh about your condition, unlike the Blue Horse.