July 9, 2002
By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
To quote the Bard, "summer's
lease has all too short a date." So, with so many good books and so little
time, we're diving into the July installment of our Summer Reading series.
Our 10 essayists this time around also have shared favorite books that
encompass varied themes.
For instance, Mary Mitchell
found inspiration and self-awareness in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes
Were Watching God; Andrew Herrmann joyfully bonded with his boyhood in
the pages of Franklyn E. Meyer's Me and Caleb, and Marlene Gelfond was
moved by shared experiences of her own Jewish heritage in Bernard Malamud's
The Assistant.
We hope you enjoy July's
selections. And thanks for your feedback--about books that have touched
your lives as well as books recommended by our essayists last month.
One reader commented on
Andrea Hanis' June selection, A Prayer for Owen Meany, writing that "your
description of the feelings you felt was a great reminder of my own destiny
or faith."
Please feel free to continue
to e-mail us with your thoughts (summerreading@suntimes.com), and by all
means, keep reading.
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
(Ballantine Books, $17.47)
"Hello, my name is Inigo
Montoya. You killed my father--prepare to die."
Tell me you don't remember
that challenge from William Goldman's The Princess Bride.Chances
are, you first heard it in the film version of Goldman's fantasy fairy
tale. But I fell in love with the book years before Rob Reiner ever thought
about adapting the charming, clever novel for the big screen.
I was 13 when my brother
presented me with his dog-eared paperback copy of the book, which was first
published in 1972. I had just broken my arm and had already gone through
all my "kid" books. I remember grimacing when he described it as "fantasy,"
but I was bored enough to crack it open.
It didn't take long to get
hooked on Goldman's tale. And when I finished the book later that evening,
I remember feeling sad--not because there wasn't a happy ending (there
is!), but because I missed the characters already. I wanted to read more
about the lovely Princess Buttercup and her Farmboy Wesley. I wanted to
hear more of tenderhearted giant Fezzik's shy rhymes.
And, being a goofy kid with
a big crush on some impossibly good-looking and uninterested boy, I needed
to believe that "true love is the greatest thing in the world," and that
some devoted hunk would answer "as you wish" to all my requests.
My arm has long since healed,
but I like to revisit that book every so often. It takes me back to a time
when life's biggest complication was a broken bone, not a broken heart--which
we all know takes much longer to heal.
Jae-Ha Kim is a features reporter.
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
(Perennial Classics, $13)
It was November, almost 30
years ago, and Jewish Book Month. I looked over our bookshelves for authors--Saul
Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth--and ended up
pulling out A Malamud Reader, a collection of short stories and
novellas by the Jewish writer Bernard Malamud.
My cousin advised me to
read Malamud's The Assistant, the story of a beaten-down 60-year-old grocer,
his disappointed wife and their devoted daughter. The three struggle to
exist in post-World War II New York, where they run a grocery-delicatessen--an
experience that mirrored the lives of many families I knew in a similar
neighborhood on Chicago's West Side.
I sensed a new chill in
the air as I read in the quiet kitchen of our suburban home, occasionally
glancing out at the last golden and burgundy leaves falling from our majestic
trees. The book begins, "The early November street was dark though night
had ended, but the wind, to the grocer's surprise, already clawed."
I sank into the dark, cold
life of a family trying to eke out a living. Their only son has died, and
their daughter, Helen, works full time to help the family while attending
night school. After her emotionally distant love affair with a promising
law student, a strange, lonely gentile man running from his dark past wanders
into the store and offers to help the ailing grocer.
His presence arouses Helen,
and their attraction becomes unstoppable. Both yearn for a better life,
so against her parents' wishes and her own doubts, Helen slowly moves toward
him.
Malamud's characters ring
with realism. I could hear the familiar Jewish immigrant inflection in
their speech as well as the pain in their lives.
Marlene Gelfond is an
editorial assistant in the features department.
Me and Caleb by Franklyn E. Meyer
(Follett Publishing, out-of-print but available used and at area libraries)
As a grade-schooler, I liked
how words turned into sentences turned into paragraphs turned into information.
Mostly, it was bloodless, soulless information, though.
Then came Me and Caleb,
a 1962 chronicle of a pair of half-pint anarchists whose daily battle against
adolescent boredom was milk-through-your-nostrils funny.
Written by Florida schoolteacher
Franklyn E. Meyer, the book stars Caleb, a nose-picker prone to flicking
his boogers onto the backs of window fans, and the older brother narrator
Bud, whose idea of a good time is putting his teenage sister's bikini on
the family dog Petunia.
They were the anti-Hardy
Boys, which made them seem so dead-on real.
The book and its sequel,
Me and Caleb Again, follow the pair as they romp through Missouri's Ozarks,
but the setting could have very well been my own playground of northeast
Lake County ravines, old farm fields and the swimming pits hidden inside
Illinois Beach State Park.
I'm not alone in my appreciation.
One fan writes on Amazon.com: "completely politically incorrect and a total
joy.''
Online auctions reveal middle-age
men bidding hundreds of dollars for pristine copies.
Me and Caleb taught me not
only about reading for fun but living for it, too.
Andrew Herrmann is a news reporter.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
(Grove Press, $14)
I used to think I was well
read, that is until I met my fiance, Don. After countless times answering
in the negative when asked, "Have you ever read ...," I feared that we
would never be able to discuss literature, until one day, he pulled A
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole from my bookshelf. Dunces
is a rip-roaringly funny novel that my sister turned me on to years ago.
Ignatius J. Reilly--the
slovenly, socially inept but hyper-intelligent hero of the story--is a
larger-than-life character who rambles through New Orleans seeking out
the "proper geometry and theology" to support his ideological worldview.
His brain steeped in Medieval philosophy and his pyloric valve a constant
irritation, Ignatius spends his days doing menial work, eating junk food,
railing against the modern world and writing down his own philosophical
rants in an ever-growing pile of Big Chief tablets.
The cast of characters adding
to Ignatius' misadventures is endlessly hilarious, including his long-suffering
mother; his liberal, crusading, sex-obsessed New York girlfriend Myrna;
the elderly, hard-of-hearing, wannabe retiree Miss Trixie; the bumbling
Officer Mancuso; Bourbon Street stripper Darlene, and the broom-wielding
janitor Jones, just to name a few. (Steven Soderbergh is slated to begin
making a movie of the book in the fall.)
I recently had the pleasure
of listening to the book on tape while vacationing with Don, where we joyously
bonded through our shared passion for Toole's work. (Sadly, Toole died
in 1969. The book was published, through the efforts of his mother, in
1980, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His only other novel, The
Neon Bible, was also published posthumously, in 1989.)
Laughter and books are two
great gifts in and of themselves; to get both at once is a rare treat.
Teresa Budasi is the assistant editor of WeekendPlus.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
(Perennial Classics, $13.05)
Zora Neale Hurston and I
are kindred spirits.
I didn't know for sure until
one steamy August day in Atlanta when I wandered into the annual Arts Festival.
There, and I swore I'd never do such a thing, I stopped by a reader decked
out in African garb and let him throw the cowrie shells.
Among other things, he told
me my female ancestral spirit is Hurston. Made sense to me.
Since reading Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God in an African-American literature class,
I have felt a special bond with the Harlem Renaissance writer.
Through the voice of Janie
Crawford, she gave black women license to live our way. Janie saw hope
in the passionate love of a good man. And she wouldn't let the bad men
she encountered along the way, what other folks thought, or even time,
take that dream away from her. And so when love finally came in the form
of a much younger man, Tea Cake, she wasn't too beaten down to recognize
it.
Written at a time when social
protest dominated the black literary scene, Hurston's novel is an enduring
reminder of the power of love--to heal, to cleanse, to nurture, to save.
I've read Their Eyes
Are Watching God several times and I savor Hurston's simple, poetic
language like tasty morsels of food.
But it is her insight into
the metamorphosis of a black woman's love that keeps me returning to this
celebrated novel.
Mary Mitchell is a member
of the editorial board.
The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
(Anchor Books, $12.95)
From the outside, Marian's
life seems complete. She's a young woman with a decent job, a good-looking
fiance and friends who keep her socially occupied. But inside, she's a
mess. Her job is stupefying, her friends are challenging, she fears marriage
might consume her and she's fighting an attraction to a weird guy she recently
met.
Then she develops a bizarre
eating disorder where all food--even cake!--becomes unappealing ("God,"
she thinks. "I hope it's not permanent; I'll starve to death.").
Despite her problems, Marian
remains upbeat. Convinced she's hallucinating at one point, she thinks,
"So I'm finally going mad, like everybody else. What a nuisance. Though
I suppose it will be a change.''
Is Marian actually mad,
or is she a victim of our crazy society? Margaret Atwood answers that question
to my satisfaction in The Edible Woman, her first novel. I'm a huge
Atwood fan, and when I first read this book some 15 years ago I was convinced
I was Marian (despite having never eyed a cake I couldn't devour). But
I hadn't thought about her in many years, until recently, when a close
friend got married. I wondered: Would I still relate to Marian today? How
much has society changed since I first read this book? How much have I
changed?
Not far into my second reading,
I got my answers. They came during a fight between Marian and her fiance,
Peter. Here's a bit of it:
"The trouble with you is,"
Peter said savagely, "you're just rejecting your femininity."
"Oh, SCREW my femininity,"
Marian shouted. "Femininity has nothing to do with it. You were just being
plain ordinary rude!"
My answers: Yes, not enough
and apparently not at all. I laughed, remembering why I love this book.
And why I love reading Atwood, in the summertime, or any time at all.
Carol Slezak is a sports
columnist.
Independence Day by Richard Ford
(Vintage Books, $14.00)
Richard Ford is so confident
of his powers in the 1995 novel Independence Day, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
sequel to his wonderful 1986 book The Sportswriter, that he makes a real
estate transaction the major engine of suspense: Will Joe and Phyllis Markham,
reluctant refugees from Vermont, have the sense to jump at the one house
they can afford in the volatile housing market in Haddam, N.J.?
As the book opens, Frank
Bascombe, a former sportswriter, now real estate agent and divorced dad,
is looking forward to a road trip on the Fourth of July weekend with his
teenage son to, among other destinations, the Baseball Hall of Fame in
Cooperstown, N.Y., "the ur-father-son meeting ground."
What he traverses as well
in a few days is a familiar, anxious but also very funny American landscape
of missed connections and unsatisfying comforts, as Bascombe comes up against
the dead-ends that his choices have sent him toward.
Running through the story
are Frank's phone calls to the Markhams, to see whether they have passed
far enough through the emotional wringer to be ready to bid on that house.
I first read Independence
Day over a Fourth of July weekend years ago, and it was so entertaining,
so well done and, by the end, so compelling, that in June every year I
start thinking about how much fun it would be to re-read.
Working with the most ordinary
elements of modern life, Ford has fashioned a masterpiece about a man who
would like to connect, if only connecting didn't require so much commitment.
Delia O'Hara is a features reporter.
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
(Penguin Classics, $6.95)
I was perusing the Oak Park
library shelves, looking for a page turner, when the blurb on a 19th century
novel grabbed my attention. The Moonstone, gushed T.S. Eliot, was "the
first and greatest of English detective novels."
Wilkie Collins, a close
friend of Charles Dickens--and in my opinion a better writer--wrote The
Moonstone. It's about the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful heiress'
fabulous yellow diamond. The story is told by different narrators, including
the housemaid, the butler and the detective. Lurking outside are Hindu
priests who have been searching for the diamond for years.
The Moonstone also
is a Victorian era love story, without the soft-porn sex that pollutes
so many best sellers. Collins' masterpiece may not be the greatest mystery
ever written, but it certainly puts John Grisham, Sara Paretsky, David
Baldacci, etc., to shame.
Collins showed that a novel
can be compulsively readable without excessive violence, four-letter words,
preposterous plot lines and evil government conspiracies. I wish there
were more like him today.
Jim Ritter is the Sun-Times'
health reporter.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
(Beacon Press, $13)
Science fiction doesn't need
to include aliens or creepy-crawlers to be engaging.
Octavia E. Butler proves
this with her broad selection of books that employ elements of science
fiction to address issues that impact the African-American experience.
My favorite is Kindred,
a book about Dana, a black woman living in 1976 Los Angeles. Dana time-travels
to 1815 to save a small, red-haired boy named Rufus on Maryland's Eastern
shore. The connection: Rufus is the future slave owner whose rape of Dana's
great-grandmother begins our heroine's lineage.
While many feel the spirits
of their ancestors in their modern-day lives, Butler supports this notion
in her captivating story line.
During Dana's travels between
the past and the present, readers learn how she assumes the role of a slave
to survive, how she endures whippings, how she keeps from being raped and
how she fights for freedom by attempting to escape.
The experiences--all so
harrowing--affect her enough that she internalizes the pain in her present-day
life.
Reading the passages touched
my soul. Through Butler's eloquence, I placed myself in Dana's world and
started reflecting on the struggles of my ancestors.
And for this, I'm grateful.
I was better able to understand the impact of slavery on my life even now,
more than 150 years after the era Dana visits.
Lisa Lenoir is the fashion editor.
Scarface by Paul Monette
(Berkley Books, out-of-print but available used and in libraries)
Most movie novelizations
read like clip jobs that uninspired authors crank out to pay the rent.
When Paul Monette accepted the assignment to novelize "Scarface," it must
have seemed like a particularly thankless task because he was following
a screenplay written by Hollywood superstar Oliver Stone, not to mention
the 1932 original version.
But Monette found ways to
improve on the acclaimed screen epic about a thug named Tony Montana (portrayed
so memorably by Al Pacino), cast out of Castro's jails as a traitor to
the revolution and onto the streets of Miami, where he gorged on the American
Dream until he choked on its excess.
While the film begins with
Tony arriving in Florida and being grilled by immigration authorities,
the novel first paints a riveting portrait of the Havana street urchin
starving for a better life. "Now and then you saw a man in jail who was
born with nothing to lose," Monette wrote. "A man like this didn't make
deals. He didn't sleep, and he didn't dream. He just waited for the next
chance. And when it finally came, he'd kill the whole world if it stood
in his way."
Monette's list of credits
includes several novelizations of macho action-adventure flicks. His own
novels, though, were based on gay themes, most commonly a man caring for
his HIV-infected lover. The author's own life was cut short by AIDS in
1995.
Monette's spellbinding tale
convinces readers that the author knows this character inside and out,
and that the lowlife who washes up on the beach in Florida as part of the
Cuban crime wave would have the ruthless cunning to be running a multimillion-dollar
drug empire six months later.
It's great reading--and
a great reminder to writers that no assignment is too mundane to give it
all the talent and dedication at your command.
Jeff Johnson is a copy
editor in the features department.
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