Season's Readings: Choice books

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Season's Readings: Choice books

Monday, November 19, 2001

By JOHN MARSHALL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER BOOKS REPORTER

Books are thoughtful gifts, books are insightful gifts, books are economical gifts.

Books are, in short, perfect gifts for these troubled times.

Books have already demonstrated these considerable virtues in the aftermath of the haunting tragedy and the altered world of Sept. 11. One of the first places where stunned customers returned was bookstores, a safe community gathering spot with helpful wares that seemed appropriate somehow.

"When shopping for shoes seemed obscene," says Michael Coy of M. Coy Books in downtown Seattle, "bookstores seemed OK."

Customers have continued to return to bookstores in the ensuing months, even amid the dire headlines and the slumping economy. But the uncertain days of the holidays loom and booksellers may be holding their collective breaths more than most retailers this season.

That's because booksellers earn between 30 and 35 percent of their annual sales in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a time especially crucial to the independent bookstores without the deep-pocket resources of the national chains. The rest of the book retailing year is mostly a matter of keeping afloat in hopes of making it to the holidays.

Roger Page, the well-named owner of Island Books on Mercer Island, stresses, "The holidays provide 35 percent of my business, 80 percent of my profits. So much is going on in December that you cannot only pay the rent and other fixed costs, you can end up with something left over. It's very important."

Page is so concerned with holiday business that he recently set off on a reconnaissance mission to all of his major independent book-selling competitors in the Seattle market, with this object: to make sure that no other store was stocking some great new book for holiday giving that had somehow escaped his notice.

Holiday buyers face much the same challenge as Page in seeking out the perfect book gift. There are so many book offerings that the sheer numbers can prove daunting.

That's why the Post-Intelligencer Life and Arts section is devoting this entire week to finding the best holiday books, with different categories featured on different days. This Thanksgiving week books coverage has become a holiday tradition at this newspaper, our gift to the avid readers of this book-loving region.

Today's coverage is an overview, one writer's choices of some of this year's outstanding books that would make excellent gifts during this holiday season. These selections come from all genres, with some authors and publishers who are well-known, some obscure. What they share are a high quotient of interest and excellence:

CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL

By Glen David Gould

(Hyperion, 483 pages, $24.95)

This has been a fine fall for fans of the first novel, with much of the attention being lavished on Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and Leif Enger's "Peace Like a River." But this inaugural effort by a Hollywood screenwriter also is winning its devotees, with its rich re-creation of the 1920s world and its real characters drawn from history (the technique done so well in E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime"). Gould's enthralling story focuses on magician Charles Carter (Carter the Great) who becomes a suspect in the mysterious death of President Warren G. Harding. Magic imbues many pages of this novel.

TEN POEMS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE

By Roger Housden

(Harmony Books, 118 Pages, $14)

Poetry has particular resonance in these trying times of uncertainty and short attention spans. That is demonstrated once again by this irresistible little gift book in which a Northern California author offers insightful life lessons from 10 timeless poems by such fine writers as Walt Whitman, Galway Kinnell, Pablo Neruda and Rumi. "Good poetry," Housden writes, "has the power to start a fire in your life."

THIS COLD HEAVEN

By Gretel Ehrlich

(Pantheon, 356 pages, $27.50)

The frigid, barren lands still hold their eerie appeal. Witness the recent outpouring of book and film homages to explorer Ernest Shackleton. Ehrlich, one of the American West's finest writers on nature, chronicles her solo travels in Greenland in this stark, vivid and poetic account, much of it in engaging first person. "For seven years," Ehrlich writes, "I used the island as a looking glass: part window, part mirror."

THE NEW BILL JAMES HISTORICAL BASEBALL ABSTRACT

By Bill James

(Free Press, 970 pages, $45)

On the heels of a glorious baseball season comes this first complete revision of a 1986 classic work that is an undisputed favorite among baseball cognoscente. This is a remarkable volume filled with history, players, humor, opinions, stats, surprising comparisons (why Craig Biggio is "the best player in major league baseball today ... contributing far more to his team than Ken Griffey Jr. ever has"). The baseball authority from Kansas City hits a grand slam for this year and many years to come.

THE FUTURE OF IDEAS

By Lawrence Lessig

(Random House, 268 pages, $30)

The incredible potential of the Internet is facing a critical crossroad, according to one of the country's leading legal experts. Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University, argues that a wide variety of increasing limitations threaten the village "commons" of the cyber world. Lessig's thesis (called "the 'Silent Spring' of ideas" by one admirer) is timely, tough-minded and cogently argued. It should be of great interest both to those in the tech elite and the rest of us affected by their decisions.

THE GIFT TO BE SIMPLE

By Bill Coleman

(Chronicle Books, 119 pages, $25)

Simpler times and timeless verities hold even more appeal in these complex, contradictory days. That is demonstrated again in this glorious collection of photographs of the Pennsylvania Amish by a photographer who has devoted a quarter century to capturing their timeless lives in evocative, yet respectful color photographs. Here are a community barn-raising and barefoot children on country lanes, fresh-baked bread and well-ordered farms captured in ethereal light.

ISLAND: THE COMPLETE STORIES

By Alistair MacLeod

(W.W. Norton, 431 pages, $25.95)

One of Canada's greatest living writers had been a virtual unknown in the States until publication last year of his well-reviewed novel, "No Great Mischief." But MacLeod's sterling reputation in his native land was built on short stories that depict life on the remote Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. This impressive volume collects all 16 of his resonant stories with their graceful language and their complex examinations of the family dynamic in a rugged landscape.

52 MCGS.

By Robert McG.

Thomas (Scribner, 192 pages, $20)

Writing obituaries has long been regarded as a kind of Elbe exile on most newspapers, the place where reporters either serve their thankless apprenticeship or cruise off toward the retirement sunset. But Robert McG. Thomas, a veteran on The New York Times, settled into the beat in 1995 and revived the final exit story as an art form. He brought an uncommon humanity and humor to obituaries, especially those of eccentrics and other footnotes to history (the man who invented Kitty Litter, for example). Here are some of his finest deadline efforts, along with a McG.-style summation of the writer himself, who passed into obituary land in 2000.

HOOP ROOTS

By John Edgar Wideman

(Houghton Mifflin, 242 pages, $24)

Wideman, one of the country's finest African American writers, has produced a slam-dunk memoir of "basketball, race and love." The former captain of the University of Pennsylvania's five does a creative jazz riff on the game that he describes as "fluid, flexible and as open to interpretation as a song." Baseball and golf are usually the sports that evoke the most literate writing, but Wideman's memoir elevates the game of asphalt and hardwood to another level.

POETRY SPEAKS

(Sourcebooks, 322 pages, $49.95)

Who would ever have guessed that it is actually possible to hear Walt Whitman read his own poetry? Or Alfred Lord Tennyson? Or Robert Browning? But this remarkable coffee-table book provides those unexpected thrills on three compact discs that are included with the book itself. It includes readings by such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke and William Carlos Williams. And each of the 42 poets included on the discs has a chapter inside the book itself, several of his or her poems, plus an introductory essay on the poet written by some of today's finest poets (Jorie Graham, C.K. Williams, Galway Kinnell). This is a volume to delight longtime lovers of poetry and to spark new love for poetry, especially among the young.

APRIL 1865

By Jay Winik

(HarperCollins, 480 pages, $32.50)

It may seem now that September 2001 changed the United States more than any other month in American history, but historian Jay Winik creates a compelling portrait of April 1865 as "the month that saved America." Here are the last days of the Civil War and the death of Abraham Lincoln portrayed with the detail of a novel and the pace of a thriller. And Winik demonstrates how the outcome of history can hang in the desperate balance, with other possibilities almost as likely as what occurred.

PEANUTS: THE ART

OF CHARLES M. SCHULZ

Edited and designed by Chip Kidd (Pantheon, 336 pages, $29.95)

This is a match made in graphics heaven, the art of the beloved creator of "Peanuts" selected by the leading book designer in the country. Here are rare early strips before the characters assumed their familiar look (Snoopy walking on all fours), drafts for assorted strips, various Schulz memorabilia (high-school yearbook entry, drawing tools left as they were after his last strip), plus glorious color photography and brilliant design throughout. This utterly captivating book is a keepsake valentine to a beloved icon of American life.

KINGDOM OF SHADOWS

By Alan Furst

(Random House, 272 pages, $11.95)

At long last in American paperback editions, the cult favorite novels of former Seattleite Alan Furst are poised at last for the wide popularity they deserve. Furst renders the European world on the eve of World War II in smoky atmospherics, an edgy time when lives were on the line and the unthinkable passed for the norm. "Kingdom of the Shadows" focuses on Nicholas Morath, Hungarian aristocrat and veteran of the Great War, who enlists in a series of shadowy missions against fascists in his native country from his adopted home of Paris, a city rife with intrigue but also holding its breath. Furst's delicious novels are addictive.

P-I books reporter John Marshall can be reached at 206-448-8170 or johnmarshall@seattlepi.com.

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