This Week’s Recommended Books:
I wrapped up reading Tim O’Brien’s July July, a recommended book from last week via a longish in-bed read on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I can’t recommend it enough. The story of a class reunion of sixties college friends thirty years later might leave you cold if, well, the 60’s do. But like O’Brien’s seminal book The Things They Carried, this one easily outdistances its demographic and deftly becomes more about capital letter themes like Aging, Memory, and The Passage of Time. The characters won’t become your best friends but there’s enough about them to hook you in. By the end, you’re weeping for all of them and anyone you’ve ever known who gave up on life way before it gave up on them.
July, July by Tim O’Brien (Houghton Mifflin, $26 in Hardcover, 322 pp.)
July, July also whet my appetize for more novels built on brisk, confident storytelling. As I do every few months, I then turned to mystery writer Laura Lippman, whose career I’ve been following in a freaky, stalkerish way since we worked together at the Baltimore Sun about 8 years ago and her dad was a professor of mine at Johns Hopkins. Laura had just begun work on her first mystery, Baltimore Blues.
Since then, Laura’s written 6 novels each better than the one before. Her heroine is Tess Monaghan, a private eye with a quick mind, a propensity for rowing, and a quiet cynicism for most of humanity. All of Tess adventures are set in Baltimore, where her dad is a liquor license inspector, her flirtatious aunt runs a feminist bookstore and her boyfriend Crow is a local musician.
Since I’m only an amateur mystery reader, I tend to stick to books that have a great sense of setting and a protagonist whom, even if I don’t like, I’m intrigued by. Tess I probably have an out-and-out crush on, even though I know she’d be terrible for me. And I went to college in Baltimore, the wackiest city on the east coast, so I love its trivia and lore.
These things might mean nothing to you but I’d recommend Laura Lippman’s books anyway. They’re fun, intelligents reads, bordering on literary, but swift of plot enough to head your fingers clinched around their covers. The latest, The Last Place is on my night table now.
The Last Place by Laura Lippman
(William Morrow, $23.95 in Hardcover, 341 pp.)
During my sick week, I had to cancel appointments and events all over tarnation but I was most disappointed by missing Douglass Rushkoff’s tour stops in San Francisco. Rushkoff, a respected technology author and critic, is the author of the new book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, which just hit the shelves. In it, Rushkoff has written the book that I wanted to someday and has probably done it better.
Nothing Sacred accuses contemporary Judaism of losing its focus on spirituality in favor for an obsession with combating inter-marriage and raising money. It’s a criticism long overdue. Rushkoff also presents bibliolical and halahahic (according to Jewish Law) evidence why this is a patently unjewish mode of thinking and offers alternative he calls Open Source Judaism. In Open Source Judaism, Judaism’s sacred texts are constantly evolving based on the commtenary, thoughts and ideas of those make them part of their spiritual life.
Though I haven’t dived yet and can’t quite imagine how Rushkoff’s ideas will work in practice, I’m fascinated by the project itself. And we are more than ready of a thorough reevaluation of what it means to be an American Jew. Bravo to Doug Rushkoff for his courage and conviction.
Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism by Douglass Rushkoff
(Crown Books, $24.95 in Hardcover, 242 pp.)