Customer Reviews

City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide

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4 star:		(1)
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This book is a huge collection of interesting recommendations for people who love to read. I'm enjoying my own copy, and I'm going to gift another copy to my brother for the holidays. What a great find!

Wow! A dream come true. Some of my favorite writers recommended their favorite overlooked book.

In this 367-page sturdy volume with two ribbons for bookmarking and a cloth cover are more than 160 individual reviewers writing about 201 books each has chosen for great but little-known -- or perhaps, little read --- works of literature, and what's so wonderful amid this compact offering is that almost all of the reviews are engagingly written, intimate, and make great literature by themselves.

Mark Warren, writing about Jean Paul Sartre's novel "Nausea" based on his experiences in a small town in Texas, offers an appealing piece of personal writing as he peers into the psyche of an alienated adolescence (which is himself), and is memorable apart from anything he asserts about this French novel of the mid-20th century.

Another review of Jean Rhys's "The Wide Sargasso Sea" by Ernest Hardy actually brought tears to my eyes. Writing about the novel, he says that it "sent me into a weeks-long depression the first time I read it." Later, towards the end of the review, Mr. Hardy writes, "Reading 'Wide Sargasso Sea' left me wounded, open. The impact of the book on my own politics, worldview, and writing is incalculable. It is one of my all-time favorites. And I still can't bear to reread it." Not only did this author inspire me to obtain my own copy of Jean Rhys's novel, but also he made his own words burn in my memory for a lifetime.

Another excellent and inspiring reviewer, Dale Hrabi, has made Elizabeth Smart's 1945 novel, "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept" one of the foremost books for my next purchase. It's a tragic love story, but what Dale Hrabi says about the novel is so significant and beautiful: "At times, the writing has the richness and cadence of scripture. When I slip into the book again, after a few years, I feel I have returned to the High Mass after a stint of sensible agnosticism."

Besides Elizabeth's Smart novel, this collection of reviews has brought to my attention a few other books I'd never known existed -- "Joe the Engineer" (1983) by Chuck Wachtel, a working class novel. Nobody writes the working class novel anymore. Another is "Lights Out in the Reptile House" by Jim Shepard. Move over "1984" and "Brave New World" and make room for this contemporary daymare! While I'm no great fan of Samuel Beckett's writings, the reviewer for "Gogol's Wife and Other Stories" made me want to read Tommaso Landalfi's existentialist fiction.

This collection contains reviews of non-fiction life-narratives, historical works that read like novels, and lots of excellent and fun show biz memories from Ben Hecht to Elsa Maxwell -- and this collection also reviews some books of poetry and travel writing as well.

All in all, the book, though containing nothing but book reviews, was an entertaining and insightful reading experience. There are a few duds and clunkers in the collection -- not even near misses, like the over-intellectualized review of M. K. Gandhi's "Hind Swaray" -- or the reviewer who lavished praise on a book that's about brook trout. No matter how many adjectives were used to describe the book, it was clear the audience for such a book is very limited.

Some books that are known as classics but have been forgotten were given a fresh face-lift and made tantalizingly ready for a new reading by these wonderfully descriptive and personable reviewers. Such works as "Belinda" by Maria Edgeworth (1801), "Columba" by Prosper Merimee (1840), "Bel-Ami" by Guy de Maupassant (1885) and "Cabala" by Thornton Wilder (1926) were all given a contemporary gloss that no serious fiction reader would want to ignore.

I also realized through one reviewer writing about Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" (1941) that if I really do want to understand World War I up close, Rebecca West's historical memoir is nonpareil.

Here's a little secret: I also can't wait to dive into "The Big Love" by Mrs. Florence Aadland as told to Tedd Thornway (1961). It's her tale about her 17-year-old daughter's sexual affair with Errol Flynn! Patricia Marx, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, says Mrs. Aadland's voice here is somewhere between Anita Loos and Nathaniel West, and even she cannot decide if this candid tale is literature or if it's trash!

Buy the book. It's worth every cent and makes a great reading experience.

City Secrets Books is a fabulous find for anyone who loves to read, but is bored with the bestseller list. It is the book that will keep you reading forever (and a perfect gift for the holidays)!

What a wonderful book. You know the whole three wishes thing, where you're smart and greedy enough to wish for all the wishes in the world. Three! Huh! Anyway, this book is like that. I've spent a lot of years reading voraciously, and now I'll have to live a whole lot longer!

Being someone who's often wondered about the reading habits of my favorite writers, I was delighted to pick up a copy of City Secrets Books. Featuring short essays by the likes of Oscar Hijuelos, Jim Harrison, Margot Livesey, and Scott Spencer, it not only gave me insight into the sorts of books that have influenced these author's own creations, but pretty much supplied a wonderful reading list that will keep me busy for a good long while. While some of these books are indeed obscure, the passion with which the contributors write about them makes a strong case that they don't deserve to be. I know what's going into the stockings of my bibliophile friends come this Christmas.

This is yet another great volume in the City Secrets Series. Like the other reviewers, I'm thrilled with the recommendations. The books are reviewed alphabetically by title and there is a chronological index; there's even an index of contributors. But I'm amazed at the lack of Author Index. Major oversight.