Customer Reviews

More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

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So what's the big deal about a list of books? Anyone can jot down what they've read. The big deal is this particular list maker, who flies through her lists organized to themes and moods with an infectious enthusiasm and flashes of wit (I would repeat her hilarious recommendation for changing the categorical name of "lad lit," but that would ruin the joke).

Nancy Pearl is the Ur-general reader and the Ur-librarian who has read it all. This is a sequel to the break-out hit, BOOK LUST, offering another 1,000 recommended titles. Lest you think Pearl is throwing everything she ever read onto the heap, she says that she omits the books that did not measure up. Given her broad spectrum approach, everyone will find at least one item worth reading but also something they know they disliked, so it's best to follow up her suggestions with some homework, like trolling Amazon reviews. Of the suggestions in MORE BOOK LUST, I'd read 124 and disliked perhaps 10 of those. I found about 40 new ideas to pursue, but after flipping through Amazon postings cut that list in half. Pearl recommends the "rule of 50": give a book 50 pages before giving up on it, unless you are over 50, in which case, subtract a page for every year over 50 so you don't waste any more of the reading time you have left.

Avid readers tend always to be interested in anyone else's more or less qualified opinions about books -- what to read, what other writers a fan of a particular author might enjoy, and newly discovered novelists of promise. Pearl is an ex-librarian in Seattle and a regular on NPR, and her tastes are so eclectic in both fiction and nonfiction, I can't imagine not finding suggestions here to suit almost any reader. The index is thorough, so you can search for authors and titles you already like, but this volume is really meant for browsing. Whether your interested in the politics of the 1960s, or female detective characters, or small-town life, or fiction set in Florida, or even intriguing opening lines of novels, you'll find useful leads here. (I wish she had included publishing dates though, which so many books like this seem to omit.) Pearl also includes her email address so readers can send in their own recommendations -- as so many did after her first book.

Nancy Pearl is the ultimate librarian and book-nut. This book follows in the same vein as her original Book Lust, but with different lists. Pearl provides an annotated list to each book she has enjoyed in categories such as: Best for Teens, Fantasy for Young and Old, Graphica, Libraries and Librarians, and many more. It was a quick read and I kept pen and paper handy to make my own TBR list from Pearl's findings.

Wow...this lady can READ! If she's read half of those she's recommended in two volumes, RE-read many of them, AND found the time to write these books-listing-books atop that, well...I'm truly impressed. That's a life well-lived in the world of reading.

It's all a matter of opinion, but a few of her suggestions were outright bombs where I labored to get to page 10 (Amazon probably will strike me down for saying so, but thank God the library's free). Then again, there were a few which more than made up for them-and which I'd never have tried otherwise. I was delighted to find a few of my own favorites among her lists, and some that I'd found to be blatantly missing.

The important thing is to keep reading once you find an author or a style you love. If it's not on Nancy Pearl's list, it could-and should-be on your own.

If you're looking for books to read - in my experience, there are always too many, but if you are - I'd definitely suggest borrowing Book Lust and More Book Lust from the library. (I'd say buy it, but once you extract the titles that interest you I'm not sure how much use it would be. Still, it's up to you.)

Not everyone will find all of the reading lists in the book useful, but that's really how it was meant to be read. I skipped over more than half, only reading the sections that caught my attention, and I STILL had a good eighty titles by the time I'd finished.

My one complaint would be that I grew tired of seeing the "Too good to miss" listings (of which there are many) throughout both books. They're devoted to the work of one author that Nancy Pearl considers especially good, but I found them much less useful than everything else. Probably because they're not as varied, so if I don't happen to like the sound of one author's work I've got to skip to the next part.

The moment I finished Pearl's first book, Book Lust, I reached for its sequel, More Book Lust. Pearl's lists in her first book sparked a fire within to create a diverse list of to-be-read titles and authors, which I could carry to the library on upcoming visits. I wasn't sure that she could write a more interesting set of book lists than she already had. But I am glad she never doubted it!

More Book Lust continues in the same format as its predecessor... Lists of books by title, location, or topic. Some familiar, some classics. Some nearly as new as her own 2005 publication.

There are lists for the culinary savvy and lists for kids, or adults who are kids at heart and never tire of a good kid-lit read! There are lists about war. (Notice I said lists - plural; she doesn't lump all war books into one general group but takes the time to sort them according to venue, military branch or author.) There are lists of books on topics I never dreamed of reading but now am curious to take a closer look. There are books with an international flavor and books with small-town USA plots and characters. In short, if there is a topic for a book, it has its own list in Nancy Pearl's Book Lust duo.

Pearl was a librarian and is now a noted NPR regular as well as author. She is credited with the first "book group" by launching a citywide activity in 1998 for everyone to read the same book and then come together to discuss it. Look how far that concept has reached now in towns and cities all over the country and online. Even in our own Story Circle Network, the fruits of her idea can be realized in our reading e-circle or one of the Austin area reading circles.

If you are stumped for a good read, or if you just like books so much that you feel inclined to read a book about books, More Book Lust is sure to please!

by Lee Ambrose
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

BOOK AFTERGLOW

REVIEW: Pearl, Nancy. More Book Lust: 1000 New Reading Recommendations for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason. Seattle, Sasquatch Books, 2005.

I picked up Nancy Pearl's original book to discover the fiction I may have missed over the last number of years. I had not paid much attention to fiction. I did find a few novels and short story collections that I may read, ---and thank you.
I also discovered that there were serious omissions in Ms Pearl's lists of books. I bought the second book in hopes that she might have included the works I thought were missing, but did not locate them. Therefore, I will supply a few titles she might have listed.
INDIVIDUAL WORKS
For WWI fiction, I thought Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End was the standard bearer, but it does not appear in the book lust lists. It is interesting to note that the work used to be a trilogy under the name given above, but now there are four books as part of it. Ah, things change, ---and it has been decades since I even looked into Ford's work. (The fourth novel, making it a tetralogy, is not equal in quality to the first three.) There have been so many other wars each with its own pathos that the mind tires of it. But Paul Fussell (a WWII veteran) said that WWI had a special sadness, as chronicled in his work The Great War and Modern Memory, advised to read by Ms Pearl. (By the way, if you have ever wondered what no man's land was like - the area between the trenches of the allies and the Germans in WWI - Fussell tells you in his book. I will let you discover it.)
For Science Fiction, I thought A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. was at the top of every S/F list, but Pearl overlooks it. It is the story of the reformulation of civilization in the American Southwest after a nuclear catastrophe. It mixes theology and American political theory in a potent brew.
In the Science Fiction genre, Brian Aldiss's Greybeard must be mentioned. The premise of the story is that children stop being born in the world. The resulting society in Britain and on the planet together with the eventual final resolution is spellbinding. A movie should be made from this book.
Ms Pearl describes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness four times in her first book, but not another of his novels. As fine a work as is Heart of Darkness, I think Conrad's Nostromo is nearly its equal, ---or close enough in quality to read. The death of Decoud, the Latin-American liberal patrician, is one of the best sustained literary passages in the English language. He dies from solitude, a devastating commentary on modern civilization. The book gives us an insight into the minds of our South American cousins.
I have long admired the treatment by Robert Graves of the book called The Golden Ass. It is a translation into a novel of the book known as The Transformations of Lucius Apuleius, an ancient collection of Milesian tales from Cappadocia, once part of the Roman Empire but now in Central Turkey. It is considered by some to be the primary proto-novel. The treatment of the Cupid and Psyche legend is precious. The book functions as a cautionary lesson for men not to get involved with magic, as it is the prerogative of women. Graves' book has recently been reissued.
The very title of the book, The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, indicates its ambience. That is the perfect description of the Spanish azure. It is Josephine Herbst's book of memoirs of the early decades of the 20th century.
I believe Nancy Pearl should have included The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo. The author is Japanese but wrote his book explaining the tea ceremony and its philosophical and cultural implications in unique English that is wistful and heart-felt. Kasuzo's book is number 189,165 on Amazon's rankings, and might have been listed for that reason alone. It is a cult book and on Kindle.
I would suggest you read the late 19th century book by Henry Adams titled: Democracy, an American Novel. You will discover that American politicians were as thorough sleazebags then as now. The novel is rather wooden in its character development, but I consider that to be a perfect delineation for politicians and those they associate with, and not a flaw of style.
I cannot understand why Ms Pearl failed to mention the Spanish poet and writer Juan Ramon Jimenez. He is not a writer from a past century, but modern, ---and died in 1958 in Puerto Rico where he had gone to escape the Spanish fascists of Franco's time. His book, described as prose poems, translated into English as Platero and I, is the story of a man who takes a journey with his burro to find out about life,---and discovers that his donkey is smarter than he is. You must admire the mind of a man who would admit to it, even in a humorous way. Jimenez won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1956.
For a book much different in subject matter, read Sweet Zen by Cherie Huber. I have read D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, Walpola Rahula, Batchelor, Herrigel, Cleary and other writers on secular Buddhism, but Huber's book has a special quality that makes Zen personal, even emotionally intimate. You might want to read Huber's other Zen books on depression, death and dying and other subjects. (You can find them at Borders.)
For all you romantic lovers, I would advise you to read Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont. De Rougement considers romantic love to be a pathology, and with historical proof, as he is a scholar. Only a Frenchman could write such a work, and I hasten to add that I have a French-Canadian connection.
The most serious omission by Nancy Pearl of books that should be read is Eagle in the Snow, by Wallace Breem. It is an historical novel. The historical facts are that in the late 4th century CE the Roman Empire was crumbling. Stilicho, the Romanized Vandal, was master of the Roman army in the West. He was protecting the core of the empire in Italy, and did not have the time, personnel or funds to guard Lower Germany and Gaul south of the Rhine. Various barbarian tribes were threatening to invade across that great river and extinguish civilization. Breem, for his novel, makes the premise that Stilicho appoints a Roman legate, Maximus, from Britain (where the legionnaires are melding into the local population by intermarriage while maintaining Hadrian's Wall), as commander of Roman forces to build an army from local resources to keep the barbarians north of the Rhine. The book is the story of how Maximus constructs his legion together with his cavalry general, Veronicus. It is a case study of Roman military genius, and involves the wife of Veronicus and includes a cameo episode of a captured blonde German maiden that is priceless.
Historically, in 405 CE the Rhine froze solid and about 180,000 Vandals stormed over it, wiping out by sheer mass of numbers the remnants of the Roman guard that was stationed there. (This chaotic force went on to sack all the cities of Gaul and Spain and crossed into North Africa where they made St. Augustine and his milieu miserable before sort of dissipating in the African heat.) In the novel, Breem describes the desperate tactics of the legion to stave off the masses of barbarians in the freezing weather but without avail. It ends with Maximus, after the battle, with his sword hand cut off, ending his own life. Eagle in the Snow is a superbly tremendous historical novel. I do not understand why it has not been made into a movie. It would be a great time for a movie of it now when the West is threatened by another inchoate force, radical Islam. (Francis Ford Coppolla should make the film.)

AUTHORS
I had mentioned Robert Graves above but you should read more of him. He considered himself a poet and a poet only, but was forced to write other works to feed his poetry habit. These works, known as historical novels, but which he called his "historical reconstructions" are all of them treasures. Nancy Pearl mentions the two works on the Roman Emperor Claudius: I, Claudius and Claudius the God (made into a BBC TV series in 1976) but other of his novels include: Homer's Daughter, a development of Graves' idea that the true author of the Odyssey was a woman; Hercules, My Shipmate, on the journey of the Argos; King Jesus, about events in the Mideast 2000 years ago (Graves also wrote a ponderous tome about the New Testament with the scholar Joshua Podro, The Nazarine Gospel Restored, but I am not advising you to read it); Watch the North Wind Rise (called Seven Days in New Crete in England), a utopian novel placed on the island of Crete; and many others including two novels about Sergeant Lamb, a British noncommissioned officer in colonial America. My personal favorite is Count Belisarius, the life of the great general of Justinian the Great who re-conquered Italy from the barbarians. (I appreciate this work because of my personal background, and because the Byzantine Empire has vanished almost completely from the consciousness of Westerners, both European and American.)
Robert Graves was advanced for his time. I stated his claim that the Odyssey was written by a woman, and he recreates what he imagines to have been her life in the novel Homer's Daughter. In his Sergeant Lamb books, he writes of a Native American tribesman whom we would call "homosexual," and who was accepted by the members of the tribe as a naturally occurring phenomenon. In Graves' novel of the voyage of the Argo, the introductory character Ancaeus, the helmsman, is a Pelasgian from the island of Samos, a descendant of a people native to Greece before the arrival of the Greeks, and who believes in the religion of the Triple Goddess, an ancient matriarchy. This is to his regret, unfortunately, because after that great voyage when he returns to Samos he is banned from it by the Olympian Greeks, as a worshipper of the nymph. At his request, he is released onto a small island in the Mediterranean still ruled by the matriarchy. But the ruling goddess has him killed by the island worshippers of the Triple Goddess who are savage goat men because Ancaeus is considered to have been corrupted by his life with the Greeks. The only facet of Graves' books that might put you off is the periodicity of his sentences. His sentences are long and complex. He wrote before the cinema, TV, modern journalism and the Internet claimed our attention and when readers could settle down on a long winter's night and really get into a book. (You will get into his prose style, soon enough. Conrad writes in a similar style.) Nor should you miss reading The White Goddess, a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth), which Graves called his poetic lexicon. (The white goddess changed to a black goddess sometime later.)
By the way, while exploring the works of Robert Graves read the poems of Laura Riding with whom he lived for a while. They are collected in a thin paperback. Riding's poems are very difficult and much under-appreciated. Someday poetry will regain a structure and intelligence, and Riding's poems will be seen as the jewels that they are.
I had also mentioned Brian Aldiss, and his great S/F novel, Greybeard." Aldiss was part of the "New Wave" of British S/F writers, after the originals such as Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. Van Vogt, and others. It is an "old wave" now, though, as it started in the 1960s-70s. He has written many other S/F books (read his Report on Probability A), straight novels and memoirs. Aldiss is still writing.
I will tell you about Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. His mother was English and his father was a patrician from Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka). His books interpret the East to the West, and include Buddhism and art. Read The Transformation of Nature in Art. Coomaraswamy's writings on Oriental textiles are still used in art schools. Coomaraswamy was a colorful man, and collected Borzoi hounds and mistresses. He had a position at the Museum of Natural History in Boston, and died in 1947 when he was preparing to enter a monastery in the Himalayas. (He was a Buddhist, and perhaps the hounds and the women became too much for him.) He is someone for you to explore.
Finally, I will advise that you read the works of Frithjof Schuon. He wrote on the metaphysics of comparative religion, first in German, then in French and then in English in the same refractory dense prose. He had much to say about Islam and its esoteric expression in Sufism, and this may be his relevance for today. He is exceptionally difficult to read, and I am not certain how I got through many of his works. (I was younger when I read them and had more patience with authors.)
Schuon made the most perceptive statement about the tribal peoples in the American continent that I have ever read. He said that they lived in a sort of paradise that was fated to fall.
SPECIAL
In parting, I will mention one more book that Nancy Pearl could have listed for the perusal of speakers of English.
One of the advantages of going to book sales is that you can find books that you would not normally buy and even be interested in, but since the cost is usually one dollar, it is irresistible to buy them and keep them around the house,---and maybe read them on a dull night. This is how I discovered and brought home as a treasure, The Nature of Women: An Encyclopedia and Guide to the Literature, by Mary Anne Warren. (Published in 1980 by Edgepress, Inverness, California. ISBN 0918528070.)
I read the entire 701 page reference book, entry by entry from ABBOTT, Sidney...to ZARETSKY, Eli right through the radical feminists who want to main men with surgery and chemicals to control their aggression (you can imagine), and including the substantial reference sources at the end,--- over about three years. I found the book to be terrifically informative, and believe that no man, woman, person of alternate sexuality or beast in the modern era should be without its insights and perceptions. The book has never been revised, to my knowledge, and so is unique in that what you see is what you get, ---something that I have rarely found to be the case with women. (I could not resist it.)
ENVOI
There is no end to books. They make an indefinitude. I have not told you all I know about them because a lustful lover of either (or any) sex never reveals all he, she or whatever knows so that ardor is kept at fever pitch.
(TRC Final Revision 08-17-09)

1,000 new book recommendations from America's most famous librarian. I took notes as I read, and just like Book Lust, I came away with pages of new books to try.

Reading this book is like filling a thimble with a garden hose. I fear I will never get the time to read all the books I want to try!

I have to recommend it highly, though! :)

I would recommend this book for booklovers of all types. It offers a wide variety of books from many different genres. My wishlist grew to large proportions because of it.

In reading through Ms. Pearl's first volume, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason, I found mention of 71 books that I thought sounded interesting. In this volume I found well over 100. Once again the author provides us with an assortment of lists from the whimsical ("Nagging Mothers, Crying Children," "Fractured Fairy Tales") to the serious ("Literary Lives," "Midcentury: From World War II to Vietnam") to the very personal (several authors she describes as "Too Good to Miss," including such various names as Lee Child and P. G. Wodehouse). Her selections likewise run the gamut, from classics like Anna Karenina (Signet Classics) to a selection from the many East Indian authors suddenly gracing Western shelves, like Akhil Sharma and Arundhati Roy. Fiction and nonfiction are represented in about equal measure, and most of the books she lists have at least a sentence or two explaining why she found them worth including. And, once again, she invites e-mails suggesting "good books I might have missed or overlooked." Put this volume beside its predecessor and my Steven Gilbar favorites, Good Books and The Book Book, and it should take you at least a few years to run out of things to read.