考研阅读精选：六本好书推荐
SIX GOOD BOOKSOur literary editor MaggieFergusson recommends Jeanette Winterson on her mother, Joan Didion onher daughter, and four others ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2011
miliars are here: Lestrade, Wiggins, Moriarty,the warmth of 221b Baker Street and the freezing fogs outside. At thecentre, however, is a crime Conan Doyle would not have contemplated,and, chronicling it after Holmes’s death, Watson becomes unaccustomedlywistful. The text is pot-holed with typos, but Horowitz rides throughthem with panache.
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (4th Estate, hardback, out January 19th).
Youmay need to bone up on baseball to enjoy this, but it’s actually aboutfriendship, failure and coming of age. Set in a college on the shores ofLake Michigan, the story revolves around a student team preparing toexchange the security of the baseball diamond for the complexities ofthe real world. When their gifted shortstop is afflicted with the sportsequivalent of writer’s block, all their lives begin to unravel.Harbach’s prose is sharp-eyed but big-hearted. Over 500 pages, heimmerses you in his imaginary campus, provoking nostalgia for youth, andrelief that it’s over.
SHORT STORIES
We Others by Steven Millhauser (Corsair, hardback, out now).
Millhauser,a Pulitzer prize-winner, is drawn to the surreal and uncanny, bloomingon the fringes of ordinary lives “like growths of mold”. His title storyis narrated by a ghost who, yearning for companionship, breaks theheart of a lonely teacher. Another, the inspiration for the film “TheIllusionist”, follows a magician so good at creating illusions that hebecomes, himself, illusory. In a third, a giant shopping mall seduces,then enslaves, an entire town. Behind his courteous prose, Millhauserseems to be holding something back, like a doctor soft-pedalling on grimnews.
FINANCE
Boomerang by Michael Lewis (Allen Lane, hardback, out now).
Following“The Big Short”, and again exercising his twin passions for highfinance and human folly, Michael Lewis shifts his focus from America toEurope on a hilarious journey of “financial-disaster tourism” throughthe countries that gorged most grossly through the credit boom. Lewisenables you to see the wood and the trees, so while getting to gripswith European debt you also form a mental gallery of bizarre vignettes:the governor of Iceland’s Central Bank holed up in his office writingpoems; or Ireland’s Bertie Ahern exclaiming, on the collapse ofLehman’s, “They had testicles everywhere!”
MEMOIRS
Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Fourth Estate, hardback, out now).
“Whatgreater grief can there be for mortals”, Euripides asked, “than to seetheir children dead?” Joan Didion’s only daughter, Quintana Roo, died in2005, two years after Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne, mourned somemorably in “The Year of Magical Thinking”. Here, her grief is just asforensically examined, but all the more devastating for being tingedwith guilt. Quintana was adopted, and troubled. Were the two connected?Didion’s feel for the material world—fabrics, food and flowers—assumes aterrible poignancy as she contemplates oblivion.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (Cape, hardback, out now).
Thequestion was asked by Winterson’s adoptive mother. Mrs Winterson, asher daughter chillingly styles her, is the star of this artful memoir,comic but appalling, a frugal, religiose tyrant who dispensed End Timecommandments and hoarded Royal Albert china. Jeanette, born Janet,“self-invented”, racked by rage, asks her own questions. Why is she sobad at loving? Why did her real mother give her away? Was Mrs Wintersonperhaps not “normal” herself? How does a mind work with its own“brokenness”? Her answers are tentative, but fierce, funny, harrowing.
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