Philip Gooden

Philip Gooden writes both fiction and non-fiction. His historical novels include the Nick Revill series, set in Elizabethan London, and a Victorian sequence, the most recent title for which is The Ely Testament. He also writes books on language, including Who’s Whose? and Faux Pas?, which won the English Speaking Union award for the best English Language book of 2006. He was chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association in 2007-8.

A few weeks ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I’ve just read Piece of Cake by Derek Robinson. It came out about 30 years ago as a kind of sequel to Goshawk Squadron, Robinson’s novel about aerial combat in World War One. Seen largely through the eyes of the young pilots of the fictional Hornet Squadron, Piece of Cake takes us from the build-up to the outbreak of WW2 in September 1939 and into the heart of the Battle of Britain a year later. It’s a long, panoramic book which avoids cynicism, sentimentality and hero-worship. Yes, Robinson pays tribute to the bravery of the pilots and the skill of the ground-staff, the fortitude and optimism required of both the men and the (few) women directly involved in the war. He shows them buckling and sometimes breaking under pressure, but also he describes people who can be petty and unscrupulous immediately before or after they’ve risked their lives for their country. The cast is mostly British but, as the fighting really gets underway, there are fliers from occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as an American who constantly tries to get his superiors to break with tradition and adopt a more rational approach - that is, one which improves your chances of not being killed. Robinson handles the inevitable deaths superbly. Some characters just drop out of sight, literally so in the case of pilots who bale out. Others survive (or die) when you don’t expect them to, or perish as a result of a foolish bet or a piece of bravado or a trivial accident. There’s plenty of friendly fire and, above all, a sense of war being an ‘untidy and inefficient business’, in the author’s own words in a closing note.

And the book I read before Piece of Cake was The Big Short by Michael Lewis. I’d heard that it was the best account of the financial crash of 2008. So it may be, though the only other non-fiction one I’ve read on the subject is John Lanchester’s Whoops!, which takes more of an ABC attitude to things. Michael Lewis shares some of the bounce and confidence that goes with being a successful trader, which is what he was back in the 1980s, and The Big Short sometimes has the assured swagger of Tom Wolfe-style reportage. Quite often I thought I understood what was going on but then the mists closed in again.

Read more about The Ely Testament and visit Philip Gooden's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Popp Berman

Elizabeth Popp Berman is a sociologist at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Her first book, Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine, recently won the Social Science History Association’s President’s Book Award.

Earlier this month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I have more time to read fiction in the summer, when I’m not teaching. And I’m the kind of person who likes to create arbitrary projects for herself. So last summer I started reading the Man Booker Prize winners in reverse order. I started with 2009, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I loved. It’s a long historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, a nobody who, sphinxlike, rises to become Henry VIII’s right-hand man. It was completely gripping, and I can’t wait to read the sequel, which is coming out this year. Unfortunately, we know how Cromwell’s going to end up—the same way all those wives did.

From there I worked my way backward. I skipped a couple that weren’t in the library, but I made it as far as 1994, to James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late. And there I got stuck. It’s been sitting on my dresser for months, and I can’t get past page 50. I think it’s because the book is written in Scottish dialect, and it’s just too much work for my American ear. So, with due apologies to Kelman, it may be time to give up this project. Or at least move on to 1993.

For work, I tend to dip into things rather than actually read them front to back, although I wish that weren’t the case. This morning it was a handful of books on science and technology studies: two books on science and public policy by Sheila Jasanoff, the fat Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, and Social Knowledge in the Making, a new edited volume. I’m trying to think about how the discipline of economics affects policymaking, and wondering about how it is similar to, and different from, the ways the natural sciences shape policy.

Learn more about Creating the Market University at the Princeton University Press website and Elizabeth Popp Berman’s website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosamund Bartlett

Rosamund Bartlett's books include Wagner and Russia and the acclaimed Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. An authority on Russian cultural history, she has also achieved renown as a translator of Chekhov.

Her latest book is Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

A few weeks ago I asked Bartlett what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m particularly pleased to be asked this question now, as I’m currently abroad and having a bit of time off, so have been reading all kinds of things simultaneously. When I am at home in Oxford, I usually have my head in a book, but mostly with a view to writing about an aspect of Russian culture, so these last few weeks I have been enjoying getting away from my usual commitments and reading purely for pleasure, which for me is the best kind of holiday.

In November I was invited to lecture at the University of North Carolina, and was amazed and delighted to discover a second-hand book shop in the departure terminal at Raleigh-Durham Airport. I wonder if it’s unique? The literature usually on offer at airports makes one despair. Naturally I had to buy a book on principle, and to support the cause of reading, and was happy to find a book about the American Civil War dealing with the part of United States I had just been travelling in: Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic (Vintage/Random House, 1998). It’s an amusing read, and illuminating.

Another book I have been reading is by the Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri, whose detective novels featuring Inspector Salvo Montalbano have all been runaway best-sellers in Italy. I’ve been learning Italian for a while now, and a few years ago, after reading dual-language texts, made a decision to start reading without any props. It was a bit hard at first, but I started with a cult teen novel by Federico Moccia (Tre metri sopra il cielo) which is about a romance between a rebellious young biker and a girl from an upper-class family in Rome. I got so caught up in the story that I soon started absorbing new words almost without noticing, and have never looked back. When you have to read something slowly because you are not fluent, you can really savour the words themselves, and there are some wonderfully endearing expressions in Italian, which is as beautiful a language as Russian. I first read one of Camilleri’s Montalbano books in translation, and that helped me when I came to read them in Italian for the first time. They are set in a small Sicilian seaside town, and there is quite a bit of watered down local dialect, but it’s not too difficult to figure out. Camilleri is now in his eighties, and has produced about a dozen of his very witty novels featuring Inspector Montalbano, who has refined literary tastes, likes eating, preferably alone, and contrives to spend not too much time with his long-suffering girlfriend who lives up north. I’ve been reading one of the most recent, which is a rather ghoulish murder mystery: La caccia al tesoro (Sellerio editore Palermo, 2010).

Although I am a Russian literature specialist, and am currently translating Anna Karenina for Oxford World’s Classics, I don’t often get to sit down to read the masterpieces of Russian literature in Russian for pleasure, so I’m enjoying the chance to get to know better one of Dostoevsky’s most challenging works: The Devils (sometimes known as The Possessed or Demons). It was written just before Tolstoy embarked on Anna Karenina, and it’s been interesting comparing Tolstoy’s Russian to Dostoevsky’s, which is predictably very different. The Devils is a dark and uncannily prophetic novel which explores the world of the Russian radical underground at the beginning of the revolutionary movement.

Someone I admire a great deal is the American composer Elliott Carter, who celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008, and who is still writing exciting music. The Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland recently produced a beautiful book about his extraordinary life which I have been poring over: Elliott Carter, A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, ed. Felix Meyer and Anna C. Shreffler (publication of the Paul Sacher Foundation, Boydell Press, 2008)

A trip to Australia inevitably involves jet lag, but I have discovered a great way to pass the time on sleepless nights – reading books downloaded on to my iPod. I have been particularly impressed with the BeamItDown iFlow Reader which provided me with a free copy of Jane Eyre. It works like a teleprompter with automatic scrolling whose speed is adjusted intuitively, and the fact that there are only a few words on the screen at one time means you can engage with the language of the text really closely. I read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre last when I was a teenager and have been totally engrossed in it this time. What a brilliant novel! And what intoxicatingly beautiful use of English. Unfortunately BeamItDown has shut down, having issued the following statement: “Apple is now requiring us, as well as all other ebook sellers, to give them 30% of the selling price of any ebook that we sell from our iOS app. Unfortunately, because of the "agency model" that has been adopted by the largest publishers, our gross margin on ebooks after paying the wholesaler is less than 30%, which means that we would have to take a loss on all ebooks sold. This is not a sustainable business model.” Seems a shame.

Visit Rosamund Bartlett's website and learn more about Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Burdett

John Burdett practiced law for 14 years in London and Hong Kong until he was able to retire to write full time. He has lived in France, Spain, Hong Kong and the U.K. and now commutes between Bangkok and Southwest France.

His new book is Vulture Peak, the fifth and latest novel in his series featuring Bangkok police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep.

Earlier this month I asked Burdett what he was reading.  His reply:

I'm reading Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq and The Operators by Michael Hastings (inside story of the Afghan war and how Hastings' reporting brought down General McChrystal). They are research for my next novel which features a Vietnam Vet who cannot resist war. I did not set out to educate myself on how many lives and dollars America has spent on unnecessary wars over the past forty years - but once you start to look into it, the conclusion is pretty depressing.

Perhaps for that reason I have also turned to the classics. About a minute after I bought my iPad 2 I realised I could download just about everything worth reading that had been written by our forefathers from the Guten Project, for nothing. So when I'm not researching I'm free to gorge myself on Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Gibbon, Aesop, Dumas - well, the list is endless. I realised, dangerously, that it is quite possible, now, for me to retreat to that desert island with a single book-size volume, called iPad 2, stuffed with more reading material than it is possible for one man to get through in a lifetime - and, so long as there's a battery charger under the palm tree, never be bored or need to send for more books.

Learn more about the book and author at John Burdett's website.

The Page 69 Test: Vulture Peak.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Bondurant

Matt Bondurant’s second novel The Wettest County in the World was a New York Times Editor’s Pick, and one of the San Francisco Chronicle's Best 50 Books of the Year. His first novel The Third Translation (Hyperion 2005) was an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, The New England Review, and Glimmer Train, among others. He currently teaches literature and writing in the Arts & Humanities graduate program at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Bondurant's new novel is The Night Swimmer.

Recently I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I’m currently reading Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, which is one of those great books that has long been on my list and I’ve finally gotten around to it. What is surprising to me is the gorgeous prose; I had assumed I would get plenty of rich scenes of Africa but Dinesen’s gifts go far beyond simple landscapes or even dramatic encounters with wildlife. It is a real meditation on solitude, destiny, culture, and so many other things, written in an often understated but always fresh, lyrical and compelling style. I could read her sentences all day.

I also recently just finished Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian, which was a thrilling read, though again not what I expected. As a tale of seagoing adventure and naval warfare it was quite tame (though plenty to satisfy), but what was astonishing throughout was the level of mastery that O’Brian exhibits about sailing vessels, maneuvers, battles, naval life and culture, and all the way down to sails, ropes, and various other minutiae. Mesmerizing.

The last really great novel I just read a couple weeks ago is by Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son, which came out January 10, same day as my new book. It’s set in North Korea and Johnson spent 8 years on it. It is a tour de force, an epic, the kind of book that fills me with awe and wonder. He’s a brilliant writer. He was the big guy on campus literally and figuratively at Florida State when I was there in graduate school and when he graduated, his shadow loomed over the rest of us. And with this book, that shadow just got a lot larger. But even if I didn’t know him, I’d feel confident in saying that The Orphan Master’s Son will be the biggest novel of 2012.

Learn more about the author and his work at Matt Bondurant's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Wettest County in the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jesse Browner

Jesse Browner is the author of the novels Conglomeros (Random House, 1992), Turnaway (Random House, 1996), The Uncertain Hour (Bloomsbury, 2007), and Everything Happens Today (Europa Editions, 2011).

His The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down: An Informal History of Hospitality in Western Civilization was published by Bloomsbury in 2003.

Earlier this month I asked Browner what he was reading. His reply:

It is difficult to credit, or to explain, just why so many masterpieces were written in Hungary in the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps it has something to do with the rich loam created by a decaying empire. In any case, whenever I tell anyone about my thing for mid-century Middle-European literature, they always have another obscure favorite for me to add to my list: Sándor Márai’s Embers, Miklós Bánffy’s They Were Counted, and most especially Dezsö Kosztolányi’s Skylark.

Most recent of these (for me) is Antal Szerb’s 1937 novel Journey by Moonlight. I’m not sure where I heard this, but apparently all Hungarians grow up reading Journey by Moonlight, which would make it their equivalent of The Great Gatsby or Huckleberry Finn. When you stop to consider that it’s about a man who abandons his wife on their honeymoon to descend into a maelstrom of depression, paralysis, fraud and crippling nostalgia, it makes you rather grateful that the Hungarians were unable to hold on to their empire. But it is very truthfully, as one back-cover blurb puts it, a “burning book.”

Mihály’s dilemma, as he travels through Italy trying to avoid those who would either restore him to the straight and narrow or, conversely, destroy him for his perfidy, is that he is incapable of vanquishing the ghosts of his youth. These include in particular the memory of his best friend Tamás, who committed suicide for highly suspect ontological reasons, and of Tamás’s sister Éva, who disappeared after her brother’s death and before Mihály could declare his love for her. And even as he darts and flits and circles warily the shadow of his own siren suicide, Mihály draws these ghosts in towards him, like moths to a flame, for their own final danse macabre.

Believe it or not, the book is also very funny and in no way lugubrious, despite all that. I was able to read it with breathless concentration on a beach in the South Pacific, which has defeated countless other stabs at high-mindedness in the sun. I’m not sure what they’re up to now, but the Hungarians were really onto something a hundred years ago, and if you’re new to their product, you could do a lot worse than to start with Journey by Moonlight.

Visit Jesse Browner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rick Mofina

Rick Mofina is a former crime reporter and the award-winning author of several acclaimed thrillers. He's interviewed murderers face-to-face on death row and patrolled with the LAPD and the RCMP, and his true-crime articles have appeared in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Reader's Digest and Penthouse.

His latest novel is The Burning Edge.

Not so long ago I asked Mofina what he was reading. His reply:

Right now I am reading True Grit by Charles Portis. I confess that my introduction to the story came through the John Wayne movie when I was probably about the same age as the heroine, 14-year-old Mattie Ross. Mattie's quest is justice for the murder of her father by Tom Chaney, a former hired hand. She hires crusty U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to help her pursue the killer. I loved the story and began looking into the book. Having learned that the tale, as written by Portis, is actually told through Mattie's recollection as an old woman, intrigued me. I had always intended to seek it out and read it. The story exceeds the movie, Mattie's voice is a masterstroke. The book is as mesmerizing as it is entertaining. I think it deserves to be ranked with anything created by Twain or Faulkner. And I have never lost sight of the fact that it could also be called one of the best crime stories ever written.

Visit Rick Mofina's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Randy Rawls

Randy Rawls is a retired US Army Officer and Department of Defense civilian. He is the author of Thorn on Roses, the Ace Edwards, Dallas PI series as well as a number of short stories. A North Carolina native who called Texas his home for a number of years, Randy Rawls lives in South Florida.

Recently I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I have to open with the fact that I am an avid reader. I always have a book near me, ready to open—home (of course), doctor's office, bank, post office, etc. Of course, that's easy because I read on a Kindle. I've had one since early in the K-life and am now using a K-3. I suspect there is a Kindle Fire in my future.

I have my favorite authors from the NY publishers, but don't read as many of those as I used to. Publisher-greed has caused me to look to them much less than once upon a time. Some of those are John Hart, Robert Crais, Harlan Coben, PJ Parrish, C.J. Box, Michael Connelly, and many others. However, paying more than $9.99 for an ebook goes against my sense of fairness. In my opinion, the big publishers are simply gauging the public.

So, what I love to do is find a new author, one who has not gotten the NY treatment. I used to search a lot of books by people I'd never heard of, looking for a good read. Recently, after being burned many times by badly written stories that are not ready to be published, I've quit looking at self-epub'd unless I happen to know the author, or someone I trust recommends it. Too much dreck out there to sort through. And before I start getting the blistering emails, I know there are some worthwhile, even good, books being self-epub'd. But honestly, I don't have the patience to dig through the pile to find them.

So with those standards in mind, I look at small publishers and their authors. One of those I found is Tom Lewis. He is published by a small press in North Carolina. My last read of his is Fifty Years to Midnight. Tom has taken the typical "can't go home again" story and transitioned it into one with more twists and turns than a mountain road. The protag, a NC highway patrolman, retires after seeing one too many young people die in an automobile accident. He returns to his hometown, a village in eastern NC. Many of his high school classmates are still there with varying degrees of success, and he is welcomed home. However, his fascination with a strange young woman who wanders homeless through the town, supporting herself on hand outs and dumpster-diving soon causes his friends to distance themselves from him. That's the simple part. The rest is so complicated, I won't even try to unravel it for you. I strongly recommend Fifty Years to Midnight. Mr. Lewis has several other books out that I have read. Only one of those fails to meet the high standard I have set for him. (Interestingly enough, I just discovered he has a new one out I haven't read. I'm downloading it now.)

Another pleasant find is Kyle Mills' The Immortalists. Apparently, Mr. Mills already has some popularity, but this was my first exposure to him. He takes an ultimate medical cure for progeria and drug for immortality into the world of thrillers and writes a fast-paced international plot versus naïve young biologist and wife. Some of the escapes are too convenient to believe, but the writing is crisp and the plot moves fast. I may look at some of Mr. Mills' other works.

Darcie Chan's The Mill River Recluse violates my rules against self-epub'd. However, after reading Ms. Chan's comments in a Wall Street Journal article, I decided to gamble on her. She said, or that's how I read it, that she thought her book needed professional editing. Reading that from an author is always a shock. The Mill River Recluse was an interesting read. While I agree some hard-nosed editing would improve it, I thought her storyline was strong enough to overcome it. It is written in two timelines—a young girl who grows into a recluse living on the hill and looking out over the town—and the death of that recluse and its aftermath on that same small town. Each story was interesting enough to stand alone. My biggest complaint was that Ms. Chan did not know when to stop. The last half-dozen chapters, or so, could have been condensed into no more than a couple and the book would have ended on a higher note. However, I can recommend this book. I hope Ms. Chan will have more stories published—after a hard-nosed editor works them over.

My last comments concern some people I know, talented writers in their own right. Yes, they have self-epub'd, but I know and trust their writing and think they're worth anyone's effort. Gregg Brickman writes mysteries featuring nurses (not the same nurse in each book). Gregg has a knack for walking along the edge of the medical profession without inundating the reader with unpronounceable medical terms and procedures that only a medical academic can understand. Take a look at her (yes, Gregg is female) Illegally Dead featuring Tony Conte, an ex-Army Special Forces medic and martial arts expert turned nurse. Murder abounds and Tony is caught in the middle, even as his wife develops a life threatening illness.

A second friend in the self-epub'd world is Vicki Landis. Vicki is multi-talented person who paints as well as write in multiple genres. Her self-epub'd mystery is Blinke It Away. The story is set in Hawaii and the trip through the non-tourist areas of Oahu are worth the trip. The mystery of who killed Blinke's best friend, leaving her four small children motherless, is icing on the cake. I suggest you put a lei around your neck and take this one on a vacation.

Visit the official Randy Rawls website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Beth Fantaskey

Beth Fantaskey is the author of Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, Jekel Loves Hyde, and the newly released Jessica Rules the Dark Side. Her reply to my recent query about what she's been reading:

Right now, I am under the gun to finish my doctoral dissertation, which is dictating everything that I read. (If I don’t finish by May, I’ve wasted seven years of schooling!) Anyway, my subject is female crime reporters of the 1920s, so the last book I read is The Girls of Murder City: Crime, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired “Chicago”. It’s about two 1920s killings – and subsequent trials – that inspired reporter Maurine Watkins to write the musical “Chicago.” It’s written in a rat-tat-tat style that’s reminiscent of old gangster movies, so it read almost like a work of fiction. However, I was most interested in the strong female characters – good and bad – who dominate the narrative, since the goal of my dissertation is to prove that as early as the Prohibition Era, a group of overlooked women were reporting hard news on equal terms with men. Interestingly, I also like to write about strong girls in my novels. I guess it’s a bit of a cause with me!

Learn more about the author and her work at Beth Fantaskey's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jessica Rules the Dark Side.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul M. Barrett

Paul M. Barrett is an assistant managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek. His books include American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America, and the newly released Glock: The Rise of America's Gun.

Earlier this month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I've been on a David Foster Wallace kick lately, catching up with my wife, the documentary film maker Julie Cohen, who is a DFW scholar and admirer. Consider the Lobster is probably the best collection of nonfiction essay-like journalism I have ever read. Wallace simply had no peer in noticing the telling detail or recording the way people really talk. His combination of dismay at, disgust over, and ultimately compassion for his subjects--e.g. the porn performers and promoters of "Big Red Son"--strikes me as one of the most sane takes on contemporary American culture. The poor man was too sane for his own good, of course.

The stories in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men are often amusing and typically so repulsive they actually made me wince. I'm most of the way through Girl With Curious Hair, which stands up remarkably well, despite being published in 1989 and collecting stories that are even older. "My Appearance" has more to say about the irony bath of post-modern television (and life) than practically anything else I can recall reading.

One self-serving note about Wallace: He has a brilliant throw-away passage in Infinte Jest which I cited in my new book, Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, as an illustration of the cultural influence of the Glock pistol. The Wallace character, a junior tennis player (a favorite type for an author who was himself an outstanding junior tennis player), takes a Glock with him onto the court and threatens to blow his brains out if he loses. Naturally, his opponents are distracted, and he always wins.

On other fronts, I have lately read a very good history of gun control in America: Gun Fight, by a law professor named Adam Winkler. My book is a biography of one iconic gun, with passing references to how attempts to restrict the Glock consistently backfired and helped sell more of the Austrian pistols. Winkler's look at the history of the Second Amendment is not specific to any one firearm but has its own surprising lessons.

Finally, just as I was finishing the manuscript for my Glock book, I decided to go back and re-read E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, because there is so much in the novel about the dark glamor of American violence, and especially gun violence. I enjoyed the story as a whole, again, and especially the brilliant passage about the allure of the handgun (which I quoted in my book).

Visit the official Glock: The Rise of America's Gun website.

--Marshal Zeringue