Christie Hodgen

Christie Hodgen is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the novel Hello, I Must Be Going. She won the 2001 AWP award for A Jeweler's Eye for Flaw and the 2003 Pushcart Prize.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

This summer I'm making my way through Céline's companion masterpieces - Journey to the End of Night and Death on the Installment Plan, and doing my best to put Céline's art aside from his later politics. Really, for style and humor, they can't be beat.

I've also just finished making my way through B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, a book which comes in a box with each of its chapters separately bound, to be read in any order.

And I re-read an old favorite, W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants.

For short fiction I've been reading Roberto Bolano's Last Evenings on Earth, Deb Olin Unferth's Minor Robberies, Ander Monson's Other Electricities, Julie Orringer's How to Breathe Underwater, and Robert Walser's Collected Short Prose - the work of a tortured, beautiful mind. All very rewarding.

Among the praise for Hodgen's Hello, I Must Be Going:

"The work of a wildly talented writer. Christie Hodgen's kid-narrator, Frankie, faces tragic loss in a world where everyone is earnestly, hilariously, flamboyantly making a mess of trying for better days. Every intense, vibrant detail in this novel feels exactly right."
—Joan Silber

"Dark and witty, Christie Hodgen's prose is exhilarating to read."
—Marly Swick

"Wise and often funny....Frankie's vulnerability and resilience make this a moving novel."
—Publishers Weekly

"Hodgen's writing soars in this sad and funny novel."
—Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle

Learn more about Hello, I Must Be Going at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Kingwell

Mark Kingwell is a philosopher, cultural theorist and best-selling author. His new book is Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City.

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

Right now I’m working on a philosophical biography of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, so much of my recent reading has related to that. Tim Page edited The Glenn Gould Reader, which shows the vast range of Gould’s critical thinking -- much of it contradictory and even crackpot, but almost always fascinating. Among other things, in these pages Gould interviews himself, defends Petula Clark, dismisses Mozart and the Beatles, and generally throws his intellectual weight around.

Geoffrey Payzant’s Glenn Gould: Music and Mind was the first book published about Gould and it remains the best -- Payzant was a philosopher as well as a musician and understood the underlying philosophical intentions of Gould’s thought. I hope to advance some new arguments in my own book, but Payzant’s is pretty good.

There are of course lots of Gould biographies already, but I prefer works that attend to his own unease with the idea of a unified life narrative. Jonathan Cott’s Conversations with Glenn Gould gives a good sense of the man late in life, when he had not only retired from public performance but had become a sort of rambling intellectual monk, living by night and communicating almost entirely by telephone even as he recorded some of the best music and radio documentaries of the century.

A. N. Wilson is also rightly dubious of the biographer’s fiction, and his Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her is gossipy, meandering, self-regarding affair that nevertheless manages to give the reader a good sense of the woman and her work, pulling us away from the recent ‘Alzheimer’s Lady’ caricature from popular book and film.

Wilson is the sort of friend who makes enemies superfluous: he dishes dirt on pretty much everybody in the London-Oxford literary axis, including the revered John Bayley, Murdoch’s loving husband. But his judgments on the books, interspersed with the anecdotes, are mostly sound, and he recalls fans like me to the inimitable character of those many thousands of pages she wrote.

Still, the one book I’m now going to read as a direct result of Wilson’s is not by Murdoch. It is Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent Women, which both Wilson and Bayley esteemed. Pym is underrated, a wry social comedian to rival Penelope Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bowen, if not Jane Austen. I’m saving that book for my vacation starting this week.

Alberto Moravia is funny in a darker manner. Just finished his book Contempt, which offers an unreliable first-person narrative of a marriage wrecked by the disgust the wife feels for our narrator, an undistinguished screenwriter. The book and the character are alike maddening, and Moravia has a way of getting under your skin.

Speaking of skin, Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle is probably the best novel written about race in America by someone in my generation. It’s middle section, which describes a laid-back Santa Monica black kid moving to West Los Angeles and having to “learn how to be black,” is hilarious and scathing. The book falls apart in its last quarter, with its Richard-Condon-esque absurdities, but is worth sticking with anyway.

I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road just after, and that too strikes me as a book without a good ending. I was surprised at the acclaim since it is really just a pallid version of Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece, Riddley Walker. Where McCarthy describes (brilliantly, yes) the workaday details of survival, Hoban extends and expands language as a form of endgame consciousness. George Saunders’s Civilwarland in Bad Decline, which I read earlier this summer, is more inventive than McCarthy, and funnier (not hard!). The stories are a little too similar, but taken apart are like nothing else being written today.

Finally, this summer I hugely enjoyed two books that might be considered polar opposites except in that both are funny after their own fashion: Simon Rich’s humour collection Ant Farm, and Slavoj Zizek’s brilliant and kooky For They Know Not What They Do. I suppose I could construct an intellectual scaffold joining my pleasure in these two masters, about symptoms of enjoyment and Lacanian jouissance, but I won’t bore you with that.

Among the early acclaim for Kingwell's Concrete Reveries:

“In this stunning treatise on the transnational global city, philosopher and cultural critic Kingwell (Better Living) meditates on how the architecture of the modern city must cater efficiently yet aesthetically to a combination of basic human requirements—“the cemetery within the city doubling as a park; the prison or madhouse as public architecture; the toilet within the house; the dump or recycling center within the city limits”—and how the city in turn is an extension and embodiment of human consciousness. More than 75 photos punctuate essays that meander around the poetry of porches, doorways, spiral staircases (“a line circling”) and the political implications of “generic, airport-style designs.” The book is not a travelogue; New York and Shanghai are merely stops along an intellectual walk, which also takes up geometry, boundaries, thresholds and other elements of urban design that are metaphors for the mind and body. “No room is just a space; it is always a place we are either entering, occupying, or exiting,” writes Kingwell in this book that is at once mesmerizing, indulgent, romantic, complex and perceptive.”
--Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

Learn more about Mark Kingwell and his work at his University of Toronto faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul M. Collins

Paul M. Collins is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. His new book is Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I am currently reading A Confederacy of Dunces by the late John Kennedy Toole. I was turned onto it by my good friend, Catie, who, like me, is a New York, Irish-Catholic transplant to the South. It is brilliant fiction; absolutely hysterical. The story centers on Ignatius J. Reilly’s search for employment in New Orleans and his run-ins with a host of colorful personalities in the French Quarter. My wife informed me that I remind her of Ignatius. I like to think this is due to my somewhat quirky personality, as opposed to my physical appearance and style of dress.

Learn more about Friends of the Supreme Court at the Oxford University Press website.

Among the early praise for the book:

"Professor Paul Collins provides a scholarly read that addresses a topic of consuming academic and legal interests: agenda setting on the Supreme Court. He meticulously analyzes all aspects of amici participation not only in depth, but also longitudinally - from the beginning of the Vinson Court in 1946 to the end of the 2001 term. None have investigated the subject as comprehensively and as thoroughly as Professor Collins, and I fully expect it to become the definitive work on amicus curiae participation and influence."
--Harold Spaeth, Michigan State University

Visit Paul M. Collins' faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Guy Geltner

Guy Geltner is a postdoctoral fellow in medieval history at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, and the author of The Medieval Prison: A Social History.

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

Killing time on a recent visit to Chicago I picked up Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, two mammoth works I’ve been meaning to read for some time. I swallowed the transfixing Mailer, and am about to assault DeLillo with a due sense of trepidation, as I am a DeLillo virgin….

In between I’m finishing David Grossman’s recent novel, Until the End of the Land, and going systematically through a dozen or so Crusade chronicles from the Middle Ages for a course I’ll be teaching in the fall.

This often reminds me that my taste in modern literature doesn’t sit quite well with the available medieval works, but there are some interesting attempts to go back and forth in time, genre, and style. A unique example is Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, which I finished a couple of months ago (although I liked Snow much better).

Bedside lies José Saramago’s O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida, an allegorical-Marxist “children’s book” which is always good fun. If I weren’t between apartments, another bedside book would certainly be Boccaccio’s Decameron. Nothing like the ambiguous, fourteenth-century tales of a dirty old man to send you to sleep with a grin.

Among the praise for Geltner's The Medieval Prison:

"This is a very valuable contribution to the history of crime and criminal justice. Geltner demonstrates, contrary to the claims of modern historians, that the prison as a punitive institution was born in the later Middle Ages, and shows, contrary to the claims of medieval historians, that prisons were not hellholes. There is no equivalent study of Italian medieval prisons."
--Trevor Dean, author of Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy

"A most welcome addition to what has been a neglected field of medieval legal and social history. Geltner argues very persuasively that imprisonment was an important phenomenon in medieval Italian cities. The Medieval Prison should appeal to a fairly broad audience outside the field of medieval history."
--James B. Given, author of Inquisition and Medieval Society

Read more about The Medieval Prison, including the introduction, at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danit Brown

Danit Brown holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University. Her stories have appeared in many literary journals, including Story, Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, and One Story.

Her new book is Ask for a Convertible, a collection of connected stories. It is a selection in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series for Fall 2008.

Late last month I asked Brown what she was reading. Her reply:

This summer I am very pregnant and living in an apartment with inadequate and very noisy air conditioning, which means that my powers of concentration are nearly nonexistent, as are my ankles. In terms of reading, all I want are light-hearted books with happy endings. At the same time, I’m trying to read with an eye for structure in preparation for writing a novel of my own.

Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony is another interesting book in terms of structure: it’s comprised of a series of episodes from Mia and Julian’s relationship with friends, with each other, and with their families. Part of the pleasure of reading this novel is seeing Henkin slide all the pieces into place so that when we leave Mia and Julian, we know they’re going to be just fine on their own.

Christie Hodgen’s Hello, I Must Be Going has lots of funny, insightful moments, but at its core is so heartbreakingly sad—among other things, it’s about a girl recovering from her father’s suicide—that if the writing weren’t so strong and Frankie, the narrator, weren’t so engaging, I probably would have put it down. What really intrigues me here is the way Hodgen moves back and forth in time, so that the book ends not with Frankie’s safe arrival at adulthood, as you might expect, but with a series of memories about Frankie’s father that leads to a new understanding of their relationship.

Right now I’m reading Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club. Initially, I picked this up after a friend told me that she has a tremendous writer crush on Coe. What impresses me so far—I’m only a few chapters in—is the novel’s sweeping point of view. Coe moves effortlessly between characters, rendering them and the world they inhabit tenderly, with lots of humor. I’ll admit that I already suspect that the ending will be bittersweet rather than happy, but here’s hoping!

Update: I picked up the book again after writing the previous paragraph, and in the very next chapter something tragic happens to a couple of the characters. Consider yourself warned.

Read selections from Ask for a Convertible, and learn more about the author and her work at Danit Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Kuper

Peter Kuper's illustrations and comics appear regularly in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and MAD, where he illustrates SPY vs. SPY every month.

His graphic novel Stop Forgetting to Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz, made Danny Fingeroth's list of top 10 graphic novels.

Recently, I asked Kuper what he was reading. His reply:

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao- Junot Díaz
Aztec- Gary Jennings
Disaster and Resistance- Seth Tobocman
Wordless Books- David A. Berona
Ganges #2- Kevin Huizenga
Don't Let's Go to The Dogs Tonight- Alexandra Fuller
Beyond Palomar- Gilbert Hernandez
The Ground Beneath Her Feet- Salman Rushdie
Complete Peanuts 1967-1968- Charles Schultz
What It Is- Lynda Barry
Travels with Charlie- John Steinbeck
The Lightning Thief- Rick Riordan

Visit Peter Kuper's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brendan Halpin

Brendan Halpin is the author of the novels Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Long Way Back and Donorboy, as well as the memoirs Losing My Faculties and It Takes a Worried Man.

He is also the author of How Ya Like Me Now and Forever Changes, both novels for young adults.

Late last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm going to take a risk and tell you what I'm actually reading instead of what I think I should appear to be reading. So I'm uncharacteristically reading a bunch of stuff at once right now. I've just finished Lilith Saintcrow's Working for the Devil, which is about a badass woman who talks to the dead who gets hired by Satan to hunt down a rogue demon. It was action-packed and I really enjoyed it. It also has an incredibly cool cover.

I'm also reading the The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics, which is packed full of twisted tales of terror and is a ton of fun. Horror comics are comfort food for my brain; I suppose it's best we don't look too deeply into that.

Right now I'm reading Devil in the Details: Scenes From an Obsessive Girlhood by Jennifer Traig, which is a hilarious account of the author's mental illness. No, really. I find myself laughing aloud a lot, which is occasionally embarrassing. It's very touching as well as funny, and in addition to being a first-hand account of living with OCD, it's also got a lot of interesting stuff in it about growing up in an interfaith family. Each chapter ends with a little mini-piece with stuff like "instructions for handwashing"--there are several steps that involve pondering whether or not water is clean.

I've also just started Snake Agent by Liz Williams, which is a science-fiction/police/fantasy/horror novel. Ten pages in, it's totally kickass.

Finally (whew!) I'm rereading my friend Dana Reinhardt's new YA novel How To Build a House. I read and liked an early draft, but she assures me it's very different and much improved since then. So far it doesn't seem all that different, but I guess most of the revisions are in the last third.

Brendan Halpin is not a "Life-Changing Fiction" author.

Visit Brendan Halpin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ed Lynskey

Ed Lynskey's new P.I. Frank Johnson title, Pelham Fell Here, is available from Mundania Press.

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

Fools Rush In by Ed Gorman. Pegasus, 2007.

I’m a true sucker for the novels set in small towns, prairies, or agrarian societies. I grew up on a rural route and that’s programmed in me. I wouldn’t change it if I could even today when I live outside Washington, D.C.

Ed Gorman’s detective/lawyer Sam McCain is from Black River Falls, Iowa (Iowa City, Des Moines, and Cedar Rapids are the population centers), hooked me from the get-go. Fools Rush In is the second title I’ve enjoyed in the Sam McCain series. The time-frame here is June 1963, so throw in some nostalgia as well.

This engaging story, however, is nothing like taking an leisurely Sunday drive in the country. Sam is caught up in investigating a double homicide with racial overtones. The murdered black university student David Leeds has a relationship with the Caucasian Lucy Williams, the daughter of the powerful, Republican senator Lloyd Williams. Blackmail and pornography play a role in the wrongdoings. Seething in the background is the social news of the Freedom Riders and “Bull” Connor unleashing the cop dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama.

The amiable Sam has friends, beginning with his household of cats that know who their daddy is. Sixtyish Judge Esme Anne Whitney is Sam’s mentor and friend dealing with her own personal issue. Jane Sykes, easy on the eyes, is the new and efficient D.A. Kenny Thibodeau pens those dirty adult books and helps out Sam with his sleuthing activities.

Irish to the core, Sam is easy-going until you shove him into a corner or cross him. Sam holds his own in brawls and has a knack for winning cooperation when he needs it from key witnesses. Like all young men, the complex Sam wonders about his future romance prospects and broods over his past trysts going up in flames. His longings often arise in eloquent passages that put me in mind of James Lee Burke. The images of Friday night in a small town setting are priceless.

All told, I recommend Fools Rush In and look forward to reading more of the adventures from Sam McCain and his friends.

Read an excerpt from Pelham Fell Here, and learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website.

Ed Lynskey's other books include The Dirt-Brown Derby, The Dirt-Brown Derby, Out of Town a Few Days, and A Clear Path To Cross (all detective mysteries).

His work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, and New York Times.

Ed Lynskey's The Blue Cheer, the movie.

The Page 69 Test: The Dirt-Brown Derby.

The Page 99 Test: Pelham Fell Here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Ryback

Timothy W. Ryback is the author of The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, a New York Times Notable Book for 1999. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is Deputy Secretary General and Director of Programs at the Académie Diplomatique Internationale and cofounder and codirector of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation.

His new book, Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, will be released in October.

Last month, I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I recently put the finishing touches on my book on Hitler's private library and have been in literary detox since. I reread Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, both books which I return to occasionally and come away from each time with renewed awe at the characters, plot, style, not to mention cover design.

I have also been doing random reading in my 20 year old copy of the New Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Helen Gardner, who weaves familiar classics that underscore the power of human emotion and the magnificence of the English language with lesser known works that can surprise with some of the timelessness of more mundane themes. Take, for example, Gardner's selections for Thomas Gray (1716-1771). In his haunting churchyard elegy, Gray remind us, famously, that the "paths of glory lead but to the grave," but he also observes that lesser creatures are possessed by similar ambitions and equally tragic inevitabilities as in his somberly titled poem, "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes."

My current bedside book is The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum, which I bought in Paris, where I am resident, at Shakespeare & Co. just across the Seine from Notre Dame. I selected the book both because I love Rosenbaum's passion and style, and also because I wanted a subject as far removed in tone and content as possible from Adolf Hitler. What a rude surprise I experienced when I read the first line of Rosenbaum's acknowledgements: "First I want to thank—well, no, I want to acknowledge the role of—Adolf Hitler." You'll need to buy his book, which is well worth the purchase price, if you want to know his reasoning.

Next on my list is Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, a book my thirteen year old daughter has been urging me to read for some time now. Her last recommendation, Bridge to Terabithia, was a moving reading experience that left me ever attentive to her recommendations.

Among the advance praise for Hitler's Private Library:

“Hitler's Private Library is a meticulously researched and highly original focus on one of history's most enigmatic figures. Timothy W. Ryback shines his laser-like perceptions into the library and mind of Adolf Hitler in a way no previous book has done. Anyone even vaguely interested in the uses and misuses of ‘a little bit of knowledge’ and ideology will marvel–and shudder–at Ryback's riveting insights.”
--Steven Bach, author of LENI: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

Learn more about Hitler's Private Library at the Knopf website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeroen van Bergeijk

Jeroen van Bergeijk's new book is My Mercedes Is Not for Sale: From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou...an Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I am usually reading three or four books at a time. It's a habit I hate, but can't seem to lose. What usually happens is that I am reading a book that I think I should read, but don't completely enjoy, and I start another book, and if that's not what I'm up for at the moment, I start another and so on. Also, being a journalist, there are books I have to read for work and there are books I read solely for pleasure.

I am Dutch, so I usually have at least one Dutch book going, currently Tim Krabbe's (of The Vanishing) latest called Marte Jacobs, which hasn't been translated yet.

I picked up Joseph Mitchell's anthology Up in the Old Hotel, which I couldn't find in my native Amsterdam, and am absolutely loving it. He is without doubt one of the best American nonfiction writers in history.

I am also reading Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing. I discovered McCarthy through the Coen Brothers movie No Country for Old Men. (I must admit that I discover a lot of great American writers through movies.)

Then I have going A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan. I am reading it because this is a big dream of mine as well: to build my own home. Of course in Holland, a place that is so built up and urbanized, that is quite an impossible dream.

Finally, I just finished Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? in which Thomas Kohnstamm tells of his adventures as a Lonely Planet guidebook writer. I always wondered how these books were put together. At least in Africa, where I have used them a lot, they always seem a few years out of date and inaccurate. Thanks to Thomas I know why that is (but as he explains, if you take them with a grain of salt, they're useful).

Jeroen van Bergeijk is a journalist based in Amsterdam and has written for the New York Times, Wired, and many other publications in Europe and the United States. His documentary Ours is the labour debuted at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam in 2007.

Visit Jeroen van Bergeijk's website, and learn more about My Mercedes Is Not for Sale from the publisher.

--Marshal Zeringue