Reading Ahead
The fall (and start-of-winter) book season is just about upon us. Here are some of the titles you’ll want to get in on early. By Jenna Schnuer
While I’m not one for rushing the lovely laziness of summer off the calendar (after all, summer provides plenty of time to sit and read), I’ll admit that around mid-August, I start to get a bit giddy over the thought of fall. And it isn’t about the leaves changing colors in New England. No — fall is the biggest new-book season of them all. It’s when the publishers deluge bookstores with tons of new titles from their heavy-hitter authors as well as from their we-think-they’ll-be-big up-and-comers for readers to (hopefully) enjoy — or learn from, or get peeved about, or whatever the book is supposed to do. In anticipation of the approaching reading season, I wandered the aisles of the book industry’s biggest show, BookExpo America, chatted up publicists aplenty, pawed through early editions of books by the bundle, and tore through the publisher catalogs to see what the publishers are betting their fortunes on. (See how much I go through for you?) Along the way, I discovered a bunch of books that, for sure, everybody is going to be talking about, along with a pack of other titles that everybody should consider talking about. So load up your online bookstore shopping cart or pay your friendly neighborhood store a visit and preorder these suckers. You’ll be glad you did. I hope.
The Year of Living Biblically
By A.J. Jacobs
Simon & Schuster, October, $25
If author A.J. Jacobs were just a drop less funny or a drop less smart, he’d come off as truly annoying. But he is that funny and smart, so … all is forgiven — especially since his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, offers an accessible way to think about religion in modern life. Yes, studying religion can be fun. Wander the path with Jacobs as he grows a freakishly unruly beard, tends sheep in the Negev Desert, and figures out where religion fits into the life of a guy who grew up in an ever-so-secular home. The book, which has caused quite the buzz, is the author’s follow-up to 2004’s The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (see, even the title would be annoying if it weren’t so funny).
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
By David Michaelis
HarperCollins, October, $35
We all think we know Charles Schulz. After all, Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and the lot have played at least some role in the life of, well, everybody in America. Anybody who claims that he or she has never read a Peanuts strip or seen A Charlie Brown Christmas has been living under a mighty big rock. Mighty big. But we don’t really know Schulz — he wasn’t the most openmouthed about his own life. It was the life of his characters that he was most interested in sharing with all of us. Now Michaelis offers an authorized look at Schulz himself — along with, of course, a look at Schulz’s favorite bunch of artfully drawn kids.
The Used World: A Novel
By Haven Kimmel
Free Press, September, $25
Haven Kimmel, one of the best author names around, is most well known for her memoirs, A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana. These days, though, she’s all about the fiction — and the reading world is a better place for it. The Used World gives us Hazel, Claudia, and Rebekah, the women who run an Indiana antiques shop called (and this might sound familiar from the title) Hazel Hunnicut’s Used World Emporium. They are characters worth knowing. This is one of those books that people will keep handy on a shelf, ready for them to read again every few years or so.
Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life
By Steve Martin
Scribner, November, $23
I admit it: I still love The Jerk. But that’s not why I picked this one. Martin has had one of the most interesting careers of anybody in entertainment these days, yet he’s remained such a mystery. He doesn’t even seem to give up very much about himself in interviews. And that’s made me even more curious. So now I want to see what he’s going to give up about himself. Everybody I mentioned the book to responded with, “Oh, I want to read that!” So I figured you would as well.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
By David Halberstam
Hyperion, September, $35
When it comes to historical narratives, there aren’t many writers who do it better than David Halberstam did. He set the standard — and set it high — with The Best and the Brightest, his 1972 account of the Vietnam War. In The Coldest Winter, his latest and last, as he was killed in a car accident earlier this year, Halberstam turned his narrative strengths and incredible reporting skills (he’s been a Yoda to generations of journalism-school students) on the Korean War. This is sure to be the — and we mean the — history book of the season.
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures: Stories
By Vincent Lam
Weinstein Books, September, $24
It’s Grey’s Anatomy for the literary set. Lam’s debut work, which won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize for fiction, goes inside the world of what it takes to become a doctor. It’s a world Lam knows well — he’s an emergency physician at East General Hospital in Toronto. His characters deal with trauma and drama as they wend their way through the early years of their life in medicine. Folks with a fear of needles, be forewarned: This may not be the one for you.
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England: A Novel
By Brock Clarke
Algonquin Books, September, $24
Brock Clarke’s latest novel has been getting some dandy reviews. And, though it’s a mystery, lit lovers of all stripes will find something in it that they’ll love — after all, the mystery is about figuring out who’s burning down the homes of some of America’s most famous writers, from Edith Wharton’s to Herman Melville’s. And the writing? Darn good stuff.
Signed, Mata Hari: A Novel
By Yannick Murphy
Little, Brown and Company, November, $24
This one will certainly deserve a wider audience than it will get — at first. But there’s something about the elegance of the writing that makes me believe that it will slowly but surely end up with a big fan base. A fictional telling of the life of Mata Hari, Murphy’s rather sexy novel takes readers deep into the life of a very intriguing character.
I Am America (And So Can You!)
By Stephen Colbert
Grand Central Publishing, October, $26
If you don’t find Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report funny, don’t buy the book. If you do find it funny, buy the book. It’s that simple. This is the TV show brought to dead trees. And the snippet I read of it? Darn funny. And now you know what I watch on TV too.
Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever
By Susan Warren
Bloomsbury USA, September, $25
Who doesn’t love a good giant-vegetable story? No, really. I mean, giant vegetables are funny. But for some truly dedicated growers, they’re serious business. Every year, authors offer us a look into a variety of quirky subcultures — I’m still hooked on Stefan Fatsis’s competitive-Scrabble book, Word Freak — and this season, Susan Warren gives us one of the most interesting peeks with this book about her journey into the world of competitive veggie growing. It’ll be fun to see how Warren, a Wall Street Journal editor, builds the narrative; after all, it’s not the easiest task in the world to turn a tale of watching a pumpkin grow into high drama.
Forgive Me
By Amanda Eyre Ward
(Random House, $24)
Nadine Morgan is a fictional journalist created by Amanda Eyre Ward for her novel Forgive Me. Thousands of novels feature a journalist as their protagonist. Many of these fictional scribes are forgettable — they serve as the engine that drives the plot, but they never seem alive, let alone realistic. Ward’s Morgan, however, seems very much alive and, for the most part, realistic. In her mid-30s, she travels the world as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines, seeking out dangerous stories in dangerous places, from Mexico to Haiti to India to South Africa.
Morgan lost her mother at a young age and has minimal contact with her father, who is employed at a fish market on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It seems she is always running toward stories while simultaneously running away from family, friends, and the possibility of any romance that could lead to marriage and children. In South Africa, when she was a young journalist, Morgan fell in love with a photographer. But when he died on assignment, she became even more peripatetic, even more wary of personal commitments.
Forgive Me opens in Mexico, where Morgan is beaten almost to death while on assignment. Against her will, she ends up back in Massachusetts, under the care of her father and his well-intentioned but overbearing female friend. The doctor caring for Morgan is a pleasant person who falls in love with his temporary patient. Though Morgan feels comfortable with him, she bolts for South Africa without telling him when she learns about an unfinished story there that she wants to write.
The majority of the novel is set in South Africa during the racial violence of the 1980s and during the start of the nation’s healing in the 1990s. A couple of subplots are difficult to follow because of an irregularly recurring diary device used by Ward, an Austin writer who has published two previous novels. But the novel’s positives far outweigh its negatives. Not the least of those positives is the refreshingly accurate portrayal of a journalist. — Steve Weinberg
Everyman
By Philip Roth
(Vintage, $13)
Many people say they’d like to die peacefully in their sleep. No one adds the further hypothetical condition, simply and obviously, that the death they’d desire would be before the years of degeneration and, in truth, decomposition that accompany old age. While you may exercise, eat right, and feel great, your body is slowly killing you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
If Philip Roth’s latest, a compact tale titled Everyman, has a thesis, it’s this: You’re going to die, and it’s not going to be a barrel of laughs. As you age, one medical problem will snowball into more and more problems; your visits to the hospital will be as frequent as those to the toilet; and, of course, all your friends and acquaintances will die before you, so you’ll be alone, cold and bitter. You’ll learn that fancy doctors these days can take a vein out of your leg and stick it in your heart, as if you were some lonesome, miserable Rubik’s Cube. You’ll learn that a stent can be inserted to expand your coronary arteries in order to diminish high blood pressure. You’ll learn that your bones have the consistency of Funyuns. What, then, is the purpose of a lifetime of healthy living?
The protagonist of Everyman, whose namelessness draws a plentitude of reader-supplied monikers (mine was Olden Coughfield — feel free to use it), is himself dead. The book opens at his funeral, takes a leap back in time to the beginnings of his medical problems, and then worms its way back to his corpse. If this smacks of familiarity, recall Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which opens at Ivan’s funeral, takes a leap back in time to the beginnings of his medical problems, and then worms its way back to his corpse. The major difference here is that purely Rothian secular morality and sugarless wit. One of the great lines in the book occurs when Coughfield, who teaches a painting class at the nursing home, explains to one eager student, “Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Is Everyman an exposition on The Unbearable Lightness of Being’s evil grin, or is it a 182-page argument for assisted suicide? We’ll leave you to decide. The big question, though, is: Will you go out with some dignity? — J.D. Reid
And when you’re done with those …
There are an awful lot of books published each fall. Since we couldn’t give the full treatment to all the ones we’re excited about, here is a list of 10 more, with no explanations attached. Just trust us — they’re all worthy additions to any reader’s bedside table.
Tomorrow
By Graham Swift
Knopf, September, $24
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story
By Diane Ackerman
W.W. Norton, September, $24
The Art Thief: A Novel
By Noah Charney
Atria, September, $25
Hack: How I Stopped Worrying about What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab
By Melissa Plaut
Villard, September, $14
Ghost: A Novel
By Alan Lightman
Pantheon, October, $23
Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody
By Fake Steve Jobs
Da Capo Press, October, $23
Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter
By Phoebe Damrosch
William Morrow, October, $25
The New Kings of Nonfiction
Compiled by Ira Glass
Riverhead Trade, October, $15
The Almost Moon: A Novel
By Alice Sebold
Little, Brown and Company, October, $25
Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer
By Chuck Thompson
Holt Paperbacks, November, $14
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TVD
Missed something the first time around? Check out the best of TV on DVD. By Bryan Reesman
It’s amazing to think that many of us are willing to shell out money for TV shows on DVD — to pay for programming that we no doubt could have watched, or did watch, during its broadcast for free. Indeed, the recently-aired-shows-now-on-DVD part of the home-video industry reaps $4 billion annually, thanks to our boob-tube addiction. But there’s more to the TV-on-DVD revolution: There are many shows that have been resurrected for our viewing pleasure after having been off the air for years, and there are also many programs from other countries, programs that we were unable to watch when they originally aired, that are now showing up on DVD. This is what actually makes the whole trend so refreshing, as proven by the following selections.
 Comic Capers
Sitcoms have been disappearing rapidly from the airwaves, mainly because they’re generally lame. But there is plenty of vintage sitcom and sketch comedy to keep you laughing.
The long-awaited first season of WKRP in Cincinnati has finally surfaced after years of Fox’s wrangling with music publishers over the rights to the original ’70s rock used in the show. Both sides lost, so some of the music has been replaced with generic cues. But there are many reasons to watch this classic American sitcom: the chaotic WKRP environment, the animated antics of Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap, and the debate over who’s hotter, Bailey or Jennifer. Music (and greedy music execs) be damned — this is still a fun show.
A long-lost ’80s series that has been revived, thankfully without a laugh track, is Sledge Hammer!, which poked fun at the Dirty Harry archetype. David Rasche played a fascistic cop who relished dispensing justice, no matter how minor the offense, with his fists and his gun (which he spoke to). Only his partner, Dori Doreau, could help control his itchy trigger finger and keep their boss from having a coronary. The Witness parody, “Witless,” from season one, is absolutely brilliant.
The British have served up some incredible comedies over the years, most notably the surreal Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the department-store high jinks of Are You Being Served?, which made us reevaluate the retail experience. There are also lesser-known English treasures to be found.
Before Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry played Dr. Gregory House and Oscar Wilde, respectively, they had a sketch show called A Bit of Fry & Laurie, which premiered in 1986. For four seasons, the duo unleashed half-hour bursts of mirth and inanity; admittedly, they were sometimes too British for many Americans, but they still tapped some great moments. Season one highlights: A man goes to a bank, seeking a loan to sell drugs; a church-based duo performs “light metal” from the pulpit; and an elderly audience member keeps screaming to Fry and Laurie that they’ve stolen his material.
After Monty Python disbanded, Michael Palin and Terry Jones teamed up for Ripping Yarns, on which they delivered oddball short stories of adventure, mystery, and combat. Their Python sense of absurdity carried over, as Palin portrayed all manner of kooky characters, most notably a World War II secret agent who had to choose between stopping a dangerous German plot and taking a vacation, and a British soldier obsessed with constantly escaping German POW camps (and always failing), even when his fellow prisoners could care less. The latter, a parody of The Great Escape, is absolutely precious.
Lastly, there have been plenty of stand-up comics finding renewed life for their vintage work on DVD. Case in point: SRO Entertainment recently unearthed a collection of nine comedy/music specials by the legendary George Burns. Titled The TV Specials Collection, it dates from 1976 to 1986. If you’re a fan of old-school stand-up — and this is very tame compared with what’s out there today — you’ll enjoy the 450 minutes of viewing material featuring famous guest stars Johnny Carson, Milton Berle, Madeline Kahn, Don Rickles, and Phyllis Diller, among many others.
Small-Screen Screams
Horror is experiencing a major revival at the moment, and the small screen is catching up with Cineplex output as more international fear merchants invade our TVs.
The recent BBC hit series Hex is Charmed or Buffy for adults — less campy action, more drama. Cassie is a boarding school teen who discovers that she has magical powers and that she’s linked to a witch who was killed on those grounds 400 years ago. She must fend off her nemesis, the fallen angel Azazeal, and cope with her budding sexuality, made more complicated by the continual ghostly presence of her ghost roommate, Thelma, who had the hots for her. Hex is racy, spine-tingling, intelligent fare that will quickly have you hooked.
If you’re a fan of classic anthology series like Tales from the Darkside and Tales from the Crypt, the Japanese series Prayer Beads may be up your alley. In these creepy shows, naturally, people who’ve done bad things or tampered with mysterious forces get their comeuppance. Shot on digital video, they have tantalizing twists that place them a cut above like-minded fare. Trippy episodes like “Mushroom Hunting” (witches), “Real” (hallucinogenic freak-outs), and “Vending Machine Woman” (with a great H.R. Giger–inspired finale) will play with your mind.
There are still many great horror anthologies to exhume and put on DVD. Where are Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, and Darkroom? It’s time for them to come back to life!
Eccentric Espionage
When it comes to hip secret agents, the British have the market cornered. Nobody does it better than they do. Even before the digits 007 became permanently etched into our cultural consciousness, Secret Agent (aka Danger Man) and the Avengers were the suave but tough agents for NATO and England, respectively, and used cunning, stealth, and their wits rather than weapons to stop the bad guys. Even in black-and-white, they were cool.
Danger Man started as a fast-paced, half-hour spy drama in which John Drake (the intense and relentless Patrick McGoohan) traveled the world to help solve various crimes and crises, doing everything from hunting down slave traders in the Middle East to locating a former UK operative seeking to assassinate a former German torturer. After first airing between 1960 and 1962, it was resurrected in 1964 for four more seasons as an hour-long show, and it was then that it reached our shores. The box set includes the shorter episodes not aired in the United States, which include appearances by Lois Maxwell (the future Miss Moneypenny in the 007 franchise) and Honor Blackman (who went on to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger).
The Avengers will forever be associated with the dapper John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and his bold and beautiful partner, Emma Peel (Dame Diana Rigg), but the hour-long show actually ran for four years prior to Mrs. Peel’s arrival. Steed had a male partner in the first season, after which he paired up with Ms. Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) for two years of intrigue and adventure (’62 to ’64), made more interesting by the fact that she knew judo. In fact, Blackman studied it in real life and accidentally knocked out a stuntman during the 1964 season! While this later era of The Avengers was shot on videotape, as opposed to film, it still offered plenty of sass, charm, and wacky villains.
Both of these shows generated spin-offs. Many believe that the strange, surreal, and fascinating 1968 series The Prisoner, in which a former secret agent is abducted and taken to a remote island in order to keep him quiet, was a direct continuation of the character that McGoohan helped create with Danger Man. John Steed returned in 1976 to school two young agents in New Avengers for two seasons.
Worlds of Wonder
The realm of fantasy has become quite commonplace on television, but we’re still besieged by low-grade Cheez Whiz on cable. So travel to the past and check out some cool series that deserve another look.
When it aired for two and a half seasons in the late ’80s, Beauty and the Beast was a big hit with women. Before she kicked butt in T2, Linda Hamilton was a tough yet compassionate assistant DA who fought for justice and lived perched in a Manhattan high-rise. Before he kicked butt as Hellboy, Ron Perlman was a fierce yet gentle lionlike beast who dwelled beneath the city streets and aided the DA, though he shunned society because it feared him. Bonded by his telepathic empathy for her as well as by a platonic romance, the duo fought the denizens of a gritty Manhattan and grappled with the fact that they might never be together. Yeah, it was a little hokey at times, but it was still fun to get lost in.
If you’re looking for something imaginative but not too intense for kids, check out A Twist in the Tale, a series shot in New Zealand around 1997 and hosted by William Shatner. Yes, Captain Kirk beamed down from the stars to spin fanciful fireside yarns to young kids about time travel, ghostly possession, Arthurian mythology, and more. While supernatural in nature, there’s nothing outright scary about these life-affirming tales, which makes them perfect fare for the family.
On the flip side of that, who can forget the weirdness that was Twin Peaks? If David Lynch’s bizarre, award-winning series had launched today, it undoubtedly would have stayed on the air longer. But its story of an FBI agent seeking to find the murderer of teenager Laura Palmer in a suburb of Washington State was a little too sexy and strange for network television back in 1990. That’s okay — now you can enjoy Kyle MacLachlan, Sherilyn Fenn, Chris Isaak, and the rest of the cast traipsing through this unusual Lynchian landscape at your leisure. Just make sure Bob isn’t lurking nearby.
Want to learn more about your favorite TV shows on DVD? Visit TVShowsOnDVD.com and TV.com.
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