Summer Reading

Between riding the train and being up at the cabin, I’ve managed to squeeze in some book reading. And thanks to the help of friends and family, I haven’t read a clunker yet this week. If you’ve finished the latest installment of Harry Potter and looking for something else to read, here’s some suggestions.

Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin

I bought this as an easy read for the train, and also as a belated, second-hand gift for Mother’s Day. Of course it’s a great epilogue to the Tales of the City series, but it’s also a kind of primer in growing old gracefully the San Francisco way. It’s a love story at heart, and based on my brief meeting with Maupin and husband Christopher Turner, probably a tad autobiographical. Maupin’s tone is as witty and style as cleanly devoid of affect as ever. The City isn’t as central a character as it has been in the past, but the theme that you can build a family from friends there is stronger than ever.

Dishwasher, Pete Jordan

Jordan did a great job of turning his ‘zine and his memoirs into a unified story. The best part is the endearing and unpretentious way that he manages to draw the history of labor’s struggle into the narrative. It’s also absolutely hilarious, and absolutely no dogmatic ideology — all too rare in the literature of the left. Recommended to me by my friend Suzanne at City Lights, I passed it on to my dad who also loved it, it reminded me to some degree of Red Eye, Black Eye. Both are great travel reading.

Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta

Another of Suzanne’s recommendations, it’s a wonderful look at the complexities of alienation and the lives and values of two generations of activists and critics. Set mostly in Seattle, I could definitely relate to the milieu as well as the subtextual debate over appropriation and assimilation on the part of both capitalism and its detractors. While the plot — related in a somewhat staccato, no-linear, episodic structure — is enough to hold the book together, and the characters are a little two archetypically shallow, the strength of the book is in how the story explores the ethics of class struggle and the reality of group dynamics in a human way.

Tijuana Straits, Kem Nunn

As I wrote to my friend Mike, who recommended that I check out Nunn as a corollary to HBO’s John from Cincinnati, “it felt a lot like Carl Hiaasen West, with a little more zen buddhism vs. catholicism that’s distinctly Californian.” Like Hiaasen, Nunn uses the pulp format to explore humanism and environmentalism, but is ultimately less manichean by giving more respect to the villain. But to live up to the “noir” part of “surf noir,” there should be even more ambiguity. Still, a wonderfully imaginative and fun page-turner.

I just stopped by Elliot Bay Books here in Seattle and picked up Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford and the last of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, Flash For Freedom!, which I have yet to read. Forgot to mention that I’m also working on Michael Chabon’s latest, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which is just fantastic. If only I didn’t have to get back to work this week and could just keep reading!