Dear readers, Summer is my favorite time to read. Even though I have long since graduated from the halcyon days of academic calendars, something about the season still sings of leisure; the hours stretch out like a cat in a sunbeam, begging to be whiled away on a porch somewhere, lost in a well-worn paperback, with a sweaty glass of limeade within reach. There is a particular kind of book I gravitate to in this season — it has to be engrossing, with fascinating characters and a plot that keeps me hooked. And even better than one great plot? Twin story lines that intertwine in fascinating ways, sweeping me along as they race to the finish: the “por qué no los dos” of reading experiences, if you will. Here are two of my favorites. —Jennifer “The History of Love,” by Nicole KraussFiction, 2005
This slim, enchanting novel features two of my favorite narrators of all time. It opens with Leo Gurksy, a Holocaust survivor, retired locksmith and writer whose unpublished novel about the love of his life was lost in the war. Leo lives in an overstuffed New York apartment, weighed down by mountains of clutter and the old wounds of heartbreak, so desperately lonely and afraid of vanishing in one of those horrible, neighbors-finally-called-because-of-the-smell New York deaths that he takes a job as a nude model for a figure-drawing class just to be seen. Funny and poetic, he plows through the indignities of age with the brute force of wit — and with the help of Bruno, his neighbor and childhood friend, with whom he reconnects after spotting him outside an East Broadway grocery store, thousands of miles and six decades removed from their rural Polish boyhood. Then there’s Alma, a cunning, tenderhearted 14-year-old Brooklyn girl whose father died of pancreatic cancer. Worried about her grieving mother, and hoping to serve as matchmaker, Alma strikes up a correspondence with the stranger paying her mother to translate an obscure book, published by a Polish Holocaust survivor living in Chile, called “The History of Love.” But Alma soon becomes less interested in her mom’s love life than in the book itself — and in its main character, Alma’s namesake, who she comes to suspect is based on a real woman. “The History of Love” is a mystery and a love story, a dreamy meditation on family and grief and the power of storytelling. Krauss pivots from a Polish shtetl to a Long Island shiva to a Chilean cafe with mesmerizing finesse, and in language so beautiful her sentences will burrow their way between your bones. This is the rare book I have reread several times, and whenever I pick it up I find I can’t put it down until the story barrels to its conclusion. Read if you like: “The Book Thief,” by Markus Zusak; “City of Thieves,” by David Benioff; “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” by Gabrielle Zevin; the Veselka meat plate; the Simon & Garfunkel song “Old Friends.” “Great Circle,” by Maggie ShipsteadFiction, 2021
In 1950, the aviator Marian Graves disappears on the last leg of her attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Decades later, in 2014, Hadley Baxter, the former star of a blockbuster supernatural teen romance franchise, attempts to resurrect her career with a lead role in a prestige biopic about Graves’s life and presumed death. The stories of these two women and how they each ended up in a cockpit — one rickety and real, the other simulating a dramatic plunge into the Southern Ocean via movie magic — bob and weave through Shipstead’s thoroughly absorbing novel. My gripe with many dual-story books is that one of the plots is more compelling than the other, forcing the reader to slog through the subpar chapters to get back to the main event. This is not one of those novels. I was completely captivated by both women: Just as I was humming along through Marian’s Montana childhood or her early jobs flying moonshine for a bootlegger, the book would change gears and I’d find myself equally gripped by Hadley’s child star days and her investigations into Marian’s final journey. It’s a rare feat, one that reminded me of how I fell in love with reading in the first place, and it is made even more impressive by the perfectly calibrated twists at the story’s conclusion. I love this book so much I wish I could erase it from my memory and experience the joy of discovering it all over again. Read if you like: “The Whalebone Theater,” by Joanna Quinn; “The Great Believers,” by Rebecca Makkai; Amelia Earhart conspiracy theories. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
|
