Weekend picks for book lovers
What should you read this weekend? Paste BN’s picks for book lovers include Will Schwalbe's personal guide to reading.
Books for Living by Will Schwalbe; Knopf, 288 pp.; non-fiction
To explain what Books for Living is, a good place to begin might be to say what it isn’t.
It isn’t David Denby’s deeper, more ambitious Great Books or similar offerings by colleagues in the book-reclamation biz, Michael Dirda (Browsings) and Robert Gottlieb (Avid Reader).
Which is not to imply that Will Schwalbe, best known for his best-selling 2012 memoir The End of Your Life Book Club (in which he shared his love of reading with his dying mother), doesn’t have interesting things to say about literature in Books for Living. It’s just that he does so in a quiet, personal way.
Instead of trying to dust off some forgotten tome and convince us of its value, he focuses on its pressing relevance at some critical juncture in his life.
Schwalbe presents himself as an Everyman; his high-low eclecticism ranges from Homer’s The Odyssey and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener to E.B. White’s Stuart Little and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train.
Paste BN says *** out of four stars. “Books for Living is (a) …gift …that keeps giving.”
Small Admissions by Amy Poeppel; Atria, 356 pp.; fiction
Debut novel about a young woman who gets a job as an admissions officer at a prestigious New York City day school.
Paste BN says *** stars. Poeppel “delivers a perfect balance between the totally believable… and the truly absurd.”
Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marias; Knopf, 444 pp.; fiction
This literary mystery, about the troubled marriage of a filmmaker and his wife in early 1980s Madrid, is narrated by the filmmaker’s ingenuous young assistant.
Paste BN says ***½ stars. “Stunning…Marias has a knack for suspense without trickery.”
All Joe Knight by Kevin Morris; Grove Press, 353 pp.; fiction
The hero of Kevin Morris’ debut novel, buffeted by mistakes in money and marriage, is left pondering what happened to his American dream.
Paste BN says *** stars. Morris “has put a spotlight on a lower middle class that gets little attention in contemporary fiction.”
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher; Blue Rider Press, 272 pp.; non-fiction
The iconic Star Wars actress, who died Tuesday, revealed in this memoir (released in November) that she had a three-month-long affair with co-star Harrison Ford when she was 19.
Paste BN says *** stars. “Funny and frequently touching.”
Contributing reviewers: Kevin Nance, Mary Cadden, Charles Finch, Mark Athitakis, Brian Truitt