Earlier this afternoon,
Huffington Post posted a
preview of the most eagerly-anticipated books set to be published this year, and my to-read list just got a little longer. At this rate, I'd better be immortal or I'll never get through it all.
This past Monday,
Jared Diamond released
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? It's nearly unforgivable that I haven't yet read either of his bestsellers,
Guns, Germs, and Steel or
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I've been meaning to for years: they are just exactly the kind of books that I usually enjoy reading, and I have no good excuse for not having done so by now. I even own copies of both books, which have been silently judging me from the shelf for some time now. I did watch National Geographic's documentary based on
Guns, Germs, and Steel (which, by the way, is streaming on
Netflix) and found it fascinating, so I think the time has come. I'm going to start with his older books, though, and chances are good that I won't catch up to
The World Until Yesterday until sometime in early 2018, but it's nice to know that it will be there waiting for me when I'm ready for it. ;)
Lawrence Wright's
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, about the September 11th plot and the counterintelligence operation designed to prevent it, was one of the best works of narrative nonfiction that I have ever read. It provides a compelling and masterful explanation of jihad mobilization and the bureaucratic snafus that culminated in the attacks. If you haven't read it, I cannot recommend it highly enough--it's one of those books that will help you better understand why America is the way it is in the new century. (In fact, if you look to the upper right corner of this page, you'll see a array of covers of my favorite books, and The Looming Tower is among them.)
For that reason, I am absolutely perplexed at his choice of subject matter in his latest book,
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, due January 17th. Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed that he focused his considerable talents on a topic that, at least on the face of it, seems so trivial compared with his previous work. He's such a strong writer that I'd follow him pretty far afield from my usual reading interests, but Scientology and Hollywood is probably stretching it a bit too far. I'm sure that there must be quite a story to tell if he chose to tell it, but I'm just not very interested.
In June, Colum McCann (author of
Let the Great World Spin) will publish
Transatlantic, a novel that weaves together the lives of
Frederick Douglass,
Alcock and Brown (the British pilots who completed the first transatlantic flight in 1919), and former
Senator George Mitchell (D-ME). McCann is a great storyteller, and I'm curious to see why he chose to focus on Senator Mitchell, the former Senate Majority Leader and roving diplomat who has assisted with peace talks in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. I work in politics and have met the senator in passing a couple of times, and I think this book will probably mark the first time when I will read a novel featuring a character that I have met. If it were nonfiction, it wouldn't be so strange, but in a novel it seems both kind of bizarre and cool, don't you think?
In any case, HuffPo also mentioned books forthcoming from David Sedaris, Stephen King, Maurice Sendak, E.O. Wilson, Dan Savage, Lionel Shriver, and Chuck Todd. And in March, readers in the U.S. will have their first opportunity to get a copy of The Tragedy of Mr Morn, an early play by Nabokov. Buckle up, kids--there's a busy year ahead!
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