Best books...chosen by Chrissie Hynde
Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer and principal songwriter of the Pretenders, will be
touring with her band again this summer. She has recently produced a memoir, a
book of paintings, and a jazz album featuring tunes by other great songwriters.The Book List^ ARTS^23
Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee
(1983). It’s not often I read something that
affects me the way this novel did. So tender,
bursting with humanity and understanding. It’s
in my top five of all time. I might start crying just
thinking about it.Low Heights by Pascal Garnier (2003). This
French writer was new to me; I found his novel
in a hurry at the airport. It’s very funny, full of
insight on being arrogant and getting old, and
on being a servant who is generous of spirit.
Humility, grumpiness, some tender love, and bru-
tal violence. I will now investigate all of Garnier’s
other books—there are about 60!The Blue Guitar by John Banville (2015). I have
to include Banville, one of the greatest novel-
ists alive, and I like to think he wrote this one
expressly for me—blue guitar and all—although
it doesn’t have the slightest reference to me and
I am delusional. I take ages reading Banville, as
I reread every other sentence to savor his incred-
ible constructions of text. Nobody can touch
him, in my opinion.Enemies, a Love Story by Isaac Bashevis
Singer (1972). Another masterpiece by a master.
Singer’s story about a Polish Holocaust survivor
living in New York manages to be extremely
funny, heartbreaking, and insightful. Any reader
who hasn’t read this has a real treat in store.Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958).
The first time I read this one, I was on tour in
Australia. I had to hide in a hotel room for an
hour to finish it. I was devastated, crying, the lot.
It was one of the first novels by an African to
be published in English, and it is a masterpiece.
Breathtaking stuff.Me Cheeta by James Lever (2008). This surpris-
ing spoof autobiography is not only hilarious,
but also tender and insightful. Cheeta recounts
his days working with Johnny Weissmuller as
Tarzan’s chimpanzee sidekick, but it’s more than
that. He also recalls his capture from the jungle
and arrival in America. I can honestly say that
I laughed, I cried, and I learned a lot. Why this
baby has not seen a movie screen yet is a mys-
tery. It’s another that I read and reread.Also of interest...in raising boys
AP, Jill Furmanovsky
Don’t judge this “indispensable” book
by its first pages, said Steve Don oghue
in OpenLettersReview.com. Though
author Peggy Orenstein initially seems
ready to indict boys for their attitudes
about sex, “the bulk of the book is
brilliant”—built upon interviews with 100-plus
young men, ages 16 to 22, many forthcoming
and eloquent. As in her best-seller Girls & Sex,
Orenstein is “consistently superb” in teasing out
patterns in the answers, showing parents why
communication must go beyond “the Talk.”Boys & Sex
by Peggy Orenstein (Harper, $29)
“Explaining neurobiology, testicular
growth, the gun crisis, screen addic-
tion, sexting, consent, and how to
talk about it all is too much for
200 pages,” said Lauren Smith Brody
in The New York Times. But parents
need the knowledge, and this “zippy, bighearted”
book by a pediatrician provides evidence-based
insights on every topic. Chapter-concluding bul-
let points offer tips on how to talk so teenagers
will listen—and how to set rules for screen time
and alcohol without being a tyrant.Decoding Boys
by Cara Natterson (Ballantine, $27)Douglas Stuart’s 400-page debut
novel “reads like a masterpiece,” said
Bethanne Patrick in The Washington
Post. Shuggie Bain is the youngest son
of an alcoholic mother in working-
class 1980s Glasgow, and when his
father abandons them, Shuggie, who is gay, must
grow up in dire circumstances while caring for
the only guardian he has left. Locals heap scorn
on Shuggie, but his mother never does, and Stuart
“gives voice to the kind of helpless, hopeless love
that children can feel toward broken parents.”Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart (Grove, $27)
“Every father-and-son story is really
about two sets of fathers and sons,”
said David Shribman in The Boston
Globe. Calvin Hennick’s unhappy
childhood thus informs his “enor-
mously endearing” memoir about a
road trip he made to his Iowa hometown with
his son. His desire to be a good mentor is com-
plicated by race: Hennick is white and 5-year-old
Nile is biracial. Though Hennick has too many
questions to answer here, “for the time being, it’s
enough to have raised those questions.”Once More to the Rodeo
by Calvin Hennick (Pushcart, $17)Colum McCann
Colum McCann is the type
who simply throws himself
at life, said Bryan Appleyard
in the Sunday Times (U.K.).
As a young man, inspired by
the novels of Steinbeck and
Kerouac, the Dublin native
cycled across America gather-
ing strang-
ers’ tales. In
2012, having
won major
prizes for the
novel Let the
Great World
Spin, he co-
founded a
nonprofit dedicated to the idea
that young people from differ-
ent worlds can be transformed
by sharing their stories. So
of course he couldn’t resist
trying to write a novel about
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
after he traveled to the West
Bank in 2015 and sat with two
men—one Israeli and one
Palestinian—who’d each lost
a young daughter to the vio-
lence. “I had my heart blown
open,” McCann says. “I was in
floods of tears.” He had been
looking, he says, for some-
thing “deeply, deeply difficult
to write about.”
And he chose a deeply difficult
way to do so, said Elizabeth
Winkler in The Wall Street
Journal. Apeirogon, his new
novel, puts those two men
and their tragedies at the
center of a tale that, while
transpiring across a single
day, is broken into 1,001 frag-
ments. “I knew if I was going
to deeply affect readers,” he
says, “I’d have to knock them
off balance—disrupt them so
they look at the world in a new
sort of way.” Reviews have
been mixed. While Bryan
Appleyard called it “a delirious
and thrilling improvisation,”
the New York Times’ Dwight
Garner wrote that it is “so cer-
tain of its own goodness that
it tips almost instantly into
camp.” That probably won’t
change McCann’s MO. “I’m
perfectly happy to be called
idealistic,” he says. “I will not
be called sentimental, because
this is hard stuff.”Author of the week