Special Post - Resources for Finding Great Books

Situation:
You crave the perfect title to fit your reading mood, whether a thriller, romance, mystery, coming of age, biography, or history. You want something great, quirky, and definitely a grabber from the first sentence. 

Problem:
You need a source of recommendations from a source you respect who has similar passions as you for quality reads, interesting characters, and challenging plots. You want the newest books praised by this person, not just something popular from the list of New York Times Bestsellers. 

Solution:
Below are some sources, both print and online, that I use to learn about new and old titles. Reading a quick review by a smart writer rouses my curiosity and gets me to search out the first sentences in a copy from the bookstore or online at Amazon. If that writing grabs me, I am ready to actually read the book, pretty much assured I will enjoy it.

Hope these resources provide some titles that catch your interest. Maybe you have other resources you use. Please let me know in the Comments below as I am always looking for new avenues to the best reads.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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Print Resources

Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason - Nancy Pearl

Description:

By far the best reviews for quality reads. Pearl recommends huge numbers of books organized by eclectic categories including "Academic Mysteries," "Armchair Travel," and "Australian Fiction," to "What a (Natural) Disaster," "Women's Friendships," and "World War II Nonfiction."

She writes short, enthusiastic reviews which make you want to read every book she mentions. Even better, she has three other books about great books: More Book Lust, Book Lust to Go (travel writing), and Book Crush (kids and teens).

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Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You - Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin

Description:

Different books appeal to us depending on our moods. Sometimes we need cheering up, a quick escape, a look into history, or a great love story. Other times, we need help, whether to learn about ourselves, our problems, or the world itself. 

Novel Cure offers hundreds of high-quality titles and descriptions of the perfect books to fit with your needs of that moment, including "Abandonment" (Plainsong by Kent Haruf), "Age Gap Between Lovers" (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka) and "Aging, the Horrors of" (JItterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins).

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Great Beginnings: Opening Lines of Great Novels - Georgianne Ensign

Description:

Hundreds of opening lines to great books. Sections are broken into what these first sentences reveal, from meeting the narrator, setting the scene, critical actions, to the arrival of a stranger, revelation of the contents of a letter, and the author's philosophy. Even have sections covering the dramatically short sentences as well as openings with 100+ word sentences.

No descriptions of the contents of the books, but since I believe the first sentences determine the quality of the book, you can quickly, confidently decide how each book might meet your tastes based on style, characters, and plot.

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Booked to Die - John Dunning

Description:

It's unusual to read a fictional crime novel and discover great recommendations for books, but John Dunning's Bookman series of ex-cop-turned-rare-book-dealer Cliff Janeway are rich lodes of classic titles.

Although Janeway gets involved in murder investigations, his main interest is selecting quality books for his rare book shop. Thus, he shares his favorite titles and authors and why he loves them enough to stock them (or keep them for himself). His tastes are exquisite, uncovering forgotten authors (such as mystery-writer C.W. Grafton, Sue Grafton's father) and titles that have stood the test of quality writing, character, and plot.

There are several books about Janeway and his book recommendations/crime stories, including Bookman's Wake, The Sign of the Book, The Bookman's Promise, and The Bookman's Last Fling. Come for the book recommendations and stay for the great writing and crime stories. (Booked to Die was previously reviewed here.)

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One for the Books - Joe Queenan

Description:

Queenan estimates he has read between 6,000 - 7,000 books at about 150 per year, with usually more than 15 going simultaneously. Therefore, he's read everything and, even better, has strong opinions on what is great and what is forgettable.

His writes of his tastes organized in an unexpected way to include diverse titles, so it is preferable to simply read chapters like a regular book rather than skimming. You won't be disappointed with titles referred to in chapters such as "Prepare to be Astonished" (The Good Soldier), "The Stockholm Syndrome (The Dogs of Riga), and "Life Support" (Book of Lost Books). 

This is a fantastically fun, enlightening, opinionated, and wild book about books. I just love following his wandering tastes and accompanying stories, discovering many new books including those he's read more than once (e.g., Flaubert's Sentimental Education). A great resource for classic and obscure reads. (One for the Books was previously reviewed here.)

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Education of a Wandering Man - Louis L'Amour

Description:

As a young man, Louis L'Amour, the great Western story writer, spent much time hopping onto trains and riding the rails, jumping off wherever he liked, working a bit, then traveling some more. Education of a Wandering Man complies entries from his diaries of these years of roaming, but also contain lists of the books he read during his travels.

He always carried a bag of book to read and share with fellow travelers. Even better, he kept copious lists of every book he got his hands on. Fascinating to examine what he read (everything). An interesting note: he only kept the books for his own library which he could not easily be able to acquire again (e.g., The Annals and Antiquities of Rajahstan). Using this criteria, one can view the titles he classifies as of the highest quality and the rarest.

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Page-A-Day Booklovers Calendar

Description:

I have found more fascinating books from this calendar than any other resource. Every day offers a title from the recent or distant past, books that have proven quality, but maybe have slipped into undeserved obscurity. Each title is reviewed in only a few short sentences, but so passionately written that you want to search out every selection immediately. And once you purchase this, you can access the titles and descriptions online or have them emailed to you each day. Learning about a new book is a wonderful way to wake up in the morning!

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Free Online Resources 
(Blogs, Newsletters, etc.)

   BookPage






   
Description:

This is a monthly book newsletter distributed free in print format in 450,000 bookstores and libraries. The online version offers book-of-the-day email postings for the newest titles and reviews, as well as more extensive lists of current and past reviews. An excellent resource to keep up to date on the best and brightest of new books.

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    NPR Books

    

Description:

Wonderful weekly resource for great reads by topic, whether new publications or off-beat older selections. Newsletters are available to be sent you via email, RSS, etc. You can listen to podcasts with Nancy Pearl and other reviewers as well from this web site.

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The Huffington Post Books

Description: 

Online newsletter with lots and lots of quality books and reviews from a variety of readers with differing tastes. The variety is wonderful and the writing and passion makes you want to get every book.

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  Booklist Online 

Description:

Over 130,000 book reviews created by the American Library Association "for librarians, book groups, and book lovers." A very wide range of current books with high-quality reviews. Also, their newsletter provides many pre-publication titles so you can be the first to order one from your library or book store.

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The Longest Chapter                     The Longest Chapter

Literary fiction, poetry, first editions, classics… 

                                           

Description: 

Really great book review blog from the NPR book critic for WOSU in Columbus, Ohio. Introduces lots of great, lesser-known titles (at least to me) that have proved captivating, well-written, and challenging (e.g., Norwegian by Night, The Collector of Lost Things, The Good Luck of Right Now, Burial Rites, and my newest favorite, Brewster). 

All of these titles I can honestly say were among my favorites of the past few months. She even offers her list of the most memorable 54 books for her 54 years.

What To Read and Why

Prose, Francine. What To Read and Why. New York: HarperCollins 2018. Print

First Sentences:

Reading is among the most private, the most solitary things that we can do.

A book is a kind of refuge to which we can go for the assurance that, as long as we are reading, we can leave the worries and cares of our everyday lives behind us and enter, however briefly, another reality, populated by other lives, a world distant in time and place from our own, or else reflective of the present moment in ways that may help us see that moment more clearly.

Description:

The books I most eagerly and thoroughly enjoy are those that tell me about other books. Whether through an author's personal reading preferences like Book Lust by Nancy Pearl or Joe Queenen's One For the Books, or by recounting personal adventures with books like The Shelf (reading an entire shelf of library books) by Phyllis Rose or The Know-It-All (reading the entire encyclopedia) by A.J. Jacobs, anything that describes and thereby promotes great, interesting books is always my first choice.

What To Read and Why by Francine Prose ably fills the bill for me. She clearly understands the double joy of reading: the solitary time in the author's world and then the sharing of the book's ideas with others. And she suggests that "You've got to read this" are the words that should open every positive book review. She feels the best reviews of recommended books really are telling readers to "Drop everything. Start reading. Now."

Reading and writing are solitary activities, and yet there is a social component that comes into play when we tell someone else about what we have read. An additional pleasure of reading is that you can urge and sometimes even persuade people you know and care about, and even people you don't know, to read the book you've just finished and admired -- and that you think they would like, too. 

In What to Read, each of its thirty-three chapters covers one highly recommended book and author. They range from the more recognized Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and George Eliot's Middlemarch to the lesser-know (at least to me) Roberto Bolano's 2666 and Mark Strand's Mr. and Mrs. Baby. Along the way author Prose covers the lives (briefly) and books by Austen, Alcott, Munro, and Knausgaard, as well as Charles Baxter, Deborah Levy, and Mohsin Hamid, all of whom I was to varying degrees unfamiliar with.

Prose even includes a couple of chapters on related topics such as "On Clarity," "What Makes a Short Story?",  and "On the Erotic and Pornographic." Got your interest yet? Surely there is something to whet anyone's reading appetite in What To Read and Why. 

Here's a writer who clearly loves to read and enthusiastically share her gems will all of us. Now, a few tidbits to get you excited about her recommendations:

• [on "The Collected Stories" of Mavis Gallant]: I feel  kind of messianic zeal, which I share with other writers and readers, to make sure that Gallant's work continues to be read, admired -- and loved....She builds her fictions with moments and incidents so revealing and resonant that another writer might have made each one a separate story....Her fiction has the originality and profundity, the clarity, the breadth of vision, wit, the mystery, the ability to make us feel that a work has found its ideal form, that no one word could be changed, all of which re recognize as being among the great wonders of art.

• [on Patrick Hamilton]: With their intense, and intensely mixed, sympathies for the men and women who haunted the pubs and walked the streets of London's tawdrier districts just before, during, and after World War II, Patrick Hamilton's novels are dark tunnels of misery, loneliness, deceit, and sexual obsession, illuminated by scenes so funny that it takes a while to register the sheer awfulness of what we have just red.

• [on Andrea Canobbio]: Canobbio...avoids the obvious pitfalls, largely as a result of his acuity and inventiveness, of the specificity and density of his detail, the elegance of his style, and the depth of his psychological insight.

• [on Elizabeth Taylor (the author, not the actress)]: The best of her fiction is extremely funny, incisive, sympathetic, and beautifully written, but it can also make us squirm with uneasy recognition and tell us more than we might choose to hear about ourselves and our neighbors. Awful things happen in those narratives, not in the sense of violence and gore but of characters realizing awful truths about the lives in which they are hopelessly mired.

• [on Jane Austen]: No other novelist combined such a subtle, delicate moral sensibility with such a firm, no-nonsense grasp of the most material realities -- of the fact that money determines one's opportunity to live in the tranquil and gracious style to which one is (or would like to be) accustomed.

• [on Stanley Elkin]: Stanley was not only a maximalist of language, but also one of truth....That was one of the most astonishing and special qualities of his work: that piling on more and more -- more metaphors, more world, more sentences, more humor, more energy -- as a way of delving into, bringing to light, and forcing us to look directly into the heart of the simultaneously dark and scintillating mystery of what makes us human. 

Well, you get the idea. Francine Prose is a gifted writer herself, willing to read widely, analyze the importance of great writing, and share her loves with us. No one could pick up What To Read and Why without finding something unexpected and alluring, an author, title or review, that will make them immediately go into a bookstore, library, or online to obtain a copy of this new treasure. Highly recommended. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Pearl, Nancy. Book Lust.   

Absolutely the best, most compelling, delightful reviews of hundreds of recommended titles from the head librarian of the Seattle Public Library. Irresistible, and best of all Pearl has several other Book Lust titles available for travel, teens, etc. (previously reviewed here)

Browsings

Dirda, Michael. Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books. New York: Pegasus 2015. Print

First Sentences:

As readers of Browsings will discover in the weeks to come, I'm pretty much what used to be called a "bookman." 

 

This means, essentially, that I read a lot and enjoy writing about the books and authors that interest me....But my tone aims to remain easygoing and conversational, just me sharing some of my discoveries and enthusiasms.


Description:

OK, I admit it. I'm a hopeless sucker for books about books. Anything that covers ground about reading experiences and interesting titles, I'm all in. Whether the topic is about reading the encyclopedia (The Know-It-All: One Man's Quest to be the Smartest Man in the World), perusing every book on one shelf in the library (The Shelf: From LEQ to LES), thoughtful recommendations from someone who reads 6,000 books a year (One For the Books), or just a personal list of wonderful books organized by subject and complete with witty descriptions (Book Lust), I gobble up these books, copying enticing titles into my pocket notebook of "Books To Be Read" for later consumption.

My latest treasure in this "Books on Books" topic is Michael Dirda Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books. Dirda was a columnist for The American Scholar between 2012-13, taking the column over from the great William K. Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well, which to me is the definitive grammar and writing style advice guidebook. Quite large shoes to fill.

But Dirda can really write, and write he does on any book-related topic that strikes his fancy for his column, "Browsings." In this book, Dirda collects one year's worth of his short columns on a wide variety of topics, including:

Thrift store book shopping -

One thing never does change: the books you really covet always cost more that you want to pay for them. But, to borrow a phrase that women use of childbirth, the pain quickly vanishes when you finally hold that longed-for baby, or book, and know that it is your forever.

Book Collecting - 

Three important points for buying a collectable book : condition, condition, condition....Now you can easily acquire almost anything with a keystroke, if you have the funds. But where's the fun of that? Where's the serendipity? The thrill of the hunt?...that's not collecting, that's shopping.

Anthologies - 

Anthologies resemble dating. You enjoy some swell times and suffer through some awful ones, until one happy hour you encounter a story you really, really like and decide to settle down for a while with its author. Of course, this doesn't lead to strict fidelity.

His own life - 

I had graduated from Oberlin College and failed to win a Rhodes Scholarship -- a long shot, at best, given that I played no sports, earned mediocre grades as a freshman and sophomore, and had participated in absolutely nothing extracurricular. It turned out that zeal for learning and boyish charm weren't quite enough for the Rhodes committee... 

He introduces or refamiliarizes us readers with his favorite writers, such as:

• Everett F. Bleiler - author of The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, with summaries for 1,775 books written between 1750-1960;

• Irvin Leigh Matus - author of Shakespeare, In Fact, the definitive scholarly work about the life of the Bard, despite Matus having no formal education beyond a high school diploma, and incredibly had 20 years earlier been living on a heating grate behind the Library of Congress

• Charles Wager - Oberlin College professor who wrote essays on his college in To Whom It May Concern. Wager was the teacher whom Robert Maynard Hutching, renown president of the University of Chicago, said was the only truly great teacher he experienced during his years of education at Yale, Princeton, and many other universities

Dirda mentions his love of classic novels, especially those long-forgotten but are still captivating and worth re-exploring. He even developed and taught a course at the Univerisity of Maryland entitled, "The Classic Adventure Novel: 1885-1915" where students read King Solomon's Mines. Kidnapped, The Time Machine, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Man Who Was Thursday, Kim, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and Tarzan of the Apes (my favorite hero as a boy. I read all 24 Tarzan books three times before my parents made me move on). This wildly popular class led to his follow-up course "The Modern Adventure Novel: 1917-1973" which covered Captain Blood, Red Harvest, The Real Cool Killers, True Grit, and The Princess Bride. Who wouldn't want to take those courses with him and dive into these gripping novels?

Here's just a peak at a smattering of some of the other unusual titles Dirda mentions that caught my eye:

• Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind 
• The Moon Is Feminine
• The Man With the Magic Eardrums
• The Skull of the Waltzing Clown
• The Lost Continent
• When I Was a Child I Read Books 
• I Am Thinking of My Darling
• The Fangs of Suet Pudding
• The Bible Repairman and Other Stories
• The Venetian Glass Nephew
• The Man Who Understood Women 

I could go on and on about the treasures uncovered in Browsings, but I'll leave that pleasure to you readers curious about discovering new titles to explore, reading about the author's incurable scrounging through used book stores, encounters with famous and not-so-famous writers, and his pursuit of quality reads and reading experiences.

I've lived slow, dithered and dallied, taken my own sweet time, and done pretty much what I've repeatedly done ever since my mother first taught me to read so long ago: Found a quiet spot and opened a book. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Miller, Andy. A Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life  

Author Andy Miller decides to read fifty book in one year. Along the way, he writes an essay on each book about what the book means to him, his feelings for the author and background, and anything else delightful he can think of. He avoided Dan Brown's books. (previously reviewed here)

Queenen, Joe. One for the Books  

Here's a gifted reader, writer, and commentator on books (he reads up to 32 at a time!), guaranteed to fill up your To Be Read file with countless interesting titles you simply cannot live without reading. Wonderful writing and a goldmine of book ideas (previously reviewed here)

 

 

 

What Makes This Book So Great?

Walton, Jo. What Makes This Book So Great?. New York: Tor. 2014. Print.

First Sentences:

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who re-read and those who don't.

No, don't be silly. There are far more than two kinds of people in the world. There are even people who don't read at all. 

Description:

I do read some science fiction and fantasy, but usually stick to the masters like Clarke, Asimov, Tolkien, Heinlein, Bradbury, Lem, etc. My problem is there is a lot of sci-fi I simply don't respond to (too technologically complex, too fantastic, too bleak, too many strangely nuanced aliens and/or humans). So, to my secret shame, I rarely take the time even to read their first sentences. 

What I really need is a trusted reviewer like Nancy Pearl or Joe Queenan, someone who reads voraciously and can point me to quality sci-fi titles they have discovered which I can then explore for myself.

Enter Jo Walton, the Hugo Award-winning author and prodigious reader (and re-reader) of sci-fi and fantasy. She admits she reads (or re-reads) a book a day, often 5-6 when sick and confined to bed. And she writes about what she has read in short, highly passionate and readable reviews found on the sci-fi website Tor.com. Her writings have now been compiled in What Makes This Book So Great?, all of which introduce and recommend Walton's best of the best in sci-fi and fantasy books.

She starts by clearly defining the genre, showing me why I often am disappointed with pseudo-sci-fi:

In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character. In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world. In a mainstream novel trying to be SF, this gets peculiar and can make the reading experience uneven. 

Besides close to 100 reviews of book, series, and authors in What Makes This Book So Great?, there are short pieces on related topics including the beauty of re-reading books, problems with traveling faster than the speed of light, reading long sci-fi series, the weirdest book in the world, how to talk to writers, cozy catastrophes (where the common people are conveniently wiped out and the rich are spared), the Suck Fairy (who destroys a beloved book that turns into trash upon later re-reading), and much more. 

Even better, I agree with her opinions on the few sci-fi/fantasy books that I actually have read. She recognizes The Lord of the Rings as the greatest fantasy book written. She's a Heinlein fan, too, even when his later books are not so great. 

And she explains "IWantToReadItosity," an often inexplicable urge for her. It is the overwhelming lure of some books that keeps her plugging through long series, re-reading favorites, and anticipating new titles from certain authors. This urge gives her strong subjective opinions of books "entirely separate from whether a book is actually good." For example, she likes Heinlein and Le Guin, but doesn't like Hesse and Huxley for admittedly unknown reasons. I feel a similar desire, and can be eagerly and totally absorbed in the world created by a favorite writer.

A Game of Thrones is eight hundred pages long, and I've read it six times, but even so, every time I put the bookmark in, I put it in reluctantly.

So now I'm at least willing to explore sci-fi with a little more confidence and open mind for some new authors. Now my to-be-read list has swelled to include, for their interesting titles alone as well as the intriguing plots:

• MIdnight's Children (Salman Rushdie) - children in India born on the eve of the revolution now posses super powers; 

• Babel-17 (Samual Delany) - focusing on an intergalactic war, an unbreakable alien code and an unhappy female telepathic poet;

• A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge) - a universe "where not only technology but also the very ability to think increases with distance from the galactic core;" 

• Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel R. Delany) - "like pop rocks for the brain;"

• The Left Hand of Darkness  (Ursula K. Le Guin) - "one of those books that changed the world...it changed feminism, and it was part of the process to change of the concept of what it was to be a man or a woman;"

• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein) - in Walton's top five books, it tells of the revolution of lunar inhabitants against their controlling government. Who can resist this title?

If you are a reluctant sci-fi reader like me, someone looking for a new title in the genre, or just enjoy great writing by a skilled reviewer, jump into What Makes This Book So Great. Ideas, challenges, the beauty of quality writing by the author, and exciting recommended titles is the reward for anyone who picks up this book.

I am talking about books because I love books. I'm not standing on a mountain peak holding them at arm's length and issuing Olympian pronouncements about them. I'm reading them in the bath and shouting with excitement because I have noticed something that is really really cool.

She is my new hero for writing such compelling reviews which make you want to read everything that she brings to your attention. I can only hope to write one tenth as well about books with her passion and wit. Well, I can dream, can't I?

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Pearl, Nancy. Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

Simply the best source for short,.highly entertaining and passionate book reviews for a huge variety of books. Makes you want to get each one and begin reading immediately.

Queenan, Joe. One for the Books

An insatiable reader who is absorbed in at least 15 books at a time, Queenan provides his strong opinions on popular and forgotten books on a wide range of topics, enough to satisfy any reading itch. (previously reviewed here)