Reading Resolution: April Showers (of Men)

Posted by David Duhr in WBN News & Events      8 comments

May
3

After a rather lackluster March — three books, all dudes — I picked it up a little in April.

Except for the “all dudes” portion: Five books in April, all by men. Three of them are technically for work, so that’s part of it. And also I’m partway into two books written by women, and given a few more days, they’d have made this list.

But they didn’t. So I’m at 19 books on the year, 12 by men. Clearly I am lagging.

The other half of the bet is going better: 11 of the 19 fit the minority and/or translated writer bill. Still, I’m not exactly killing it.

(Here are January, February and March, if you’re new to this and curious.)

What are you currently reading? And how is your reading resolution going? Let us know below.

And now for the books.

1) The Adventurist, J. Bradford Hipps (Macmillan)

My review of this won’t run for another week or two, so I’ll have to hold off. But in brief: sharp intellect and funny writing overcome a somewhat stale office plot. For readers who like their protagonists funny and philosophical. Think The Moviegoer.

2) Bottom of the 33rd, Dan Barry (HarperCollins)

This is hands down my favorite baseball book, and I’ve gone through hundreds of ’em. I’ve read it about half a dozen times now, once per year since I discovered it, and a few years twice.

The setting is a bitterly cold Easter eve in 1981 Rhode Island, where the AAA Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings play 32 innings, and around eight hours, of deadlocked baseball. By the time the game is finally suspended very early on Easter morning, only about a dozen fans remain.

It sounds like an absolutely miserable night, for all involved. But Barry spins some sort of evil writer’s magic and makes me wish, dearly, that I had been in the stands that night.

I could write a book about how much I love and admire this book.

3) Long Gone, Paul Hemphill (Viking)

I get the sense that this is a mostly forgotten baseball novel. It’s an enjoyable story about a D League team in the Florida panhandle in the 1950s. Everyone’s broke and drunk, many of the players are past their prime, and even the younger ones don’t have much of a future in baseball. I suppose “down and out” is a quick & easy way to summarize the league and its talent.

The book moves quickly. Perhaps too quickly. I know I had a good time reading it, but it has left little impression.

The friend who suggested it also fondly remembers the made-for-TV film adaptation. It looks very, very ’80s.

4) A Rage in Harlem, Chester Himes (Maybe Dell? I’m having trouble finding the original publisher. Here.)

I won’t write too much about this here, because I’m working something up. But I can see that I am going to read a great deal more of Chester Himes’ work. In many ways, this book is unrecognizable as being by the same author as If He Hollers Let Him Go (which I talked about in the February edition). In other ways, it’s obviously the same guy.

In brief: A dupe of a hearse driver is scammed by a group of hustlers, and then begrudgingly enlists the help of his sketchy brother — who makes money by dressing up as a nun and asking for donations — to get it, and his girlfriend, back. But is his girlfriend in on the scam?

It’s a very entertaining, angry, and ahead of its time crime novel. It’s the first of Himes’ so-called Harlem Cycle.I shall be reading many more of them.

5) Arcade, Drew Nellins Smith (Unnamed Press)

This is the debut novel from a good friend of mine, and I’ll have a lot more to say about it when his pub date arrives, six weeks from now. I read his draft and enjoyed it a lot. I read the final version and enjoyed it even more.

Check out the description. If it sounds even remotely up your alley, then it is. If it doesn’t, then it’s probably not.

So that’s my April reading. Coming up in May (I hope): More baseball, more Harlem, some Jane Jacobs, a quick trip to Barcelona … and fewer male writers!

What have you been reading? How is your reading resolution going so far? Better yet, how is your writing resolution going so far? Let us know in the comments below.

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WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is copy editor and fiction editor at the Texas Observer and contributes regularly to the Dallas Morning News, Publishing Perspectives, the Observer and other publications.