Staff Picks: A tender thriller, a father’s memoir, Jimmy Carter and wolves (2024)

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Ron Charles, fiction critic

“Reading It Wrong” sounds like a book reviewer’s nightmare, but I’ve come to trust the scholar Abigail Williams. Six years ago, she published “The Social Life of Books,” a fascinating study of how newly literate people in the 18th century gathered to read aloud. Her forthcoming work of literary history (Sept. 19) returns to that era to ask a curious question: How did all these new readers manage to understand the period’s notoriously cryptic satires, allegories and poems? Her answer: They didn’t. (Where was Dr. Williams when I was an undergraduate clawing through a bramble of footnotes on Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”?) By examining letters, diaries and marginalia, Williams demonstrates that those original “imperfect readers” were awash in “a particularly acute sense of puzzlement and confusion.” But this bafflement wasn’t a bug; it was a feature of dynamic and interactive works of literature that playfully “taxed their readers with making meaning.” Williams lays out the many ways in which the mysterious or difficult allusions in, say, works by Jonathan Swift could generate “argument, intimacy, and social cohesion.” Maybe, she says, “the cryptic crossword or Wordle works on the same basis.”

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Stephanie Merry, deputy editor

While I was on maternity leave, and consuming audiobooks like potato chips, I discovered a new barometer for measuring literary appeal. Some nights I wasn’t fazed if the baby awoke at 11 p.m., then 1 a.m., then 3 a.m.; in fact, I was excited to press play and answer the nagging question, “What happens next?” As you may imagine, few books reach Better Than Sleep status, but I found a handful. I wasn’t surprised that “Horse,” by Geraldine Brooks, was worth staying up late to finish, or that Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead” was hard to put down. But another book’s entry into this hallowed pantheon did shock me. On the surface, Gillian McAllister’s “Wrong Place Wrong Time” doesn’t differentiate itself substantially from any number of contemporary suspense novels, though it does bleed into other genres. The audiobook, beautifully narrated by Lesley Sharp, begins with a mother, Jen, witnessing her 18-year-old son brutally stab a man without apparent motive. In subsequent chapters, Jen finds herself jumping backward in time, giving her the chance to uncover what precipitated the violence so she can stop the attack from happening. The story is peppered with clever, nearly impossible-to-predict twists (at least for an addled, sleep-deprived brain), but what sets it apart is its tender portrait of motherhood and marriage. In my postpartum haze, I picked up McAllister’s book because I figured she would give me the tidy, satisfying conclusion my mind craved. She did, along with aching insights into what we’re willing to do — and what we’ll give up — to protect those we love.

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Sophia Nguyen, news and features writer

Andrew Leland first thought that his memoir would end with his completely losing his vision — only to find that his condition, retinitis pigmentosa, didn’t conform with that story arc. At a doctor’s visit, he describes feeling a perverse desire to be told that he’s going blind even more quickly: “Let’s just go all in on the catastrophe, shall we?” he thinks to himself.

The book that resulted is less a ledger of loss than an accounting of how blindness transforms Leland’s life, from routine tasks — such as pulling the right ingredient from his kitchen cabinet — to seeking out new experiences, like navigating an unfamiliar city or going to a museum.

It’s nerdy, often funny — as when Leland describes his cane “blasting apart clusters of pedestrians with its powerful semiotic force” — and delicately tender: At one point, his young son mimics the shape of an owl’s grasping claw with his hand so that Leland can touch it, and thus perceive it, for himself. It’s a delight to tag along with Leland as he chronicles his new world of perception and what blind normalcy — and agency, and adventure — might come to feel like.

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Becca Rothfeld, nonfiction critic

Nothing reminds us that we are hostages of our bodies more than illness; autoimmune illness in particular. To discover that you have an autoimmune disease is also to discover that your entrails are quietly conspiring against you. In the past month, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder with a name like a villain in a Dickens novel: pernicious anemia. What this means, roughly, is that my body has been attacking my stomach lining, thereby preventing me from absorbing any vitamin B12. Untreated pernicious anemia is fatal (hence the “pernicious,” which I gather used to mean “unsurvivable”), but in the age of modern medicine, it’s easily fixable, provided you are lucky enough to have a doctor who takes initially slippery symptoms like “fatigue” seriously: For now, all I have to do is inject B12 directly into my bloodstream until I have normal levels again, then intermittently for the rest of my life.

In my contribution to the last round of the Staff Picks series, I noted that I planned to read all of Nabokov’s novels in roughly chronological order. I’ve since carried on with that delightful project, but I’ve also returned to a book I first read when it came out in 2022, Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness.” For someone suffering mutely — and there is nothing more defiantly mute than physical pain — there is no greater balm than language that confers intelligibility. In her refreshingly humane account of her own grueling battle with chronic illness, O’Rourke recognizes, and thereby alleviates, the awful incommunicability of it all. “I could taste the solitude of the human body like a brine in my mouth,” she writes. “Pain was an empire of its own, well defended against language’s forays against it.” But the point of the book is to make a foray, and I am so grateful that it succeeds.

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Nora Krug, editor

Whenever I walk past a Little Free Library, I find it hard not to peek inside, then not to take anything (if I do, I go back and replace it). Recently, I spied a tattered, blue, jacketless hardcover that tempted me with its nakedness. I opened it, and there on the flyleaf was an inscription: “Keith, I saw this book and thought it was really cute. Enjoy!” The sign-off was illegible. Intrigued, I turned the pages further and realized I had read this book years earlier (perhaps I had even given it away, though not in a Little Free Library). Now I wanted to read it again. “Crawling,” by Elisha Cooper, is a father’s memoir of his daughter’s first days and months. Such books often can be naive and sentimental, especially to a reader like me, whose kids are long past this stage of life. But this is no ordinary parenting memoir. Cooper, whose picture book “A Good Night Walk” is my go-to baby gift, is a gentle, self-effacing, relatable writer. “Change for me has always been a scary and unknown creature, whose circling presence made me construct routines to guard against it,” he writes. A child is the ultimate routine-breaker, of course, and Cooper’s book, punctuated by his evocative drawings, is a delightful embrace of that chaos.

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Jacob Brogan, editor

Few books that I’ve read in the past year or two have dazzled me more than the Irish novelist Sebastian Barry’s “Days Without End.” Call it a revisionist revisionist western: Where writers like the late Cormac McCarthy dig into the myth of the Old West to uncork the wells of blood that fueled it, Barry passes through McCarthy’s cyclonic violence to find something tenderer and more loving on the other side. He achieves a similar effect in his latest novel, the marvelous “Old God’s Time,” which I picked up after it was longlisted for the Booker Prize this month. Here, Barry reaches deep into the messenger bag of mystery fiction and turns the whole business inside out to show the soft suede of its lining and the loosening stitches of the seams.

“It was a terrible thing when you couldn’t solve a murder. Like a house falling down on a builder,” Barry writes in the warm voice of his protagonist, Tom Kettle. Kettle, a retired police detective haunted by griefs that unspool slowly for the reader, finds himself caught up in an unsolved case from decades before, one involving the death of an abusive priest who committed heinous crimes at a time when men of the cloth were protected, perhaps even encouraged, by the church. The story plays out in ways that repeatedly surprise, but its twists and turns are less important than its steady emotional beats, which elegantly braid the long work of mourning to the mere fact of love.

As always, Barry is a prose stylist of near-miraculous skill, turning out crystalline sentence after crystalline sentence without ever leaving or betraying his protagonist’s perspective. His is an aphoristic imagination, and almost every chapter ends with a revelatory pirouette. “Everything busy, accurate, mysterious, ongoing, unstoppable, tending not to car crash and disaster but beauty, recompense and happiness,” he writes of the sea that Kettle surveys throughout the novel. It’s an apt description not of what Kettle has endured but of where Barry takes him, to a comfort beyond all suffering and a joy that exceeds all loss.

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Becky Meloan, editorial aide

Anyone who knows anything about our 39th president, Jimmy Carter, has probably heard that he started life as a peanut farmer in Georgia. Wondering how such a man came to be the elder statesman and humanitarian that many see him as today, my book club chose to read “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood,” a 2002 Pulitzer finalist for biography and Carter’s 15th book, which came out in 2001, when he was 76. In this feat of recollection, Carter not only remembers his life on the farm in vivid detail, he also places his rural boyhood in historical context, discussing such factors as the effects apparent on the land from displaced Indigenous people and the influence of segregation and tenant farming on his small community. Mostly, though, Carter spent his youth astonishingly hard at work, both on the farm and at what would today be called “side hustles” — swapping chestnuts for marbles, selling boiled peanuts, hamburgers and ice cream to Saturday afternoon shoppers on Main Street in Plains. Everyone in my book club enjoyed the depiction of his life in a vastly different period of American history, and we all wished he hadn’t ended the story before getting to his relationship with Rosalynn. Seeing as the prolific Carter, now 98, went on to write 17 more books, perhaps we’ll get to that another time.

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Jill Pellettieri, editor

Two raves in our companywide book Slack channel prompted me to reach for Sarah Thankam Mathews’s debut novel, “All This Could Be Different,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award last year. The coming-of-age story centers on 22-year-old Sneha, who is settling into post-college life in Milwaukee at her first corporate job, trying to enjoy the pleasures that come with newfound independence, good friends and a flush bank account. But when faced with a series of conflicts, Sneha grapples with almost every aspect of her identity — her Indian heritage, her sexuality and secrets in her past that she allows to dictate her present. Mathews, who wrote the novel when she was 29, has talked about how the book poured out of her “like my hair was on fire” over a four-month stretch after she experienced a period of deep depression and financial instability, and those raw, panicked feelings jump off the page through Sneha’s crises. Twenty-somethings in the midst of self-discovery — and anyone who’s been 20-something — will appreciate how tenderly Mathews captures what it means to find support from loved ones during this vulnerable period in life.

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John Williams, Book World editor

I was recently in Montana for the first time (Missoula), and a local bookstore’s well-curated “regional interest” shelf sustained my interest. I ended up leaving with three books from it, and I started reading “Of Wolves and Men” on the plane home. Lopez, the acclaimed nature and immersive-travel writer who died at 75 in 2020, writes in the introduction: “The truth is we know little about the wolf. What we know a good deal more about is what we imagine the wolf to be.” But he is interested mostly in the reality, even when it’s hard to know, and he exerts great effort to research and convey it. He writes lyrically about the animal’s “bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows,” guides us through the history of the animal’s physical and metaphorical presence in medieval times and among Native Americans, and bemoans the shrinking population of wolves at the time of his writing (“as is the case with so many things, deep appreciation and a sense of loss have arrived simultaneously”). I have fairly broad reading interests, but this is a lovely, heady book that I might never have thought to pick up if I hadn’t found myself in front of it far from home.