BookEnds

Reading Rainbow, a favorite from my childhood, is to end its 26-year run, NPR reports. I’m so sad. How will kids know what to read without LeVar Burton?

Yesterday I spent a considerable amount of time wandering Barnes and Noble, a favorite activity, trying not to succumb to my rapacious appetite for all those lovely new reads lining the shelves, their glossy covers and thick, creamy pages just begging to be rifled through. For me, books have the same tantalizingly irresistible pull that women often ascribe to designer shoes – no matter how many I’ve got stacked in my bookshelf at home, I just have to buy more. Once I’m in a Barnes and Noble, it takes a good deal of self control not to wobble to the checkout buried beneath towering stacks of books that have caught my attention. Yesterday, though, I managed to resist the siren song of half a dozen delicious new books and restricted myself to just one purchase: a beautiful, sunny yellow edition of E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India”, it’s cover patterned with delicately intricate designs and fairly exhaling the perfume of exotic mystery (I’ve been on a Forster kick since “A Room With a View”). I did let my eye wander longingly over several titles that I’ve been musing over lately and plan to pick up, once I’ve finished the approximately 20,000 other books I’ve got on my list (only a slight exaggeration). Two of the titles that I pondered: “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann and “Glover’s Mistake” by Nick Laird.

These two Irishmen, from Dublin and Cookstown, respectively, really leapt off the shelves for some reason, perhaps because I’d been previously influenced by the New York Times reviews. McCann’s last book but one was “Dancer”, the brilliantly compelling story of famed Russian ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev. Half-fiction, half-biography, the book left me breathlessly in awe of McCann’s talents as a writer and his newest book, “Let the Great World Spin”, promises another magnificent read. From what I gleaned in a short perusal, the story is of two Irish brothers in New York and the tales of those whose paths they cross in their individual journeys. The first few pages were so good I had to put the book back on the shelf with great reluctance, making a mental note to savor it another time.

Nick Laird, probably better known as “Mr. Zadie Smith”,  is primarily a poet, I believe, and his second novel, “Glover’s Mistake”, looks to be an interesting prospect. I haven’t really read Laird’s poetry, other than briefly flicking through one of his collections and alighting on a line or two I liked, and I have to confess, I was originally drawn to his book because he’s the other half of a famous literary couple (his wife Zadie Smith wrote “White Teeth”, which I quite enjoyed). The Times review of “Glover’s Mistake” was very nice, though, and I was particularly drawn to this line, excerpted from the book in the review:

“This hour must once have been the kingdom of the lamplighters, and subject to their piecemeal, point-by-point illumination, but now the street lights all came on in a single instant pulse, a blink.”

Worth a shot, I think. But first, I’ve got another book to finish. Review pending.

Two books I’ve read recently provide pretty good perspective on the health care debate — “Nudge,” by Obama advisor Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler and “Better,” by Atul Gawande. Gawande, a New Yorker staff writer, wrote the oft-cited piece about the cost of health care in McAllen, Texas, where Medicaid reimbursements are the highest in the nation but which don’t make the populace any healthier. Both are worth a read because they provide insights on what some of the country’s smartest thinkers think about health care, the insurance markets, and how people respond to them. Enjoy them while BookEnds decides what the next book club choice will be.

I’m not a huge audio book fan, but I often find myself driving between 6 and 8 on Saturday evenings. That might not mean much to you, but to me it means tyranny: every public radio station between New Haven and Brooklyn — at least the ones I’m aware of — play only “A Prairie Home Companion” during those hours. No offense to Garrison Keillor — who’s an icon, I know — but I turn away as soon as I hear the chimes heralding American Public Media. I need to listen to something on the way down, so occasionally I’ll download an audio book.

Recently I was entertained by David Plotz’s new book, “Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.” Plotz is an editor for Slate and began reading and blogging the Old Testament, from alpha to omega, a few years ago.

Plotz also reads for the audio recording, and I’ve heard his voice so often on Slate’s Political Gabfest that he feels like an old friend. While the book was a pleasure, I’m fairly certain it was more fun reading as an ongoing blog than listening to as an entire book. Still, I learned more about what’s in the Bible than I knew there was to learn.

Most interesting, though, was a point Plotz keeps coming back to again and again. You run through a lot of different tribes in the Old Testament, tribes against whom the Israelites war and with whom they intermarry, but we don’t know much about them. It’s not clear what happened to them all, but Plotz’s point is that he thinks the Jews survived as a people and a religious group because they wrote a book. They wrote their traditions down, and Plotz writes about how moving it can be to practice ancient rituals and know the same rituals were performed in ancient times. That really struck me: survival through book writing.

Before we started reading “The Nine” I unsuccessfully tried to cram in one of my favorite guilty pleasures: “Wicked Prey,” the latest in a series of mysteries by a former Twin Cities journalist who writes under the name John Sandford.

The Prey series is one of two I picked up as a young teenager because my mom read them and they seemed grown up. My tastes have long since shifted, but, though you’ll never find me waxing nostaligic about another pre-teen fave, Mary Higgins Clark, you’ll always find me with a copy of the latest Prey book.

When I finished Jeffrey Toobin, I picked up Sandford. More than anything, I wanted to see what the hero, a former-cop-turned-state-agent named Lucas Davenport, was up to. The books rely a little too heavily on boilerplate mystery cliches, but the pace, both in the book and as you read it, is fast enough to keep you involved. The problem with the Prey books is that they’re all so similar, I tend to forget them almost as soon as I read them.  I can’t really tell you where the last book’s narrative thread ran out, but I can tell you a lot about Davenport. There’s something about Davenport and the way he moves through the cities that makes me want to sign up for the Minneapolis police force, too.

I feel the same way about the other mystery series with a solid place on my own young adult shelf, the Kinsey Millhone novels by Sue Grafton. Millhone is a private investigator in a Santa Barbara-like fake town called Santa Teresa. More importantly, the book titles are in such a form — “A is for Alibi,” “B is for Burglar,” “C is for Corpse,” — that guessing what the next title would be was a favorite car game for my family when we were young kids. Coming up: “U is for Undertow.” We didn’t guess that one. Still waiting for news on the X. Xerox was really our best shot because x-ray seemed like cheating.

Because Grafton writes the books as if little time is passing in Millhone’s world between each one, it’s still the 80′s in Santa Teresa. And that makes the feeling that I’m revisiting my own past even stronger. Whatever I’m doing in my real life, I’m spending the end of the day or so it takes me to suck down one of these books scoping out properties on the southern California coastline so that I can get into my VW Rabbit and go become a private investigator. Not that I have a Rabbit. Or the skills to become an investigator.

SPOILER ALERT: You know what happens in “Wicked Prey?” Lucas Davenport catches the bad guys. Ah, the reassuring feeling of a predictable trip to a favorite place.

For all of you science fiction lovers out there, authors Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson will speak on their new book in the popular “Dune” series, “Winds of Dune,” tonight, 7 p.m. at Just Books in Old Greenwich. Written by Herbert’s father, the late Frank Herbert, “Dune” tells the story of a feudal interstellar empire at war and the struggle of the novel’s powerful antihero, Paul Maud’Dib, to wrest control of the desert planet Arrakis. The novel has become the epitome of literary science fiction and has spawned a television series and a film directed by David Lynch. Brian Herbert and Anderson continued the series in 1997, reigniting interest in this beloved saga. Their eleventh book in the series, “Winds of Dune,” focuses on Lady Jessica as she comes to terms with the dissappearence of her son after he wanders blind into the desert. Seats can still be reserved for this event by calling 203-637-0707.

Malt Whitman or Li-Berry Pie?

As the summer melts blissfully into the thick, sultry humidity of August, the library can become a delicious oasis of cool; the air-conditioned stacks of arid-smelling books and chilled silence of the hushed reading rooms are a delight on the hottest, muggiest of days. What could possibly be more delicious, more satisfying and better suited to cut the cloying heat of a sticky mid-afternoon than the delectably bookish pleasure of library-themed ice cream?

That’s right — Ben & Jerry’s is considering the launch of a library-themed ice cream flavor, spurred by the campaign of New Jersey librarian Andy Woodworth. Woodworth wanted to bring attention to the current plight of the public library, suffering beneath the burden of slashed budgets, so he embarked on this crusade to combine the academic with the gastronomic. His Facebook group to support the idea has already garnered over 4,000 eager followers and more are sure to follow in the trail of such a delicious idea. After all, if Jerry Garcia, Dave Matthews and Stephen Colbert can inspire their own flavors, why not the library?

A few of flavor ideas being bandied around already sound scrumptious:

- “Gooey Decimal System = Dark fudge alphabet letters with caramel swirls in hazelnut ice cream.”

- “Cookie Bookie = a combination of cookie bits!”

- “Li-Berry Pie = Lime sherbet mixed with raspberry sauce and pie crust crumbles (cinnamon sugar, butter, piecrust).”

- “Rocky Read = vanilla with chocolate covered nuts chocolate chunks and raisins.”

- “Sh-sh-sh-Sherbet! = Key Lime or a Chocolate/Vanilla combination.”

- “Malt Whitman” = malt ice cream with chocolate alphabet letters and two caramel and fudge swirls.”

The Facebook group includes a link where interested bookworms and ice cream afincianados alike can suggest a flavor right to Ben & Jerry’s. Personally, I’d vote for “Gooey Decimal System” but does anyone have any other mouth-watering suggestions?

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And, in other food-related news, I found this post in the New Yorker book blog that just made me smile — the team at The Book Bench “decided it would make sense to put on our Zagat hats and reduce great works of fiction to mediocre restaurants.” Suggestions include “The Sound and the Curry”, “Rabbits at Rest Free-Range BBQ”, “War and Pizza”, “Grapes of Wrath” winebar and “Animal Farm”, a gastro-pub where the sausage “occasionally talks back.” Dinner, anyone? 

As Chris pointed out in his first post about “The Nine” by Jeffrey Toobin, the battle over the Supreme Court has been framed by a for the last three decades by an ideological debate between those who believe the framer’s intentions in drafting the Constitution should be strictly interpreted and those who believe the Constitution is a living document meant to adapt to changing times. In specific response to what many conservatives believed was the overreaching of the Warren and Burger courts, they have made efforts to get new justices who believe precedents set then should be overturned. Decisions in those years established the right to an attorney at trial, the right to privacy, created the Miranda warning, overturned racial segregation, and, in a controversy that still rages today, made abortion legal in Roe v. Wade.

The precedents established are not easily undone. As Toobin points out, even Chief Justice William Rehnquist did not overturn the Miranda ruling when given the opportunity because people had come to rely on it. The litany of rights read by police officers before a suspect is interrogated is so pervasive its on crime and justice television shows, and many citizens can recite it verbatim. A respect for stare decisis also explains why David Souter was so different than predicted to the president who nominated him, George H. W. Bush.

Now, though, with Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas solidly in the majority, and the moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy taking the place as the court’s swing vote, the court has come full circle. Conservatives finally have the court they would wish for, a court that seems willing to overturn precedent from those years. But it comes as the conservative revolution in politics, which reached its height with the two terms of President Ronald Reagan, comes to a close. President Barack Obama often is compared to Reagan; he’s the same style of communicator and he seems to have ushered in a close to the Reagan revolution with a new kind of coalition.

It’s unlikely, though, that Obama will have a chance to change the court. Those most likely to leave are its most liberal members, and the youngest are those nominated by President George W. Bush. So its Obamaism that has to continue if Obama wants to leave a mark on jurisprudence, just as it was Nixon’s and Reagan’s predecessors who made the court more conservative.

What does this mean for the country? It may be easy to argue that the Warren and Burger courts brought change before many people were ready, particularly in Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Those decisions ripped parts of the country in two. Now we have a court that may be more conservative than the populace, that may be more reluctant for changes like gay marriage than the voting public. But that’s a good or bad thing depends on your view of the role of the judiciary.