My Book Report: What to Read on Vacation
By Deidre Depke
I’ve never understood the appeal of the summer beach read. I guess those novels with the candy-colored covers are meant to be diverting, without requiring too much attention. But if you’ve got some free time at the beach (or the lake, or the mountains, or in your air-conditioned apartment, for that matter) why not read something legitimately good?
I’ve got a couple of suggestions.
Art and Inhumanity
The Director, a 2023 historical novel by Germany’s Daniel Kehlmann, was released in translation earlier this year. It’s an imagining of the life of G.W. Pabst, one of filmmaking’s great early directors, who achieved fame for his movies starring Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. Pabst inexplicably left exile in Hollywood to return to Austria after the Nazis had seized power and just as the war was beginning. His motivation has never been clear.
Kehlmann’s novel takes up the story from there. Trapped with his wife and young son in a sinister Austrian castle, Pabst believes he can continue to make the movies he wants, even as his efforts are financed and overseen by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Pabst is hopelessly naïve, of course. And as the war drags on, his scruples are increasingly compromised. The story culminates with his final wartime film, during which the director trucks in extras under guard from a concentration camp. That movie has been lost to history, but Kehlmann’s brutal description of the filmmaking will stick with you for a very long time.
The Director is an achievement, going well beyond the sickly, seemingly endless truckload of fiction set during the Nazi regime that very often offends as much as it edifies. (The Tattooist of Auschwitz comes to mind here.) In the end, Kehlmann’s book asks the reader to consider what role art and beauty can play in a society built around violence and brutality. And it details the very thin the line between cog and collaborator.
S’mores and Horror
The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore, is a page-turner set at a summer camp, qualifying it, I suppose, as a summer read. But the book has grander ambitions.
It's 1975, and a thirteen-year-old camper has disappeared from her bunk. She’s the daughter of the camp’s wealthy owners, the Van Laars. Barbara is not their first child to go missing: 14 years earlier, her brother similarly vanished and had never been found.
With local residents joining the extended family in a frantic search, Moore digs into the tensions between the Van Laars and the blue-collar community living in Camp Emerson’s shadow. While she considers questions of class and economics, Moore unearths dynastic secrets, painting a portrait of female subjugation and mental illness. Her story may have taken place half a century ago, but this novel is as much a commentary on our own issues around those topics as it is a period piece.
Picks by My Circle of Readers
For other summer-reading options, I asked a handful of people to give me their suggestions — fiction only, not necessarily new.
From my globe-trotting sister Meighan: Julie Otsuko’s fantastic The Buddha in the Attic, a 2011 novel about the Japanese “picture brides” who immigrated to San Francisco in the 1900s. (Another option: Otsuko’s earlier book, When the Emperor Was Divine, about Japanese-American internment camps. Buddha is fantastic; Emperor is a triumph.)
From my stagecraft-savvy daughter Agnes: Mona Awad’s All’s Well. The story of a college theatre director trying to mount a production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. An accident leaves her in chronic pain, dealing with a failed marriage, a deepening dependence on painkillers, and a tenuous grasp on her career.
From my very-well-read friend Monika: The Trees, by Percival Everett. He’s had a ton of attention (and a Pulitzer) for James, his recent recasting of the Huckleberry Finn story. Trees, published in 2021 is set in Money, Mississippi, the town infamous for the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till.
From Sarah, queen of my book club (she started with 25, but we whittled her down to three): Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, a multi-character, multi-generational epic of love and revenge set in Kashmir; Einstein’s Dreams, the 1993 fictionalized story by Alan Lightman of the young scientist as he works on his theory of relativity; and Group Portrait of a Lady, Heinrich Böll’s 1971 novel of a woman in Cologne, Germany, set from the 1910s to 1971.
From the ladies at my yoga studio: The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhorn. This one is a little bit of a beach read, but what the hell. Set in Maine in 1789, the novel tracks a midwife and healer in post-revolutionary America.
The Odious & The Awful
‘Can We All Get Along?’ Apparently Not, But For Now, Protest Must Be Militantly Nonviolent
Thirty-three years ago, after several Los Angeles cops who beat the bejesus out of Rodney King were acquitted, ferocious and destructive rioting broke out in the City of Angels. The late Rodney was no seraphim, but nobody deserves the punishment he took, and an angry, largely Black and Hispanic underclass reacted with a fury that left more than 60 dead, a couple of thousand injured, 12,000 arrested, and property damage of some $1 billion.
King went on TV to plead, “…Can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?” But it was almost a week before order was restored by a massive force of National Guards, Army Infantry, Marines, and officers from multiple law-enforcement agencies besides LAPD.
Over the past four days, Angelenos again rioted, though lawlessness was not widespread. Still, the National Guard was mobilized on orders of President Trump without consulting LA’s ineffective mayor, Karen Bass, who was on a junket in Africa when wildfires ravaged the city last year, or California’s made-for-TV chief executive, Governor Gavin Newsom. Today, 700 Marines were also deployed.
This time the issue isn’t police brutality but ICE inhumanity.
Violent rioting was wrong in 1992, and it is even more wrong today, no matter how limited.
More wrong because burning and looting and throwing rocks at cops just begats more mayhem.
More importantly wrong because those protesters who engaged in violence played right into the small hands of the President. This is what he has been waiting for to justify his harsh crackdown on migrants.
And the emergence of the Mexican flag as a symbol of protest is such a moronic gift to the architects of the current inhumanity – Trump, seriously evil Stephen Miller, vapid mannequin Kristi Noem, and heartless Tom Homan – that you have to wonder whether right-wing provocateurs are involved.
Much of the country no longer gets its news from reputable sources, relying instead on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. And one video of a dumb fuck on a dirt bike flying the flag of another nation while repeatedly circling a burning car is its reality about the protests, no matter how many on-the-scene news organizations report that the demonstrations are largely peaceful.
Right now, militant nonviolence is the only way to fight back against the authoritarianism spewing forth from Washington. The protest playbook written by Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and others — and embraced by Bernie Sanders and AOC with their anti-oligarchy rallies — should be guiding demonstrations. Lobbing industrial-grade fireworks at law enforcement only lends credence to an administration sneering at the rule of law.
There are scheduled to be some 1,500 “No Kings Day” protests across the country on Saturday, coinciding with the $40+ million military parade celebrating the Birthday Blimp in the White House (and the Army’s 250th anniversary and Flag Day).
It is estimated that millions will rally against the defenestration of American democracy. Doing so with the utmost peace and grace will send a much more powerful message than a torched vehicle, not only to Trump but to those Americans sitting on the sidelines.
The day of the musket isn’t here — yet.