This summer — in place of weddings, dinner parties and large family gatherings — I surrounded myself in the company of over a dozen authors, some of whom I found more pleasant than others.

Today, for your future reading purposes, I have summoned these fifteen authors to one long table, at which I am seated at the head. With great care and subjectivity, I have arranged my guests at the table based on the amount of pleasure their books brought me. 

Sitting to my right in the seat of honor is Deborah Feldman, author of my favorite pandemic read: her memoir Unorthodox. Ms. Feldman began her writing career in 2009, publishing a sensational blog that detailed her repressed life as a woman in the NYC Hasidic community. This book is the finished product of that blog, chronicling her Dickensian upbringing as a quasi-orphan living with her put-upon extended family. The language is raw and evocative. Her outrage at the mistreatment she experienced at the hands of her family is unqualified and unyielding, an interesting contrast to the trend of empathy and rationalization in memoirs these days. It’s also funny and dryly ironic in parts. Don’t bother with the “inspired-by” Netflix series.

Seated across from Deborah is a man at the other end of the privilege spectrum who looks like Santa Clause’s fine-arts brother: Bill Buford, erstwhile New Yorker editor and author of the excellent 2003 memoir about Italian cooking, Heat. Buford’s new book, Dirt, chronicles his adventures in Léon, France, where he moved with his young family to try his hand in the kitchens of the country’s gastronomic capital. In less capable hands this would be a tedious reading experience. But Buford brings entertainment and enlightenment to the premise, largely through self-deprecation, boundless enthusiasm, and a love-hate relationship with Léon, a city filled with beautiful women and ugly men, all of whom are vividly portrayed as unwelcoming hedonists.      

A trio of equally interesting authors sit farther down the table. First there is Jane Austen, looking coy and refined despite two centuries in the grave. For a book club this summer I reread her masterwork Emma, a fine calibration of characterization and plotting. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what specific questions of the 18th century her novel is now answering. Next to her is that smug but useful weasel Gabriel Wyner, author of Fluent Forever, which I praised in my previous blog post about Anki. Rounding out this top tier is an equally shifty man with a salesman’s smile and sincerity: Michael Finel, author of the fascinating Stranger in the Woods, which chronicles the adventures of Christopher Thomas Knight, aka the Maine hermit, a man who lived in isolation for almost three decades in the Maine wilderness, keeping himself supplied with food by breaking into hundreds of (usually) unoccupied vacation homes. While the hermit himself is a fascinating subject, equally worthy of examination is Mr. Finel, a disgraced reporter who was able to start a letter correspondence with the hermit immediately after his arrest, and was subsequently able to strongarm his eccentric friend into talking long enough to parlay the experience into a book deal.   

Farther down the table sit a group of authors whose books I enjoyed but would only recommend with qualifications. That’s Michelle McNamera with her face buried in her phone. Her gripping I’ll be Gone in the Dark is the story of the horrifying Golden State Killer, who terrorized Sacramento and Southern California during the 70s and 80s. It’s a book I can see high schoolers really enjoying: McNamera has that efficient journalist’s ability to characterize with a few phrases. The graphic descriptions and the general terrified tenor of the book itself was a little much for me, to say nothing of the slapped together construction of the text itself (McNamera died before the book was complete or the GSK was finally apprehended in 2018). But if that’s what you want in your life, then by all means. Speaking of unnerving, that’s journalist Caroline Knapp looking miserable as she sips her fourth iced water and lemon of the evening. Her memoir Drinking, a Love Story is a very 90s memoir about alcoholism and finally sobering up. Knapp would die of lung cancer only a few years after publishing this memoir, which is similar to Feldman’s Unorthodox in its uncompromising depictions of those surrounding her. Unfortunately, in Knapp the book has a much less sympathetic center figure. I personally didn’t mind Knapp’s self-centered and often self-pitying attitude (horrors included wearing an unflattering dress at her sister’s wedding, and her bottoming out was slightly injuring her knee) but the rest of my book club found her WASP-y upbringing and blithe yuppie values enraging. While we’re on the subject of yuppies, Chris Nashawaty wrote a book about that favorite comedy film of the baby boomers: Caddyshack. Contrary to the title, the story about the creation of the movie only takes up the final third, with the rest recounting the life and times of comedy wunderkind and Caddyshack writer Doug Kenney, a “counterculture icon” who doesn’t come across as particularly genius or relevant despite Nashawaty’s best attempts.    

We also have authors of more edifying content present in this grouping. There’s Gustave Flaubert of Madame Bovary fame, over there le mot-ing his justes before he will consent to say anything to his fellow partygoers. His influential novel left my book club perplexed. The writing was fantastic, but the characters themselves were so unpleasant. My edition, incidentally, was translated from the French by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, so perhaps that had something to do with the bleak depiction of the bourgeoisie life. On the other hand, I found the ferocious historical fiction of Hilary Mantel unexpectedly inspiring. Her Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies are the first two parts of a trilogy depicting the rise and fall of Henry VIII’s powerful personal lawyer: Thomas Cromwell. A man with a common background largely slandered by history books over the past five centuries, Cromwell is depicted by Mantel as a worldy and kind man, educated but empathetic to those around him, able to return favors as well as hold a grudge for years, resourceful if at times practical to a fault. Enjoying the books requires a very basic understanding of Henry VIII’s reign, as well as a little patience: Wolf Hall in particular has three main characters with the first name Thomas. Mantel makes the journey rewarding though. I found equally rewarding experience listening to two audiobooks by James Shapiro: The Year of Lear & A Year in the Life of Shakespeare. The latter audiobook is read by the author, whose Bronx accent rattles against the stately Elizabethan subject matter. Both books have similar premises as they examine Shakespeare’s two most artistically productive years (1599 and 1606) and provide lots of fascinating historical context that may have inspired Shakespeare as he was writing Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, and King Lear. They’re excellent books that appear to be meant for general consumption, but not books I would recommend to a casual reader, unless that casual reader had a deep knowledge of and interest in Shakespeare.  

At the back of the table we have a group of authors from whom I choose to keep my distance. There’s When in French author Laura Collins, whose memoir about marrying a Frenchman and learning his language falls into many of the cloying pits that Buford’s book avoids. Next to her sits stoic Agatha Christie, author of  Five Little Pigs and The ABC Murders. Plenty of people enjoy her books and the adventures of old Poirot. I’ve tried my best and I find it as boring and rote as a Law and Order rerun. Same goes for one-hit wonder Bram Stoker, whose Dracula has a thrilling opening that is never topped in this tedious epistolary novel, which probably was much more gripping when it was first published and the reader did not know exactly what was coming next. Yeah, it’s my table and I’ll decide where these legendary authors sit! And rounding out this group, I’m sad to say, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, glaring from across the table, outraged to be seated with the dregs. Sorry, man. Nobel Prize or not, Love in the Time of Cholera just didn’t have enough love — or cholera, for that matter.