| It's set at the beach, which is convenient |
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| The Thread's Must Read |
“What We Become” by Arturo Perez-Reverte
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It’s truly rare these days when I enter the world of a book so completely that I just don’t want it to end. Some of that is because I read books concurrently — usually three or four books at a time — and so I’m closing one and returning to the others.
Some of it’s because I read so much for work that I’m reading for comprehension as much as for pleasure...so I’m at a kind of remove as I read. And some of it’s because truly immersive reading is a singular experience that has as much to do with place and time as prose.
But that was exactly how I felt each time I returned to Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “What We Become.”
It’s not like the other novels I’ve recommended in this crime series this summer. They were stylish police procedurals with unusually compelling characters.
But the con man and the woman he’s obsessed with at the center of Perez-Reverte’s novel are so human, so conflicted and flawed and interesting that I simply didn’t want to leave their orbit when the novel was finished.
And something else happened in this novel that’s refreshing for me. Perez-Reverte schooled me in classic and modern tango, in high-stakes chess and in some obscure European history in such an effortless way that I barely registered it. I was that caught up in the plot.
Arturo Perez-Reverte is well known in Europe for his war coverage as a journalist and for his historical fiction. And now that I've found him, I’m reading everything he’s written.
-Kerri Miller |
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| Buy these books
One in five Americans has some experience with mental illness every year — and these three new memoirs dig into that experience, whether it's the author's own illness or that of a loved one.
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| | | 'Aloha Rodeo' offers alternative to the cowboy cliche | | "Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West" by David Wolman and Julian Smith |
| Buy this book
Journalists David Wolman and Julian Smith chronicle the history of Hawaii's cattle trade and profile a number of "paniolos" — every bit as tenacious and resourceful as their mainland cohorts.
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