Books!

++Congratulations to Alice Munro for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Canadian writer, who said she was not writing anymore, is best known as a master of the short-story for which she won the prize.

++Fall is great reading season. The Producer of the Wire, mystery writer George Pelecanos brings us another Spero Lucas novel. If you want a writer about official Washington,D.C.,stylistically your man is Ward Just. If you want the writer of the real Washington,D.C., it is Pelecanos. In this novel,Lucas, an ex-Marine who served in Iraq and now a private investigator in Washington, takes the assignment to recover a painting by a not-so-well-known American woman artist titled the "Double", which had been stolen from a worker at a non-profit by her boyfriend. Lucas travels through the neigborhoods of Washington to areas off the Chesapeake Bay to procure the stolen painting and meets up with a gang who matches him in firepower and wits. Lucas is supported by his psychologically wounded band of brothers. As usual, Pelecanos captures the gritty reality of a Washington being gentrified. The Double was just released this past week by Little, Brown.

++Charlie Parker has been an elusive figure for biographers and jazz buffs. Clint Eastwood did the biopic a few years ago to mixed reviews. Now, Stanley Crouch appears with Kansas City Lightning:The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (Harper Collins). Crouch dissects every influence on Parker and recreates the Jazz scene in the Midwest with copious references to every musician on the scene and the roots of Jazz. Crouch distills his 40 years of writing about Jazz in this masterpiece, apparently the first of two on Parker.

++Brave Genius: A scientist, A philosopher and their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize by Sean Carroll, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin. Most of us are aware of the relationship between Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. But few of the bond between Camus and molecular biologist Jacques Monod. This is a superbly researched book, which provides new insights into both men and the actual day-to-day reality of the French Resistance. When Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature as the youngest person since Robert Louis Stevenson, he faced intense criticism in Paris but sought solace in the young Monod, who has been his companion in the Resistance. To the layperson the dashing Jacques Monod's life is little known while he too would go on to win the Nobel Prize for his work. Both men shared a type of humanistic conscience somewhat lacking in the world today. After Camus' tragic auto accident,Monod picks up the mantle and courageously smuggles activists out of Hungary during the Soviet takeover and later shows up in support of the students in the 1968 uprising in Paris. Near the end of his life,Monod would produce Chance and Necessity, which he thought was the philosophical sequel to the Myth of Sisyphus. A wonderful idea for a book, a great read and a nice picture of a France under Occupation and a Europe threatened by the Soviets.

++Jonathan Cott has done superb books of his interviews/conversations with people like Glenn Gould and Leonard Bernstein. His book on Leonard Bernstein is a must read and Bernstein lights up every page with his brilliance. Now Yale Press has published his complete Rolling Stone Interview with the late Susan Sontag. Susan Sontag ranges across the spectrum of issues from morality to aesthetics to photography and politics. The conversation doesn't hit the very highs of Bernstein but gives the reader a sense of the range of Susan Sontag's interests and preoccupations.

++So if you want more, the Library of America has just published Susan Sontag's extended essays Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, On Photography,Illness as Metaphor and other uncollected essays on Bill Burroughs, Aging,The Third World of Women. And this book only takes us to 1978. I look forward to more.

++Yes,he's back! Dan Torrance who escaped oblivion at the conflagration at the Overlook Hotel is Doctor Sleep in Stephen King's sequel to The Shining.I'm half-way through and it is an engrossing read and is King at his peak. If you haven't seen The Shining or read the book, Doctor Sleep stands alone and you will not be confused but maybe a little on edge. Few critics ever remark how well King portrays lower working class Americans and captures people on the margins.A tribe of people travel across America called the True Knot while Dan Torrance battles alcoholism to keep his gift hidden and away. He encounters a young women named Abra Stone who has the Shining more intense than he and is now sought by the True Knot, who consume such people for their "steam" so they can continue to be immortal. Available where good books are sold.