There are many great works of historical non-fiction written to be accessible to a general audience. Probably a good idea to get one that is time/place/subject relevant, but some stand out for making a seemingly tough subject fascinating and simple.

One example would be Longitude by Dava Sobel.

John Lyons' Ground Control and Riding manuals are straight forward, thorough and less expensive than the merchandise rich Parelli stuff. Like him better personally too, his horses look happy, you know? Buck's stuff is fantastic also, the man is a god. Watching video will help you, Lyons (Josh and John), Ken McNabb, Dennis Reis, Buck Brannaman. Not as much of a fan of Parelli or Clinton Anderson and certainly not Monty Roberts (don't like they way they talk about the horses, and Parelli is just too much about money). I'm not at home at the moment so I can't get into books but I'll post them up when I do. Sally Swifts books for riding but I assume you are riding at an advanced level if you are starting greenies anyway so you probably don't need it. I assume you are attending clinics and such as well, or apprenticing. Go watch everyone you can. Talk to everyone you can. Stick with the people whose horses look happy and work easily and well. Don't know what you are looking at in terms of getting a horse, but definitely leasing is a nice intermediate step, especially if you may be able to buy the horse in the future. Vet checks before purchase, pro opinion on conformation re: discipline, return options (ex: can return horse in first month if any problems), don't ever buy from auctions, etc. Volunteering at horse rescues is great practice with behavioral problems/fear issues, restarting, etc. and I learned a lot from it, much more than just working with greenies, plus they need experienced hands. You might even find yourself a nice OTTB or something (we had several national level competitive reiners and eventers come through the rescue I used to volunteer at). Natural horsemanship stuff is applicable across all disciplines, or should be, it's pretty general stuff. True Horsemanship Through Feel (Bill Dorrance) is great, Tom Dorrance's stuff is nice too, also There Are No Problem Horses, Only Problem Riders by Mary Twelveponies. You really are going to learn the most from other people and from the horses themselves. Training wild mustangs is extremely educational if you can find one around (people often get them ignorant of the challenges and are eager for help, try your local horse rescue or maybe contact the BLM and offer to help). Training a wild burro would be useful too, and probably harder, they're are smart as hell. Also keep in mind the 15 minutes to backing kind of thing you see in natural horsemanship demos is not actually anything anybody should be doing at home, which the people who do it will usually acknowledge. Not that it's not doable, but it's not desirable if you've got the time to play with. If you can get RFDTV through satellite TV they have a bunch of training shows, Reis and McNabb are on it I think (also Anderson, but again, not a fan), and my local tack store rents out a lot of these guys training videos (and many many others), yours may too.

Here are some of my favorite collections of Ghost Stories and collections of Horror Stories, A lot of great stuff for readalouds in there, for sure. One newer collection I'd add in there is Ghosts by Gaslight. Oh, and the library of America's new two-volume American Fantastic Tales. For novels, I might suggest Jon Harwood's The Ghost Writer, (or his The Seance), Francis Cottam's The House of Lost Souls, James Herbert's The Secret of Crickley Hall, to name a few.

I might suggest Kyril Bonfiglioli's antic mystery trilogy, Don't Point That Thing At Me, After You with the Pistol, and Something Nasty in the Woodshed. Funny, irreverent, Or for something a bit less rough edged, Ian Sansom's Mobile Library Mysteries might work, or maybe Connie Willis's Bellwether or Remake. Cooking with Fernet Branca, by James Hamilton-Paterson. The Ascent of Rum-Doodle, by W E Bowman.

Hi there-

Hre are a few books that you can try:
Best Friend on Wheels by Debra Shirley
Susan Laughs by Jeanne Willis
Why Do Some People Use Wheelchairs: questions children ask about disabled people

Hope that helps!

For fiction, in addition to the already mentioned Michener, I'd suggest the two novels of Alan Brennert - "Molokai" and "Honolulu" - which are quite good historical fiction on the islands.

The hot non-fiction book right now on Hawaii is Sarah Vowell's latest, "Unfamiliar Fishes." Here's from Publisher's Weekly: "Outrageous and wise-cracking, educational but never dry, this book is a thought-provoking and entertaining glimpse into the U.S.'s most unusual state and its unanticipated twists on the familiar story of Americanization."

Another non-fiction that takes a less traditional approach is Gary Okihito's "Island World: A History of Hawaii and the US" - first of a planned trilogy. Publisher's Weekly writes: " Okihiro combines human history, natural history and mythic Hawaiian folklore with interpretations of how Hawaiian cultural artifacts (such as surfboards) infiltrated American culture and vice versa. He likewise depicts the lives of Hawaiians who wound up in North America, either by choice or involuntarily. ... Okihiro places the story of Hawaii in direct and constant relation to the story of the United States. Some readers may find this eclectic mix of facts hard to follow and synthesize, but all will come away intrigued and enlightened." Looks like something you might enjoy, or that meets your desire to know not just what happened, but what's going on, at least in Okihiro's view.

In addition to what's already been mentioned here, there have been a couple of really good historical overviews just this past year: Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, by Peter Marshall (Publisher's Weekly: "Blowing away cobwebs of misunderstanding and misrepresentation, this is a stimulating portrait of a highly varied but distinctive political ideal, tradition, and practice arising from the enduring human impulse to be free.") and The World That Never Was: The True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agensts, by Alex Butterworth. (that last isn't exactly about Anarchism, but it looks fascinating nevertheless, and got good reviews).

You should check out the catalog over at AK Press, which has tons of titles on anarchism. One that seems almost too big - and this purports to be just Volume One - but that I've been dipping into now & again is the mammoth Anarchist FAQ. Their "Anarchism Starter Pack" includes that, as well as Cindy Milstein's recent Anarchism and its Aspirations, and Daniel Guerin's classic anthology of anarchist writings, No Gods No Masters. Seems like a nice present to get for yourself, and all for a measley $50.

Finally, from what I can see, Anarchism: A Beginner's Guide, by Ruth Kinna looks quite good. (And the library will loan it to you for free: talk about anarchism!)

I mentioned Louise Penny in a recent Shelf Talk post about "fair play" mysteries, which also mentioned Jane Haddam and Peter Lovesey. I also think you might enjoy L.R. Wright's series featuring Canadian Mountie Karl Alberg and Librarian Cassandra Mitchell, set in coastal BC, so it has a nice local feel. I'd also say such standbys as P.D. James, Donna Leon and Elizabeth George and golden age writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie might be worth a try. And finally, although less of a whodunnit, Minette Walters or Ruth Rendell might please for their rich psychological depth and unsettling atmosphere.

The great Red Hot Jazz website has a short bio, a complete (or nearly so) discography (including many tracks that you can listen to online -- click the Quintet of the Hot Club of France link), and a bibliography. The only one I'm familiar with is the 1961 Delauney book, which is written with a lovely style but, like a lot of earlier jazz books, perhaps a little soft on the hard facts. The more recent Dregni book "Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend" looks really interesting.

I'm not a musician, and I don't know if you are, but the Dave Gelly book "Django Reinhardt: Know the Man, Play the Music" looks pretty cool too -- it's both a biography and a play-along instructional book with a CD. Even if you don't play, it's probably pretty interesting to hear musical examples as you read about the stylistic innovations behind them. I've done this many times myself manually, but it would be great to have an expert put it together for you.

Stephane Grappelli has never been my cup of tea, but he played with Django a lot, and has written a great deal about him in his autobiographies.

SPL has the Delauney and Dregni books. In fact, they have a couple of even newer books by Dregni that look even more promising, especially "Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing" (2008). It looks like he covers a lot more context, which in the rather obscure French Gypsy world is probably helpful. You might have to wait for that one while I reserve it ahead of you, though!

EDIT: left out the Red Hot Jazz link:

http://www.redhotjazz.com/django.html

Ah, Cloud Atlas. One of my most favorite books EVER (if you look closely at my profile pic you can see it's at the top of the book pile). I agree with Nancy it's a good idea to stick with Mitchell; in addition to Ghostwritten, I'd suggest The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (for the historical fiction angle), and also Black Swan Green, which is a coming-of-age story involving a teenage stammerer growing up in early 1980s Britain. It may sound like it's not your cup of tea from that description, but one of the characters from Cloud Atlas makes an unexpected and delightful cameo appearance in this book.

As for other authors and novels that are similar to Cloud Atlas, that is a tall order. I often suggest Haruki Murakami to David Mitchell fans – like Mitchell, Murakami has a experimental, playful side to his writing that I think would appeal to Cloud Atlas fans. His books are usually set in contemporary Japan, but a very surrealist version of that place, where odd things can and often do happen to the main characters, who often find themselves suddenly on a quest or engrossed in solving a mystery that they literally stumble into. Since you mentioned you read a lot of mysteries, you might want to start with A Wild Sheep Chase, a very oddball mystery involving a flock of mythological sheep. But also check out Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (which many Murakami fans consider his best work).

Another book that I think you might enjoy is Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. The historical sections of Cloud Atlas (especially the first and last ones) reminded me a lot of this book, not only for the similar setting (19th -century South Pacific Islands) but for their dark humor and the way both authors address the impact of British colonization on the natives of New Zealand, Australia, and other islands in the vicinty. Plus Flanagan's book is a literary tour-de-force on a par with Cloud Atlas. (Yes I know tour-de-force is a huge book reviewing cliché. But in this case, it is an accurate statement).

Since you mentioned liking the futuristic sections in Cloud Atlas (I'm assuming you're referring to “An Orison of Somni-451” & “Sloosha's Crossin'”), I would like to point you to a few earlier Questionland requests for good dystopian/post-apocalyptic novels. I think you'll find quite a few good suggestions in the responses to this post and this one. And this one.

However, if none of these suggestions work for you, don't forget that you can always Ask a Librarian and get a hand-crafted, personalized reading list from some amazing SPL librarians! Tell 'em Questionland sent you.

Happy reading,

Abby

Catton is great, but I really believe the new standard for Civil War histories has been set by James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom which is just plain remarkable. Seriously: I read it in a single marathon 48-hour stretch, barely moving the whole time; and then immediately read it again.

But you've already read about the Civil War...

Have you read The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, about WWI? Brilliant, untoppable. They will make you want to read her The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 and The Zimmermann Telegram (about the US entry into the war) immediately after.

The best book ever written about WWI, though, isn't strictly speaking history at all; it's The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. This might be the best book I've ever read -- so powerful, so illuminating, so unexpected. It will blow your mind. Even if you don't give a damn about English poets like Sassoon and Owen, you'll come away from this book believing that WWI was the pivotal stupidity of the entire stupid century of evil.

Another essential book on war that strays a bit from your question but gives much-needed perspective on the real horror of it is The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme by John Keegan, which is about the soldier's experience, everything from boredom and regimentation to terror, injury and death. Again, you will come away aghast at the repulsiveness of WWI.

I heartily agree with Jim’s suggestion of The Wind-Up Girl. It’s a fantastic and thought-provoking book that paints a scarily believable future for the human race, in which globalization and large-scale climate change have wreaked major havoc on human societies around the world. Bacigalupi has also written an excellent teen post-apocalyptic novel called Ship Breaker, which takes in a future Gulf Coast that is ravaged by oil spills and gigantic storms called “city killers.” It’s a little easier to get into and more fast-paced than The Wind-Up Girl, but still full of very interesting ideas and well-realized characters.

In fact, post-apocalyptic novels are all the rage right now in teen fiction, due in large part to the success of The Hunger Games. If you’re not averse to reading a few teen books, I’d suggest the following: The Hungry City Chronicles by Phillip Reeve (first book is called Mortal Engines) about a post-apocalyptic, steampunk-ish future in which most highly advanced technology was destroyed in a nuclear war, and cities are now clanking, mobile entities which “eat” each other in order to survive (a practice known as Municipal Darwinism). Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Last Survivors series (starting with Life As We Knew It) describes what happens to Miranda, a teenage girl, and her family when a meteor knocks the moon out of its orbit, with disastrous consequences for earth’s inhabitants.

You’ve probably already read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. If you liked those books, you might also want to try The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, or Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World is another great one, which my colleague David Wright has talked up elsewhere on Questionland. If you like graphic novels, check out Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man, about a mysterious plague that destroys every male on the planet except for Yorick Brown, a small-time escape artist and his pet monkey.

There’s some other great suggestions  for post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction on the Seattle Public Library’s blog, Shelf Talk, here and here. [update: I see that David also posted links to the same posts. Sorry for the redundancy, but we just can't stop promoting the library. It's a compulsion for librarians! :) ]

If you’ve read all of these already or want more suggestions, you also always Ask a Librarian for more good books to read. We’re happy to help!

For Spain:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon: This is a literary mystery that starts in a rare books room. I still remember reading this in Barcelona while sitting on the roof of the Gaudi apartment building.

Or for a hardboiled mystery set in Barcelona, Dog Day by Alicia Gimenez Bartlett

I really enjoyed these two international bestsellers that are set in Paris:

Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda: A story about broken people who find one another.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery: I wrote about this one here.

Happy travels!

King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War.

Sorry in advance for the length of this reply, but I also enjoy medieval-set historical fiction, though as someone who got my B.A. & M.A. in medieval studies, I have a hard time finding ones that don't make me cringe with inaccuracies :-)

* The Sunne in Splendor/Sharon Kay Penman (Richard III of England)
* Here Be Dragons/Sharon Kay Penman, followed by Falls the Shadow & The Reckoning (12th & 13th century England & Wales)

I have not enjoyed subsequent books by SKP nearly as much, but for what it's worth she has a series on Eleanor of Aquitaine & Henry II, a series of medieval mysteries, and a couple of other books also set in medieval England/France/Wales.

* A Vision of Light/Judith Merkle Riley, followed by In Pursuit of the Green Lion & The Water Devil (14th century woman dictating her life story to a disapproving monk)

* The Daughter of Time/Josephine Tey (might not be ideal for you, as it's about a modern-day detective looking into Richard III & the princes in the tower, but it's phenomenal)

* Queen of Swords/Judith Tarr (Melisande, the heir to the kingdom of Jerusalem during the 12th century-- Crusades, in other words)

Judith Tarr has also written other books set during the Crusades, but they have more of a fantasy bent, which may or may not appeal to you. If that sounds interesting, start with The Hound and the Falcon, an omnibus edition of the trilogy (the other books are prequels/side stories)

* The Good Men/Charmain Craig (Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade in southern France)

* The Treasure of Montsegur/Sophy Burnham (ditto)

* Jerusalem/Cecelia Holland (story of Templar knight during the 2nd Crusade)
* The Firedrake/Cecelia Holland (Norman conquest of England)

I only recently started reading Cecelia Holland, but so far she's fantastic. She has quite a few freestanding historical novels, many of which have medieval settings, as well as a recent series set during the Viking era.

* Morality Play/Barry Unsworth (14th century England)
* The Ruby in Her Navel/ditto (12th century Norman Sicily)

* Katherine/Anya Seton (late 14th century England; tells story of mistress of one of the sons of Edward III)

If you like historical fantasy at all, I'd also recommend Guy Gavriel Kay. Many of his books are set in fictionalized versions of medieval Europe. Unlike a lot of historical fantasy, his books are very well researched-- he seems to fictionalize the settings more so he can tweak details/time frames to suit his plot, instead of just out of laziness with the actual historical facts, if that makes any sense. At any rate, here are the books of his I'd recommend:

* The Lions of Al-Rassan (El Cid & the Reconquista in Spain)
* A Song for Arbonne (Cathars & Albigensian Crusade in S. France)
* The Last Light of the Sun (Vikings in "Dark Ages" England)
* Sailing to Sarantium/Lord of Emperors (5th c. Byzantium)

Okay, must stop now before I want to reread my *entire* bookshelf. Enjoy!

The Selfish Gene, hands down. It does an amazing job of explaining gene-centered evolution, and how genes adapt and interact within an organism and environment. By doing so it clarifies how such complex traits like reciprocal altruism can arise through evolution. I make it required reading for my evolution students.

I'm not as much in for some of his "yay atheism" books, but the selfish gene is by far one of the greatest non-technical books on evolution out there.

For similar reasons, I also love The Blind Watchmaker.

That's great that your wife is getting into graphic novels! There are so many different stories being told in this format now; it's a pretty exciting time to be discovering comics. 

In addition to all the great suggestions below, I'd add the following that haven't been mentione yet: 100 Demons by Lynda Barry, funny yet sometimes hearbreaking look at the author's personal demons -- from head lice to the 2000 election, Berlin: City of Stones by Jason Lutes, which chronicles the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens of all classes & backgrounds, Aya by Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie, a light-hearted look at the lives of three young women growing up Abidjan, Ivory Coast in the late 1970s, Local by Brian Wood & Ryan Kelly about a young woman named Megan McKeenan who roams the country trying to find herself and her true home -- each chapter is set in a different city in a different year of her life.

I think you can't go wrong with Los Bros Hernandez -- especially the early Locas & Palomar stuff -- especially if your wife is looking for strong, three-dimensional female characters who grow and develop over time. And I totally agree that Sandman is a great entryway to graphic novels for many comics newbies.The new Absolute Sandman editions are a little cumbersome, but gorgeous.

Since you mentioned she's not afraid to try a little fantasy, I'd also suggest she try Castle Waiting by Linda Medley which is less a novel than a set of interconnected stories that take some of the more sexist conventions of fairytales and turn them on their heads. Another fun fantasy comic series is Fables by Bill Willingham, about classic fairytale characters like Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf who are forced to make their home in modern day NYC after an evil Adversary takes over their storybook homeland.

If she likes dystopic, post-apocalyptic science fiction (think The Road) and doesn't mind violence, swearing and some gratuitous nudity, she might like Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan about Yorick, who wakes up one day that a mysterious plague has wiped out all males on earth except him & his pet monkey. Accompanied by special agent 355 he goes on a quest to find his girlfriend Beth & discover why he alone has managed to survive. 

You can find more suggestions on a list of great graphic novels for adults put together by librarians at the Seattle Public Library.

If your wife wants more suggestions, she should email the librarians at SPL and tell them a little bit more about what she does and doesn't like to read -- favorite authors, books she loved (or hated), etc & they'll make up a list just for her. 

Hope this helps you out!

Here are a few ideas for your consideration:

The Quincunx, by Charles Palliser – a big complex Dickensian multiple mystery dense with atmosphere, gothic flourishes and a truly puzzling plot that is a blast to figure out. His The Unburied is also really good although about half as long, if you’d rather have something shorter. Also in the same universe is The Dress Lodger, by Sheri Holman. Another densely detailed Victorian mystery – grim and grisly fun. Or you could return to the source and read Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. Just to throw out a few more in this vein. Ex Libris, by Ross King, The Syracuse Codex, by Jim Nisbet.

Mr. White’s Confession, by Robert Clark. This depression era literary mystery about a photographer who seems the perfect suspect for a series of murders will have you guessing until the very end, and then you’ll want to talk about it to compare notes. Beautifully written, surprising, and curious.

Zeitgest, by Bruce Sterling. Wild jam-packed funny thrilling hypersmart thing, circa Y2K, and on a par w/ Robbins & Stephenson. Also Jack Womack’s Let’s Put the Future Behind Us.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. The old gods never died – they’ve just gone into hiding, but now a new race of American gods – television, credit, internet, plastic – are taking over, and the old gods make their stand. Rollicking, thoughtful, fun. (Which reminds me of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, by Steven Sherrill. The minotaur is working in a rib shack, trying to live a normal life and find love outside the labyrinth) Likewise, you might enjoy James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah, about what happens when the corpse of god (who is dead, or hadn’t you heard) lands on earth. Morrow is smart and irreverent and fun to read – it is the first of a trilogy.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millet. A librarian starts a world peace cult three famous nuclear physicists who have travelled from the past. It sounds hokier than it is – what it is, is brilliant and moving and fascinating.

(I recently suggested to another reader Dan Simmons’ The Terror and Kathryn Davis’ The Thin Place, and think you two just might like those as well).

What is it about Dean Koontz? I won’t make value judgments on him as an author, but I will say that there seem to be an inordinate number of readers who stick with him and will read nothing else, which seems… unhealthy? shall we say. Non-nutritious? Kind of like people who eat only Domino’s pizza – I get the appeal, but trust me – there’s other kinds of pizza out there that are really goooood. Sometimes this wierd brand loyalty of Koontz fans kind of gets me down.

To which end, maybe it is best not to go jumping to filet mignon, but just to start with some other really good non-Dominos pizza.

For instance: John Farris – just in general – Phantom Nights, Solar Eclipse, Soon She Will Be Gone, You Don’t Scare Me… Farris is a great read for Koontz fans – very similar appeal.

Another horror writer who might appeal is Bentley Little – a really good atmospheric writer whose stories have a wonderfully nightmarish feel – I especially like his The Ignored, about a man who seems to be almost invisible at his job, which drives him kind of crazy. And T.M. Wright’s Laughing Man – really really freaking terrifying and weird. And finally John Saul, who is also on the suspenseful end of the horror spectrum – try The God Project or Creature.

Moving a bit farther afield, how about Greg Bear – something like Blood Music or Dead Lines, both of which are very gripping and thrillerish in a way Koontz fans will appreciate, with the added bonus of being a great way to tiptoe into the more thought-provoking reaches of speculative fiction – and into the Science Fiction section of the library / bookstore. In a similar vein, perhaps Blue Light by Walter Mosley – a Koontzish fable that may tempt him on to Mosley’s other - frankly better - work in a variety of genres.

Then there's Bad Men, by John Connolly. Here is a supernatural thriller in the best tradition of Koontz (it is set in Maine, so I can’t help thinking of Stephen King as well), written by a really gifted Irish-born writer who has done some good mysteries and literary fiction.

They’re Watching, by Gregg Hurwitz. HIGH octane suspense – creepy, mysterious, supernatural? Very well done. Similarly, Blackout by Guy Smith – a good horror thriller.

And finally, The Lost Girls, by Andrew Pyper. Here is a terrifically creepy, uncanny suspense novel by a Canadian author – and I think a very good read for Koontz fans.

I haven't read Stoner yet, but now I will have to. It sounds like it's probably a good idea to read more by Williams or to go for the Cather as well, but if you need more...

For more academic settings and/or professors, try A New Life by Bernard Malamud (set in a fictional Oregon town), Straight Man by Richard Russo (which everyone thinks is very funny--and it is--but I think is truly tragic as well) and The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies (first book in the Cornish trilogy).

For a elegaic school boy coming-of-age, try William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf.

For books with a similarly melancholy tone, try two other NYRB reprints, The Go-between by L. P. Hartley or Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter, which is sad and brutal of the school-of-hard-knocks variety.

It was originally printed in a book by publishers Price/Stern/Sloan in 1973, as by Albran with two "collaborators", Martin A. Cohen and Sheldon Shacket, and in the copyright entry for the book Albran is listed as a pseudonym of those two men.

Indeed, the page you found it on includes the original dedication from the book, which states "The Author is deeply indebted to Martin A. Cohen and Sheldon Shacket for conceiving this book, writing it and drawing the pictures.".

Sheldon Shacket appears to have only ever written one other book, "The Complete Book of Electric Cars". There are umpteen Martin A. Cohens on the web; I have no idea if this is the Jewish historian, the lawyer, the doctor...

PSS was and is a publisher of comedy books -- they are responsible for the "Mad Libs", for instance. Price and Stern were writers for the old Steve Allen TV show along with a million other TV and cartoon projects (including Mad Magazine).

could it be Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman?

What a tasty question – I look forward to seeing what people suggest. You’re probably already familiar with the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, just given the other day Rowan Somerville’s The Shape of Her, for such choice phrases as “like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.” Shudder. 

I am reminded of one anthology called The Naughty Bits: The Steamiest (and Most Scandalous) Sex Scenes from the World's Greatest Books. That might lead you in some interesting directions. (A similar earlier collection was The Literary Companion to Sex, which also includes poetry).

I’m afraid the examples that first spring to my mind are both on the disturbing side. First is Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, which is filled with truly incredible, bizarre, grotesque sexual imagery. Be warned.

The other is an extraordinary novel which begins with two highly erotic sections, and the gradually transforms itself into a different kind of novel altogether. To reveal more would be a crime against the book, but I can HIGHLY recommend D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, if you enjoy a book as provocative to the mind as to the privates, and one that is more than a little disturbing, this is one you won’t soon forget.

For a rollicking good romp in the hay, Andrei Codrescu’s Casanova in Bohemia is good, and certainly well-written by almost any definition.

Some other titles for your consideration:

Allison Fell’s The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro.

Nedjma’s The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman.

Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love Like an Onion.

The Calligrapher, by Edward Docx.

Damage, by Josephine Hart.

For depth, complication, and all-around trickiness, the best SF has to offer is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. It was originally published in four volumes and is now available as a two-book set. Ursula Le Guin called him the genre's Melville, if that carries any weight.

For its strong sense of place, I recently enjoyed River House by Sarahlee Lawrence, a memoir of building a house by hand with her father in Central Oregon. I wanted to jump in the car and drive down there the whole time I was reading it.

Fiction-wise I'd second The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, along with just about anything by Haruki Murakami, just for the quality of his writing. His novels are set in Japan but are replete with references to western culture and music. Personally I prefer Jay Rubin's translations of his work.

A favorite essay collection is The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. It's a collection of essays about a variety of countries, all focused on happiness and why some cultures seem more content than others. It's funny and fascinating, and two years after reading it, parts of this book are still lurking in the back of my mind.

Hi there,

I think it is still a little too early for a comprehensive history of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that contains everything you mention, but there are some really good books out there on the storm and its devastating impact on New Orleans and the Gulf that are definitely worth reading. Douglas Brinkley’s book, The Great Deluge, was published a year after the disaster and remains one of the nonfiction accounts with the broadest scope of any of the Katrina books. Brinkley is a New Orleans resident and historian who uses multiple narrative threads to tell the story of the storm and the government’s woefully inadequate response.  City Adrift is an eye-opening investigation by seven top journalists into various pre-existing environmental, social, and economic factors that contributed to the disaster. The staff of the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, won a Pulitzer prize for their Katrina coverage, and you can see evidence of their reporting skills in metro editor Jed Horne’s Breach of Faith. There's also been a slew of first-person accounts and memoirs of Katrina by New Orleans residents and survivors too numerous to mention here.

Other books I think you might like if you liked Zeitoun and Ninth Ward: A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld, a graphic novel that recounts the true stories of seven Katrina survivors from different walks of life, and Hurricane Song by Paul Volponi, a gripping teen novel that provides a fictionalized account of the horrors experienced by storm survivors in the Superdome.

I know you’re looking for books, but there are also two excellent documentaries on Katrina: Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and Trouble the Water.

Hope you find something here that will tide you over until the definitive account is published. I’m guessing that won’t come out for another 10 years or so. . .

Richard Price’s books might work for you – I’d especially suggest his Lush Life, which is a remarkably complex and impressively convincing look at crime and how it reflects our society. In fact, a number of authors featured in this list of titles for readers who enjoyed HBO’s The Wire do a similar job with both fiction and non-fiction. Certainly George Pelecanos.

Andrew Vachss might be another one to try: his world is very dark indeed – a world in which the criminal underclass work together to police society’s most depraved transgressors. Those are the Burke books, but you might also try a non-series novel such as Two Trains Running, which is a riveting and bloody account of a corrupt Midwestern town in 1959.

Likewise Loren Estleman’s Gas City is that good – even better than Ellroy in some ways. Ace Atkins’ Devil’s Garden, in San Francisco, or the Florida set White Shadow. Michael Simon’s Dan Reles series. David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet.

I wonder if you might enjoy Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins crime novels, that cover a range of decades in Los Angeles, with a very thoughtful critique of race and social relations backing them up. Likewise Ken Kuhlken’s California Century series. An interesting recent Hollywood noir sort of book is Joseph Kanon’s Stardust. Megan Abbot is also good that way.

If you really want to get darker than dark, I recommend Derek Raymond’s Factory Novels, or Tom Coffey’s Blood Alley.

For non-fiction, Charles Bowden’s Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family, which looks at the Mexican drug wars; Edward Bunker’s Education of a Felon; Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song.

I've read The Abortion aloud a few times because I love the language so much. Brautigan is so underrated these days; as far as I'm concerned, he's right up there with Vonnegut. (Did you ever read Charles D'Ambrosio's appreciations of Richard Brautigan? One was in the first issue of Swink magazine—not available online—and it was incredible. D'Ambrosio doesn't write like Brautigan, but he appreciates him so much that I bet you'd appreciate his writing. They have a certain kind of unexplainable bond. Try to find Orphans, but Dead Fish Museum is excellent, too.

I bet you'd like Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles. It has a similar, floaty feel to it; you learn about the character indirectly, but that turns out to be one of the best ways to meet a character.

(I second David's suggestions of Queneau and Markson. I think you might enjoy Oulipian authors a great deal. And another of David's suggestions is right-on: You might hate him, but I have to say that Tao Lin's most recent novel, Richard Yates, was one of the most Brautiganian reading experiences I've had in a while. I think if Brautigan was starting out today in a world of Google Chat and celebrities and the internet, he'd be writing a lot like Lin's style in Yates. But bear in mind that it is a completely acquired taste.)

There's a great out-of-print book called Dreams of an Imaginary New Yorker Named Rizzoli that you should definitely track down (I bet it won't be very expensive.) I read it during my Brautigan-intensive period, and it blew me away. Other authors I discovered when I finally read my way through everything Brautigan wrote: Jim Dodge, Italo Calvino, Nicholson Baker, and Donald Antrim.

And I'm not a spiritual person at all, but I really enjoyed David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives. It's a series of thought experiments about imaginary afterlives. Each chapter is a short, stand-alone imaginary glimpse into what could happen to us when we die. It's not Christian (or religious at all, for that matter) and it's just the right amount of whimsical. Let me know if you've had any experience with any or all of these authors and I can fine-tune my suggestions further.

The standard book on African Americans in Seattle is "The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 Through The Civil Rights Era" by Quintard Taylor. It's fascinating and extremely readable.

One of the several things that was exciting for me to learn is that while Seattle's black community was until WWII quite small, it was diverse, and in fact was two separate groups, one, made up of businessmen and their rather posh families, mostly from the East, up at the northern end of the CD centered on the William Grose house up at 28th and Madison, the other lower-class Great Migration southern immigrants ("sharecroppers" as the hoity-toity uptown blacks called them) down at 12th and Jackson. These groups did not always get along too well. In between, the CD grew together as the only part of the city that did not routinely feature racially exclusionary clauses that made it illegal for blacks to settle in, say, Queen Anne or Fremont (Asians and Jews also settled there; the CD has never been an exclusively black ghetto). There's good stuff in here, too, about labor -- which for most of our history has unfortunately been a powerful enemy of racial minorities, from the days of anti-Chinese mobs to the exclusion of blacks from the waterfront and Boeing until surprisingly recently.

Another good book looking at this is Esther Mumford's "Seattle's Black Victorians: 1952-1901".

You should definitely look at "Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz In Seattle" by Paul De Barros and Eduardo Calderon for a look at what that "southern" end of Seattle's CD was like when it was hopping with important music. The black club scene depicted in this last book also extends down into the ID, which brings us to....

A good book on the Japanese experience is "Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle" by David Takami. You may wonder why the ID is always called the ID, when it looks like Chinatown. That's because for a long time the Japanese were the most significant group there, during the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act, roughly from about 1890 to WWII, when new Chinese immigrants were prohibited and the people who were already here were aggressively chased away. Obviously the shadow of the WWII internment camps hangs over everything related to Japanese-American Seattleites, but it is important to realize that long before that time there was a thriving community there.

In addition to the book, you absolutely MUST visit the Wing Luke Museum, not so much for the exhibits, which are less than stunning, but for the guided tour, which is incredible. Your guide will take you upstairs to some mostly untouched rooms in the hotel upstairs, which illustrate some of the immigration experiences there -- the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Filipino. It's one of the best things in Seattle, and hardly anyone knows about it.

Another thing to see is in the tea room at the Panama Hotel on Main Street. The tea's great, but DO NOT MISS THE MAPS. There are two large hand-drawn wall maps in the back that show block-by-block what was in Japantown, as recalled by old residents, from two time periods, the 1920s and the 1940s. These, along with the old photographs on the wall and the glass plate in the floor, which reveals the undisturbed basement of the hotel as discovered by the new owner, with the trunks of people's belongings left behind when they were taken off to the camps -- it's all powerful stuff.

The relevant chapters in the more general histories -- Murray Morgan's "Skid Road" and Roger Sale's "Seattle Past To Present" top the list.

Another marginalized population living in and out of the mainstream white world is Seattle's gay population, and there's a book about that: "Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging" by Gary Atkins. Everybody should read this book! At least the first half of it; later on he gets bogged down in a great deal of radical politics that seemed like it mattered a great deal to certain people at the time but in some ways seems more quaint than the 1850s now. But the first half, which starts off with the earliest recorded appearances of sexual minorities, culled, inevitably, from court cases, well back into the nineteenth century, and then follows their story as it gradually unfolds and stands up for itself, is not just exciting reading in its own right, it's hugely important to the development of Seattle. Seattle was always a strait-laced white city; and its treatment of sexual minorities was part and parcel of its treatment of all excluded people, including not just racial minorities but criminals and partakers of vice (gamblers, pinball players, drinkers, prostitutes; they were all seen as pretty much the same by the police, and treated as such, and this inexorably led to nearly a century of entrenched police and political corruption that eventually exploded into resignations, arrests and prosecutions at the highest city levels -- mayors and police chiefs. It's a stunning story, and it centered around the gay bars. It's told best here.

Another amazing book on early gay Seattle is "An Evening In The Garden Of Allah: A Gay Cabaret" by Don Paulson.

I still haven't found a great book on the Indians who were (and are) here. Not to say one doesn't exist; I just haven't got there yet. They are a constant presence, though, and if you look through the amazing illustrations in Paul Dorpat's "Seattle Waterfront: An Illustrated History", which is not a commercially produced book, but a publication commissioned by the city (and available for checkout at SPL), you will see them as they are slowly pushed out by development.

You also definitely should check out the UW's civil rights web pages, which are a fantastic resource for all of these topics and more: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/