Books in the Time of COVID-19

A Top Ten List

We can’t go out and socialize.  There are no sports on TV – and thus no fantasy teams to track.  The gyms are emptying.  Hollywood has shut down production.

What will we do with our free time?

There are all sorts of activities to fill the day, of course.  Video games and board games, puzzles and podcasts.  You can learn to juggle or tango or speak Portuguese.   

Or – you can read.  

As a public service I’ve put together a list of entertaining books.   This is not a list for hardcore book readers – or, if you’ll allow me a moment of literary snobbery, it is not a list for people who got the reference in the title of this post.   Most of these books haven’t won a coveted Johnny-Bingo Award.

Rather, it is a list for the casual reader, one who knows the wonderful feeling of a great read but can’t name many authors beyond Grisham, Rowling, Patterson, and King.

Some of these books are light, fun, frothy.  Some are a bit weightier, but still page-turners.

Here we go:

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

The greatest Western ever written.  Yes, it is long, nearly a thousand pages.  But don’t be daunted by its length.  If you watched 73 episodes of Game of Thrones you can handle a thousand-page book; just treat each chapter like an episode.  And the pages fly by – cattle drives and saloon fights and horse rustlers and Indians and – at the heart of it all, Woodrow Call and Gus McRae, two of the greatest characters in literary history.

Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

Let’s move to non-fiction now, and this extraordinary tale of a catastrophic climb of Mount Everest.  

Mild spoiler alert: early in the book we learn a major character doesn’t make it, but even though I’d known this for hundreds of pages I was still shaken when it actually happened.  This is reporting + storytelling at its finest. 

The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara

A thousand pages is too long?  Then warm up with this 370-pager about the battle of Gettysburg.  You’ll bounce all around the battlefield and experience the personal stories from Union cavalrymen and Confederate generals and foreign observers.  You’ll learn about the most important battle in American history but be so captivated the whole time you won’t even notice you’re learning.

  

Positively Fifth Street:  Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker, James McManus

If you like poker, this is the book for you.  The author got paid by Esquire magazine to go to Vegas and cover a murder trial.  And not just any murder trial, but the murder of Teddy Binion, whose seedy old casino was the original home of the World Series of Poker.  McManus takes his writer’s fee and enters the WSOP.

It’s part murder trial reporting, part memoir of his run in the tourney, part history of poker.  Awesome stuff.

The Winds of War/War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk

Okay, this one’s a big one again.  Not one, but two long books. 

Herman Wouk conveniently places members of the Henry family all over the world during (and before) the Second World War.  If you want to learn all about that global conflict while immersed in a rip-roaring yarn of a family saga, this is your book(s).

Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, Bill Bryson

Your trip to Europe was cancelled.  Want to travel there vicariously with a hugely entertaining and witty writer instead?  Bryson's got you covered.

Who’s Your Caddy? Looping for the Great, Near-Great, and Reprobates of Golf, Rick Reilly

The noted Sports Illustrated wit spent a year caddying with everyone from PGA pros to Vegas golf hustlers.  He caddied for the blind golf champion and Jack Nicklaus.  He caddied for Donald Trump and Deepak Chopra.  He even caddied at the Masters. 

A fun read for anyone who loves golf or used to look forward to reading the back page of SI.

The Myron Bolitar series, Harlen Coben

I read a lot of crime series.  Maybe all of them.  And this isn’t the best one.  It’s not even the 9^th best one.   BUT –I have a lot of friends who never read books but only watch sports and listen to sports radio, and this might be the series for you.

Myron is a former college basketball star whose NBA career was derailed by injury.  He becomes a sports agent – and, like those ridiculous 1970s TV series like Hart to Hart where ordinary citizens get involved in crime-fighting escapades - Myron is constantly having to save his clients from some evil villain. 

They are fun and funny and have just enough darkness in them to save them from being too frothy.

The Princess Bride, William Goldman

You’ve seen the movie.  Now read the book!  William Goldman is a screenwriting legend (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men) but he wrote TPB as a novel first and a screenplay writer.  And the novel is as charming and delightful as the movie.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Read the first 5 pages.  If you love it, you will love all five books in the trilogy (not a typo).  If you hate it, put it down.  This is not for you.

What Not to Read

The Passage Trilogy, by Justin Cronin

This vampire-horror sage about a bat-borne virus that leads to a near-apocalypse…well, unless you’re a masochist, maybe wait on this one.

Happy Reading!