Kimberly Kafka's True North

A Book Lover's Favorites
with Colleen Coghlan
December 2000

Midday welcomes Colleen Coghlan, who teaches in the graduate Library and Information Science program at the College of St Catherine. During the summer, she runs a front porch bookstore in Maine called Roseledge Books.

She says, "Reading is cumulative and intertwined with experience. This makes anyone's list of favorite books close to unique and subject to change with whatever is the last book read."

Given all of that, she offers the following:

Reader's note No. 1
What a person chooses to read is more interesting to me than what he or she thought of the book. For instance, I have had it with serial killers, legal thrillers, bleak books, and strong women who endure. I need hope at least, even better optimism, and a bit of wry humor if possible and well done.

Reader's note No. 2
I read to try to figure out how the world works. I know this will require more than a lifetime, but there is nothing wrong with a good start.

Reader's note No. 3
At any given time, I read because I have questions. Though I mean to answer them, I inevitably end up with more or different questions. One measure of a good book is its ability to provoke. For instance, I love books about how ideas happen and develop into what we know:
• Longitude, by Dava Sobal
• The Ice Finder, by Edward Blair Bolles
• The Rum Affair, by Karl Sabbagh
• Flu, by Gina Kolata
• Medicine Quest, by Mark Plotkin
• Spending, by Mary Gordon
• How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill

Reader's note No. 4
Mostly, I want to learn from whatever books I choose to read, fiction or nonfiction, especially if the fiction is "two parts fun and one part learning," as Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times.

Near East
I knew when we went to war with Iraq that I knew way too little about the Near East. So far I have happened onto the following gems:
• Black Tents of Arabia, by Carl R. Raswan
• Agents of Innocence, by David Ignatius
• A Stolen Tongue, by Sheri Holman
• Palace Walk (Cairo Trilogy), by Naguib Mahfouz
• Damascus Gate, by Robert Stone

Finance through fiction
Way back when, I knew that college accounting courses were not enough and economics texts were way too much. The following are definitely useful and fun.
• The Set-Up, by Paul Erdman
• A Conspiracy of Paper, by David Liss
• The Matorese Circle; The Promethus Deception, by Robert Ludlem

Place: How better to visit first?
• Scotland: Dorothy Dunnett, Walter Scott, R. L. Stevenson, Lillian Beckwith, M. C. Beaton, and Diana Gabaldon
• Ireland: Bartholomew Gill and Thomas Flanagan
• Seattle/San Juans: Earl Emerson, Janet L. Smith, Mary Daheim, Jo Dereschke, and David Guterson
• Wyoming: Gretel Erlich, Annie Proulx, Lise McClendon, James Galvin
• The Bitteroot mountains, river, valley: James Lee Burke and Jamie Lee Harrison
• Australia: Bill Bryson

Snotty Vatican novels
Any 2,000-year-old, mostly secret, hugely powerful and rich organization of mostly old men is almost by definition ripe for exposing. Throw in the mysterious and marvelous Vatican library, and set it all in Rome, and you have great potential for a good read.
• Assassini, by Thomas Gifford
• The Seville Communion, Arturo Perez-Reverte
• Basilica, by William D. Montalbano
• The Genesis Code, by John Case
• Shroud for the Archbishop, by Peter Tremayne

Mysteries
I read mysteries first for the background learning, then for the puzzle, rarely for character. I started with Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes. The following are some I like now. (Maybe I should add suspense to my criteria): Dana Stabenow, Margaret Maron, Bartholomew Gill, Janet Evanovich, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Sarah Caudwell, Amanda Cross, Sarah Paretsky, Edmund Crispin, Jane Detinger.

I'm tired of Robert B. Parker, Patricia Cornwall, John Grisham, and probably others. I liked William Kent Krueger's Iron Lake and just bought his Boundary Waters. Just today someone said I should read Tami Hoeg, and I bought Sarah Andrews' Bone Hunter because the detective is a forensic geologist.

Roots
Deciding who we are and why is not an easy task. It's even harder to decide how to tell others.
•Away, by Jane Urqhuart
• Cottonwood Roots, by Kem Luther
• Beyond the Bedroom Wall, by Larry Woiwode
• Sources of the River, by Jack Nisbet
• Secret of Roan Inish (movie)

Reader's note No. 5
Sometimes books turn into film or tape or good conversation, have both a hard and soft cover, and save lives.

Movie adaptions
Movies from books that might have been hard to follow:
• The Name of the Rose, from the book by Umberto Eco
• Smilla's Sense of Snow, from the book by Peter Hoeg
• The Ninth Gate, from Club Dumas by Arturo Perez Reverte

The spoken word
Audio taped books—but have you "read" them if you've only "heard" them? • Anything by Charles Dickens (they're long, but they began as serials)
• Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
• Anything by Tony Hillerman

Books that save lives
• The captain refused to sail, by Martha Grimes (skinny)
• Hand surgery, by Janet Evanovich, Jamie Lee Harrison (light)
• I will be eight nights on my parents sofa Thomas Friedman (fat)
• A long flight to India, by Leslie Roberts (fat)

Good Conversation
• Provocations, by Lucy Grealy
• The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, by Jonathan Rosen

For Book Clubs
McMains, Victoria Golden, The Readers' Choice: 200 Book Club Favorites

Reader's note No. 6
Books are a wonderful and very personal gift to give because, with the right title, you tell your friend that you have not lost touch. With the wrong one, well ...

For a safe, but almost personal gift, how about a "degrees of separation" book?

Book Game: Degrees of separation between what you are reading and a place, e.g. Minnesota.