by Craig Ruff
June 16, 2009

What with the economic woes, a somber summer-time read may be Grapes of Wrath. With all this nationalization, maybe we should re-read 1984. Escaping, Pat the Bunny or Goodnight, Moon may be in order.

I cannot face rereading Steinbeck (an absolutely dreadful writer who somehow rose above carelessness, verbosity and insipid dialogue to nail the hell of impoverishment), Orwell (a brilliant writer who vacillated between what system of government did what and how much damage to whom), and authors of books only three-year-olds and their moms and dads could love.

In the early innings leading up (with any luck) to summer, I’ve lapped up some read and unread books piling up. No matter the genre, virtually every single book shocks at how new the old is and how old the new is. Here are the devoured thus far:

Child 44 (Tom Rob Smith). Stupendous writing and unnerving reading. Spillane reborn in a Dickens’ setting thick with disgust, injustice and Orwellian paranoia. You may want to read Gulag Archipelago or rent Fahrenheit 451 before reading, but not essential. (Friend Steve Scheffel loaned me a biography of Stalin years ago. I read it after Child 44. With whatever sequence of reading, you will be shell-shocked by Smith’s pitch-perfect rendering of that most dehumanizing culture and era.)

The 20th century was the vilest mankind ever endured. Combine the utter absence of privacy and individual liberty along with a riveting detective novel. If this does not chill you to the bones, you’ve got a serious case of osteoporosis. Is this what the 21st century has in store?

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (Will Cuppy). Does your tolerance for reading extend to a handful of pages about somebody famous written with the wriest humor? This book, recommended by friend Phil Power, sends up to the rafters a whole lot of nincompoops and ne’er-do-wells who, somehow, made it into history’s hall of f/shame.

If you do not care for these selected passages, by all means pass on the book and please do pass up our next opportunity to have drinks together. (1) As a legislator, Charles (Charlemagne) was untiring. He held two assemblies of nobles each year, one in the autumn to make more laws and one in the spring to repeal them. (2) Since Nero’s character leaves much to be desired, we are apt to forget his good side. We should try to remember that he did not murder his mother until he was twenty-one years old.

Alas, Cuppy died before seeing his book in print in 1950. That would bother me as an author much less than a leader or friend reading this work and not dying of laughter.

The Power Broker (Robert Caro). Do you have a clue as to who Robert Moses was? In a nutshell, he was the 20th century’s greatest enlivener of American public places — all in greater New York City. Do you evince any respect for anybody who takes charge? Does anyone among Michigan’s parlor of leaders truly get what the accumulation and use of power can and should do? I’d have had problems with Mr. Moses. But, no notes or footnotes on leadership can compare in impact and inspiration on the essentials of purposeful change-agents and visionaries in this biography.

If you hate 500+ page books about people whom you do not know, by all means do not pluck this off a library’s shelf. If you want to lead and change the world, by all means do. Lord Acton was partially correct: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. He forgot to add: “Exercising no power when you have it is despicable.” It’s unlikely that any state political leader has ever read this work, or if s/he has, they failed to take away any leave-behind.

Tell No One (Harlen Coban). Apropos of nothing overtly about the jurisdiction of leaders, this book (and a brilliant French film of 2008) is riveting. This incredibly fast-paced work told mountains about the way in which the expected is unexpected and the unexpected is expected. The world is more honestly imagined and fully detailed by Hitchcock or King than those unctuous self-helpers plying wares on Oprah. If, what you saw over the last few months, is beyond your powers to prophesy, you will revel in this book…and you will never break the oath of keeping its storyline and ending to yourself.

Dream House (Valerie Laken). My fetishes do not include home renovation. A certain Ann Arborphilia drew me to this rich work. A creative writing grad of U of M, Laken writes of dreams and nightmares set in the streets of Ann Arbor that anyone familiar with the town will love. It rivals Anatomy of a Murder (John D. Voelker or his pseudonym, Robert Traver) and Cold Day in Paradise (Steve Hamilton) in nailing Michigan’s place of place.

To Norman Mailer: Don’t you envy Laken’s metaphors? Dream House is about racial and cultural divides and conjoining. It’s about assuming that you can make something of nothing. The characters leave a lot to be desired, but it is a riveting novel of sense of place; it’s about people, but more importantly people and places.

Summer’s reading will stretch into the scores of books. If you have read and hate the above, please let me or would-be readers know. If you have a pick not on this list, ditto. Reading is a pleasure. It’s about the times, places and characters that you run into everyday: some pleasant and ineffective; some effective and unpleasant; and rarely, some pleasant and effective.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.