Our critic recommends old and new books.
Hello, readers.
Do you listen to music while you read? I can’t — my powers of concentration are too easily wrecked — but this past week forced a new soundtrack into my life. It began on Wednesday. I was reading in peace when a shocking noise came through the window: the sound of a person shrieking in distress. Possibly a person being murdered. I leaned far out the window. There was more shrieking. Louder shrieking! What to do?
On closer examination, it seemed that the noises weren’t quite human. Hmm. A spurt of hasty Googling revealed that I was hearing “vixen screeches” — the mating calls of local red foxes. Those crazy critters were really in the mood!
Breeding season in Massachusetts, where I’m currently located, is approaching its conclusion. Silence will soon return. But a part of me will miss the adrenaline spikes caused by these haunting vulpine screams. They add a certain spice to the reading experience.
—Molly
“Bad Lawyer,” by Anna Dorn
Nonfiction, 2021
I anticipate Anna Dorn’s books the way I anticipate pop songs masterminded by Max Martin, which is by drooling. Even if I’m not innately interested in a song’s subject matter (e.g. Ariana Grande’s love life), I know the producer’s mastery of structure and style will whirl me into a frenzy of euphoria. Every time.
Dorn — a former criminal defense attorney — has written two novels (one called “Vagablonde” and the other called “Exalted,” coming in June) as well as the memoir “Bad Lawyer,” which is our topic today. The title is accurate: This is a book about why Dorn quit the legal profession. And we are lucky that she did. Because otherwise, we would not be treated to stories about judges who sip bourbon in chambers and browse eBay auctions when they ought to be listening to homicide testimony.
Dorn is also tough on herself. She admits that she has never shredded a document or read a contract all the way through. She confesses to leaving confidential papers in bars. She spent most of her clerkship writing a novel in the body of a judicial order form. And more! “Bad Lawyer” is an impious banger written with razor blades of critique embedded within.
Read if you like: Legal history, watching Glenn Close throw a stapler at someone’s head on the TV show “Damages,” burning bridges
Available from: Hachette
“Crewe Train,” by Rose Macaulay
Fiction, 1926
Denham Dobie is a young Englishwoman living in Andorra when her father abruptly dies, leaving her in the care of chic relatives who drag Denham to London and set about “civilizing” her.
Denham is not interested in being civilized. All she wants to do is eat a lump of cheese alone on a sunlit hillside while wearing minimal clothing — a vision that many of us might find attractive. But no part of this dream is feasible in London. Instead of illuminated slopes, there are rainy streets; instead of “nobody,” there is an excess of people; and cheese is unavailable in Denham’s preferred unit of lump. Plus, her cousins are always inflicting barbaric ideas upon her, like the tweezing of eyebrows or the getting of a job.
This book is notably odd because the main character, while technically a human woman, might as well be a rock or a block of wood. (I kept using the wrong pronoun for Denham — “it” instead of “she” — while writing this blurb.) The inertness is intentional; the character’s neutrality is a backdrop for Macaulay’s satire of silly and snobbish London elites. The genre is comedy of manners, the prose is drier than Melba toast, the social observations are wicked. This recommendation came from a reader. Thank you, reader. I wish you a lifetime of solo hillside cheese.
Read if you like: Tart aphorisms, P.G. Wodehouse, resisting other people’s attempts to change you, getting a little drunk and being rude
Available from: Free to borrow at the Internet Archive
Why don’t you …
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Lean into the slalom turns of this Agatha Christie-style mystery set in 1930s HARLEM?
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Pick up “TRANSCRIPTION” if you like John le Carré novels but wish you were able to more easily untangle their plots? (No? Just me?)
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Ask yourself if you, too, could become a successful bond trader AGAINST ALL ODDS?
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Test your ability to resist a thriller about the venerable topic of RICH PEOPLE COMMITTING SINS?
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