Book report for June 2024

A very good month as a reader. Dr Essai would recommend every book he finished last month. Should you follow a link to purchase a volume from Bookshop.org, your correspondent receives a few bucks as a kickback. All perfectly legal, you understand. Thank you for reading.

Completed

• Istanbul Passage, Joseph Kanon. Great espionage novel by America’s le Carré. Set in post–Second World War Turkey, a complicated story about compromised people navigating a morally murky clandestine world in which one of the more admirable characters is a prostitute.
• Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, Ben Shattuck. Graceful linked essays by a writer who, for various reasons, rewalks a half-dozen hikes described by Thoreau in his journals.

• The Work of Art, Adam Moss. If you are fascinated by creative process, this is the book for you. Moss sat with 43 artists of all kinds and got them to revisit the process of creating individual works. A feast, if you like that sort of thing.
• Family Record, Patrick Modiano. A memoir, probably with some latitude for invention, by the Nobelist. Modiano writes with enormous skill and his sheer literary quality makes this slender volume a book to savor. Do not rush through it.
• The Grail, Brian Doyle. The late Oregon writer’s exuberant account of a year spent hanging around a vineyard that made great pinot noir. Much influenced by John McPhee, one suspects. Brian, a friend of mine, was always word-drunk and part of the pleasure here is his love of language.

In progress

• James, Percival Everett
• The Best American Essays 2002, Stephen Jay Gould (ed.)

Purchased

• Martin Marten, Brian Doyle
• The Grail, Brian Doyle
• The Solitudes, John Crowley
• Do/Photo, Andrew Paynter
• Three Scientists and Their Gods, Robert Wright