UPR listeners are avid readers, so our periodic question to you isn’t if you’re reading, but what are you reading? We hope you’ll share your booklist with us and we’ll compile a UPR list and post it on www.upr.org You can share your booklist by email to upraccess@gmail.com or on Twitter @upraccess. We’re also asking if you have any suggestions for beach or camping or summertime reading. And what do your children read during the summertime? Elaine Thatcher will join Tom Williams in studio for the hour and we’ll be talking with Betsy Burton from The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City and Andy Nettell from Back of Beyond Books in Moab.
Tom’s list:
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse
The Company by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge
The Best Land Under Heaven by Michael Wallis
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry
Elaine Thatcher Co-host:
Spring Mooa by Bette Boa Lord
Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazou by FyodorDosoevsky
The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
First Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith in Light of the Temple by Morris Samuel Brown
The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan
Apparition Lake by Doug Lamoreux
Dragon Harvest by Upton Sinclair
Art of Singing: Discovering and Developing Your True Voice by Jennifer Hamady
A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson
The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
Andy Nettelle from Back of Beyond Books
Monkey wrench gang Edward Abbey
Red Rock Stories by Stephen Trimble
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy D. Snyder
Ted (Listener):
I love your book shows. Thanks for feeding the reading pipeline!
I recently finished “All the Things I Never Told You” by Celeste NG (Pronounced “i-Ng”)
This was a wonderful book around the complex and intermingled topics of race, education, family, and trust all wrapped up in a page-turning mystery that I read in a single go one spring evening. Ms. Ng crafts true characters that make you pit judgements of your perceived understanding of the characters against yourself throughout the book, replete with strong surprises at every turn. Highly recommended for an enjoyable read that stays with you and really makes you think (sometimes weeks or months after you finish it).
Another great book that deals with the Middle East is birds without wings by Louis de Bernies. I love the book - it talks about the rise of Ataturk and uses him as a character in a fictional novel. It really fleshes out this important character in Turkey's history as a human being with ambitions, failures, and depth. It also addresses the Turk/Greek issue. Wonderful read. People may know this author from his other work at Captain Corelli's mandolin or the dust that falls from Dream.
Georgia Listener from Cedar City:
The Purple Swamphen and other short stories by Penelope Lively
According to Mark by Penelope Lively
Sterling Morris:
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace
Steve (Listener):
The first book is Four Fish by Paul Greenberg. An engaging writer, Greenberg established his adolescent self-identity fishing in Connecticut in waters near to where I used to live. The book is about mankind’s effect on the fish that swim in the sea, how those populations have been shaped and changed by us and with a special focus on four species that humans love to consume: Salmon, sea bass cod and tuna. Sound boring? It’s not.
The second book is We Have No Idea — A Guide To The Unknown Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, both physics professors.
I have an amateur’s interest in particle physics, relativity, astronomy and cosmology and read a lot on those subjects. Cham and Whiteson — as the title betrays — take a reverse approach from others I have read: they focus on what it is that we don’t understand rather than what we do, which is to say the book is all about what there is for us still to learn. Needless to say, this inevitably also sheds light on that which we do understand. The book is whimsically illustrated and if I have a beef with it, it is that the illustrations can be a little cutesy. Still, We Have No Idea is an illuminating and fun read.
Steve (Listener):
When I Was A Teenager I Gobbled-Up Dostoyevsky … …But now as an adult, I find him very heavy sledding indeed.