There are two kinds of people: those who think Geoff Dyer is one of the finest essayists of our time and those who have not yet read him. He has written nearly 20 books, some of them novels, but most are meditations on subjects that capture him, such as jazz, photography, and World War I. (The Missing of the Somme is a personal favorite.) Homework is his memoir of growing up in postwar England as an only child, and Dyer writes with wit and feeling and not a whiff of the mawkish. From his early love of action toys like Frogman, the family addiction to sugar (“We are talking exclusively of white sugar. Even brown sugar was too sophisticated; an acquired taste with suggestions of a health fad”), and a part-time job at a clothing store where he stole underwear (“I’d take a packet into the toilet, discard the wrapping, and wear them home over the pair I’d come to work in”), Dyer succeeds in making what otherwise might seem prosaic into something romantic.
Who can possibly resist a book with this title? Robert Finch, who died last year, was a peerless nature writer devoted to Cape Cod, but heartbreak led him to leave the Cape in the summer of 1995 for the village of Burnside on the northeastern coast of Newfoundland. He returned there every summer for the next 20 years and became involved in the lives of the 50 or so year-round residents. His observations of life and terrain make this book a joyous wonder to read in these noisy and chaotic times. There is romance as well, since by the third summer in Squid Tickle (a name derived from the narrow water passage called a “tickle” that separated the town from Squid Island) the author began coming with his partner (and eventual wife), and he emerges in these pages a much happier man. The deaths of longtime friends and a deteriorating house persuade them to leave Squid Tickle for good in 2015, but the book captures the time and place in a way that fixes their stay in our minds.
Archaeologists have found tantalizing signs that the Chinese and Mayans shared cultural similarities, but there is no hard evidence that the Chinese ever visited the Mayans more than 2,000 years ago. This has not deterred Tim McGirk from creating a crackling novel that imagines the travels of Xu Fu, a real-life Taoist priest dispatched by the Chinese emperor around 225 B.C. to find the island where the Immortals lived and bring back the elixir of life. No spoilers here, but by conjuring Xu Fu’s adventures and combining them with the modern-day exploits of Ned Sheehan, an archaeologist who stumbles upon the graves of Xu Fu and the emperor’s mother in southern Mexico, McGirk has crafted a tale of tomb robbers, murder, drug cartels, and romance, all interspersed with the fanciful memoirs of Xu Fu translated from clay tablets, that makes for timeless entertainment.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl. He can be reached at jkelly@airmail.news
