Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community in War by Nathaniel Philbrick

Named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times, and a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower tells the story of—as The Atlantic’s brief review last summer put it—“the Pilgrims’ turbulent first fifty years in the New World, and how they set the stage for subsequent American history.” Mayflower presents a riveting narrative tale, and Philbrick brings a bracing (and sometimes bloody) revisionism to one of the nation’s most jealously guarded mythical episodes. “History is at its most potent when the lessons of yesterday flow naturally into today,” wrote Peter Preston in The Observer, in London. “Here, brilliantly constructed, is a river of resonance. We have warlords and constantly shifting alliances, treachery, bribery, bungling. We have religious extremism, racial hatred, military carnage and cover-ups. This could be Afghanistan or Iraq, as bloodily relevant as the latest roadside bomb. Instead, across four centuries, Nathaniel Philbrick offers us the New England of the Mayflower pilgrims, the benign myths that helped shape modern America and what really happened.” Mayflower is both an epic yarn and a touchstone for conversation about America’s origins.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Is it pornography? That’s the question that seems always to attend Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the “classic” selection for the inaugural Plum-Atlantic reading list. The Atlantic, for its part, has consistently answered that question with a resounding “No.” When Lolita arrived on American shores in the 1950s, Charles Rolo reviewed it for the magazine, writing “There is not a single obscene term in Lolita, and aficionados of erotica are likely to find it a dud. Lolita blazes, however, with a perversity of a most original kind. For Mr. Nabokov has distilled from his shocking material hundred-proof intellectual farce … It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy.” Other writers who revisited the book in The Atlantic’s pages in later years were no less adulatory. In 1992 Martin Amis wrote of the book, “I have come to see it, with increasing awe, as exactly the kind of novel that its predecessors are pointing toward,” and “Lolita is perhaps the funniest novel in the language.” More recently Christopher Hitchens, writing about the book on the 50th anniversary of its publication, situated it alongside Joyce’s Ulysses and announced that even after multiple re-readings, the novel keeps its “promise of genius.” A masterpiece of literary craftsmanship, Lolita is an excellent jumping-off point for a discussion of the relationship between style and morality, aesthetics and ethics.

Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy

Already one of the more talked-about literary events of this year, Cullen Murphy’s book bracingly takes on the question that Americans have been anxiously asking for generations, with increasing urgency of late: Will the American Empire suffer the fate of the Roman Empire? And what does that mean? Eschewing facile comparisons and obvious analogies, Murphy mines history and current events in original ways to create jarring equivalencies between Rome and America, yielding penetrating insights. Is the American Empire fated to decline like Rome? Probably so, at least in some sense. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. “Like Rome,” Murphy writes, “America is in some ways inextinguishable. What we can’t know is which characteristics will be extinguished and which won’t. But we do have a say in the outcome.” Murphy, who for twenty years was The Atlantic’s managing editor, takes us on a brisk and entertaining tour of both Rome in the third century BCE and America at the dawn of the 21st century. This book is both fun and important: America’s future course depends in part on whether we can learn from Rome’s mistakes.

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

In a review that appeared in the September 2006 issue of The Atlantic, Elizabeth Judd deemed The Emperor’s Children an “excellent read” and “a cheeky exposé of the pundit class in all its privileged splendor.” “Claire Messud turns the grappling for ideological supremacy among two generations of intellectuals into a riveting comedy of manners,” Judd wrote. “Thirty-year-old Marina, the brainy, ravishing only child of a celebrated journalist, returns to her Upper West Side home to complete a possibly worthless book on the cultural implications of children’s fashion. There she falls for an iconoclastic editor who dismisses her beloved father as ‘a tiny, pointless man roaring behind a curtain.’ ” With The Emperor’s Children, Messud has evoked comparisons to Tom Wolfe, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. The book’s large social canvas, array of interesting characters, and penetrating psychological insights make this a Big Novel in the classic sense, one that has already been a conversation generator, among not only the chattering classes it depicts but also among discerning readers across the country.

To read Elizabeth Judd’s full review of this novel, click here.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Recently declared Britain’s “national writer” by The Times of London, Ian McEwan must also be counted on the short list of the world’s greatest writers of our time. In Chesil Beach, his new novella, McEwan tells the story of an ill-starred wedding night on England’s Dorset coast in 1962. In the very first line we learn that Florence and Edward, an aspiring concert musician and historian respectively, “were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Never has so momentous, and cataclysmic, a tale been told around an incident of premature ejaculation. As lurid as that sounds—and McEwan’s description of the couple’s nonconsummation is almost forensic in its clinical detail—this is a beautifully told tale that, despite its brevity, brilliantly captures a moment in time; it touches on universal themes of innocence, desire, and fate, and on the enduring consequences of human decisions made in moments of duress.

Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon

Deemed “one of the most interesting American novelists at work” by John Updike, Thomas Mallon has for many years fused history and fiction in entertaining and provocative ways. In Fellow Travelers, set in Washington, D.C., at the height of the McCarthy era, he unspools a yarn that intertwines the Red Menace and the Lavender Scare. The affair between a debonair, WASPy State Department officer and an earnest young Senate aide—both closeted gay men—plays out against the government’s dogged effort to purge homosexuals from its ranks. Mallon weaves McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade, the young protagonist’s struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with his Catholicism, and the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the Cold War into a dense tapestry of events and ideas. Despite the darker overtones of the anti-gay and anti-Communist witch hunts, Fellow Travelers conveys a buoyant patriotic spirit—and the book provides an occasion for discussion about freedom, sexual identity, and the American Idea amidst the tensions of the Cold War.

All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones

Selected by literary editor Benjamin Schwarz as one of the best books of 2006, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, this book was reviewed as follows by The Atlantic in November 2006: “These stories—formal in tone, precise in style, intricately imagined, and arrestingly specific in their evocation of place and time—offer an intimate and impressively varied look at African American life in Washington, D.C., throughout the twentieth century.” Jones does for Washington what James Joyce did for Dublin, giving it a richness and vividness that is both literal and metaphoric. Though set in a range of times and specific places in our nation’s capital, the stories consistently explore the ways in which people negotiate between their own needs and the demands of their families and their communities. All Aunt Hagar’s Children lends itself naturally to discussion not only of the enduring challenges of race in post–Civil War America, but also of the myriad complexities of life in an extended family.

God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Religion, Christopher Hitchens writes, “is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” This controversial book, which reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list, struck a resonant chord in American culture: predictably embraced in some quarters and attacked in others, it has been fiercely debated everywhere. With his usual writerly brio, Hitchens make a number of claims about religion, among them: that it calls for an unhealthy denial of human nature; that it incites violence, and servile deference to authority; that it suppresses free inquiry; and that it is scientifically inaccurate about the origins of the universe and the human race. Whether God Is Not Great infuriates you or affirms your (non)beliefs, it can hardly fail to engage you, and it provides an invigorating, if polemical, starting point for discussion.

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

A non-fiction classic, The Best and the Brightest is included on the Bookmark 2007 reading list as a tribute to the late David Halberstam, who was among the greatest journalists of his generation. After beginning his writing career as a newspaperman, eventually covering Vietnam for The New York Times, Halberstam went on to write more than 20 books, many of them top bestsellers. The Best and the Brightest is probably Halbertam’s most important book, and surely his best-known—and it is also the most germane to our present moment. “The Iliad of the American Empire and the Odyssey of this nation’s search for its idealistic soul,” as The Boston Globe put it, The Best and the Brightest is the riveting, horrifying account of how America’s leaders dragged the nation into quagmire in Vietnam. The book’s relevance now is obvious—and it brings valuable historical perspective to contemporary debates about Iraq, the American empire, and the American soul.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

Many memoirs, and especially memoirs of personal growth and spiritual awakening, are cloying or saccharine. Elizabeth Gilbert’s is neither. An accomplished journalist (she has been nominated three times for a National Magazine Award) and writer of fiction, Gilbert comes across in this book as smart, funny, honest, and engaging—in short, as an excellent companion. No wonder Jennifer Egan, writing in The New York Times, declared, “If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her.” Eat, Pray, Love tells how Gilbert, reeling and broken in the aftermath of a protracted divorce and a devastating love affair, sought self-understanding and renewal in a year’s journey through three disparate cultures: In Italy, she learns Italian and revels in fine food; in India, she meditates in an ashram; and in Bali, she reconnects with a healer she had met years before—or, as Gilbert describes the motivations for her trip, “I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two.”