Whether you're traveling far and wide this summer by seeing one or both U.S. coasts, jetting off to a foreign country or remaining exactly where you are, camped out in the comfiest corner of your home, I'd wager that a good book would make the destination and time off all the more relaxing.
I've read just about everywhere I've visited -- in the backseat of many a road trip, which proved not to be the best tactic for an easily motion-sick person, on planes to and fro, at bus stops and the occasional train station, even on my honeymoon.
I'm one of those readers who always has a book on her, usually a physical one tucked in a bag or purse. But with the advent of Kindle and its app and the many ways to stream audiobooks, my load is getting lighter. It's a good thing too, because now my arms and bags are full carrying my sons' stacks of my children's books from the library and local bookstores.
Here are a couple of the books that were a worthy use of my free time this year:
'The Goldfinch' by Donna Tartt
Looking forward to an event, a trip or even reading a new title all give me the same pins and needles feeling of anticipation. In recent months and days, none has been more built up in my mind than completing "The Goldfinch." The tome was released all the way back in 2013, but that was a busy year for me. I met the love of my life, changed jobs and was knee deep in graduate school.
The combination of all that new work, the business of falling in love and starting a family meant that neither my husband nor I read the Donna Tartt novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. Even if it hadn't won that highest national honor for literary achievement, it would have piqued our interest.
At the start, Theodore Decker is just a boy, consumed by childhood conundrums of school and family life. But he is soon experiencing catastrophic things, starting with the bombing of an art museum and the death of his mother, the only present family member he has, then meeting a barrage of strangers who each have an impact on him.
The first of those strangers, an old man dying of the injuries he sustained in the same bombing, advises Theo to take two things with him as he escapes the museum -- a ring that should be returned to his business partner and "The Goldfinch" painting. The tasks would shape the rest of his life.
One leads him to a mysterious antique furniture restoration shop that he would come to think of as home and the other into a secretive world where the powers of the most sought-after works of art are harnessed for progressively darker and darker deals.
Tartt's writing is a spectacular thing to behold, no secret there, but I'm still impressed that she came up with such a compelling tale rooted in a singular painting and its ability to upend lives. Technically Theo is the main character, and there's no shortage of faces throughout the nearly 800 page story, such as the elite Barbour family, the complicated father figure, a troubling friend and the lovable Hobie, who took Theo in when he had no one back in New York.
But you could say that the true main character is the painting itself, as pervasive as it is throughout the whole tale. It exists beyond the fictional pages, made by Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, who died in an explosion himself in the mid-1650s, destroying all but a few of his paintings. Every bit of storytelling is informed by where it is, what's happening with it, and the biggest twists and turns come directly from its presence.
That said, you definitely don't have to be an art connoisseur to be enraptured by the many ups and downs of this thrilling and emotional ride.
'The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece' by Tom Hanks
Yes, the Academy Award winning actor Tom Hanks is also an author. If you missed his 2017 book of short stories, "Uncommon Type," you're in luck, because now you have two titles to catch up on. "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece" was released just last month, and this was one audiobook I couldn't pay for fast enough. It's read by Hanks himself, along with a full cast that chimes in progressively more throughout the story, and plays to the curiosity that so many people have about the business of Hollywood -- what it's like becoming a star and working on a film set.
There are a couple sides to the making of "Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall," the fictional superhero movie that all these characters are working on. First is the inspiration. A young, artistic 5-year-old boy meets his uncle, who is freshly back from World War II and leaves him stranded at a soda shop, but not before filling his mind with the tales of using a flamethrower. The two lose touch, and the boy grows up to be a comic book author in the '70s, spinning a tale based on his uncle's life, knowing now that his uncle was hardly more than a boy himself when he had those harrowing experiences.
Decades later still, the comic book gets picked up by an eccentric director to be spun into the latest multi-million dollar superhero trilogy. But how? From the selecting of the cast -- and even more importantly the rest of the crew -- to the constant diplomacy and problem solving amid drama both on and off screen, the reader gets a taste of it all -- the glamour and the nitty gritty.
By my count, the first part of the novel that detailed the family's story of finding and losing each other again felt seamless and held my attention effortlessly. Transitioning to the film set was an adjustment, but Hanks develops the stories of the director and crew in a way that brings you to care about them just as much as the original set of characters.
The more I listened, the more I came to appreciate the many, many fine details of what all goes into making "movie magic." There was so much detail about the logistics of such an undertaking that I feel it must be a major point of Hanks' to make: creating a major motion picture, for all its perceived glamour, is an arduous process that can be tedious and can take countless reworks.
Hanks' writing is a joy to read, with his words falling easily on the ears to the tune of the way that people actually talk, skating by and giving broad strokes to details in areas that he knows wouldn't interest the average Joe anyway. His folksy phrases have a way of getting to the root of things in other places, such as this astute observation: "Those who caused more problems than they solved would be as obvious as lima beans in a bowl full of carrots."
I get the sense, after having read this book, that movie making can at times be so hard or so boring that those who love it the most work at it, curse it, then come back to it before call time the next morning.