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August 25, 2003
Reading matter
Not surprisingly, I toted a bag of books to Isle au Haut, two of which were good enough that I read them by candlelight. Both were memoirs, a genre notable in recent years for little more than gross self-indulgence, but these two, I'm pleased to say, turned out to be compelling exceptions to that dismal rule.Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free Press) is the story of Carlos Eire, a professor of religion at Yale who was a mere child when Fidel Castro took over Cuba, and who has woven his youthful memories of Havana life into a gorgeously written, unsettlingly passionate account of what it felt like for a little boy to watch his world turned inside out. George Howe Colt's The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home (Scribner) is the story of a Cape Cod house and the family that spent its summers there, fishing and sailing and keeping unexpectedly dark secrets. It's less intense than Waiting for Snow in Havana--Colt, after all, is a bred-in-the-bone WASP--but no less passionate or involving.
If you're looking for a book or two to round out your summer reading, look no further.
Posted August 25, 2003 12:03 PM
