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Summer Reading

Andria
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John Montgomery and David Pesikoff

John Montgomery and David Pesikoff (from left) started their Men’s Book Club 12 years ago, and they’re still going strong.

Here’s to hoping we’re all on the verge of having more time to read. It is summer, after all. To maximize the prize time, my favorite Buzz column of the year: reader book recommendations. Enjoy!

In 2012, Anna Jones read 108 books, rendering her immensely qualified to skim the top. (She also made 133 recipes and took 104 walks – more on Anna’s “100s” goals to come.) Her picks: Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West. Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of The New Yorker, penned the story based on real-life letters home from her grandmother and a friend, both of whom left New York society in 1916 to teach school in Colorado’s wild west. Anna says Wickenden “weaves those letters and the era’s history into an engrossing memoir which reads like a feel-good novel.”

And she claims Miriam’s Kitchen by Elizabeth Ehrlich changed her life. “Or, rather,” she says, “it stopped my whining about having to make dinner every night, and sent me into the kitchen with a new attitude where cooking and baking became an act of love and appreciation rather than a drudging obligation.” The book tells the story of the author connecting with her Jewish heritage through her mother-in-law, a Holocaust survivor. That the connection happens in the kitchen and builds on the mother-in-law’s memories of living in a concentration camp makes it part memoir, part history lesson, part cookbook.

John Montgomery, an oil and gas trader, and David Pesikoff, a founding partner of a venture capital firm Triangle Peak Partners, started their MBC – Men’s Book Club – about 12 years ago. David says, “We’ve got about 15 guys who meet nine to 10 times a year.” And they’re serious about reading.

John says that connecting books to his own life experiences is what endears certain works to him. A favorite is The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway, a collection of stories about Hemingway’s alter-ego. Set chronologically, mostly in Michigan, the stories offer a window, fictitious and real, into Hemingway’s world. Having spent growing-up summers in Michigan, John says these stories – especially the coming-of-age ones – appeal to him directly. They are, he says, “classic Hemingway: bare, honest, accessible.”

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is another favorite. John says the novel that William Faulkner named “the best ever written” speaks to him “because the characters are deeply human and imperfect, and that is timeless and reassuring. Has anyone figured out how to balance love, God, commitment?”

David calls In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson “mesmerizing.” The true account of America’s first ambassador to pre-World War II Germany delves into family, Hitler’s burgeoning power and the U.S. State Department’s initial reluctance to push back. And of James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, David says, “You feel like you are there when [Shakespeare] performs for Elizabeth I and for the masses. [This book] weaves the history of the time into [Shakepeare’s] plays in ways I had never appreciated.”

Ali Katz founded the blog “The Daughter-In-Law Diaries” and reads voraciously. She praises The Burgess Boys by Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout, a story delving into family and deep-seated tensions as two very different brothers return home to Maine to help their sister and her troubled son. Ali says, “Interesting family dynamics abound as readers understand how events in a family’s history have long-lasting effects on the way lives are shaped.”

She also recommends Me Before You, by Jojo Moyes, which details the unfolding love story between a suicidal quadriplegic and the upbeat woman his family hires to be his companion. Ali calls this “a wonderful novel, the kind that makes you wonder how you would handle yourself in a similar situation.”

Attorney Joe Epstein is co-chairing the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center’s 2013 Book and Arts Fair this fall (watch for information on visiting authors and events). He likes J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. “The exquisite character detail, along with descriptions of how the teens’ and adults’ worlds interact, explores all kinds of issues.”

Joe also touts Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers: A Novel. Kushner, who recently moved to Houston, was nominated for the National Book Award for her novel Telex from Cuba. Her most recent book weaves themes of art, love, betrayal and the feminine into a story set in 1970s New York and Italy’s underground of the same era.

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