NEWS

Carr -- faculty member, specialist in reading, book group organizer -- offers summer reading selections

CHAPEL HILL -- Just as summer brings a bounty of crops, it also can provide a bounty of time in which to catch up on reading for pleasure, and the organizer of a local reading group has a few selections that may fill that time nicely.

Dr. David Carr, associate professor of library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializes in reference, reading and cultural institutions as a teaching area – and he organizes a reading group. He served as an adviser to Miriam Intrator, curator of "The Art of Reading: Images of Booklovers" at UNC’s Ackland Art Museum. (A release on the exhibition is available by clicking on http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jun03/booklovers061903.html)

Carr thins his personal book collection at the end of each academic year by presenting special selections to his students. Below, he has provided a few selections for summer readers looking for a good book:

• "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," fiction, Michael Chabon. Carr: "An astonishing mix of themes and ideas – magic, Holocaust, comic books, heroism, wartime, fatherhood, friendship, fear – makes this novel a complex and entirely accessible world."
  
  
• "Word Freak," nonfiction, Stefan Fatsis. Carr: "There is a level of fanatical Scrabble playing that we might not want to enter ourselves (at least not for long), but Fatsis takes us there and we are willing to stay until the game is over."
  
  
• "Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight," memoir, Alexandra Fuller. Carr: "Fuller allows us to live through the tense and troubled transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe through her eyes as a young girl in an expatriate family of settlers."
  
  
• "Carter Beats the Devil," fiction, Glen David Gold. Carr: "Magic, an irresistible theme, is in this novel as well (see Chabon, above), and a great character performing vividly staged feats of illusion. The presence (and disappearance) of Warren G. Harding makes the work slightly less illusory."
  
  
• "The Unfinished Bombing," nonfiction, Edward Linenthal. Carr: "The bombing that doesn’t end is the one that happened in Oklahoma City; the topic is how the event is possessed, remembered and understood by those for whom it is always April 1995."
  
  
• "The Englishman’s Daughter," nonfiction, Ben Macintyre. Carr: "War strands British soldiers in occupied WWI France, and leads to love, betrayal and an inversion of emotions and morality among the village dwellers who hide them. Though we feel as though it is a novel, it isn’t."
  
  
• "Elvis Presley," biography, Bobbie Ann Mason. Carr: "An inspired pairing of writer and subject, the match is a charm, and the reading is like recovering the memorable voice and presence of a relative lost in our distant past."
  
  
• "The Circus Fire," nonfiction, Stewart O’Nan. Carr: "O’Nan is a novelist whose heart is touched by the 1944 conflagration of Barnum & Bailey’s big top in Hartford."
  
  
• "Bel Canto," fiction, Ann Patchett. Carr: "A great, insoluble political problem becomes a problem of human relationships, and then a problem of love, and then a problem of art. Throughout, we know that what we want to happen, cannot happen."
  
  
• "Empire Falls," fiction, Richard Russo. Carr: "Russo’s compassion for his confused and feckless blue-collar characters is infectious. He is a master of the crumbling industrial cityscape, and of the parallel souls to whom life has happened, and keeps happening."
  
  
• "The Lovely Bones," fiction, Alice Sebold. Carr: "Like ‘Bel Canto,’ this brilliant and stunning novel begins with an experience that shatters and devastates the imagination, compelling us to keep reading, even against our fear and sorrow."
  
  
• "Hamlet’s Dresser," memoir, Bob Smith. Carr: "Living through Shakespeare can be a form of self-rescue, when there is no one else to assist."

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