Michael Perry is one of those authors that I like and admire, but I haven’t actually read that often. He’s written six books, all on various topics of rural life, but I’ve only ever finished one — Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg. I’ve perused bits and pieces of a couple of his other books, but they’re all written in this sort of meandering style that makes them easy to pick up (and put back down again) as the mood strikes.

For that reason, I was really excited to be on a tour for his most recent book, Visiting Tom: A Man, A Highway and the Road to Roughneck Grace. I knew I’d like it, but I also knew that having a date for review planned ahead would keep me from putting the book aside for something that seems, at first, a little more exciting:

What can we learn about life, love, and artillery from an eighty-two-year-old man whose favorite hobby is firing his homemade cannons? Visit by visit — often with his young daughters in tow — author Michael Perry finds out. Toiling in his shop, Tom Hartwig makes gag shovel handles, parts for quarter-million-dollar farm equipment, and — now and then — batches of potentially “extralegal” explosives. Tom, who is approaching his sixtieth wedding anniversary with his wife, Arlene, and is famous for driving a team of oxen in local parades, has stories dating back to the days of his prize Model A and an antiauthoritarian streak refreshed daily by the interstate that was shoved through his front yard in 1965 and now dumps more than eight million vehicles past his kitchen window every year. And yet Visiting Tom is dominated by the elderly man’s equanimity and ultimately — when he and Perry converse as husbands and the fathers of daughters — unvarnished tenderness.

There are a lot of different plots moving through this book, stories that wind around each other much like the interstate highways and country roads that provide the tension in this story. Tom’s story of battling the interstate system parallels a smaller story about Perry fighting with a county highway commissioner about the road near his house. I thought Perry’s local government nightmare was really funny to read about (since I cover local government for my job and so I have totally seen what happens to him happen in my life too), but of course you have to be at least a little bit of a government nerd to really love that.

One of the challenges to reading Perry, I think, is that the day-to-day of what he writes about is pretty mellow. He’s a Midwestern guy living on a small farm in rural Wisconsin, a place that sets up a very particular lifestyle and very particular set of challenges. Small town life can be insular, specific, and idiosyncratic, to a point where some of the dramas that make for big news down at the coffee shop or in the pages of a book can seem quite small when you’re not in it. I think for me, that sometimes makes it easy to put one of his books down and forget to pick it up again — the “plot” isn’t necessarily what is going to keep you reading.

What will keep you coming back is Perry’s writing style. He has mastered this folksy, sarcastic voice that makes him both genuine and snarky. His sense of humor is veiled, but when you get into the style and start to see what he’s seeing, it’s just wonderful. For me, his descriptions of sitting in public meetings, the “Midwestern tug-of-war” he gets into with a local official, or the specifics of cold weather driving posture were just golden. But he’s equally as charming writing about the first time he met his wife and the role the Hartwig’s played in their courtship.

I liked this one a lot, and I’m glad to have been given a little push to revisit Michael Perry. I’m feeling inspired to grab one of his older books from my shelves because his sense of rural comedy seems perfect at this time of year.

Other Tour Stops: Bibliotica | BookNAround | The Road to Here | Book Club Classics! | Capricious Reader | Apples and Arteries (Sept. 5) | It’s All About Books (Sept. 9) | Read. Write. Repeat. (Sept. 10) | Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books (Sept. 11) | The Library of Alexandra (Sept. 12) |

I realized about two weeks ago that I haven’t done a monthly reading wrap-up since May — a combination of vacations and other commitments, I think. I love doing these because I like taking at least a few minutes to look back on what I’ve been reading. It’s easy to forget sometimes!

I’ve read so many wonderful books this summer, I almost can’t believe it. I think the reason I read so many books is because when I read something great it inspires me to read more and more and more. Does that happen to anyone else? It’s great when that happens.

June

I read a respectable nine books in June. I struggled a little bit late in the month as I was prepping for vacation and feeling pretty stressed, but still finished a couple of books that I adored right at the end. My favorite of the month was, hands down, Ten Letters by Eli Saslow.

1. Hanel, Rachel: We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down (memoir)
2. Rowling, J.K.: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (YA fiction)
3. Van Booy, Simon: The Illusion of Separateness (fiction)
4. Rybczynsk, Witold: Last Harvest (nonfiction)
5. Horn, Stacy: Imperfect Harmony (memoir)
6. Rowling, J.K.: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (YA fiction)
7. Collins, Paul: Duel With the Devil (narrative nonfiction)
8. Glei, Jocelyn: Manage Your Day-to-Day (nonfiction)
9. Saslow, Eli: Ten Letters (narrative nonfiction)

July

I was on vacation for about the first 10 days of the month, so I got a lot of reading done. After that, my focus turned to a few “required” books — book tours, paid reviews, and Bloggers Recommend choices — but I still finished an impressive (for me) 12 books. My favorites were probably two audio books, Shadow and Bone and Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo. They were fantastic YA fantasy.

1. Barry, Max: Lexicon (fiction)
2. Bardugo, Leigh: Shadow and Bone (YA fiction)
3. Sonnenberg, Susannah: She Matters (memoir)
4. Atkinson, Kate: Life After Life (fiction)
5. Coffey, Wayne: The Boys of Winter (narrative nonfiction)
6. Rowling, J.K.: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (YA fiction)
7. Sicha, Choire: Very Recent History (narrative nonfiction)
8. Kachka, Boris: Hothouse (nonfiction)
9. Le Page, Jody and Bell White, Sylvia: Sister (nonfiction)
10. Brosh, Allie: Hyperbole and a Half (essays)
11. Rowling, J.K.: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (YA fiction)
12. Bardugo, Leigh: Siege and Storm (YA fiction)

August

My 13 books in August were helped, a bit, by finishing up a couple books that had been languishing unfinished — Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed and the audio book of Insurgent by Veronica Roth — and a couple of comic books related to Avatar: The Last Airbender. I also went on a fiction binge at the end of the month, flying through Night Film by Marisha Pessl and all of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. I don’t think I can pick a favorite from the month — nearly every book was amazing, and I can’t wait to write some reviews for them.

1. Pang, Alex Soojung-Kim: The Distraction Addiction (nonfiction)
2. Yang, Gene Luen: Avatar the Last Airbender: The Promise (YA fiction)
3. Yang, Gene Luen: Avatar the Last Airbender: The Search (YA fiction)
4. Bishop, Patrick: The Hunt for Hitler’s Warship (nonfiction)
5. St. Germain, Justin: Son of a Gun (memoir)
6. Jackson, Nate: Slow Getting Up (memoir)
7. Butler, Katy: Knocking on Heaven’s Door (nonfiction)
8. Kizza, Tom: Pilgrim’s Wilderness (nonfiction)
9. Strayed, Cheryl: Tiny Beautiful Things (essays)
10. Pessl, Marisha: Night Film (fiction)
11. Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake (fiction)
12. Atwood, Margaret: Year of the Flood (fiction)
13. Roth, Veronica: Insurgent (YA fiction)

I spent Labor Day weekend with my family, first going to the State Fair with my sister then heading up to our family’s cabin for a few days. It was a perfect end of summer weekend, and I feel more at peace with the fact that fall is right around the corner. I haven’t really looked ahead to September, but a quick glance at my calendar promises a busy, busy month — I’ll try to get caught up with sharing some of that in next Sunday’s “Currently” post. Happy first day of school!

PHOTO CREDIT: ROB WARDE VIA FLICKR

As someone who loves books but hates thinking about money, the idea that publishing is a business is often hard for me to wrap my head around. But the fact that publishers need to make money with books like 50 Shades of Grey in order to support Great Literature is a reality of the publishing business.

Because I’m curious about that tension, and because I love the occasional gossipy nonfiction, I was very excited to read Hothouse by Boris Kachka when it came out this month. (As a semi-interesting aside, when I featured this book as one of 5 Books on the Business of Books over at Book Riot in June, the book’s editor contacted me and offered a review copy — that’s the first time that has ever happened and I thought it was neat). Quickly, a summary:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is arguably the most influential publishing house of the modern era. Home to an unrivaled twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and generation-defining authors like T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen, it’s a cultural institution whose importance approaches that of The New Yorker or The New York Times. But FSG is no ivory tower—the owner’s wife called the office a “sexual sewer”—and its untold story is as tumultuous and engrossing as many of the great novels it has published.

Boris Kachka deftly reveals the era and the city that built FSG through the stories of two men: founder-owner Roger Straus, the pugnacious black sheep of his powerful German-Jewish family—with his bottomless supply of ascots, charm, and vulgarity of every stripe—and his utter opposite, the reticent, closeted editor Robert Giroux, who rose from working-class New Jersey to discover the novelists and poets who helped define American culture. Giroux became one of T. S. Eliot’s best friends, just missed out on The Catcher in the Rye, and played the placid caretaker to manic-depressive geniuses like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Jean Stafford, and Jack Kerouac. Straus, the brilliant showman, made Susan Sontag a star, kept Edmund Wilson out of prison, and turned Isaac Bashevis Singer from a Yiddish scribbler into a Nobelist—even as he spread the gossip on which literary New York thrived.

Admittedly, the first few chapters of this book were a bit slow for me. Kachka spends about 100 pages exploring the childhoods and early careers of Straus and Giroux, which involves quite a bit of name dropping of wealthy families and prominent businessmen — most that I didn’t recognize or didn’t care about. It’s probably a necessary grounding for the rest of the book, but if you’re reading this to learn about publishing it’s not especially interesting.

Fortunately, the book picks up markedly when Straus finally gets into the world of publishing and starts to maneuver in ways that will lead him to founding FSG. Early life at the company is also fascinating. There’s speculation that some early employees in Europe worked for the CIA and that many of the secretaries had high security clearance to take calls. In an era when money was tight, the office manager made salesmen hand over free hotel soap to be used at the office. There’s lots of gossip — who was having sex with who, and where, and who else knew about it — that seems pretty hard to substantiate conclusively, but makes for a good read nonetheless.

My favorite part of the book, however, was the way that the story of FSG intersects with the broader world of book publishing. Straus and Giroux, in their own ways, took taking care of their authors quite seriously and didn’t care, necessarily, about the bottom line. There’s also tension between the desire to remain an independent publishing house and the business realities that push towards acquisition from a big publisher. FSG is an example of the tensions that arise when business and culture collide over the making of art, and that tension is really fun (and educational) to read about. If you’re at all interested in the world of publishing, Hothouse is a must read book.

I’m a little bit late getting any final thoughts on the Bout of Books posted, but I have a good reason — I spent most of today reading! I started Oryx and Crake on Saturday and I just couldn’t put it down until I finished right after dinner today. Here are my final stats for the week:

Saturday/Sunday (and Monday)

• Pages Read Over Three Days: 374
• Total Pages Read: 1,328
• Books Read/Finished: Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed (finished), Night Film by Marisha Pessl (finished), Why Have Kids? by Jessica Valenti (in progress), and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (finished on Monday)
• Other Notes: Technically, I just finished Oryx and Crake a few minutes ago, but since I haven’t watched any television today it still feels a little bit like the Bout of Books is going on. And since there aren’t any official prizes for books or pages read, I don’t mind fudging a little bit.

Overall, I had a lot of fun participating in the Bout of Books (you can check some of my status updates here and here). The only goal I set for the week was to cut out solo time in front of the television and, for the most part, I succeeded.  I broke down late in the week, but overall I think I probably only watched about four hours of television total. Most of that was late in the week or when I was feeling tired — I like to have something on tv when I’m trying to take a nap.

The reading highlight of the week was probably Night Film. I pre-ordered the book, which meant it arrived on Tuesday in the afternoon. I read it voraciously until Friday night when I finished it up on a furious reading marathon because I was so creeped out reading it alone, at night, in my old and noisy house. It was a great book — perfect for the Halloween season, if you’re into that sort of thing.

For now, I’m trying to catch up on comments — I neglected the blog in favor of reading most of the week too — and get started with Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (the second book in The Maddaddam Trilogy). I’m so excited for that one too!