Staff Pick: Two Crime Novels

Staff Picks
April 14, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 12 4 min read

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I’ve been thinking lately that I should be reading more crime fiction. I’ve never been against it—in theory I’m in favor of anything good, regardless of genre, although I’ve never taken to werewolves—but I haven’t actively sought it out.

But since my second novel keeps getting categorized as crime fiction, my illiteracy in the genre that I’ve apparently been shoehorned into has become slightly uncomfortable. “What kind of a book have you written?” people ask.

“Um,” I say, “I guess it’s a sort of literary crime novel?” (I know. Awkward. But if you set out to write literary fiction and end up getting reviewed in Spinetingler Magazine, what are you supposed to call it?)

“Oh!” they say. “Have you read [insert name of high-profile crime writer whom I haven’t read but obviously should have if I’m claiming any sort of association with the genre]?”

The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. For your reading pleasure, two books you might consider reading even if you don’t think you like crime fiction very much:

1.
coverSavages by Don Winslow: I think this book is perhaps best described as a Tarantino film crossed with a prose poem. It’s violent, beautifully written, and experimental, and I’ve never read anything like it. Structurally, it’s a dizzyingly intricate 290 chapters, the first one only two words long (1. “Fuck you.”)

Ben is a brilliant botanist who’s partnered up with his best friend, Chon, to produce and distribute the best pot on the West Coast. Chon, a former Navy SEAL who brought unspeakably high-quality marijuana seeds back from Afghanistan, has a girlfriend named O, but she sleeps with Ben too. Everyone’s in their twenties. The trio lead lives of hedonistic ease in Laguna Beach, until a vicious Mexican cartel arrives on the scene to stage a hostile takeover of the business.

The shifts in perspective are interesting; Winslow shifts back and forth within his central trio and then moves outward, until we’re reading short chapters from the viewpoint of practically every thug who populates the pages. The effect is fragmented, but effective. What I found most startling about this book was Winslow’s willingness to abandon conventional form and slip without warning in and out of a sort of loose poetry—

Slicing through SoCal
Cutting through a California night
The freeway (5) is soft and warm and
Welcoming
But for Ben
The green exit signs are like steps climbing up a scaffold
Toward O.

The cartel kidnaps O to speed up the takeover negotiations. The body count is considerable. The book’s practically impossible to put down.

2.
coverSnowdrops by A.D. Miller: Snowdrops is as quiet as Savages is loud. The book opens with the early-spring discovery of a body; a snowdrop, in Moscow slang, a corpse hidden all winter under heavy snows. It appears with the first thaw in front of Nick Platt’s apartment building.

It’s apparent from the first pages that a complicated crime is being played out, something slow and deadly unfolding over weeks and months; evidence of it is all around us even as we can’t see how the pieces fit together—until, of course, the trap snaps shut in the final chapters and the significance of the body in the first chapter falls devastatingly into place.

Nick Platt is a British lawyer who lives and works in Moscow in the early 2000s. One day in the Metro he meets a young woman, Masha, and quickly falls in love. His narration takes the loose form of a confession to his soon-to-be-bride, years later—“You’ve wanted to know why I haven’t talked to you about Russia”—although the deeper he goes into the story, the less certain the wedding seems.

Masha asks for his assistance in helping her aunt, Tatiana, move to a new apartment. The real story here isn’t the crime; it’s the extent to which we’re willing to lie to ourselves, to ignore the obvious, in pursuit of happiness or companionship or love. A lonely man in a foreign city, courted suddenly by a beautiful young girl, is willing to suspend disbelief even when her story begins to crumble and lies start showing through, even when he’s half-aware at every turn that he’s complicit in something dreadful and that everything is wrong. An intriguing debut, suffused with an atmosphere of dread.

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her most recent novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Awards finalist. She is married and lives in Brooklyn. www.emilymandel.com.

Staff Picks

Staff Pick: E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel

Staff Picks
March 26, 2012 | 2 books mentioned 4 min read
Today I began teaching E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel in my first-year writing seminar at Fordham. I feel kind of bad about it. They’re nice kids, and they don’t deserve the royal butt-kicking Doctorow’s underappreciated Vietnam-era novel dishes out. Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, now 81, occupies an avuncular place in our literary culture. He has been an eminence grise in the NYU creative writing program for many years, and before his rise as a writer in his own right, he was editor-in-chief at The Dial Press where he edited the likes of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and William Kennedy. With his bald pate and genial, bearded countenance, the guy just looks nice. But as we know from books, looks can be deceiving. A grandchild of Russian Jewish immigrants raised in the depths of the Great Depression, Doctorow often centers his historical novels around violent insurgents bent on overturning a smug, wealthy elite. Ragtime, perhaps his best-known book, sets a white upper-middle class family that owes its fortune to the production of American flags and fireworks against a family of poor Jewish immigrants who find solace in the politics of anarchist Emma Goldman, and a fictional black jazz musician named Coalhouse Walker, who turns violent after white policemen kill his wife. The March follows General William Tecumseh Sherman on his scorched-earth March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah in the waning months of the Civil War. As good as these books are – and they are good – they keep these historical fire-breathers safely in the past, dead and buried and of no threat to us. This is what makes The Book of Daniel an outlier on the Doctorow bookshelf. Published in 1971, Daniel tells the story of accused Communist spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – called the Isaacsons in the novel – from the perspective of their son, Daniel, who is not merely still alive, but over the course of the novel becomes deeply enmeshed in one of the principal historical movements of his day, the fight against the Vietnam War. As a literary conceit, this is in itself daring. The Rosenbergs, when they were executed in 1953, did have two children, Michael and Robert Meeropol, both still living today, and both former academics long aligned with left-wing causes. In the novel, the two brothers morph into Susan, a mentally unstable twenty-year-old college student involved in the protests against the Vietnam War, and her older brother Daniel, a twenty-four-year-old Columbia University graduate student trying to finish his dissertation. The novel is that dissertation, or rather, the crazy mishmash of autobiography, historical analysis, self-justification, and blind rage that Daniel pours out onto the page after he learns that his sister has attempted suicide after being betrayed by the anti-war New Left. Structured in this way, and set during the long hot summer of 1967, the novel poses the question: What would it be like to know that your own government, in a fit of mass political hysteria, murdered your parents? How would you relate to such a government? And, more importantly, how would you function if you saw your country entering a new phase of political hysteria against a phantom Communist menace, this time located half a world away in North Vietnam, that appears likely to consume the last remaining member of your family, your own baby sister? Daniel at first responds to this crisis by going mad, and it is this, Doctorow’s depiction of a very bright, very angry young man losing his grip on his senses, in real time, right there on the page before you, that gives the book its taut drama. But what makes the book work as fiction is that Doctorow never loses his grip, not for a second. Daniel is a horror show: cruel, vituperative, physically abusive toward his young wife, and at times just this side of clinically psychotic. The text he produces is fractured and wild, careening from first-person to third-person perspective, from engrossing family narrative to dry historical analysis, from quirkily annotated lists to long, barely coherent rantings from Daniel’s crazy Russian grandmother – and yet the whole thing, if you take the time to read it carefully, makes perfect sense. The Book of Daniel is metafiction done right, by an author who cares as much about telling stories as he does about talking about telling stories. And just as that other great modern metafictional triumph, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, is the smartest book about the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War, The Book of Daniel is the smartest book I know about the home front during that war.
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| 2 books mentioned 4 min read
Staff Picks

Staff Pick: Larry Watson’s Montana 1948

Staff Picks
August 19, 2010 | 2 books mentioned 3 min read
I find it difficult to separate a book from the experience of reading it. I spent a great deal of time on tour this summer, reading at bookstores from southern California to New Hampshire, and I encountered Larry Watson’s Montana 1948 toward the end of all this, a hot day in Ann Arbor when I had some time to kill before an event. I was traveling with Unbridled Books’ sales director, who I’d name except that he once stated a preference for being a silent partner in these things. He’d been driving me all over the state of Michigan so that he could talk to independent bookstore owners and I could read at their bookstores. We’d done the same thing in New England a month earlier. We spent an hour or so in the Dawn Treader Book Shop (“Ann Arbor’s Best Browse”, according to the bookmark.) I feel an inordinate amount of guilt when I buy used books from living authors (the lost royalties! The book that doesn’t appear on the sales numbers and thus lessens the odds of the publisher wanting to buy the author’s next book!) but I do it anyway sometimes, and I’d spent a small fortune on new books that week. I picked up Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead, which I liked, and Larry Watson’s Montana 1948, which strikes me as a small masterpiece. It was a bit of a leap of faith—the copy I picked up was a small green hardcover, cloth-bound and missing its jacket, so there was no synopsis or any other indication of what the book was about—but my traveling companion pointed at it and said “Have you read this? It’s quite good,” and I’m susceptible to the recommendations of people who read a lot. I read the first two chapters in the bookstore and decided I couldn’t continue to live without reading the rest. The next day my flight home from Michigan was canceled, which wasn’t entirely surprising—I was, after all, flying Delta, which in my experience seems to suffer from an unusual degree of difficulty in getting its planes off the ground—and I found myself with five hours to kill in the Detroit airport. For the first time that week, my habit of buying a book at every tour stop seemed sensible. I found a quiet corner and read Montana 1948 in its entirety. I’ll let you guess when and in which state the book takes place. It’s summertime, and the narrator is twelve-year-old David Hayden. His father, Wesley, is the sheriff of their fictitious small town. His uncle Frank is a war hero and a highly respected local doctor, the favorite of their domineering rancher father. David is close with the Sioux woman who works in the household, Marie Little Soldier. When she falls ill one morning, David’s parents call Frank to look in on her. But not only does Marie refuse treatment, she refuses to be left alone in the room with the doctor, and flies into a panic when he comes close. When pressed, she tells David’s parents that Frank has been molesting local Native American women and girls for years. She’s dead within days, ostensibly of pneumonia; but she had been showing signs of recovery the day before she died, and David saw his uncle leaving their house around the time of her death. It’s a well-plotted story, but the marvel of this book is the quiet lucidity of the prose. I’m frequently drawn to literary pyrotechnics, fractured narratives and jigsaw-puzzle structures—Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin—but the linear simplicity of the story is captivating in an entirely different way. A story that could easily spin off into melodrama is told with utmost calm and restraint. In the afternoon I spent with this book, I hardly noticed I was stranded in an airport.
Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 3 min read
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Staff Picks

A Visit to Planet North Korea: On Adam Johnson’s ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’

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November 24, 2015 | 2 books mentioned 6 3 min read
When he set out write The Orphan Master’s Son, his 2012 novel set in modern North Korea, Adam Johnson faced a seemingly insurmountable problem: Very little is known in the West about daily life in modern North Korea. The government of the ruling Kim family pumps out a constant stream of propaganda, but nobody believes a word the country’s official news agencies say. More accurate information comes from defectors, but residents of the capital city of Pyongyang, where much of The Orphan Master’s Son is set, rarely defect. Even when Johnson wangled a rare visit to the country, his government minders never let him out of their sight and ordinary citizens wouldn’t risk looking at him on the street, lest they arouse the suspicions of the country’s brutal secret police. Johnson’s solution was to write The Orphan Master’s Son as speculative fiction, mixing the facts he was able to gather with his own fertile imagination to create a fictive world he calls, for the sake of convenience, North Korea. Just as is the case with most speculative fiction, many of the underlying facts of this fictive world, such as North Korea’s vast system of gulags and the government’s bizarre ban on owning dogs in the capital city, are real. But many other details, such as a gruesome program to drain the blood of dying prisoners to provide fresh blood for healthy citizens elsewhere, serve as literary metaphors for life under totalitarian rule. After Johnson’s surprise win of the National Book Award last week, many readers will be rushing out to buy the winning book, Johnson’s 2015 story collection, Fortune Smiles. But readers new to Johnson’s work may also want to make room on their Christmas wish lists for The Orphan Master’s Son, a brilliant, compulsively readable novel that blends the fine-grained emotional texture of literary fiction with the big ideas and world-building pleasures of the best speculative fiction. At the heart of The Orphan Master’s Son, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, is Jun Do (“John Doe”), a young North Korean raised in a work camp for orphans. In the first section of the novel, which reads like a dystopian thriller, Jun Do joins a secret government unit tasked with kidnapping valuable foreigners and bringing them to North Korea. When he succeeds at that, he is sent to language school to learn English and assigned first to work as a spy stationed on a fishing vessel and then as a translator on a diplomatic visit to a senator in Texas. The antic disaster of Jun Do’s sojourn in the American heartland sets the stage for the novel’s far more ambitious and strange second half, a cockeyed love story told in standard third-person narration, intercut with a heartbreaking first-person tale of a gung ho government interrogator, and the creepily chirpy voice of the government's propaganda office piped via loudspeaker into every household in the country. For much of this section, Jun Do is either under interrogation by the state’s secret police or an inmate in a barbaric prison mine, but Johnson leavens the bleakness of his hero's daily existence with breathtaking narrative leaps and deftly understated dashes of barbed humor. In one of the chapters narrated by the propaganda office, the voice reminds its listeners that the loudspeakers serve as a vital early warning system in the nation’s still-simmering war with its American-backed southern neighbor: "The Inuit people are a tribe of isolated savages that live near the North Pole," the voice explains. Their boots are called mukluk. Ask your neighbor later today, what is a mukluk? If he does not know, perhaps there is a malfunction with his loudspeaker, or perhaps it has for some reason become accidentally disconnected. By reporting this, you could be saving his life the next time the Americans sneak-attack our great nation. When you stop laughing, you realize this is precisely the sound of a police state quietly, gingerly tightening its ideological stranglehold on its population. In a recent New York Times article, Alexandra Alter noted that, with his Pulitzer and National Book Award wins on successive books, Johnson joins an elite literary club of consecutive prizewinners that includes the likes of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Wallace Stegner, and Eudora Welty. Of these four, only Roth is still alive and he is now retired. Johnson, on the other hand, is 48 years old, with just four books behind him. If there is a more promising writer at work in the U.S. today, it would be hard to name him.
Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 6 3 min read
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12 comments:

  1. i just got into literary mysteries thanks to “Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer” by Wesley Stace. I never knew the genre could be so satisfying. These look great. You make a strong case for “Savages”

  2. Great post. I came across “Savages” thanks to its inclusion in the Tournament of Books this year and also found it hard to put down. I’ve checked out a couple of Winslow’s older books from the library and hope they end up similarly satisfying.

    I used to read a good bit of not-so-literary crime fiction in my teenage years thanks to the sorts of books my dad would read a lot and pass on to me, but I grew away from the genre as my tastes turned a bit more literary the past couple years. Books such as Savages, though, have drawn me a bit back into the genre, and I even find a great deal of entertainment in cozier mystery series such as the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series that aren’t necessarily the brainiest or most challenging, but at the same time don’t patronize the reader.

  4. Thanks for reinforcing my wanting to read Savages, and for putting Snowdrops on my list. I have two thoughts to extend what you said.

    Could much of what is called literary crime fiction be better called literate crime fiction? Literate meaning it doesn’t patronize the reader, insult the language, or strain credibility. It doesn’t have to be on the bleeding edge of what it means to be human, or reconstruct how we tell stories, to justify itself. The literate telling of a good story, about bad people, good people, and some who blur the boundary, is justification enough; calling Rankin, McDermid, Connelly, Mosley, Minna, or Mankell writers of literate crime fiction is sufficient praise for now.

    A useful distinction others have made is between crime fiction and noir fiction. In crime fiction, the crime upsets the moral order; in the end, the crime is solved and the order restored. In noir, no absolute moral order is recognized, and the partial demands of society, family, and the individual will fight for dominance. The Singer’s Gun seems to me to be more noir-ish than crime-ish, but still literary.

  5. Emily,
    Thanks for the heads-up on the latest from Don Winslow. Your mention of the weed-growing botanists reminds me of the only Winslow I’ve read, “California Fire and Life,” which is about sleazebags who set arson fires and the people who try to catch them. Terrific stuff. And it reminded me that the best novels are rarely about people stewing in their juices; they’re almost always about people who do actual work. I’m thinking about wheat-threshing in “Anna Karenina,” bomb de-fusing in “The English Patient,” glove-making in “American Pastoral,” to name just a few.
    Bill Morris

  6. I can’t wait to read Savages. It sounds a bit like the novel Baked, Mark Haskell Smith’s pot-crime-romp through LA, which is a super fun read.

  7. One of the most compelling crime thrillers that I have read is Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. Winslow used to be a DEA guy but left in disgust and then wrote Power of the Dog about the Mexican drug wars. This was in the nineties! When I read it a couple of years ago I thought one of the scenes was a bit too much…but then the next week, in the news, the exact same scenario was reported! This guy has seen it all.

  8. I love crime novels in general – right now I’m finishing Breeders by Barney Rostaing, and I like it a lot. You made “Savages” sound like an absolute must-read, so I think I’ll pick up a copy as soon as I’m done with Breeders!

  9. “The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. ”
    I couldn’t agree more – assigning labels can sometimes have the unintended effect of missing out on a great book or a great experience. Thanks for these two recommendations, I have added them to my summer reading list. Have you read Skylights and Screen Doors by Dean Smart? I would define it as un-categorizable as it is part memoir, part true crime, part just great writing. Another example of how genres can be misleading.

  12. These days crime fiction is the only stuff I read. Thanks for the reccomendations. I will look out for both Snowdrops and savages.

    I have had enouogh of reading the ‘classics’ to impress others and ‘improve myself’.
    I want my daily adrenalin rush and the only way is through crime fiction!

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Essays Staff Picks

Susanna Moore, Cheryl Strayed, and the Place Where the Writers Work

Essays Staff Picks
October 4, 2012 | 2 books mentioned 8 6 min read
1. It was Hans Weyandt at Micawbers Books in St. Paul who pressed the slim blue advance review copy of Susanna Moore's latest novel into my hands. It was good, he said, although he understood if I didn’t want to add any extra weight to my suitcase, and if I hadn’t heard of her, she was a very good writer. I hadn’t heard of her, but that’s no surprise. I don’t feel that I’m as well-read as I should be. Further, my suspicion is that 10 percent of the novelists get 90 percent of the publicity, and while very good books can and do rise to the top and catch the attention of the reading public, the correlation between talent and exposure is casual at best. I did an event at Micawber’s that night, returned to my friend’s house and ate pizza, slept for a few hours on her living room floor and then woke up at three a.m., showered and dressed and slipped out with my suitcase to catch the 4:15 train to the airport. The stars were so bright as I was leaving Minneapolis. By five thirty a.m. I was on a flight to the next city. This was the Midwestern tour: five cities in five days, condensed in such a manner so that I’d only have to take three days off from my day job. The size of my American publisher’s tour budget was somewhat smaller than the size of the tour I wanted -- they’d already sent me out to the South and Ohio in the late spring, and they’re sending me to Florida twice -- so I put five days worth of flights and cheap hotel rooms on a credit card and hoped the checks I’d been expecting from my French and Canadian publishers would arrive soon. I just wanted to be able to say I’d done everything I could for the book. Two years ago I missed an event because of a canceled flight, which has left me endlessly paranoid, so I booked all of my flights in the early mornings when cancellations and delays are least likely. Paying for your own tour makes the stakes seem especially high. Each day began with an early-morning flight to a new city and ended with an event at a bookstore, an airport hotel. I slept four or five hours a night, went through airport security on autopilot, revived myself with coffee and dark chocolate-covered espresso beans in early-morning airports, spent sleep-deprived but pleasant days writing in cafes in strange cities, met at least two dozen booksellers, talked about my book every night, was so tired by the end that I had to carefully talk myself through the motions of getting ready for bed in that last airport hotel room in Milwaukee (“Now you’re going to brush your teeth”), could not possibly have continued at that pace for even one more day, and was improbably happy. 2. I try not to accumulate much when I travel, because I only fly with carry-on luggage, but I respect Hans’s literary taste, and Susanna’s book seemed worth carrying with me. I read it when I got home. He was right. The book's wonderful. Susanna Moore’s The Life of Objects is set mostly in Germany, over the course of the Second World War. Has any conflict in history been mined more thoroughly for fiction than the Second World War? Possibly not. I’ve lost track of how many World War II novels I’ve read. It can’t be easy to find a new angle. Or perhaps, I thought while I was reading The Life of Objects, a new angle isn’t necessarily important. Perhaps all that matters is that the book must be extremely good, and The Life of Objects is exquisite. It’s the simply written story of a girl, Beatrice, who longs to escape the confines of the Irish village where she lives. It’s the kind of backwater where everyone knows everyone else, her sole career opportunity lies in working in her parents’ store, and despite her yearning for knowledge and her love of books, there is no possibility of a higher education. She begins making lace because making lace is a way to make the world disappear, and her work catches the attention of a visiting aristocrat. She’s plucked out of the village, offered a household position with the aristocrat’s friends in Germany, the Metzenburgs. The year is 1938. When war breaks out they retreat to their country estate. The Metzenburgs, Dorothea and Felix, are possessed of both glamor and exquisite taste. Felix, in particular, is devoted to his objects: the paintings, the sculptures, the jewels. As the political situation worsens, Dorothea suggests that they leave, but Felix will never leave his objects and Dorothea will never leave Felix. Moore writes in a measured and elegant style. The Life of Objects combines elements of fairytale -- there’s a place on the grounds that all but qualifies as an enchanted forest -- and the kind of realism that brushes up against the edge of horror. The novel is a subtle and brilliant chronicle of a slow slide out of normalcy into deprivation and surrealism, and of a character's transformation from a passive and dependent girl to a bold and independent adult. The writing is a miracle of clarity and beauty. It’s the kind of book I read and think, this is why I do this, and this is what I’ve come for. This is why I travel so hard, why I work seven days a week, why I write in the subway, why I usually close myself in my office on weekends instead of seeing my friends. Why all of us work so hard. It’s because it’s possible to write books like this, and because books like this exist in the world. 3. I know a lot of writers, which means there are days when my social media feeds are clogged with relentless self-promotion. Everyone’s written a book, and everyone wants you to buy it. This is a delicate point, because we do need to sell our books. Selling books is how we make our living, or at least part of our living. But there are days when I wish we could all just take a deep breath in the midst of all the hustle and remember what matters, because my personal opinion is that what matters the most is the work, not the sales numbers. I think that the fact that most of us will never be very well-known and will never make The New York Times bestseller list doesn’t matter as much as whether or not our books are any good. The marketplace is important but not that important, at least in the sense that I doubt anyone ever lay on their deathbed and thought, I wish my sales numbers had been better. What matters is good writing, what matters is that there are people who love books enough to press them into your hands in far-off cities. We are here for the books, but I think it’s easy to get distracted by our longing for success and forget this. 4. Cheryl Strayed has had a remarkable year, a one-in-a-million kind of year, a year with a bestselling memoir that got optioned by Reese Witherspoon and picked for Oprah's book club. Almost every bookstore I’ve walked into from Kentucky to Toronto has had the memoir, Wild, prominently displayed. I secretly cheer it on every time, because I think it’s a good book and because while I’ve only met Cheryl once, she seems very kind, and character matters a lot to me. “The most annoying thing to come of this past truly good year,” she wrote recently on Facebook, "is the narrative that I 'came out of nowhere,' that I was 'an unknown writer' before WILD was published. Actually, I came out of a literary community of readers and writers who knew me quite well. Before WILD, I'd published a novel as well as many essays that were read by a national audience. I bristle at this narrative not so much on my own behalf, but rather on behalf of the many writers I love, admire, respect and read. There is a strong and vibrant literary culture that exists and thrives in this nation and it does not exist in a place called nowhere, whether you know about it or not. It's the place where the writers work." I liked this Facebook status a great deal. I love writing, and love working in solitude for long hours. But it brightens my working days and evenings further sometimes to think of all the other writers in our separate rooms, all of us trying to create something lasting in the place where the writers work.
Essays Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 8 6 min read
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