BEST POET TO HAVE ALONG WHEN THE OCTOBER WIND PUNISHES YOUR HAIR Dylan Thomas looked at the world as if it had just been created, so why is autumn his season rather than spring? Yet unquestionably it is. Thomas opens his Collected Poems with a prologue set at sunset—at the closing of a day and year and, in the end, his own life: “This day winding down now / At God speeded summer’s end.” He died the next year, 1953, at the age of 39. Like us, he strode on two levels, never forgetting that he would soon lie altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house. We remember Thomas’ musical phrasing but forget his emotional candor. In the unfinished poem “Elegy,” he writes of his father, “Oh, he could hide / The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.” Elsewhere he admits, “I have longed to move away but am afraid.” More than a half-century after his sad early death, Dylan Thomas’ voice is as dynamic as ever. His prayer-like lines echo in memory, rhythmic and natural, rising and falling like cicada music—especially in the autumn, in the evening, when we each turn toward our own “Poor peace as the sun sets / And dark shoals every holy field.” —Michael Sims BEST BOOK TO REMIND YOU TO GET YOUR FLU SHOT It’s apple picking time at the beginning of Geraldine Brooks’ novel Year of Wonders, and the book’s first paragraphs describe a lovely autumn tableau in a remote village in northern England—the golden hay, the sweet smelling stacks of firewood, the harvest safely stored away for winter. Unfortunately, the village itself has been completely decimated: over half its inhabitants have died of bubonic plague in the previous year. That year is 1666, and Brooks’ imaginary village is based upon the real town of Eyam, which, once the plague struck, chose to quarantine itself completely in an effort to contain the infection. Be forewarned: this is not a book you want to pick up if you’ve got a houseful of kids down with the croup. Anna Frith, a coal miner’s widow and the novel’s enormously winning protagonist, will lose both her children, her father, stepmother, and dozens of friends and neighbors before the story ends, and Brooks pulls no punches in her graphic descriptions of the horrors of death by plague. Yet the bigger picture—what happens when a tiny community is stressed to the absolute limit by forces beyond anyone’s comprehension or control—is riveting. Brooks, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for her second novel, March, has managed to craft that rarest of literary gems: a historical novel whose characters mesmerize the reader in a wholly modern fashion. —Fernanda Moore BEST READ FOR A DULL FOOTBALL WEEKEND Gary Smith is probably the best living sports writer, but only other writers and editors seem to know it. Year after year, the Sports Illustrated veteran is honored in the annual collection, America’s Best Sports Writing. He’s the magazine’s choice for covering the most troubling issues in sports, such as the recent steroid scandal in baseball. Yet he lacks the name recognition of a Rick Reilly or the assorted talking heads of ESPN, and he has never published a book, with the marvelous exception of Beyond the Game: The Collected Sportswriting of Gary Smith. Smith is a master at portraying psychologically interesting characters. One of the pieces in this collection was the inspiration for the movie Radio, but that’s only a drop in Smith’s bucket of balls. There’s a moving portrait of the aging Muhammad Ali, as seen by his equally aging entourage, and an energetic account of a ritualized fistfight in a remote South American village. There’s a piece that begins, “The children were playing Marco Polo off the dock where the two ballplayers died.” There’s utterly pure dialog, surprising experimentation in story structure and equal amounts of pain, love and life. There’s sport, too, but mostly there is life. —Michael Ray Taylor BEST BOOK TO READ WHEN NIGHT FALLS EARLY AND VERY DARK Autumn in Dartmoor. A cold wind blows across the gorse; low clouds swirl around craggy tors; rain pelts the mire; a hellhound stalks the night. If you love stories full of foreboding atmosphere, it doesn’t get much better. At least that’s what Arthur Conan Doyle thought. In a stroke of brilliance, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson appropriated the moor and its legends of ghostly canines to create The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of the best-loved mysteries of all time. When Sir Henry Baskerville returns to England to claim his ancestral home, he learns that the curse of his forebears may be in full force: it is said that a spectral hound haunts the family, causing the recent death of his uncle from sheer fright. Holmes and Watson are soon on the case, uncovering the secrets and dark deeds of the residents of a wild and forbidding landscape. The two friends and colleagues—Holmes the man of cold and brilliant deduction, Watson the empathetic judge of human nature—are at the top of their form as they sort through eccentric men, mysterious women, escaped prisoners and, of course, the hound. From the introductory interview in their rooms at 221B Baker Street to the climactic, fog-shrouded battle with evil, this adventure is classic Holmes and Watson. When the north wind rattles the windows and night falls early, pour a glass of port, light a fire and prepare to follow the trail across the moor. The game is afoot! —Chris Scott FRIENDLIEST EXPERT TO GUIDE YOU THROUGH THE SEASON Edwin Way Teale was one of the great naturalists and “nature writers” of the 20th century. Although he did write a charming book entitled Springtime in Britain, most of his books take place in the United States. He knew the country from Mount Desert Island to Baja California, from the dinosaur graveyards of Montana to the haunts of the ivory-billed woodpecker (whose apparent extinction is being debated by today’s leading ornithologists) in coastal cypress swamps. His “American Seasons” series in the 1950s, of which Autumn Across America was volume two, was the first nature book to win a Pulitzer Prize. Teale begins his 363 appreciative and informative pages on the Atlantic shore, at high tide on Cape Cod. The book ends at ebb tide on the Point Reyes Peninsula in California. Accompanied, as he almost always was, by his adventurous wife Nellie, Teale gazes at the stars with legendary comet watcher Leslie Peltier in Ohio, flies over migrating hawks in Pennsylvania, explores the Badlands by moonlight, gets lost in the Rockies. Always he notices everything: scouting parties of warring ants underfoot, the courting rituals of magpies, the life cycle of the tumbleweed. Teale was no dreamy-eyed tree-hugger; he simply regarded human life within its natural context and knew that each region’s cities, crops and transportation methods all originally depended upon its natural history. And always he was delighted with the progress of the seasons, the great natural rhythm that he celebrates in this superb travel book and its companion volumes. —Michael Sims BEST BOOK TO READ WHILE CUTTING CLASS The recent romantic comedy Rumor Has It claims to be based on a “supposedly true rumor” that Charles Webb’s short novel The Graduate, source of the acclaimed Mike Nichols film, was modeled on an actual dysfunctional Pasadena family. The movie’s dopey, but with any luck it’ll make people return to the story written by the real Charles Webb. The book is deceptively simple, almost all of it told in (extremely witty) dialog, but it has a depth that may not be apparent on first reading. Webb’s Ben Braddock is more cynical and brooding than the Dustin Hoffman character. Perhaps because she has entered American culture as an enduring mythological character, the Mrs. Robinson of the book is somehow more familiar and tragic than her Anne Bancroft counterpart. But the thing that most strongly links the book and the film, and keeps both current after more than 40 years, is the story’s essential truth: a good education points out the shallowness of modern American life, including much of American higher education, without providing an alternative. It’s up to the individual to find one. —Michael Ray Taylor BEST BOOK TO READ WHEN YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER IS WATCHING YET ANOTHER FOOTBALL GAME All of Jane Austen’s novels are wonderful, but there is something about Persuasion that captures the melancholy of fall. Unlike other Austen heroines, Anne Elliot is not witty and self-confident. She lives with her father and elder sister, who are shallow and self-centered. When they are not ignoring Anne, they insult her. But the true cause of Anne’s sadness is a romantic one. Seven years earlier, she fell in love with Frederick Wentworth, a young man with neither title nor money, and was persuaded to turn him down. But she has never stopped loving him. When he returns as wealthy Captain Wentworth, she must endure, with quiet integrity, his cold politeness toward her and his search for a wife among her neighbors. Persuasion asks some hard questions about the nature of relationships and how separation, both temporary and eternal, affects love. Anne makes one of the most moving statements about love in any Austen novel (or any novel for that matter): “All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” Still, this is Jane Austen, so a happy ending ensues. A foolish decision made in youth does not necessarily have eternal consequences. True love can conquer anger and years apart. Or triple overtime. —Faye Jones