Jorge Amado: During my brief, passionate love affair with magic realism- back when I was flirting with a double major in Portuguese and PoliSci, I tripped and fell upon the Brazilian author Jorge Amado and instantly fell in love. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands sit proudly on my shelf- and although both are excellent, I can give a hearty 'must read this' to the former, rather than the latter.
Deeply rooted in the northeast of Brazil, especially around Bahia, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon is two tales: the first is the deep, passionate love affair between Nacib and his cook, Gabriela. The second is the story of a young man named Mundinho Falcão, who, freshly arrived from Rio De Janeiro, brings the forces of modernization to challenge the entrenched power of the cacao barons in the region.
I love this book for the romance- I'm not a fan of the Nicholas Sparks type of romance, but Amado weaves a tale of a passionate, erotic, spicy love affair between Nacib and Gabriela that feels real and most importantly, adult- the same can be said of my book recommendation at the bottom of this post- and it's a fascinating look into the forces of modernity sweeping early 20th Century Brazil- the conflict between tradition and modernity is a theme that shows up not only in Amado's other novels but in other fiction of the region as a whole. (Def check out Mario Vargas Llosa if you want another great author from Latin America: The War of The End Of The World and The Feast of The Goat- both phenomenal novels.)
The Verdict: Gabriela, Crava E Caneta FTW! Makes me want to brush up my Portuguese and go to Brazil.
Tom Clancy: We were strange kids. I can remember my mother reading The Illiad to us and I remember her reading The Hunt For Red October to us. (Mother Cigar put up with a lot.) Once I was old enough to start reading on my own, I went through every Tom Clancy book I could lay my hands on. Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears and the rest of the Jack Ryan books. They're all doorstops and they're all good in their own way- though Clancy's attention to detail gets a little freakish with the 30-50 page chapter that's a molecule by molecule description of a nuclear weapon blowing up in The Sum of All Fears. (After the first time I read it, I tended to skip over it: true confession.)
But to me, where Clancy's story-telling really hit it's peak was with two of his novels: Without Remorse and The Cardinal of The Kremlin. The former tells the story of a rather mysterious and, up until that point in the Ryan-verse, rather minor character, the spy Mr. Clark-- it's sort of a spin off in that sense, but it's a gripping, thrilling and fascinating look at a total different character in Clancy's universe. The fact that he puts so much detail into elevating a minor character and giving him such a compelling storyline is really amazing and it remains one of my favorite books. The latter, The Cardinal of the Kremlin is an old fashioned, gripping spy yarn that could probably put up against anything John Le Carré or Frederick Forsyth have to offer- as Ryan and company race to protect the identity and then the life of one of the CIA's most valuable and most secret double agents.
If Clancy's body of work has a fault, it's that his spinoff panoply of video games tends to influence and bleed into his later work, I think. Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed Rainbow Six and I enjoyed The Bear and The Dragon, but you got the sense that these novels had more military theory behind them than the solid, well-spun yarns of his earlier work- I wouldn't want to go so far as to call them origin stories for a video game franchise, but you could go there if you were a Clancy detractor.
The Verdict: Stay for the early stuff and if you fall in love with it, keep reading- his whole body of work is entertaining, at the very least.
Nevil Shute: Hard to find these days in book stores, I know the one that everyone is expecting me to plug is On The Beach- and while that was, in fact, the first book of his I read, it's another book of his A Town Like Alice that I have to recommend here.
Don't get me wrong: On The Beach might be the definitive novel of the Cold War- it's visceral, haunting and utterly depressing (TL;DR: The last survivors of WWIII wait in Australia to die as radiation slowly moves southward.) but for a happier ending- though just as gripping and compelling of a novel, A Town Like Alice is a better bet.
Set in post-war Britain, were a young woman Jean Paget is summoned to a lawyer's office- Noel Strachan is his name and is informed that she has come into a large sum of money thanks to the death of a uncle she barely knew. The lawyer has to act as a trustee for her until she turns thirty (or twenty five? Or thirty five? Some age she hasn't reached yet.) and asks her what she wants to do with it. She says she wants to go build a well in Malaysia- and then, the story comes out: captured by the Japanese when they invaded, she had met an Australian soldier, a fellow prisoner who helps the group of women and children she is with by stealing food and medicine for them- when some chickens belonging to a Japanese commander go missing, he takes the blame, is beaten and crucified and Jean presumes him dead.
The twist, of course, is that, somehow, he survived. And A Town Like Alice is the story of how two people, separated by war, chaos and tumult can meet again, fall in love, emigrate to Australia and try and build, a town like Alice (Alice Springs, that is.)
The Verdict: There's a lot more of Shute's work that I need to explore than these two books, but both should be on your 'must read' list. The contrast between the two could not be greater, but Shute's writing is gripping, pulls no punches and dances across the page.
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