For many, the thing to grill is ribs, but most anything will do.

I am not a cook or a grill guy but consider myself something of a rib expert, having eaten plenty (those at Twin Anchors are on top of my current list) and for a few 1980s years served as a judge for the Mike Royko Ribfest, generally acknowledged, by no less an authority than “The Chicago Food Encyclopedia” (University of Illinois Press), to have been “one of the nation’s first large barbeque competitions.” I remember those days fondly, as I wrote a while ago, “the unity, the harmony and the togetherness of them all. There were, side by side, groups from Glencoe and West Pullman, Rosemont and Roseland, Austin and Streeterville — white, Black and brown. There was no anger or violence, no arrests or trouble. If there were arguments, they were about cooking methods or sauces ‘sweet or tangy.’ These were harmonious and hopeful gatherings.”

So, I was talking about grilling with Joe Carlucci, a man I have often consulted in matters of food and drink. His name may be familiar to you because he has had an acclaimed and influential presence on the local scene. He said to me, “You can’t cook, you know?

Carlucci was born and raised in New York. After graduating with a degree in psychology from Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, he worked in the music business for a few years, saying, “My first day on the job I had to pick up Bette Midler at the airport.”

He came to Chicago in the early ‘80s, began operating eponymous restaurants in the city and suburbs and worked with a couple of Mike Ditka’s joints. He still operates a few places and consults with others, including recently with some of the most popular grill guys in the world. They are the BBQ Pit Boys and this is how he found them about four years ago: “I was watching TV one Saturday morning and on came this guy with a beard being interviewed about grilling,” Carlucci says. “With my background in music I think I have a good ability to judge star quality and the guy I was watching had it.”

He tracked down the man, whose “grill name” is “Bobby Fame” but his real name is actually Bob Ahlgren, the creator of the culinary phenomenon known as BBQ Pit Boys. They talked. They liked one another. They became partners and Carlucci helped facilitate the recent publication of “BBQ Pit Boys Book of Real Guuud Barbecue” (Firefly Books). It is a handsome 256-page, colorful, lively and entertaining book. It is packed with recipes and tips for grilling and smoking a variety of meats, as well as sides and desserts. All the usual suspects are here, such as pulled pork, ribs and chicken wings. There are also recipes for alligator, lamb and venison. There’s fish, soups and sides. There’s a lot.

It also gives you the BBQ Pit Boys origin story, which Ahlgren told me over the phone a few days ago. “Well, I ran a small publishing company and was a serious antique dealer,” he says. “When YouTube first started around 2007, I thought it might be a good thing to spread the word about my business. Then a friend of mine from California wanted to get a recipe for something I grilled for him when he was visiting. I thought it would be fun to do that as a video and I posted it for him on YouTube.”

YouTube called him, asked him to become a partner and shipped him thousands of dollars worth of cameras and other equipment. They also sent him a check for $32.

That was long ago and the checks have gotten larger. The BBQ Pit Boys is now an international fraternal order, with some 18,000 international chapters and 230,000 pitmasters, according to the book. Episodes are posted every week and they have been viewed more than 94 million times.

The nature of the show hasn’t really changed. It’s still a group of guys around a grill, drinking and making food. Ahlgren is the host, affable and amiable and, as he says, “making sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

The enterprise is based not in Tennessee or Arkansas, as the boys’ outfits might suggest, but rather in Connecticut. In addition to YouTube, the Pit Boys are now spread across the other prominent social media platforms such as Facebook, X and Instgram. They have 2.2 million YouTube subscribers, are in the top 5% of all YouTube channels and are number one when it comes to BBQ.

Not surprisingly, Ahlgren has been approached “more than ten times by network producers about doing shows for them,” he says. “But I have rejected them all. They talk about how they can make me famous but I am already famous and I don’t want to be part of fake TV, become part of the reality show world.  And I never want to lose control of the content and the way we deliver it.”

This was never intended to be a star-making vehicle. The focus is on the food and that’s one reason why Ahlgren and his pals wear sunglasses and cowboy hats that cover most of their faces. That aversion to the seductions of the mainstream entertainment business appeals to Carlucci, and to another food person who is also a partner with the Pit Boys. Ed Rensi is a former president and CEO of McDonald’s and he and Carlucci are intent on exploring all manner of opportunities.

“Bob and his pit boys have such a broad platform and the ability to reach so many people,” says Carlucci. “But we are going to be true to the spirit of the show and of the people. They never had a business plan. This is just a great fun idea that has blossomed into a wonderful enterprise.”

He tells me that a Pit Boys line of sauces and rubs is currently available in 3,000 stores across Canada, and a Pit Boys beer can be had in Texas. The website offers all manner of official merchandise.

Then he asked me which of the book’s recipes I was thinking of tackling.

“You can’t cook, you know?” he said.

“Yes,” I told him. “That’s why I’m going to try the Cigar Ash BBQ Sauce (page 233) or Bacon Oreo BBQ Cookies (page 255).”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

Camille Bordas’ new novel, “The Material,” mines both of those meanings to deliver an entertaining and perceptive story that somehow manages to bring us close to half a dozen (or more) characters in a novel where the action spans half of a single day.

Bordas brings this ensemble together under the umbrella of the first fine arts masters program for stand-up comedy at an unidentified downtown Chicago university. We are introduced to the faculty: Kruger, a successful comic who has recently made a turn as a dramatic actor in a Meryl Streep movie, and Donna, the only woman on the faculty, with a long and successful career as a touring comic who has never managed to take the next step to stardom.

The students include Olivia, who is suffused with ambition, and whose self-loathing translates to a sardonic misanthropy, and also Artie, a sweet-natured young man without an apparent edge who worries he is too good-looking for comedy, a fear his classmates and professors are only too eager to reinforce. Artie has a crush on Olivia. Olivia has no time for crushes.

There is also Murray Reinhardt, a super successful older comedian who is scheduled to join the faculty as a visitor, but is also going through a period of scandal that may make him toxic.

The stand-up MFA is clearly modeled on graduate creative writing programs — a milieu I know well — where the intersection of ambition, unrealized talent, jealousy and insecurity can lead to significant angst and self-doubt. Making the students stand-ups rather than writers turns the volume on these emotions to eleven, as the students see part of their work rise above their peers. There’s a reason why a comedian who has done well is said to have “killed.”

There is very little plot — the primary locus of action moves from a student workshop in the afternoon to a performance at the Empty Bottle in the evening — but Bordas still manages to create story tension simultaneously around everyone’s fate as a performer (their comedic material), and what is revealed about the characters (the material of one’s life) through incredibly fluid use of close third person narration that manages to move seamlessly from character to character even inside the same scene.

Every character has something weighing on their minds. Kruger’s father, who is living in a retirement home in the suburbs, has recently fired a gun in a bar, an incident Kruger has paid to cover up. Olivia’s twin, Sally, is on her way to Chicago that evening, and Olivia fears her sister will throw an emotional wrench in her plans to impress Murray Reinhardt. Reinhardt is dealing with the fallout of his scandals and lamenting the separation from his ex-wife and son Augie, who is a law student in Chicago, and the reason he has accepted the teaching position. Artie’s brother is a heroin addict who has gone missing… again.

“The Material” is primarily a novel of questions: What is the line between comedy and not comedy? How do we figure out what lives we’re supposed to live? What is the right way to love another person?

Is improv comedy an abomination as compared to the art form of stand-up?

What I ultimately appreciated about the book is that Bordas does not seek answers to these questions. Instead, they are probed, held up for scrutiny through different angles and different characters.

Because how could there be answers to these questions? In truth, our lives will always serve us more material, at least until our inevitable ends.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”

Twitter @biblioracle

Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder” by David Grann
2. “Seven Steeples” by Sara Baume
3. “The Hunter” by Tana French
4. “Chenneville” by Paulette Jiles
5. “North Woods” by Daniel Mason

— Mike C., Chicago

This is a gritty one, but I think Mike can handle it: “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy.

1. “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid
2. “Roman Stories” by Jhumpa Lahiri
3. “The President is Missing” by James Patterson and Bill Clinton
4. “West with Giraffes” by Lynda Rutledge
5. “Boundary Waters” by William Kent Krueger

— Carol B., Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin

It’s been a while since I recommended one of my recent favorites, so that’s what I’m doing for Carol: “Mercury Pictures Presents” by Anthony Marra.

1. “The Women” by Kristin Hannah
2. “The Last List of Mabel Beaumont” by Laura Pearson
3. “One Year After You” by Shari Low
4. “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah
5. “The Measure of a Man” by Gene Getz

— Suzanne O., Mt. Prospect

For Suzanne, I’m recommending the understated romance and deep feeling of Kent Haruf’s “Our Souls at Night.”

Get a reading from the Biblioracle

Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.

Scholastic announced Thursday that “Sunrise on the Reaping,” the fifth volume of Collins’ blockbuster dystopian series, will be published March 18, 2025. The new book begins with the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, set 24 years before the original “Hunger Games” novel, which came out in 2008, and 40 years after Collins’ most recent book, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”

Lionsgate, which has released film adaptations of all four previous “Hunger Games” books, announced later on Thursday that “Sunrise on the Reaping” will open in theaters on Nov. 20, 2026. Francis Lawrence, who has worked on all but the first “Hunger Games” movie, will return as director.

The first four “Hunger Games” books have sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. Collins had seemingly ended the series after the 2010 publication of “Mockingjay,” writing in 2015 that it was “time to move on to other lands.” But four years later, she stunned readers and the publishing world when she revealed she was working on what became “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” released in 2020 and set 64 years before the first book.

Collins has drawn upon Greek mythology and the Roman gladiator games for her earlier “Hunger Games” books. But for the upcoming novel, she cites the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.

“With ‘Sunrise on the Reaping,’ I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,'” Collins said in a statement. “The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

The “Hunger Games” movies are a multibillion dollar franchise for Lionsgate. Jennifer Lawrence portrayed heroine Katniss Everdeen in the film versions of “The Hunger Games,” “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay,” the last of which came out in two installments. Other featured actors have included Philip Seymour Hoffman, Josh Hutcherson, Stanley Tucci and Donald Sutherland.

“Suzanne Collins is a master storyteller and our creative north star,” Lionsgate chair Adam Fogelson said in a statement. “We couldn’t be more fortunate than to be guided and trusted by a collaborator whose talent and imagination are so consistently brilliant.”

The film version of “Songbirds and Snakes,” starring Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler, came out last year. This fall, a “Hunger Games” stage production is scheduled to debut in London.

Dabble in short punchy books, but devote the season to an epic. You get three months.

I read “The Lord of the Rings” this way, one installment a summer, for years. Now I’m picking through Robert Caro’s (still unfinished) Lyndon Johnson biography this way. Another strategy: Give yourself a quasi-degree in something very specific. Read the complete short stories of the late Alice Munro. The crime novels of Stephen King. Or underrated Penguin Classics: This summer offers a couple of fresh contenders — Harry Crews’ “The Knockout Artist” (about a boxer with a talent for knocking himself out), and “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,” unclassifiable writing about being gay under a dictatorship, by Chilean legend Pedro Lemebel.

You’ll clip right along.

Same goes for an excellent new edition of a monster: The Folio Society’s wonderful “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” Susanna Clarke’s contemporary classic about magicians in 19th century England. As a single adventure, it was an 800-plus page cinderblock in 2004. Folio divides all of that into a much brisker trilogy, as it should have been, ideal for devouring in adult-size chunks that you can pass along to a precocious child or spouse, while continuing yourself.

As for the rest of you who just want a new mystery or history for the backyard, this summer is overstocked, even more so than the coming fall season. Yes, I read all of these; now get started.

No-guilt beach reads: One of the great American mystery series continues with “Farewell, Amethystine,” Walter Mosley’s 16th novel about Los Angeles detective Easy Rawlins. This one finds him in 1970, tracking an ex-husband, navigating gender upheaval. “The Sicilian Inheritance,” by airport favorite Jo Piazza, nails a clever twist on a contemporary cliche: Newly single American woman moves to Italy, discovers herself. The twist — she’s pulled into ugly family business — plays like a Palermo breeze.

You got the top pulled down and radio on, baby: “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell” (June 11) is the best kind of summer bio. It’s too critical and wandering to read like hero worship. NPR’s Ann Powers, among the smartest of music critics, captures the restlessness of a Mitchell album, walking through her catalog with eyes and ears open for both unease and transcendence. “Hip-Hop is History” (June 11) nails a similar feeling: It’s less like a timeline than a long hang with the Roots’ Questlove, who digs through the classics, offering reminiscence and discernment.

Family time: ‘Tis the season for other people’s problems. “Same as It Ever Was” (June 18), by Oak Park native Claire Lombardo (“The Most Fun We Ever Had”), and “Long Island Compromise” (July 9) by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”), check a lot of boxes — relatable but never dull, reliably bonkers family, funny. But they’re also breezy satires of privilege without sacrificing gravitas. Lombardo hems with modesty to the way minor breaks in routine spiral into epic crisis. Brodesser-Akner, who twists her knife with more relish, begins with actual crisis (a mysterious kidnapping and release), then leaps to the surprising ways it stamps fear into each member of the wealthy family. For austerity: “This Strange Eventful History,” Claire Messud’s somewhat autobiographical saga about several generations of a French family, severed from each other during World War II, and the way time and distance become inevitable.

Tales of future past: “What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean” (July 16), by Helen Scales, a marine biologist who doesn’t write like one. Here is a clear-eyed survey of what ails ocean life, shaped by Scales’s own experience and a bracing look at what’s being done. For something completely different: “The Book of Elsewhere” (July 23) is not quite science fiction, or fantasy, but as hard to pin down as you might expect a book authored by British surrealist China Miéville and Keanu Reeves. It’s also fun, a novel-length continuation of Reeves’s hot comic book, “BRZRKR,” a kind of Conan the Barbarian tale with black helicopters.

Rebel yells: “Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History” (Aug. 13) begins with what you (might) know: In 1831, an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner led an uprising that was inevitably quashed, yet promised more to come. The late historian Anthony E. Kaye, with Gregory P. Downs, retells this in a fascinating new way, centering Turner’s conviction that he was a vessel of God. “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People” (June 18), by National Book Award-winner Tiya Miles, takes a similar approach to a more familiar American hero: It focuses on Tubman as a spiritual leader and self-taught ecologist. It’s the lyrical biography we’ll need before Tubman — already more myth than person — begins gracing the $20 bill, starting in 2030.

Cruel summer: Personally, it’s not summer unless I stretch out with a new Stephen King, and if that sounds familiar: “You Like It Darker,” his latest collection of stories, is among his smartest, yet tipping toward crime tales and the slightly paranormal. The centerpiece, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” is a stealth, 140-page mystery novel tucked beside a “Cujo” postscript and the gorgeous “Answer Man,” a late-career classic. For best results: Follow with Harlan Ellison’s “Greatest Hits,” a new compilation of vintage tales that shaped sci-fi and horror, inspiring King and Neil Gaiman (who writes the forward). Sentient AI, dystopias, alien copulation, evil twins …

Two absorbing sports books that aren’t actually about sports: Joseph O’Neill’s “Godwin” — like his celebrated 2008 novel “Netherland” — defies quick description. It reads like a fable, opening with the corporate chill of a Pittsburgh office then travels to suburbs of London and soccer fields of Africa. It follows the story of a soccer agent who talks his estranged brother into finding a soccer phenom. “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball,” by former Chicago journalist Keith O’Brien, would make a nice double-header: It’s not biography but taxonomy, a pungent epic about hubris and, in the figure of the disgraced Cincinnati Red, moral vacancy.

It’s not the heat; it’s the brimstone: “Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil” (June 18), by Chicago-based Ananda Lima has an eye-catching premise — you’re reading a collection of stories by the author following a one-night stand with Satan — so clever, it’s a relief to report that’s merely the hook for a substantive first book of major confidence, and belly laughs. Speak of the devil: Randall Sullivan’s “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared” and Ed Simon’s “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain” (July 9) are ideal histories for the warmest weeks, cultural spelunkings into our centuries-old need to portray unencumbered immorality, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to the ‘80s Satanic Panic.

One lit life: “Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers” is part author bio, part literary memoir, told by Rebecca McCarthy, a former student of Maclean who kept a lifelong friendship with the Hyde Park legend, a beloved professor at University of Chicago who — famously, very late in life — wrote “A River Runs Through It.”

Just a dream and the wind to carry me: It’s hard to relay how exhilarating, and unsettling, being a speck on the ocean is, with no other specks in sight, horizon to horizon. “Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea,” by maritime historian Richard J. King, gathers dizzying case studies of what drives people to do this, improvising steering systems for sleeping, talking to dolphins out of lonliness. Consider the complicated hero at the heart of Hampton Sides’ excellent best-seller, “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.” Cook represented the best of global exploration. Until he represented the worst. As forward-thinking as he was with native cultures, he died on a beach in Hawaii, stoned by its people. Sides’s compulsively readable 16th-century history is about the gulf between decency and a boss’s orders.

Summer ennui: If you have read Rachel Cusk — and if you haven’t, there’s your summer reading list — you’re safe to assume her latest novel about creative life, “Parade” (June 18), starts with a darkly funny come-on (an artist paints a portrait of his wife, makes it ugly and it sells), only to end up very far afield. “Fire Exit,” the lacerating debut novel by Morgan Talty, whose story set “Night of the Living Rez” was a 2022 critical smash, delves again into the families in a Native American community, for a tale of a man haunted by descendants present and just out of reach. Speaking of haunting: “We Burn Daylight” (July 30), by the underrated novelist Bret Anthony Johnston (“Remember Me Like This”) delivers another thriller less visceral than traumatic: The story of a cult in Waco, Texas, about to be taken by law enforcement, and the drama that unfolds inside and out. (Any similarities to Branch Davidians are purely intentional.)

Rethinking summer programming: “Something authentic, buried beneath something fake.” That’s how New Yorker TV writer Emily Nussbaum perfectly explains the allure of both “The Bachelor” and “Candid Camera” in “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” (June 25). She works magic, walking on that wavering line between fandom and disgust but never scolding. “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982” (July 30), by “Caddyshack” historian Chris Nashawaty, begins with the maxim “Film critics get it wrong all the time,” then proves it. This is Gen-X catnip, a backstage rewind through a momentous movie summer that delivered us “Blade Runner,” “The Thing,” “E.T.,” “The Road Warrior” and far more.

Summertime sadness: “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” by Adam Higginbotham — whose remarkable “Midnight in Chernobyl” established him as the go-to narrator of tragedies — reads like a backward mystery, starting with the Space Shuttle explosion in 1986, then unwinding through institutional arrogance and the queasy assumption of “acceptable risk” that dooms even the best intentions. Eliza Griswold’s equally immersive “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power and Justice in an American Church” (Aug. 6) documents the conflicts and frayed idealism that pulled a Philadelphia church apart over 30 years, but Griswold — whose “Amity and Prosperity” won the nonfiction Pulitzer in 2019 — grounds much of the story in old-fashioned fly-on-the-wall reporting, tagging along until she’s invisible.

Summer Art Fare: At some point this summer, you may duck into the cool marble halls of a museum. “Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums,” by New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein, is a lovely wish list of American options, dreamily illustrated, full of histories of the classics (the Art Institute of Chicago), but also battleship museums, Kentucky’s Noah’s Ark, the Rothko Chapel in Texas … “The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing,” by former New York magazine editor Adam Moss, should get you through the rest of summer. Here is a brick of insight into that creative purgatory called the process, featuring notebook scribbles, sketches and chats with Sofia Coppola, Gay Talese, Suzan-Lori Parks and many more artists in far-flung fields. “Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party” (Aug. 6) could be an engrossing anecdote from those books, the story of why history museums are now occupied by creatures none of us have seen. It follows the accidental discoveries that led to piecing together the first dinosaur skeletons, and what that meant for naturalists and clergy alike.

Election-year reading that isn’t a chore: What ails us, Frank Bruni writes in “The Age of Grievance,” isn’t grievance — this is a nation, of course, founded on the stuff. But rather, “a manner of individualism often indistinguishable from narcissism,” fostering “a violent rupture of our national psyche.” It’s an illuminating rant about humility, and one that echoes throughout “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War,” by James Shapiro. Here, the history is the birth and death of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, and the question of whether a country so fractious can sustain a national theater. Each chapter, often centered on loathsome political hearings, is part rousing, part enraging.

Dipping into the deep end: One of the year’s best books is “I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays” by Nell Irvin Painter, a digressive, accessible summer course on visual aesthetics (Black Power art), Southern history, Black figures both well-known (Sojourner Truth) and obscure (Alma Thomas), but primarily, the art of writing a pointed essay. “The Art of Dying: Writings 2019-2022” collects the final 46 stories by late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, from his 2019 essay about learning he had advanced lung cancer to his final piece on German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. It’s another art course in a book (with a bonus introduction by Schjeldahl pal Steve Martin). For a decidedly more fun essay: “Any Person Is the Only Self” (June 11), by Elisa Gabbert, which collects her thoughts on Sylvia Plath, Motley Crue, “Point Break,” Proust …

I know what you read this summer: Gabino Iglesias, whose “The Devil Takes You Home” was one of the best books of 2022, summons similar darkness for “House of Bone and Rain” (Aug. 6), returning the author to his native Puerto Rico for more gangs, bad weather and traditions that slowly draw in creepy crawlies. Iglesias is where Paul Tremblay (“Cabin at the End of the World”) was a few years ago. “Horror Movie” (June 11), Tremblay’s latest, is a new jewel, the story of a cursed film, alternating between the screenplay and “the unreality of the entertainment ecosystem” that worships it. (Read before the inevitable horror movie of “Horror Movie.”)

Summer sleepers: “The Swans of Harlem” tells a vibrant, lovingly researched group biography of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, the five Black ballerinas who, at the peak of the civil rights movement, brought new urgency to a segregated art form. “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue” is another unheralded history, a fascinating excavation of the midcentury women — including two Chicagoans, Dorothy Shaver and Geraldine Stutz — whose designs and ideas reinvented American department stores and consumer fashion. In each of these books, a set of women is assembling a world they want. Bringing that history into today: In “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” Kathleen Hanna of Le Tigre and Bikini Kil writes about the grassroots Riot Grrrl movement and her fidelity to a low-fi, DIY independent music scene with bluntness, stumbling through the ‘90s, loaded with exclusionary politics and hope.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

As I’ve written in the past, while it is popular to recommend “beach reads” at this time of year, I’m not a huge fan of reading on the beach. Too hot, too sandy, too many other people. No, for me, summer is hammock reading season. Hammock reading season calls for a little different type of book from a typical “beach read.” A beach read needs to be a propulsive page-turner that requires less direct attention to extract their pleasures.

A hammock read hits a quieter, more contemplative tone, the kind of book you look up from and think about as you sway gently in the breeze, maybe with a little dog — or in my case, two dogs — curled up at your side.

Here’s a mix of new and old books that will serve you well if you want to while away an entire day in the hammock.

“The Lager Queen of Minnesota” by J. Ryan Stradal: Stradal is particularly great at walking the line of sentiment without falling into saccharine sentimentality and breaking the spell. A novel about two sisters separated by circumstance and unsettled feelings that ultimately surrounds us with the experience of what it means to negotiate what we wish for in life when those wishes are not necessarily in the world’s plans. You’ll also learn a lot about beer, which seems right for summertime.

“Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance” by Alison Espach: Not necessarily a light read given that it’s about our narrator (Sally) dealing with the aftermath of a sudden tragedy from her childhood, but the humor with which Espach infuses Sally turns her into excellent company as she moves through different eras of her life, all of them both marked by and distinct from the tragedy of the past.

“The Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman: Yes, another book where death is central, but this book, about a group of septuagenarians in a rural U.K. retirement village who take to solving crimes, is what they call a hoot. Osman’s scenes crackle with expert comic timing and he manages to sketch in fully rounded characters even while unspooling an involving mystery. We’re up to four novels in the series now, so if you like the first one, you might have a good chunk of your summer reading figured out.

“Vacationland” by John Hodgman: Hodgman has had a long career as a television (“The Daily Show”) and podcast (“Judge John Hodgman”) humorist, as well as the author of several very funny books. “Vacationland” details Hodgman’s struggles with both middle age, and the beaches of Maine. A great choice for those of us who are suspicious of beaches, and have given in to our essential nature as hammock-bound readers.

“Falling” by T.J. Newman: OK, in the spirit of beach reads, I’m including one true, highly plotted, white-knuckle page-turner about a pilot, a flight attendant and the pilot’s wife (and mother of his children) trying to stop a terrorist attack against all odds. I never had any idea how the various plot dilemmas were going to be solved — maybe because sometimes the solutions seemed to appear out of thin air — but this is a real throwback thriller, reminiscent of 1970s action pulp novels. You’ll rip through it in a sitting.

My pile of hammock reading books looks like it would take me well into next year to get through, even with many hours per day in the hammock.

We all better get busy making sure we’re not too busy to read.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”

Twitter @biblioracle

Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “Straight Man” by Richard Russo
2. “Since We Fell” by Dennis Lehane
3. “Harlem Shuffle” by Colson Whitehead
4. “We Begin at the End” by Chris Whitaker
5. “The Trading Game” by Gary Stevenson

— Tim M., Oak Park

For Tim, I’m recommending some classic crime/noir, “The Killer Inside Me” by Jim Thompson.

1. “Whalefall” by Daniel Kraus
2. “The Bandit Queens” by Parini Shroff
3. “The Book of Dreams” by Nina George
4. “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride
5. “The Phoenix Crown” by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang

— Linda R., Blue Island

I’m inspired by one of the authors on Tim’s list, but I’m going with a different book, “Empire Falls,” by Richard Russo.

1. “The Women” by Kristin Hannah
2. “The Idea of You” by Robinne Lee
3. “Mad Honey” by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan
4. “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt
5. “The Heart’s Invisible Furies” by John Boyne

— Barbara B., Houston, Texas

“Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi is a book with an ingenious structure telling a literal family story over eight generations, starting in Africa’s Gold Coast and winding its way to the present day. It really is a masterpiece that anyone should make time for, but it’s a particularly good fit for Barbara.

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Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.

His hair is long in places, white and curling upwards at the bottom. He has light peppered stubble that doesn’t quite qualify as a beard. For a lunch date at least, he didn’t bring the boxy eyeglasses he wore for decades. His eyes were pale ocean blues.

But that remarkable mind is there, the pithy commentary on American history, the casual nods to political contradictions and the way American myths trap us in our own narratives, the references to ancient Greeks, the love of Saint Augustine, all still flowing out like a tap.

Only slower.

Thankfully slower, you might say: For six decades, including 30 years at Northwestern, Wills was an intimidating, supremely confident, fearless intellect, a provocative iconoclast so prolific that his 50-odd books include classics (“Inventing America,” “Nixon Agonistes”), game-changers (“The Kennedy Imprisonment”) and one Pulitzer winner (“Lincoln at Gettysburg”), as well as works on religion, theater, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, politics and religion, politics and paranoia, opera, the A-bomb, the Greeks, the Romans. To say he challenged conventional wisdom is to understate the subversion that Wills became known for: His books advanced the idea of Nixon as the sympathetic “last liberal” and Reagan as a self-mythologizer. He argued a president is not really a commander-in-chief. He argued the United States does not have a Constitution if one politician holds the unilateral authority to launch nukes. Here was a Catholic who wrote a book on why we didn’t need priests. Here was a pacifist whose father taught boxing.

Here was a conservative — “I’m still conservative by temperament” — recruited to the National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. himself, who would then be arrested for protesting Vietnam. Here was a historian summoned to the Obama White House in 2009 to give a new president some advice. The room included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, Douglas Brinkley and Wills, and when it came time for him to offer wisdom, he told the president to get the hell out of Afghanistan, quick.

He was never invited back to the White House.

As journalist Sam Tanenhaus once wrote, sooner or later “anyone who writes about America must reckon with Garry Wills.” He described the feeling of being reviewed by Wills akin to feeling “like a vagrant caught urinating in the master’s hedges.” Indeed, even that pitilessness towards authors whose hot takes don’t measure up to Wills’ scrutiny — it’s still evident in 90-year-old Wills. When I asked if he was still a pacifist, he nodded, reached into the seat of his walker and pulled out a book, on loan from a friend.

This, he waved, this book was supposedly an anti-war book! And really it’s pro-war! He shook his head and said the he appreciated the loan, but — he shook his head again.

A smiling older man, a fellow resident of his building, stopped at our lunch table.

“He’s come to wish me happy birthday,” Wills said, explained, gesturing at me.

“Oh, how old are you?” the friend asked Wills.

“The big 9-0,” Wills said.

“That was a good deal we got, when you were born. We’re all better for it.”

“Happens to all of us.”

“Being born?”

“Getting up there.”

And yet, no less willing to drop a bombshell: Wills decided recently he’s no longer Catholic. The guy who attended church weekly, said his rosary daily, completed five of 13 years of Jesuit training to become a priest (only to get cold feet during the vows), wrote “What Jesus Meant,” “What Paul Meant,” “What the Gospels Meant,” “The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis” and “Why I Am a Catholic,” left the Catholic church.

He explained:

“My hero, for a long, long time, has been Saint Augustine. He didn’t believe in the eucharist, he didn’t buy transubstantiation (the conversion of a host into the body and blood of Christ). He fought against a papacy. He was more anti-sex than anyone, and abortion would not have been a problem since, to him, there was no sex outside marriage. But in other ways, he was enlightened. I consider myself an Augustinian Christian.” Wills could not embrace Pope Francis’s canonizing of Pope John Paul II, or continue to reconcile taking communion but not believing in transubstantiation himself.

But mainly, Natalie, his wife of 60 years, died in 2019, and the more he reflected on her own opposition to having a pope, the more decided he could not continue to be Catholic.

While we talked, most everything he said, in time, wound back to Natalie.

“(Her death) changed everything,” he said slowly, looking around the room. “I would always say that I got up in the morning happy because I would be smarter by nightfall because she was there. Almost all of the major changes in my life, she was there for. The night we met, we were both 23 and we realized we had two things in common: Catholicism and the opera. She was brought up in a Catholic household in Connecticut. I was brought up in a Catholic household in Adrian, Michigan. She asked, you buy all the church teachings? I said yeah. She said, even on contraception? I said yeah. She said, come back in 20 years. It didn’t take that long for me to see differently. On abortion, on pacifism, Natalie taught me where I should be going. She was smarter than me. You know I met her on an airplane? She was a flight attendant. She said, ‘You’re too young to be reading that book.’ I was reading Henri Bergson’s ‘Two Sources of Morality and Religion.’ I said, you’ve read this? She said no, but her sociology professor had condemned it. So we talked and argued. There was an empty seat beside me.” They married two years later and moved into her Italian neighborhood, not far from Yale University, where Wills was still in graduate school.

He was not born into a family of intellectuals. The family settled in Michigan after his father left Georgia looking for work during the Great Depression. One grandparent was a strict Christian Scientist. His mother’s brother married his father’s sister. “It became a complicated arrangement of religions and views.” He was brought up anti-communist and became a fan of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose demagogy fueled the Red Scare.

He mainly wanted to become a literary critic. After sending some writing samples to Buckley at the National Review, he was invited in. Buckley had just lost his theater critic — maybe Wills would go to Washington, watch Jimmy Hoffa get questioned by a Senate committee and treat it like theater? After that, Wills met more journalists, only to split ideologically with the National Review and became a fixture of Esquire as the magazine (and others) pioneered a more literary, less rigidly objective New Journalism. He covered Martin Luther King Jr., Nixon, Vietnam, linking past and present, rooting his reporting in historical spelunking, showing exactly what it felt to live through a moment.

He thought of every story “as an opportunity to learn,” he said. “That made me broaden my world. Harold Hayes (the legendary editor of Esquire during the 1960s) would say, ‘I’m interested in this, why not write something about it.’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ And so he would say, ‘Well, then you have a chance here to learn.’”

Natalie was there the whole time.

“She challenged everything I knew, in a way that was convincing. She wore me down.”

Since she died, Wills has not stopped writing. His last byline was in the New York Review of Books a year ago, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and he’s halfway through a new book on the history of women’s rights. But his contract lapsed with book agent Andrew Wylie (who is also literary agent for Bob Dylan and Salman Rushdie, among others) and there’s still no publisher attached. He’s talking to his daughter, literary agent Lydia Wills, about a book on leaving Catholicism. He said he doesn’t get many requests to write these days, presumably because “they think I’m old.”

He smiled blankly.

You know, he said, though he moved here in 1980 to join the history department at Northwestern, Natalie was not thrilled. She preferred the East Coast, “but I remember, once, coming home from Scotland, her saying it was a relief to go home. I remember that because it was the first time she called Chicago home, and it had been two years.”

After her death, Wills sold their home on Sheridan Road. He also got rid of most of his library, donating it to Loyola University. But he kept his favorites, which he calls “the core.” Books on the Greeks, Saint Augustine, the dictionary written by Samuel Johnson.

He doesn’t write at night anymore. He writes after meals. He sleeps more. He talks to his three children, all of whom live in the Chicago area, and to his many grandchildren.

He talked so much that he didn’t eat lunch. He boxed up his sandwich and began the slow process of standing with a walker. I thanked him for the time, and he said: “All I got is time.” When I got home, he emailed me the final chapter of his women’s rights book.

It was titled “Natalie.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

That is how Conti recalls her first encounter with Gacy. It was October 1993 and he was locked on death row in the Menard Correctional Center in downstate Chester, Illinois. Conti, along with her partner in law and life, Greg Adamski, had been contacted to possibly represent him in some civil matters, one of which was fighting the prison’s attempt to stop him from profiting from sales of paintings he had created while in jail.

Over the next months she, as the only woman on his legal team, and Adamski would come to know Gacy in close fashion. They met with him often, shared meals, phone calls to their home, banter and personal stories. They would eventually represent Gacy in his last set of death row appeals.

Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. Adamski and Conti would carry on, cohosting a radio show and otherwise fashioning high-profile legal careers. He died in 2011 and Conti continues as a weekly WGN-AM720 radio host, TV commentator, practicing attorney and professor.

Happily remarried, she was compelled during the quiet of the pandemic to revisit her time with Gacy and now that, and much more, is packed onto the 250-some pages between the covers of her surprisingly compelling book, “Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: Defending America’s Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row.”

I say surprising because, frankly, I have had more than my fill of the killer and never expected to revisit his life or crimes or death again. He and his evil have shadowed me ever since the snowy/icy December day in 1978 when, as a young reporter, I watched as some of the dead bodies of young men and boys were removed from the crawl space of Gacy’s ranch house near Norridge, in an unincorporated village in Norwood Park Township.

I stood in a crowd of stunned and curious neighbors, cops, a couple other reporters, medical technicians and others, many of them crying and all, it goes without saying, trying to grasp this particular manifestation of evil.

Eventually 33 bodies were discovered, 29 in the house and four others nearby. Gacy went on trial, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death. Even before that came, the foundation of his “immortality” had begun to form.

As the TV critic for this paper in May 1992, I wrote about his five-part gabfest with WBBM-Ch. 2’s Walter Jacobson: “(despite) typically hyperbolic promotional messages (‘The most notorious mass murderer in history talks’), the series of interviews was sedate … in fact so dull as to beg the question, ‘Why did you bother to air this?’” Also WGN-TV and its Steve Sanders at the same time offered a three-part “The Gacy File: Unanswered Questions” during its nightly newscast.

In that same story, I reviewed Brian Dennehy as Gacy in “To Catch a Killer.” I wrote that it was a “fine, tense and surprisingly reserved film … not the sordid, blood-stained romp that many might have expected.” Of Dennehy I wrote, “(he is) riveting. More physically imposing than the real killer, he has menace written across his crooked smile.”

Most recently, in 2021, I wrote about what I called a “a brilliant and provocative” six-part, six-hour documentary, “John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise” on Peacock, “handsomely made, judicious in its uses of archival footage.”

Evil fascinates and this particular evil has also generated a shelf full of books.

Even though I know Conti, I would not have been drawn to open her book had it not been for Scott Turow, the best selling author and a lawyer who handled big cases as a U.S. attorney, including serving as lead counsel in the Operation Greylord trial and later, in private practice, helping free an innocent man from death row. He has called this book “addictively readable…[and it] answers some of the law’s most fascinating questions” and there are few lawyers or writers I respect more than Turow. His is just one voice in a chorus of praise the book has received, such as “unique and engaging” and “powerful.”

Those opinions are correct. This book also serves as a memoir and you get to know Conti’s background, the reasons why she has been a lifelong opponent of the death penalty and why she was able to grasp the humanity (if that’s the right word) inside Gacy. He calls her “Dollface” and she listens as he tells her, only hours before his execution, “You’re gonna be glad you represented me. Your career’s gonna skyrocket. … You’re gonna be forever connected with me … I love ya.”

It is difficult to determine how her encounters with John Wayne Gacy might have forever altered Karen Conti. She writes that she has been asked to “participate in a John Gacy seance, to be the judge in a Halloween horror costume competition, and to host a serial killer jeopardy game for charity. Handling this case has made me a legal novelty whether I like it or not.”

But it has also, in palpable ways, made her a talented writer, provocative storyteller and decent human being.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

Aside from personal milestones, area businesses, libraries and other institutions throughout the area are celebrating longevity.

And south suburban municipalities, in particular, are aging with grace. A year after Lemont, the old dean of south suburbs, marked 150 years since its incorporation. Park Forest, a modern suburb established at midcentury, is logging its 75th year.

And next month, the village of Flossmoor will celebrate its centennial from 4:30 to 9 p.m. June 20 at Flossmoor Park, Brassie Avenue and Flossmoor Road, with baseball as its centerpiece. The park is the longtime home to the village’s youth baseball and softball operations dating back to the 1960s.

The 100th anniversary event also will include a vintage baseball game between the Flossmoor Whistlestoppers and the visiting Deep River Grinders from Hobart, Indiana. There also will be a car exhibition showcasing vehicles from each decade of Flossmoor’s official existence, and a drone light show at the end of the evening.

In a news release touting the event, Flossmoor’s official birthday is dated to a June 1924 meeting in the “garage of a large home on Sterling Avenue,” where the village’s boundaries were determined and a vote on incorporation was taken.

“Ten days later, Cook County duly authenticated the matter of incorporation, and the Village of Flossmoor was founded on June 20, 1924,” the release states.

While the village likely has incorporation documents to back up its birth date claim, 10 days seems an overly efficient navigation of Cook County bureaucracy.

The seminal Homewood/Flossmoor history booklet “Indian Trails to Tollways” published in 1968 by Anna B. Adair and Adele Sandberg, as Homewood was marking its “Diamond Jubilee,” or 75th anniversary in modern parlay, offers more insight into the origin of the plan.

The authors said the idea to turn a Scottish-themed neighborhood created years earlier on land owned by the Illinois Central Railroad into a village was floated at a Community Leap Year Dinner given by the PTA in the basement of Leavitt Avenue School.

“While the men were gathered in the furnace room for a smoke, the subject of incorporation was casually brought up,” the book reported. The authors had compiled their information at a time when some of the younger men at the meeting may still have been alive, furnace room smoking habits notwithstanding.

Flossmoor’s deeper origins stretch back to a gamble on the area’s soil quality that didn’t pay off. The Illinois Central Railroad purchased land adjacent to its tracks in 1891 in Chicago’s rural hinterland with plans to “strip the land of its black dirt and have it hauled to Chicago for use on the fair grounds for the (Columbian) Exposition of 1893,” which was adjacent to its tracks in Hyde Park.

But the dirt contained too much clay. Instead, the railroad company got into the residential real estate business, subdividing the land and giving free lunches to anyone they could lure onto sales-pitch excursion trains.

Of those who bought in and stuck around, along with neighbors who joined them over the following 30 or so years, 78 people voted to incorporate Flossmoor as a village, and 60 people thought it was a bad idea. A few years later, they got to work on establishing the village’s first park, at Flossmoor Road just east of the tracks. In the 1940s, a small field house was constructed and surrounded by baseball fields, tennis courts and an ice rink in winter. All still remain at the site and will host the village’s centennial event in June.

A small parcel of land between the park and the railroad tracks appeared to be part of the park, but it was never officially transferred from The Illinois Central to the village or park district. Instead it remained in limbo for well over a century, said Kristine Condon, who has published a new collection of essays on Flossmoor’s history in time for the village’s centennial.

“Fragments of Flossmoor: A Series of Essays on the Interesting, Curious, and Unique in Our Village,” a 128-page book is the second area history book by Condon, following up on her public art deep dive in “Richard Haas Murals in Homewood, Illinois,” published in 2020. The new book is only available on the Flossmoor Veterans Memorial site at flossmoorvets.square.site/, though she will be selling copies at a June 29 presentation at The Rock Shop in Homewood.

“I didn’t want to restate well known history, like ‘Trails to Tollways’ or the ‘Images of America’ book that was done for Flossmoor’s 75th,” Condon said. “I wanted to make sure these were little known pieces of Flossmoor history, that I felt were important to be preserved.”

The story of that triangle of land is one of her favorite vignettes in the book, because it ties in directly to its purpose as a fundraising item for the new Flossmoor Veterans Memorial planned at the site.

“That triangle is such a well-kept secret,” she said. “Part of the challenge we had with this site was that it was an ideal location, but we didn’t know who owned it. The H-F Park District said we mow it, the village of Flossmoor said we maintain it and my dad said he remembered climbing that sycamore tree as a kid and thought the railroad owned it. The railroad didn’t know who owned it — they had no record of it.”

The volunteers behind the Veterans Memorial project spent a day at the county recorder of deeds office and finally confirmed it was owned by the Illinois Central Railroad and its successors since 1910, Condon said.

“There’d been no transactional activity on that parcel for 115 years, and that’s why nobody knew who owned it,” she said.

One reason Condon is so passionate about the project is her grandfather helped establish the village’s original Roll of Honor during World War II when he was commander of the now defunct Flossmoor American Legion Post 625.

“My dad recalled the evenings my grandparents spent in the dining room gluing alphabet soup noodles onto wooden placards to provide 155 names of recognition on that honor roll,” she said.

Wartime scarcity of materials required creative reuse of everyday materials. When he was done, the Honor Roll was placed prominently downtown, where the village’s library now is.

“Grandpa’s intent was that it be a temporary marker until the American Legion could raise the funds for the remainder of it,” Condon said. Years went by and priorities in the village changed, and a permanent veterans memorial never materialized.

“I knew how important it was to him, and I know how important it is to my dad to see this work finished when my grandfather didn’t live long enough to see a permanent wall of honor in place,” she said.

So in 2021, she teamed up with former Flossmoor Mayor Paul Braun and others to begin fundraising to make her grandfather’s wish a reality. Last January, the Flossmoor Veterans Memorial group received preliminary site plan approval and a special use permit for the memorial from the Village Board. They’ve also raised over $110,000 to fund the project, though they’re still seeking more support.

Condon said all proceeds from the sales of her Flossmoor book are going toward the project, but that’s not the only reason she dove into the project. It will also be a resource, she said, for junior high students participating in a unit on village history being planned by the veterans memorial group with Flossmoor Elementary District 161.

To that end, she’s included stories about famous Flossmoor residents, such as presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who grew up in a house on McDonald Lane.

“As a young boy after Kennedy was assassinated he wrote a letter to President Johnson and asked Johnson to hire, as he put it, a large carving firm to put JFK’s bust on Mount Rushmore,” Condon said. “Johnson’s secretary Juanita Roberts wrote Michael back and acknowledged the receipt of his letter. That material is in the national archives, and that address is on file in the National Archives.”

Another essay relates to Winnifred Mason Huck, the first female representative from Illinois to serve in Congress. Only the third woman in the House from anywhere in the country, she advocated for child labor laws and bonuses for World War I veterans, among other causes, during her one term in office. She was present at the dedication of the Flossmoor Civic Center building, the main element of the village’s downtown area, in 1929.

Beyond its educational aspects, Condon hopes her book, and the larger Flossmoor Veterans Memorial project, can help “cultivate the power of community” in the village.

“Everyone in the Flossmoor community has something or story they can contribute to this project, as well try to make meaning of the contributions of the people who came before us,” she said.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.

Munro was a giant of contemporary literature. That’s what the Nobel, and a lifetime achievement citation from the Man Booker International award, and the three Governor’s General awards from her native Canada evidence. But it seems strange to think of an unassuming person who primarily wrote about people from the small south Ontario town she came from via the seemingly humble form of the short story as a giant. That the characterization is undeniably correct is a testament to her unique talent, and her persistent drive to look deeper into the lives of her characters.

Her first short story collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades” in 1968 won that year’s Governor’s General award (Canada’s equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize), announcing a writer who had arrived fully formed. Her early stories often explored the struggles of girls and young women trying to find a place in the world that seemed hostile to their desires. In the story, “Boys and Girls,” from “Dance of the Happy Shades,” the young narrator in the rural town endeavors to avoid the domestic life of her mother, but also learns that the male-dominated spaces can be hostile to someone with other dreams.

Munro’s early prose is lowkey and spare, moving inexorably to an epiphanic moment where both the character and the reader are often surprised by a sudden swell of emotion or insight.

Munro’s style remained perfectly controlled throughout her career, but over time, the palate of her technique expanded, particularly in her use of a third-person omniscient narration and temporal shifts that allowed her to peer into the minds and motives of any character at any time.

This is perhaps best evidenced by her most famous story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” collected in 2001’s “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” and later adapted into the 2006 movie “Away from Her” starring Julie Christie as the central character Fiona.

The story opens by describing the home Fiona grew up in, where she lived when she first met her eventual husband Grant: “Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish.”

Notice the incredible control and economy in the technique that manages to establish facts about Fiona’s background, and to give us Grant’s perspective on this information. This omniscience allows Munro to cover lots of storytelling territory in a limited amount of space on the page, as well as to zoom into moments where she peers into her characters’ deepest selves.

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain” shoots forward 50 years and we come to know that Fiona’s mind is failing and she will be moving into a care home where Grant will continue to visit her, even though she has little sense of who she is. One day Grant arrives for his visit and understands that his wife appears to be in a relationship with a man living at the care home, and complications ensue.

It is a juicy set-up, ripe for dramatic events, but Munro’s style was to always complicate the situation at hand, to use her unfailing eye to reveal layers to her characters beyond the perception of just about any other writer. By the end, the reader is aswirl in the full range of the characters’ competing desires.

We will not see a writer of this caliber again.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”

Twitter @biblioracle

Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” by Victor Hugo
2. “Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune” by Anderson Cooper, Katherine Howe
3. “Sutherland Springs: God, Guns, and Hope in a Texas Town” by Joe Holley
4, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” by Anthony Doerr
5. “A Thousand Ships” by Natalie Haynes

— Robert O., Chicago

For Robert, I’m recommending a powerful historical novel told in an ingenious fashion, “The Report” by Jessica Francis Kane.

1. “The Lincoln Highway” by Amor Towles
2. “Cutting for Stone” by Abraham Verghese
3. “The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett
4. “Billy Summers” by Stephen King
5. “Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany” by Stephen E. Ambrose

— Linus P., Chicago

For Linus, I’m recommending one of Richard Russo’s longer novels that allow for a lingering ride with his always sympathetic characters. The book is “Bridge of Sighs.”

1. “The Second Life of Mirielle West” by Amanda Skenandore
2. “The Great Divide” by Cristina Henriquez
3. “Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson
4. “The Three Miss Margarets” by Louise Shaffer
5. American Nightingale: The Story of Frances Slanger, Forgotten Heroine of Normandy” by Bob Welch

— Barb R., Morris

I think Barb will be fascinated with Kate Moore’s “The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women.”

Get a reading from the Biblioracle

Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.

Although doing the job she calls “amazing” was not physically taxing — she admits to working on it while in bed on many occasions — the constancy of being a seven-day-a week sage and never really being able to step away from it has proven challenging. Dickinson is looking toward other adventures closer to her home in Freeville, New York.

“Maybe I’ll be the first advice columnist not to die at my desk,” she said jokingly. “Ann Landers (the columnist Dickinson succeeded) — they ran her column after she died. She had banked a bunch of columns. Mad respect for her, but I am not built like that.”

Dickinson will be handing the reins of syndicated column writing to R. Eric Thomas, a Black male playwright, screenwriter, bestselling author and a former columnist for Elle.com and Slate.com. His new column will be called “Asking Eric.”

Dickinson said that as someone who hasn’t ever “left” anything — a person or a job — the decision to walk away from her advice column was not an easy one, especially because people may want to frame her departure as retiring. “I am leaving, not retiring,” she said.

Dickinson’s friend Julia Keller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago Tribune journalist and author of “Quitting: A Life Strategy. The Myth of Perseverance — and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free,” had offered her these words of wisdom: “You may run out of money, but you may not. But you know you’re gonna run out of days.”

“I have incredible ideas and goals,” Dickinson said. “I want to fulfill them.”

Dickinson’s last column will run June 30, and in it she hopes to offer what she calls “big picture” wisdom. She’s learned a few things over the years through her experiences as a single mom, as a reader of self-help books, as the youngest in her family, as a partner in a 16-year marriage whose wedding and Hallmark Channel-esque relationship was covered by The New York Times, and as a bestselling author of “Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home” and “The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them: A Memoir.”

Let’s not forget her regular appearances as a panelist on NPR’s weekly news quiz “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me,” which she plans to continue.

Dickinson’s fascination with human behavior has served her readers well through the years, with some viral moments along the way, including homophobic parents and notable pranks. And it’s the connection with readers that she’s going to miss the most, Dickinson said.

The road to becoming one of the few nationally syndicated advice columnists all “started as a joke that got very out of hand,” she said.

“I had written a column for Time magazine for a couple of years, but I’d never written personal advice, Q&A type stuff. Jim Warren, who was the D.C. bureau chief at the Chicago Tribune had always said to me, ’If you ever want a job … or … be a newspaper reporter …’ But I had a young child at home and there was no way.”

But then Ann Landers died. “She died and I wrote Jim an email. The subject line was ‘Now there’s a job I’d take … ha ha ha.’ All caps,” said Dickinson. “A few weeks later, he contacted me and said, ‘We had decided after Ann Landers died, we were getting out of the game. But we’re going to launch a new column and we want you to try out for it.’”

Now, Dickinson is pivoting to opening a library in her hometown. Remember the “A Book on Every Bed” initiative she kick-started with the Family Reading Partnership 14 years ago? It encourages readers to leave a wrapped book on their children’s beds on Christmas morning, birthdays or other holidays, so kids wake up to the gift of reading. Dickinson says the library that she is creating, the Freeville Literary Society, is the next step in her childhood literacy campaign.

“I’m no Dolly Parton, but I feel so strongly about literacy,” Dickinson said. “I grew up in a pretty hardscrabble environment. But we had books and books and books, and we got them from the library. To put a book in the hand of a kid … children who already love books, love getting books. Children who don’t know about having books, these become really treasured artifacts.”

The Freeville Literary Society will have membership cards, where a person will use those old-school stamps that make the thump sound when books are being checked out.

She envisions the Freeville Literary Society being a safe place where kids in her small town of several hundred residents can visit on their bikes, after school, on Saturday mornings, by themselves, to enjoy board games, puzzles and movie nights with their families. The building she bought for the library has two sections, so she plans to rent out the other side to a grocer.

“Like every little town in the world, this is a food desert. … If kids could come in and buy a popsicle, that would be amazing. So that’s what I’m doing,” she said. “I’m going to sell penny candy. I want to be that place where you can feed your mind, rot your teeth.”

You can hear how psyched Dickinson is about creating a community hub for children. She’s going to poll the youths to make sure the grocery store sells their 10 favorite candies. She’s looking to open its doors around the time she ends her column. She plans to hold a movie series that features books made into films.

“I really wanted kids to enjoy some of the physical experiences of taking out a book,” she said. “It’s a great place to gather.”

And when she’s not opening worlds and minds with literature, Dickinson will be continuing an advice newsletter and working on a novel, one that is as close to fiction as she can get, she said.

“I’ve never written fiction before. I am finding it incredibly exciting and fulfilling. … I got a lot going on,” she said. “When I decide to come back to advice, I’ll do it under my own steam.”

Looking back, Dickinson said the world has changed since readers started asking her for advice. Early on, she made it a point to win over her haters by replying to negative feedback in ways that were “always very respectful, very measured.” She said that was good practice.

“I went into this job as a really scrappy, mouthy, reactive person,” Dickinson said. “And I have taught myself to be much more careful, measured. I think I’m a much better listener.”

And while she admits to not being perfect and making her share of mistakes, showcasing her readers’ voices in her column with her strong writing is what distinguished her columns from others.

“The thing I have learned to do, which I appreciate, is I let the readers correct me. The third letter in my column is always a reaction to a previous column,” she said. “I have learned to be much less defensive about standing my ground behind my point of view, and I have really been happy to turn part of my column over to readers who want to take issue with or want to correct me. Receiving critique has been a lesson that I needed to learn.”

Dickinson is excited about focusing on the relationships in her life. And as she gears up to “go do those for a while,” she’s passing the syndicated columnist duties to Thomas, who has been heard on a variety of NPR shows himself, including serving as a host of “The Moth” StorySlams in Philadelphia.

Thomas loves audiobooks, dinner parties and cooking; he’s still trying to perfect his bouillabaisse, he said. Thomas’ husband is a pastor with a green thumb. “I don’t really have a green thumb, but he grows the rhubarb and I make the cobbler, so it all works,” he said.

For those not familiar with Thomas’ work, he gravitates toward projects that have people going through hard things in life and negotiating the ways that all identities intersect. It’s “who you are in various places in your life,” he said.

“It’s always gonna be this mix of pathos and humor,” Thomas said of his approach. “There’s this line from ‘Steel Magnolias’ that Dolly Parton’s character says: ‘Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion,’ and that is very much how I like to operate.”

Thomas said a lot of people got to know him through his Elle.com column. “That was very voicey, fun and focused on pop culture and politics,” he said. “But, there was a certain remove to it and what I love about doing advice is that you get to have a fun, little brunch conversation with a friend, but we’re talking about things that are going on in their lives, as opposed to what celebrities are doing.

“As we’ve come out of the pandemic, I’ve been hungering for that human connection,” he said. “I want to talk to more people. So when they approached me about doing this, I jumped at it because … it was sort of like the universe was conspiring to make it happen.”

Thomas’ column will premiere in early July. He said he’s proceeding with excitement but a fair bit of caution.

“There are times that it seems a little bit daunting — the exposure — but I’m really excited that I have this kind of opportunity and that people can see that somebody like me also has something really valuable to give, and I think that’s really important,” Thomas said.

He’s already started to get questions from people through his website. “I’ve read ‘Ask Amy’ for years,” he said. “One of the things I think that’s great about the long tradition of advice that “Ask Amy” has modeled, Ann Landers has modeled before me and so many others, is that this is somebody’s compassionate opinion. I’m a listening ear and somebody who has been through a lot of different things. The thing that I’m most expert on is empathy, living life and making mistakes, which I think makes for the best advice.

“I don’t know if anybody is an expert on being a human,” he said. “It’s really helpful for me to see other people being honest about muddling through, trying to figure it out, getting it wrong and then trying again, because it allows me to have grace for myself, too.”

Thomas wants his advice column to feel like hanging out with a friend, an approach that he has taken with his many writing projects. He is eager to make more friends in this new venue, and if that means spending more time on radio or TV shows like Dickinson, then so be it. He’s here for it all: Weddings, neighbors, office drama … nothing is taboo.

“Sometimes the best advice that we can get is rooted in things that we saw, read or listened to,” he said. “Sometimes you get life coached by a Whitney Houston song: ‘It’s not right, but it’s OK.'”

Thomas says he’s a good listener and he takes the “Yes, and” improv approach. “So you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this problem with my boss.’ And I’m, ‘Yeah, I hear you. Maybe you’re right, maybe wrong. But also maybe you want to take a look at this,'” Thomas said. “I think people started asking my advice more as I’ve gotten older, and that’s a testament to being a different kind of person, growing and maturing.”

Although Dickinson didn’t weigh in on who would succeed her, she did say it would be great if the columnist were a man, so as to reduce any confusion about whether the successor is related to Ann Landers, something that happened with her. She’s delighted that Thomas, a Baltimore native now based in Philadelphia, is onboard.

Her words of advice for anyone who wants to help others in a syndicated column: “Lead from compassion and ‘to thine own self be true.’ That has served me really, really well.”