Guilty pleasures

Lowbrow books for highbrow readers

by Nicholas Patterson

You know the type: they read highbrow literary books for work, school, or simply to impress friends and to scoff at literary junk food. However, in their heart of hearts they love nothing better than curling up in the privacy of their own home with a good trashy novel or tawdry celebrity exposé. This holiday season, save your friends some trouble by buying them the books they want . . . but are too embarrassed to buy themselves.

Lawrence Block, a master of the crime novel, brings back Matthew Scudder in Everybody Dies (William Morrow, 338 pages, $25). Over the course of several mysteries, Scudder has evolved from an unstable alcoholic cop into a teetotaling crime solver who attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with religious devotion. Scudder's fervent enthusiasm for AA makes the 12-step program sound like an efficient way to organize one's life, even to someone who's already on the wagon. This time around, a mysterious multicultural gang is gunning for Scudder's gangster buddy Mick Ballou, a/k/a the Butcher Boy (his father was a butcher, and Mick wears Dad's apron and uses his cleaver to dispatch enemies). Scudder has to figure out who's after Mick and track them down before the two of them are chopped into mincemeat themselves. Everybody Dies has one of the most gripping plots in a contemporary crime series. That, paired with Block's knack for writing tough-guy dialogue that rings true and developing characters you care about, makes Everybody Dies the kind of book you'll likely read all through the night.

Stephen King's Bag of Bones (Scribner, 529 pages, $28), on the other hand, is a page-turner that most people would be hard-pressed to finish in a single night. In his new tome, King returns to familiar territory: a small town in Maine, a lonely novelist with writer's block, and the inevitable appearance of supernatural forces.

Four years after his wife's sudden death, Mike Noonan comes back to Sara Laughs, a summer cottage he owned with his spouse near the infamous town of Castle Rock. Unable to stop mourning or continue writing, Noonan soon finds his heart warming to Mattie, a local young widow, and Kyra, her psychic daughter, both of whom he befriends. As his relationship with them grows, he soon learns that all is not perfect in this northern paradise: Max Devore, Kyra's rich, wheelchair-bound grandfather, wants to win custody of the young girl and threatens Noonan for getting in the way. Taking a page from Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, King resurrects the ghost of Noonan's wife, who haunts her former home and eventually enters into a tête-à-tête with the old man.

In moving from hard-core horror to romantic suspense, King continues to display his talents as a master storyteller. His prose falls short of du Maurier's, but is still fun to read. Though he's toned down the vulgarity and gore a bit from previous efforts, he's still dedicated to what he likes to call "gross stuff."

I've been a big fan of Arctic adventure stories since my seventh-grade teacher read Jack London's "To Build a Fire" to our class on a very cold day in February . . . with the classroom windows open. Ann Mariah Cook delivers just such a tale of ice, frostbite, and dogsledding in Running North: A Yukon Adventure (Algonquin Books, 312 pages, $21.95). Cook moved to Alaska from New Hampshire with her young daughter and 32 Siberian huskies so that her husband could compete in the Yukon Quest, a 1000-mile dogsled race.

Cook is no Jack London: she has a hard time combining character development with narrative. But she does a good job conveying the rugged adventure of the race, taking the reader through treacherous ice storms, meetings with tough locals, and close encounters with wolves. Running North makes you realize that although Western civilization has changed since the gold rush, life in the wilderness is still very much the same.

If your loved ones prefer their fun indoors and in high society, Edward Klein's Just Jackie: Her Private Years (Ballantine Books, 399 pages, $25.95) is the right book for them. Klein, the former editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine and the author of All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, takes us into the mansions and enormous yachts of Jackie's post-JFK life. Somewhere between Seymour Hersh's controversial The Dark Side of Camelot and Kitty Kelley's ultrasleazy Jackie Oh!, Just Jackie dishes the dirt with style, if not much substance. Klein addresses such important questions as "Did Jackie marry Onassis for his money?"; "How did Jackie overcome her tarnished reputation after Onassis died?"; and "How did Jackie cope with her final illness?"

Just Jackie is the kind of book that you disparage to friends and then secretly read at home. Each bonbon-size chapter yields a scrumptious piece of scintillating gossip -- they're good snacks but can make you a little sick if you read too many at a time.

A celeb autobiography of another Jackie has also arrived recently on bookshelves: I Am Jackie Chan (Ballantine Books, 357 pages, $24.95). Short on sex but long on action, I Am Jackie Chan chronicles the Hong Kong star's development from an abused and undernourished disciple of a Chinese opera master into the highest-grossing movie actor in the world. Teaming up with Asian-American journalist Jeff Yang, Jackie discusses his efforts to differentiate himself from Bruce Lee (Chan combines life-threatening stunts with slapstick comedy to augment the requisite martial-arts showdowns) and to gain creative control over his movies. Notoriously secretive about his personal life since a female Japanese fan committed suicide and another made an attempt upon hearing he had gotten married, Jackie finally opens up a little in this memoir: he admits publicly for the first time that he has been married for the last 15 years and has a young son.

Jackie's humor and the strength of his story are such that even those who haven't seen any of his movies will enjoy the book. The memoir spends a little too much time on Jackie's early development and not enough on his later film career. However, annotated lists of Jackie's top 10 stunts and fights, accounts of his injuries (Chan has broken almost every bone in his body), and synopses of the plots of his films will give the recipients of this book all the adrenaline-pumping thrills of Jackie's movies as they sit back and digest their holiday meals.