Birds, Brooks and Beta Males

Hello Read Like the Winders,

Gilbert Cruz here, editor of The New York Times Book Review, with a brief note. The Times has launched an exciting new iOS app for our podcasts and audio journalism called New York Times Audio. It’s a one-stop shop for all the Times audio products you’ve grown to love (“The Daily,” “The Ezra Klein Show,” a little podcast called “The Book Review”) as well as new offerings like “Shorts,” a new series that gives you daily culture recommendations in about six or seven minutes. You’ll also be able to find narrated articles from The Times and a range of top magazines, as well as many of the best episodes of “This American Life.”

It’s now available for New York Times news subscribers. To start exploring, download the Audio app here.

Dear readers,

Good morning! My small child is currently in the midst of a bird phase, and in the manner of small children’s interests, his is a single-minded obsession worthy of a pint-size Ahab. (Or maybe, more aptly, a youthful Ancient Mariner.) It’ll probably be over within a week, but while it lasts, it’s kind of oppressive: bird books, bird conversation, pigeon observation, demands for repeated viewings of “Bill and Coo,” a 1948 novelty film starring George Burton’s troupe of performing avians. (OK, that last one is totally on me.) Oftentimes I find myself recalling the amazing scene from Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women” in which Mrs. Bone grimly predicts “the dominion of the birds. … I very much fear it may come to that.” It has.

—Sadie Stein

“The Birds,” by Daphne du Maurier

Fiction, 1952 (Collected variously in “The Apple Tree” and, most recently, “Don’t Look Now.”)

Despite — because of — this avian overload, I was moved to watch “The Birds,” and then to read its source material, which has a lot less Tippi Hedren (the original story is set on a Cornish farm) but plenty of quiet menace. Du Maurier’s stories are available in various collections that merrily shuffle the contents and order, but be sure to find an edition that includes the novella “Monte Verità.” The narrator relates his memories of a young woman who disappeared into a sect on a remote mountaintop, in which, according to local rumor, the adherents never age. It doesn’t spoil the suspense or the eeriness to reveal that du Maurier may have been loosely inspired by (and perhaps was poking gentle fun at) an actual ascetic commune in the Swiss canton of Ticino that, for several decades, hosted artists, nudists, pacifists, theosophists, anarchists and freethinkers of all stripes. (Isadora Duncan and Hermann Hesse were among those who did stints there.) But for all its metaphysical chills, the story is a serious meditation on love. As the nameless climber puts it: “I have a theory that each man’s life is like a pack of cards, and those we meet and sometimes love are shuffled with us. We find ourselves in the same suit, held by the hand of Fate. The game is played, we are discarded, and pass on.”

Read if you like: The movies “Rebecca” or “Don’t Look Now”; cults and the people who love them; mountaineering; cryogenics and/or Ted Williams; A.S. Byatt’s “The Children’s Book”
Available from: New York Review Books, Virago, the library or your favorite used bookstore.

Published a year later and a world away is Gwendolyn Brooks’s only novel, a lyrical, often funny, frank and poignant nonlinear portrait of a sensitive girl growing up in 1920s Chicago. (At least, it starts in the 1920s.) There’s no particular “drama,” save the daily small joys, routine degradations, financial worries and family dynamics of a Black family in a specific time and place, beautifully rendered. To read “Maud Martha” is to wonder why you’ve never read this before and want to tell everyone to read it, immediately: It’s an absolute classic — or should be. It’s also to wish that the Pulitzer-winning poet had turned her hand to more fiction. (It’s also to wonder if Evan S. Connell read it before he wrote his iconic 1959 novel “Mrs. Bridge” — especially when you know that Brooks’s original title was “American Family Brown.”)

Read if you like: The poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks; “Betsey Brown,” “Mrs. Bridge,” “Seventeenth Summer,” Chicago history, coming-of-age, great books.
Available from: Third World Press, a well-stocked library.

Why don’t you …

• Brighten up your day? As Oscar Wilde reminds us in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life.”

• Consider the beta? “I’d walk away like a movie star who gets burned in a three-way script,” sang the late Gordon Lightfoot. “Enter number two.” If this is a dynamic that intrigues you, may I point you (as a kind anonymous neighbor recently did, thanks to my building’s giveaway table) to a 1975 book by Alex Barris titled “Hollywood’s Other Men”? It’s a compendium of all the Golden Age of Hollywood saps — frequently played by Ralph Bellamy — who get thrown over for Cary Grant, Gary Cooper or whatever leading man they had the ill fortune to compete against. It’s really a meditation on mediated desire in American culture (with terrific pictures) and I couldn’t put it down.

• Get some pragmatic life advice? From Marguerite Duras’s weird and wonderful “Practicalities” — which covers everything from vacation shopping lists to child-rearing to the male of the species: “You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.”

Thank you for being a subscriber

Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.

Friendly reminder: check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Send newsletter feedback to RLTW@nytimes.com.