Mental Health Break

There are days in a magazine editor's life when you don't see the sunlight, and this was almost one of them for me. Work kept me in the office for close to eight hours. The phone kept ringing, email poured continually into my inbox, instant messages were constant distractions. It was only toward the end of the afternoon that my wife emailed to say that a friend of ours had spotted a rufous hummingbird at her feeder. 

Maine has only a single native species of hummingbird—the ruby-throated—so this sighting was of real significance. Rufous hummingbirds normally spend their summers in the Pacific Northwest, meaning this little guy was seriously off course.

As busy as I was, I decided to sneak out for a few minutes with my binoculars. When I arrived at our friend's house, no one was home, but the feeders were filled with birds of all kinds—chickadees, goldfinches, titmice, nuthatches. And yes, a rufous hummingbird, too:

Standing outside, watching this wayward bird sipping sugar water from the feeder, I felt a sense of calm that had eluded me all day. When I returned to the office, I found that a friend had emailed me a link to a story in today's New York Times. "Your Brain on Computers: Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain" by Matt Richtel recounts a trip a team of brain experts made rafting the San Juan River in southern Utah:

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects...

The men drink Tecate beer and talk about the brain. They are thinking about a seminal study from the University of Michigan that showed people can better learn after walking in the woods than after walking a busy street.

The study indicates that learning centers in the brain become taxed when asked to process information, even during the relatively passive experience of taking in an urban setting. By extension, some scientists believe heavy multitasking fatigues the brain, draining it of the ability to focus.

Some of the scientists were unconvinced by the University of Michigan study. But I knew from my experience with the hummingbird that fresh air can be a balm for the wayward mind.

100 Must-Reads

I've written dismissively about NPR's list of Top 100 Thrillers. I have nothing against popularity contests, but I felt the NPR list slighted too many of the all-time masterpieces of suspense.

For that reason I was delighted to stumble across Thrillers: 100 Must Reads in (where else?) my local library. Editors David Morrell and Hank Wagner asked contemporary thriller authors — everyone from Lee Child to my friend Tess Gerritsen — to recommend their favorite stories and novels. The result is a great list that includes both many of my personal influences as well as a number of titles I haven't read yet but definitely plan on buying.

The books aren't ranked from one to one hundred but instead are organized by publication date:

1. Theseus and the Minotaur (1500 B.C.)
2. Homer's The Iliad and The Odyessey (7th Century B.C.)
3. Beowulf (between 700 and 1000 A.D.)
4. William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1605-1606)
5. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719-1722)
6. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)
7. James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
8. Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
9. Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1845)
10. Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860)
11. Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (1874)
12. H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885)
13. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886)
14. Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)
15. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)
16. H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898)
17. Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901)
18. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)
19. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902)
20. Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903)
21. Jack London's The Sea Wolf (1904)
22. Baroness Emma Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
23. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
24. Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger (1913)
25. John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
26. E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation (1920)
27. Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924)
28. W. Somserset Maugham's Ashenden or The British Agent (1928)
29. P.G. Wodehouse's Summer Lightning (1929)
30. Edgar Wallace's King Kong (1933)
31. Lester Dent's Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1933)
32. James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
33. Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938)
34. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939)
35. Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939)
36. Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male (1939)
37. Helen Macinnes's Above Suspicion (1941)
38. Cornell Woolrich's "Rear Window" (1942)
39. Vera Caspery's Laura (1943)
40. Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock (1946)
41. Graham Greene's The Third Man (1950)
42. Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train (1950)
43. Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night (1951)
44. Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952)
45. Ernest K. Gann's The High and the Mighty (1953)
46. Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)
47. Hammond Innes's The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1956)
48. Ian Fleming's From Russia, with Love (1957)
49. Alistair MacLean's The Guns of Navarone (1957)
50. Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1959)
51. Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File (1962)
52. Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey's Seven Days in May (1962)
53. Lionel Davidson's The Rose of Tibet (1962)
54. Richard Stark's The Hunter aka Point Blank (1962)
55. John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
56. Wilbur Smith's When the Lion Feeds (1964)
57. Evelyn Anthony's The Rendezvous (1967)
58. Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969)
59. James Dickey's Deliverance (1970)
60. Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971)
61. Brian Garfield's Death Wish (1972)
62. David Morrell's First Blood (1972)
63. Trevanian's The Eiger Sanction (1972)
64. Charles McCarry's The Tears of Autumn (1974)
65. Peter Benchley's Jaws (1974)
66. William Goldman's Marathon Man (1974)
67. James Grady's Six Days of the Condor (1974)
68. Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed (1975)
69. Joseph Wambaugh's The Choirboys (1975)
70. Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic! (1976)
71. Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1976)
72. Robin Cook's Coma (1977)
73. Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle (1978)
74. Ross Thomas's Chinaman's Chance (1978)
75. John D. MacDonald's The Green Ripper (1979)
76. Justin Scott's The Shipkiller (1979)
77. Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity (1980)
78. Eric Van Lustbader's The Ninja (1980)
79. Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (1981)
80. Jack Ketchum's Off Season (1981)
81. Thomas Perry's The Butcher Boy (1982)
82. Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October (1984)
83. F. Paul Wilson's The Tomb (1984)
84. Andrew Vachss's Flood (1985)
85. Stephen King's Misery (1987)
86. Nelson DeMille's The Charm School (1988)
87. Dean Koontz's Watchers (1988)
88. Katherine Neville's The Eight (1988)
89. Peter Straub's Koko (1988)
90. John Grisham's The Firm (1991)
91. R.L. Stine's Silent Night (1991)
92. James Patterson's Along Came a Spider (1992)
93. Stephen Hunter's Point of Impact (1993)
94. John Lescroat's The 13th Juror (1994)
95. Sandra Brown's The Witness (1995)
96. David Baldacci's Absolute Power (1996)
97. Gayle Lynds's Masquerade (1996)
98. Lee Child's Killing Floor (1997)
99. Jeffrey Deaver's The Bone Collector (1997)
100. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003)

Which famous contemporary author recommended which of the above books and why? You'll have to read Thrillers: 100 Must Reads to find out.

On the Road

I had a busy few days this week starting with an appearance at the Ocean Park Writers Conference in Old Orchard Beach where I was invited to talk about using "Setting as a Character" in The Poacher's Son. It's been years since I taught a workshop, but I think I managed to shake off the rust (or maybe I just had a very forgiving audience).

The next day I spoke at the newly renovated Portland Public Library as part of its noontime Brown Bag Lecture series.

And then last night I enjoyed a great dinner and great company as the host of a fundraising dinner to benefit Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance at the Salt Exchange in Portland's Old Port.

The idea of the author tour, in which a writer travels around giving readings and signing books, might seem like a glamorous activity to the uninitiated, but marketing yourself in service of a new novel can be an exhausting process.

Occasionally, you get a spectacular meal out of it, though. I recommend the lobster with Swiss chard, leeks, and red wine lobster sauce at the Salt Exchange. Also the octopus.

The Boulder Field

It's a week early for some reason, but I have a new editor's note up over at the day job. My subjects this month are, in no particular order, the auguries of Henry David Thoreau, the brilliance of Bernd Heinrich, the melancholy that comes from anticipating a profound loss, and a bittersweet trip I recently took with my two nephews to the Maine North Woods.

Killer Thrillers

National Public Radio has posted its list of the Top 100 Thrillers of all time. An audience of 100,000 readers voted in the survey. Here are the top 10:

• 1. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
• 2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
• 3. Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson
• 4. The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
• 5. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• 6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
• 7. The Shining, by Stephen King
• 8. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
• 9. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
• 10. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

On the whole it's not a terrible list as these sorts of things go, although the snubs are embarrassing (no Jim Thompson? No James M. Cain?). But I was struck by the number of books on the list which are better known for their film adaptations than for the novels themselves. Does anyone really think that The Bourne Identity would have come in as the fourth greatest thriller of all time (!) if Doug Liman hadn't directed a kick-ass movie version starring Matt Damon?