Dan's Bookshelf

Now that we’ve made it past the Fourth of July, many of you are assembling your summer reading lists. Because I’m here to serve, let me offer two suggestions — books I recently finished and heartily recommend.

The first is The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time. Set in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Logan Circle here in Washington, DC, it tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant trying to eke out both a living and a life while running a neighborhood convenience store.

Much of the novel hinges on Stephanos’s relationships with two sets of characters. One set is his new neighbor Judith, who’s white, and her daughter Naomi, who’s bi-racial. Stephanos grows close to both — and, yes, complications ensue. The other relationship is with two other African immigrants — Ken the Kenyan and Congo Joe, all of whom met years ago when they worked at the same hotel and who meet regularly in Stephanos’s listless store.

This book had special resonance for me as a Washingtonian.Some of my favorite writers — Edward P. Jones, George Pelecanos — are those who draw back the curtain on the part of D.C. that has nothing to do with politics, the White House, or Capitol Hill. The people here who park the cars, ring the cash registers, and drive the taxis — and who live in zip codes elite journalists and big-money lobbyists never visit — are, to my mind, far more interesting and greater sources of drama than the folks whose lives unfold in the Washington Post.

However, the book also follows in the broader tradition of immigrant literature. (Mengestu himself came to this country as a boy). It tells the classic tale of an outsider coming to the U.S., confronting its contradictions, making his way, and ultimately remaking our notions of what it means to be an American.

For all those reasons — it’s a gracefully written, very accessible, and not overly long book — The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears belongs on your summer reading list.

I’ll recommend book number two, a work of nonfiction, on Tuesday.