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12 Books Even Your Dad Would Love

by ALEX CARNEVALE

We can't all have a father, but some of us have fathers, and they require presents this time of year. The book is the perfect gift for Father's Day (Sunday!) because it tells your dad that you love him but you're not in love with him. Here are some books for their pleasure which will make them believe.

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein's classic tale of lunar revolution is a page-turner on an epic scale, nurturing your daddy's interest in global politics and differential gravity. Heinlein's masterpiece is compulsively readable; it is also the best textbook on government ever conceived. All it's missing is the sex, and your pop probably is used to not getting that. One of the greatest American novels ever written, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress beats the shit out of anything published this year for sure.

The first novel of the poet Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle has had a strange cult following since its release that I think the CIA should be looking into. It's a relentlessly funny smart book. If your dad is crotchety and boring like Tom Brokaw, I don't say that this is the right move, but if he's more like Woody Harrelson, I think you're safe.

John Derbyshire is a Brit who lives on Long Island. He's on the crotchety side, is a lot old-fashioned, but these are the kinds of exacting people who you want writing a serious history of mathematics. His chronicle of Bernard Riemann's story is a masterful retelling on the level of Dava Sobel's equally entertaining Longitude. For the dad that makes everyone listen to his stories.

'Popular military historian' isn't a thing you grow up wanting to become. Victor Davis Hanson is the finest of the kind, having written a memoir/history of California's immigration problem (Mexifornia) and a terrific book on the Pelopennesian War. Ripples of Battle is a great gift for the kind of dad who drives a pickup truck and believes he's smarter than he actually is. VDH will appeal to him on every conceivable level except his love of sweater-vests.

While many science fiction writers have become household names because of movies, Hollywood hasn't come calling for Robert Silverberg. This is regrettable, because as SF fabulists go, Silverberg's among the smarter conceptualists and better executors. His novella 'Nightwings' became the first part of his novel Nightwings, and it won a major shitload of awards at the time. It's the perfect fable. The protagonist is even old. It's what derlies love to read about, and it has alien invaders and a future dying Earth and pretty much anything I've ever asked for in a work of fiction.

Unlike most people I know, I went through a serious phase in which I read a lot of serial killer novels, the kind you take with you on planes and throw in the garbage somewhere in the middle of the Colorado rockies. The finest of such novels in my mind is Jeffrey Deaver's The Empty Chair. I have some small but meaningful requirements for a novel of this kind. First, it must have explicit sex. Second, the protagonist should have to overcome an incapacitating physical failure - in the case of Detective Lincoln Rhyme (played by Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector) he's a quadrapilegic. Third is a Southern setting. The Empty Chair has all three, along with a kickass villain and enough twists to puzzle even the wisest soothsayer. You won't be sorry you got him this one.

Poker books. I've read and masticated myself to the tune of damn near all of them. If your Dad is actually good at poker and wants a strategy guide of sorts, be sure and pick him up a copy of Gus Hansen's Every Hand Revealed. Gus is one hilarious chimichanga and he takes you through his amazing thought process at every level of a million dollar tournament that he dominated. Fascinating one of a kind stuff. If your dad is more of a casual gambler, charity God and legendary cash game player Barry Greenstein's autobiography-cum-poker guide Ace on the River is good for succeeding in business or at most anything. Priceless advice, incredibly beautiful book, hilarious as well.

Horror: it has never gotten any better than Richard Matheson's Now You See It... I'm not sure that it could get any better. Magic and murder! If someone would get on the ball and cast David Blaine in a stage adaptation of this, they would be able to wipe their ass with money. A brilliantly twisty and scary journey with another quadriplegic. This book is everything that's right about the genre. 

A man, even one such as your father, wants a book that makes him feel weak instead of strong (esp. in light of how The Hangover made him feel like he was six years old). Worry no longer. When it comes to well-meaning self-helpery, second best to Ayn Rand are the inspirational words of Jesus Christ, and best after that is the immortal autobiography of the Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico. Witty and wise, de Chirico's real life story has a worthy fictional counterpart in Kurt Vonnegut's best novel, Bluebeard. Warning: sampling both back-to-back could kill you with paint fumes.

As we get older, we become crotchety. This is the inevitable result of time's onward march. No one has put this perspective to better use than Thomas Sowell, and dude has reason to be pissed. Born in Harlem, Sowell was an iconoclast before the term was invented. The pioneering economist had a tough life, and the lessons he learned in war and peace, government and academia, are highly amusing. You can't go wrong with this autobiography, which the longtime columnist titled A Personal Odyssey.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording, and most likely knows your father better than you do. He tumbls here.

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