1. The Bookshop Dog by Cynthia Rylant - quite likely my favorite children's book ever. The story about Martha Jane, a golden lab who spends her days in her owner's bookstore, was one i chose at least once a week when reading before bed with my Dad when I was little.
2. Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta - I've read this story about a girl from an Italian family growing up in Autstralia and dealing with her mother's depression more times then I can count. On at least three occasions, I've started it before going to bed and ending up reading the entire thing that night. I also love her first novel, Looking for Alibrandi.
3. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom - A certain Ms. Arregoces turned me on to this, and as soon as I opened the first page, I didn't move off my couch for hours until I finished, at which point I wanted to start it all over again. Such a good book.
4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling - like so many people my age, this was the book that got me reading. My aunt gave it to me and started reading aloud to me, but when she left I was forced to read it myself - and I couldn't put it down.
5. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer - a really great mix of humor and seriousness, this is a great story (two stories, really) and I love the way it's written - a compilation of letters, legends, and narration. I read this on a plane and recieved stares for laughing hysterically at a Ukrainian character's mishaps with the English language.
6. The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillipa Gregory - I got really into this book, and all the ones that followed, about King Henry VIII around sixth grade. I was probably a little young for some of the racier bits but loved the intrigue and historical aspects, and it got me hooked on all sorts of historical fiction.
7. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman - This collection of essays made me realize that writing doesn't always have to be about a story - it can just be a way to let readers into your head. It made me start writing a lot more.
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky - my first foray into "indie" teen novels - ones that didn't feature the young and beautiful cavorting around in designer clothes. I felt incredibly mature and counter-culture. I later realized the book was pulished by MTV, the bastion of all things teeny-bop, but I still remember the way reading it made me realized that life for everyone else was no better than mine.
9. The Future Dictionary of America from McSweeney's - not quite a novel, but this collection of a variety of young writers', artists' and musicians' ideas on what will constitute the American vocabulary is a fascinating way to think about the way our culture is headed.
As soon as I post this I'll remember about seventeen more, but these are the books that define different times of my life and I don't think I'll ever forget.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
"It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River"
Over the summer i read:
The White Queen - Philippa Gregory
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Saving Francesca (for the ninth time) - Melina Marchetta
The Wish Maker - Ali Sethi
South of Broad - Pat Conroy
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Jane Eyre (most of it) - Charlotte Bronte
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Isabel's Bed - Elinor Lipmann
Norah Jane - Ellen Gilchrist
The title of this entry is the opening line of South of Broad by Pat Conroy, and perfectly sets the tone for Conroy's part memoir, part love letter to the city of his birth.The novel is one of the most profound and engrossing books I've read not only this summer but in a long, long time. I've been reading a lot about the South lately - I'm fascinated by the history and sensuality and light-dark complex of Spanish moss and Victorian houses and Carolina drawls (Berendt's Midnight and Gilchrist's Norah Jane also took place down south). The book's setting of Charleston in the 1960's and then 1980's feels like another world. Maybe it's my culture envy - i love the sense of tradition and identity as a Southernor (minus all of the negative past connotations and responsiblities that go along with it) - Conroy's characters all share a common bond, even if it is as the loser's of the "War of Northern Aggression". The novel is narrated by Leopold Bloom King, son of a nun-turned-Joyce-scholar, paper boy for all of Old Charleston (the area south of Broad Street), and later the premier columnist in the city's newspaper. His story flips back and forth in time, weaving together his 18th and 38th summers and various other anecdotes about his family and friends - 8 Charleston outcasts who banded together during their senior year in high school and twenty years later when tragedy strikes. Modern issues of mental illness, racism, the outbreak of AIDS in San Francisco among homosexuals (including on of their own), abuse, and chronic dissatisfaction seem hyperrealistic in the setting of shady streets winding past houses hundreds of years old.
The novel is poignant and relevant, funny and touching, heartbreaking and heart warming. Ultimately, it is the loss of three of the nine that reminds them all why they first came together. I couldn't put it down - I read all five hundred some pages in less than two days. The story is engrossing and the style impecable, and it's definitely one of the best books I've read. I liked the "us against the world" mentality of the characters and the artful skill with which Conroy sneaks in observations about family, heartbreak, tradition, memory, and growing up. Towards the end of the book, one line struck me as especially poignant and honest:
"It was the least I could do (holding his friend's hand), as he had long ago taught me a lesson about the great inner strengthe sometimes granted to the most wounded of men. And how those men can sometimes grow up to be heroes." It's especially fitting, because South of Broad is a story about what wounded quite a few men (and women), and how they all managed to grow up to be heroes. (467)
The White Queen - Philippa Gregory
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Saving Francesca (for the ninth time) - Melina Marchetta
The Wish Maker - Ali Sethi
South of Broad - Pat Conroy
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Jane Eyre (most of it) - Charlotte Bronte
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Isabel's Bed - Elinor Lipmann
Norah Jane - Ellen Gilchrist
The title of this entry is the opening line of South of Broad by Pat Conroy, and perfectly sets the tone for Conroy's part memoir, part love letter to the city of his birth.The novel is one of the most profound and engrossing books I've read not only this summer but in a long, long time. I've been reading a lot about the South lately - I'm fascinated by the history and sensuality and light-dark complex of Spanish moss and Victorian houses and Carolina drawls (Berendt's Midnight and Gilchrist's Norah Jane also took place down south). The book's setting of Charleston in the 1960's and then 1980's feels like another world. Maybe it's my culture envy - i love the sense of tradition and identity as a Southernor (minus all of the negative past connotations and responsiblities that go along with it) - Conroy's characters all share a common bond, even if it is as the loser's of the "War of Northern Aggression". The novel is narrated by Leopold Bloom King, son of a nun-turned-Joyce-scholar, paper boy for all of Old Charleston (the area south of Broad Street), and later the premier columnist in the city's newspaper. His story flips back and forth in time, weaving together his 18th and 38th summers and various other anecdotes about his family and friends - 8 Charleston outcasts who banded together during their senior year in high school and twenty years later when tragedy strikes. Modern issues of mental illness, racism, the outbreak of AIDS in San Francisco among homosexuals (including on of their own), abuse, and chronic dissatisfaction seem hyperrealistic in the setting of shady streets winding past houses hundreds of years old.
The novel is poignant and relevant, funny and touching, heartbreaking and heart warming. Ultimately, it is the loss of three of the nine that reminds them all why they first came together. I couldn't put it down - I read all five hundred some pages in less than two days. The story is engrossing and the style impecable, and it's definitely one of the best books I've read. I liked the "us against the world" mentality of the characters and the artful skill with which Conroy sneaks in observations about family, heartbreak, tradition, memory, and growing up. Towards the end of the book, one line struck me as especially poignant and honest:
"It was the least I could do (holding his friend's hand), as he had long ago taught me a lesson about the great inner strengthe sometimes granted to the most wounded of men. And how those men can sometimes grow up to be heroes." It's especially fitting, because South of Broad is a story about what wounded quite a few men (and women), and how they all managed to grow up to be heroes. (467)
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