What is everyone reading right now? Did you just finish a great book? With summer almost here I feel the need to get myself some great reads to get me through the next few months. Have any great books to recommend? I would love it if you would leave a comment with some great book titles. I would really appreciate it.
And since I love having something new to look at, here are some pictures that I never got around to blogging about. Just another morning of getting muddy for my Jesse. I really love the one where he is squinting. He's started doing that recently. Especially when he is thinking about something.
14 comments:
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese! Hands down one of the best new novels that I've read in ages and ages.
Right now, I am reading The Count of Monte Cristo (Ryan's favorite book). Ryan and I are also reading Moby Dick together because he had never read it, and I last read it as assigned summer reading in HS. It's much funnier this time around :-)
I also tell everyone who hasn't to read Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. It's incredible literature and a bit of Canadian history too.
I should stop myself here. I'm a fierce bookworm and could probably write you a few essays about books I recommend!
Chanda - don't hold yourself back. I would love a long list of your recommended favs. I'm glad you mentioned The Book of Negroes. This was a book that I wanted to read last summer but never got a chance. Hmm...this might just be my first read for the summer.
I wrote so much that the comment form actually told me I wrote too much! So I've broken it up into a few postings.
The most recent novel I read since Cutting for Stone is American Rust by Philipp Meyer. I found it to be emotionally challenging, and this is part of what it makes it good. It is so relevant to the current moment. I think here in Ontario people would probably relate to it as it's about the decay associated with industry disappearing permanently.
One book that I was thinking of re-reading this summer is Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. I last read it during my first year of grad school, so I would probably get more out of it now. Either way, it was an incredible read the first time. It's dense and long, and I did it in four days because I couldn't put the thing down. Others agreed, I guess. It won the Pulitzer Prize the year it debuted. Anyway, it's a very interesting combination of Jewish history and comic book history!
I would highly recommend most other books by Michael Chabon. Wonder Boys was turned into a film starring Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas, which I enjoyed. I hated Yiddish Policemen's Union though. I didn't like the way it talked about Arabs and Israel. I also think it was his weakest plot.
Another book I read in the last year and a half is Through The Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden. I just thought the imagery was really incredible. He's a natural storyteller.
One book that I am sort of reading right now is called Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster. It's a little bit of a crazy book just because Sesshu has a crazy way of writing. It's an alternative history in a scenario where the Aztex beat the Spanish instead of the other way around. Sesshu grew up in my neighborhood as a person of mixed ethnic background and an outsider a generation before me, so that's one reason I'm interested in his writing. (His parents were Asian and white, and our neighborhood is ~95% Latino. He now teaches English/poetry in the public school system.)
So speaking of Los Angeles history, Southland by Nina Revoyr is a novel almost no one has heard of, which is a shame. It's partially about Japanese internment, and I learned a whole bunch of stuff I didn't know, like, Blacks and Japanese used to share a neighborhood quite harmoniously before World War II disrupted their entire way of life.
You're probably familiar with Thomas King, who is a prof at Guelph. Green Grass, Running Water was amazing! His short story collection A Brief History of Indians in Canada is also really good.
A work of non-fic that I found interesting was Rhoda Jantzen's memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Her family is in the US by way of Ontario, so you might find it to be an interesting reading. I connected with it because she's an academic too and also recently went through a divorce. She makes fun of her heritage maybe too much (?) but it was interesting anyway. She's a good storyteller.
And speaking of religious memoirs, Shalom Auslander's Foreskin's Lament is hilarious. It's about growing up Orthodox Jewish in a town in New York and negotiating the psychological in's and out's of being Orthodox. His definition of Holy Days on the first page still cracks me up whenever I think about it.
As a social scientist/counselor you might find A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers interesting. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with this book, although I am deeply enamored of the introduction which includes a drawing of a stapler. It's about Dave Eggers and how he has to raise his 7 year old brother after his parents both die of cancer within months of each other.
He's since gone on to create McSweeney's, a literary publication you may have seen hanging around in Words Worth. It's also a good place to look for short stories. I used to be so obsessed with McSweeney's that when I moved here and UPS temporarily lost my entire collection, I didn't get out of bed for two days! I'm proud to say that I have since learned to live without it, since a subscription is expensive.
I think besides Cutting for Stone, my favorite read of 2009 was The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum. It's non-fiction, and it's about the debates within the literary community about Shakespeare's works, especially the ones where there are different inconsistent versions of the text. I'm not sure this book is enjoyable for anyone who isn't a complete Shakespeare nerd, but that might be you! Reading this book is kind of like eating candy because Rosenbaum has such a way with words.
Since I was talking about chess the yesterday, I'll mention a book about chess that I liked: The Kings of New York by Michael Weinreb. It's about a chess team in New York that somewhat dominated the chess scene for a while. Two of the players that they follow have continued to be at the top of the sport. It's an interesting look at how teenagers integrate chess into their lives.
I also really liked Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin. It's another interesting look at the chess world and has some interesting history about Jews on the Soviet Chess scene. The kid it's about, Josh Waitzkin, went on to quit chess right as he entered adulthood, and he's now a world tai chi champion! I enjoyed his book about that (The Art of Learning) but that might be because I have a huge crush on him :-)
One book I haven't read that came out recently is Diary of a Chess Queen, by Alexandra Kosteniuk. She's the standing Women's World Chess Champion and also a Grandmaster. I read a review by another top player, Jennifer Shahade (who helps run 9 Queens) in New in Chess, and she gave it the thumbs up. Jennifer also has a book, but the title is a bit impolite, so I won't write it here. You can find it via google though if you're interested. Both are on my reading list, but if you get to one before me, let me know how it goes.
Man, if only I could be a professional reader! I'm glad to see that you're finding time to read though. It gives me hope that having kids doesn't mean I'll never be able to read for pleasure again.
Okay, that's it for now. I'll probably be back with more suggestions later!
Wow I like Chanda's suggestions! And Chanda, some of my best reading times have been since kids...my books are often my retreat and I loved many moments of reading while breastfeeding!
"The Book of Negroes" is on the top of my summer reading list too and a friend recently finished an recommended "The Count of Monte Cristo" so those are being confirmed. I have some "light" picks for you...I read "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris while we were in Floridea it was hilarious. And I just discovered Elizabeth Berg at the library and picked up a couple of her novels and I'm loving the one I'm in for a quick light read (kinda like Maeve Binchey).
Love all the suggestions. Please keep them coming. Wouldn't if be great if we all found some new suggestions for future reading?
And Chanda...there is hope for reading after babies. It certainly took a few years for me to get back into novels (magazines had to do when my kids were really little) but I found that it was all about priorities. If it's important to you, you make time for it in your life.
Oh I forgot! I meant to list my favorite novel of last summer "The School of Essential Ingredients" by Erica Bauermeister. A delicious novel filled with life, love and food!
Beth, I'm going to look into that book! Thanks for mentioning it.
A friend of mine just suggested I have a look at Dorothy Sayers to distract myself from the mystery illness that has kept me mostly stuck at home for the last few months. I'm not familiar with her, but apparently it will cheer me up. Thought I would pass the name on :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_L._Sayers
Okay. I think I am adding this lady's book to my reading list:
http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/06/can-meat-eaters-also-be-environmentalists/57532/
I've been wanting, for years, to see a careful analysis of this stuff, and it's very, very hard to find. It's a topic that leads people to be very dogmatic, and as a scientist, I prefer to see a complete analytical picture :-)
Anyway, I guess it's another book for those interested in food.
By the way, Bret Easton Ellis's newest novel is coming out tomorrow, and that will be, for sure, my next purchase. He's one of my favorite novelists. I realize that might be a bit weird since a lot of well-known feminists had a complete freak out about American Psycho, claiming it was misogynist, but I actually thought the book was an incredibly (albeit cynical) accurate commentary on the extremes of American culture. I guess it resonated with some of what I saw as an undergrad at Harvard. I think people who saw it as Ellis's personal expression of misogyny missed the point, which is that it's about a culture that feeds misogyny.
Oh man, I could totally go on and on about Bret Easton Ellis.
I had a long run of reading "food/sustainable eating" books about a year ago. In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Food Inc. (All amazing books!) I'll also add Julie and Julia, but I didn't find this to be a very well written book. It's also not at all about sustainable eating. If you're interested, here's a link to a review of a number of vegetarian/sustainable eating books. http://mattbites.com/2010/04/26/book-reviews-vegetables-and-gardening-and-sustainable-eating-oh-my/
I can't say how objective the reviews are, but it's a good introduction of some new books under this topic. Of course there is also The Butcher and the Vegetarian by Tara Austen Weaver.
Chanda - let me know what you think of your new book pic.
I actually read and really enjoyed Cleaving, which probably puts me in a weird minority. Ryan loved Julie and Julia so much that I had to buy him the cookbook for chanukah! The first recipe he made was beef bourguignon, just like that climactic part of the film :-)
I am returned with another book recommendation. Thanks to this conversation, I went on a massive book binge (no complaints here though!), and a couple of weeks ago I plowed through Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered. It's amazing!
I also started Laura Bush's memoir. Not because I'm a Bush family fan but because I read that she speaks passionately about books (having once been a librarian). When I was at the White House in October, it turned out that all of the art I liked was stuff that she had purchased while she was First Lady. Anyway, so far it's an interesting meditation on small-town life in 1950s Texas.
The other book I picked up is The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse. This book stood out to me when I saw it in an email from the Harvard Book Store because Echo Park is part of my home neighborhood of East Los Angeles and because it's primarily Spanish-speaking and populated by immigrants, not a lot of fiction literature has come out of it yet. It's a beautifully written book that captures the experience of LA's Latino/a workers, and Skyhorse's motivation as explained in the author's note is quite interesting.
Speaking of my hometown, if you go to my blog, you can see a photo of me and my parents from a 1986 edition of the Los Angeles Times :-)
Anyway, I know, I know, I'm reading too many. Such is my way, especially when I have a tiny bit of encouragement, hehehe.
Oh oh, totally forgot to tell you that I loved the new Bret Easton Ellis book. But, I think, as with most of his work, a lot of people aren't going to get it. I think people don't like the way he reveals the violent subtext of pop culture.
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