Knopf 100--Day 23

85. We’ve probably written about Toni Morrison more than any other writer. Liz and I adore her. In fact, Beloved is on both of our top ten books of all time list, and it's actually my favorite novel. 

Anyway, Song of Solomon was arguably Morrison’s first great book. The Bluest Eye and Sula are very good books and the perfect start if you plan to jump into Morrison’s literary canon, but it was Song of Solomon, the epic American novel that follows a single family nearly a century, that was a hint at what Morrison would soon produce in her masterpiece, Beloved. (And apologies to Franzen devotees, but Morrison is the living master of the American landscape, the American story, and the publication of Beloved on the heals of Song of Solomon sealed that deal long ago. Before Morrison it was Twain, I suppose.) Morrison isn’t easy, and she asks us big, deep, moving questions and a reader must pay attention. Read Toni Morrison because it will make your life richer.  Don’t read her because you have to, or think you should (or you had a bad high school situation in your AP class...). Read Beloved, Song of Solomon, Sula, Jazz, or The Bluest Eye, because everything you’ve heard about a book changing your life is true. End of sermon. 

86. I am going to move right on to another writer that both Liz and I love, Alice Munro. Now that I think about it, Liz and I are two peas in two very differently sized pods. Anyway, I thought I would choose a Munro book that we haven't written about at all, The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose. It's set in a small 1930's Canadian town that is filled with everything you'd want--thieves, bootleggers, prostitutes, and less exciting people like factory folk--and shopkeepers like Rose and her step mother, Flo. Although, to be fair when I say boring, Rose does date quite a bit. In fact, a good number of the stories are about Rose's love life; in one she is seduced on a long train ride by a .... that's right, a very old minister. If you had any sense at all, this is everything you would need in order to be convinced to read this book, but I will also tell you the stories are lovely, sad, and are all about the one thing that make all good stories about small towns great...they are about escape. I like to think about this collection as the one that almost got away because I didn't read it until Munro (finally!) won her 2013 Pulitzer. 

87. Listen, I am going to try and do something that simply has not been accomplished on this blog. I am going to try and convince you that the 1981 film Endless Love, which was then given a second adaptation in 2014 called, well, Endless Love ... is actually a really good book by Scott Spencer. Okay. Here is my pitch: If you've seen the 1981 version of Endless Love, unsee it. It wasn't good. Close your eyes, concentrate, and just unsee it. I know you love Brooke Shields, I know it's when you first fell in love with James Spader and Tom Cruise,  and yes I know it's hard to unsee Tom Cruise, I know this oh so well, but unsee him. Okay. Now did you see the 2014 adaptation? You did? Seek help, nothing I can do for you if you're over the age of twenty five and paid money to see that movie. The novel, the really fantastic novel, Endless Love, is about wild, erotic, dangerous, violent, crazy fucking love. Poor Scott Spencer, two shitty adaptations and then you get this theme song? That's just crappy luck.

88. I recently read Anjelica Houston's first memoir, A Story Lately Told. It concentrated on her young life and you know it was okay...a little quiet but it was fine. Now, if you want an old fashion huge loud big memoir about the Houston family, go to papa. Read, An Open Book by John Huston. It is thoroughly engaging and fun from page one. A boxer, writer, actor, philanderer (he was married five times as well), and of course great film director (Maltese Falcon, African Queen, The Misfits, The Man Who Would be King, Prizzi's Honor and of course The Dead).  He doesn't bullshit in this book, he admits his many faults and mistakes (I mentioned the marriages and cheating, yeah?). He was a huge personality, a huge talent and the book reads exactly that way.

Knopf 100--Day 10

Nobel, anyone? Knopf is the home for a ton of Nobel Prize winning authors, and here are four books from this illustrious group.

33. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, originally published in 1988. Check this out. It's the film clip of when Doris Lessing found out she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"Oh Christ!" The Fifth Child probably isn't her most famous book, but it's one I loved. It's no secret that I like creepy, gothic reads that dismantle families, though. The premise is that a happy couple have brought four children into the world and created an ideal familial life in '60's Britain. Then they have Ben, baby #5, and their world unravels. Ben's not a cute baby or kid. He eats everything and he's abnormally strong. He's not the child they wanted or expected. The other kids are scared of him and his parents are appalled. What happens when you can't love your child, even when the child is an innocent? Good stuff.

34. Beloved by Toni Morrison, originally published in 1987. This is the second Toni Morrison novel we've included on our list, but so what? TM is terrific. You know what's fun? Walking up to strangers and croak-whispering "Beeeeloooooovveddd" like it was uttered in the movie. I love doing that. Anyway, Beloved, considered Morrison's best work, is the story of Sethe, a former slave living in Ohio who can't escape her memories of the atrocities of her past or the unnamed daughter she lost, whose tombstone simply reads "beloved." This novel twists up your insides, a sign of narrative genius.

35. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro, originally published in 2001. Alice Munro is the greatest living short story writer, and I could have picked any of her books to feature in this spot. I chose Hateship in part because it's received attention from Hollywood with several film adaptations. Remember that devastating and beautiful movie called Away From Her, about a man whose Alzheimer's impacted wife develops a romance in her assisted living facility because she no longer remembers she's married, and he must deal with the loss and her found happiness with another man? The movie starred Julie Christie and she was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal. That movie was based on one of the stories in this collection. Munro writes about relationships and the human drama of daily living. She's one of my two pretend-Canadian-grandmas.

36. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, originally published in 1988. The godfather of magical realism, it's an honor to say that I work for the publisher of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I haven't read all of his books, but I am a fan of Love in the Time of Cholera, among others. The story here is that a couple declare their love when they're young, but she ultimately decides to marry a doctor. He, on the other hand, goes the other direction and has affairs. LOTS of affairs. Over six hundred affairs. Dude keeps busy. After fifty years, though, the doctor finally dies and our oversexed hero finally has his opportunity to spread a venereal disease declare his undying love once more.

Home by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison--or TMo as I like to call her--is having a pretty good spring.  She's going to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the US, along with some no names like Bob Dylan, Madeleine Albright, and John Glenn.  (On a side note, this round of award-winners includes three of my hero types--TMo, Dolores Huerta the civil rights activist, and the winningest coach in basketball history, Pat Summitt.)  Aside from the accolade, though, and more importantly, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning Morrison as a new book going on sale May 8.

Presidential
Medal of Freedom

Home, like the rest of Morrison's fiction, is a short narrative that manages to pack every sentence, every paragraph, every page with unparalleled writing and emotional depth.  However, I'm stating it now--Home is the best Toni Morrison novel in a decade.  This is the Toni Morrison who wrote Beloved and Sula, two of my all time favorite books.  This is TMo proving that she's still the best writer in the United States.

Here is the story of Frank Money, an angry veteran trying to readjust to life in the United States after fighting in the Korean War.  Frank, though, as an African-American, is moving from the equality of a desegregated army into the harsh, segregated world of 50's America.  He's once more a second class citizen and he's suffering from his experiences in Korea.  And Frank needs to get across the country.  He needs to go home to help his sister--the only family he has--escape from a bad relationship.  As Frank travels from Seattle to Georgia, he encounters both kindness and hostility, and he experiences the rages of PTSD.

Toni Morrison

What sets Home apart from other Toni Morrison novels is that it's contemporary.  It's set in the 20th Century and it addresses issues at the forefront of modern American society.  Race relations are explored even as the radical right rails against our black President.  The plight of traumatized soldiers transcends the decades from that war to the ones fought in Afghanistan and Iraq as soldiers come home.  And women; women still fight for equality in relationships and in society.  This is an important book, and it's a beautifully crafted one.  If I had to place a bet on the front runner for next year's Pulitzer Prize (assuming one is awarded...sigh), my money's on TMo.

30 More Days Book Challenge: Day 4

You know what's fun?  Seeing what sort of random key words on the Google lead people to this delightful little blog.  You might think that, being mostly based on books, this blog is visited by a modern intelligentsia of bookish folk.  You would be wrong.  Yesterday, for example, Googlers found us with key word searches like "liz poo poo blog hot adventures" and "God's little designer blog by Gianna."  I'm not making these up.

Staying classy, here's Day 4: Favorite Award Winners

Gianna:

I don’t know what is worse, looking at lists like this and seeing how few you’ve read or how few you’ve liked. What makes me more of an idiot? [...No comment.] In any case, here are some of my favorite winners and my top dog for fiction and non-fiction.


Pulitzer

Some of my favorite titles include The Road, Interpreter of Maladies, The Hours, To Kill a Mockingbird, Middlesex, The Known World, The Looming Tower, and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

But my favorite non-fiction Pulitzer winner is A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power (2003). Power argues that American policy makers have been consistently slow to condemn mass atrocities or even name them as genocide (they avoid the term genocide at all costs). It is a stomach-churning but eye-opening read.

My favorite fiction winner is no less stomach-churning: Beloved by Toni Morrison. I wrote about this book not too long ago as the book I read the most number of times. It’s a difficult read for several reasons, but it’s worth the trip. “Sixty Million and More” TM

National Book Award

Some NBA favorites include Invisible Man, Life of Emily Dickinson, Sophie’s Choice, The Color Purple, White Noise, All the Pretty Horses, Waiting, Slaves in the Family, An American Requiem, Middle Passage, Them by Joyce Carol Oates, and a book I just love, Going after Cacciato by Tim O’Brien.

My favorite winner– again not a surprise--is The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1972). What I love about O’Connor (besides being easy on the eyes) is you can read her again and again and find new things to love. She never gets old to me. When I am in a reading rut – this is my go to book.

Liz:

Pulitzer

I've read a lot of these winners, and enjoyed even more of the Pulitzer finalists for each year.  From the winners list, though, two novels jump out at me: The Hours by Michael Cunningham and The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.  One novel is framed around the life of one of my favorite authors and my favorite novel by that author (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway), and the other is set in my country crush, Canada.  Both deal with family discord and coming to terms with tragedy and the errors made in the past by family.  Both contain characters involved with writing.  Both novels are the defining works by their authors.  These are books that, given the time, I would reread in the hope that their magic lingers for multiple trips through their pages.

National Book Award

A true dark horse (pun intended) winner of the NBA, last year's winner Lord of Misrule is OUTSTANDING.  I was late in reading this novel about a down-on-its-luck horse track in West Virginia because I had to read a bunch of books for work and the hardcover publisher wasn't a Random House entity.  Luckily for me, Vintage, one of the paperback lines for RH, snagged the paperback rights and I had an excuse to dip into Jaimy Gordon's terrific book under the guise of sales research.  Have I mentioned that it's a great book?  Lord of Misrule is the name of a horse, once a champion but crippled and semi-retired.  Like the horse, the track and individuals working the stables have seen better days.  With one last race, the horse and the people of the track hope for one more moment of glory. 

30 Day Book Challenge: Day 20

Day 20: The Book You've Read the Most Number of Times

Gianna:

Beloved.  First I read it because I wanted to. Then I read it because I had to.  I read it again because I really needed to. And finally…. I read it because I had just seen the film. Flannery O’Connor is my favorite writer and should Flannery ever die, Toni Morrison will move up one notch and take over that position (don’t do it, just please stop yourself from emailing). We will talk more about Toni on Day 27, or if you ever want to call me we can talk about her (or we can talk about The Closer ending, which has me very upset. Why Kyra, why?!).

Liz:

I am not a re-reader.  I often treat my books like a scrapbook history of my life--the book I was reading at a certain time and place and how its reading experience connected to that point.  Most of the books I have reread were because of school requirements.  I read The Great Gatsby a few times, as well as Moby-Dick and the loathsome Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.  Not counting the few children's books I reread for lack of fresh reading material (small town, no bookstore, too young to drive), I think the book I've read the greatest number of times is also by Toni Morrison.  Unlike Gianna's choice, though, I've read Sula more often.  I read it a couple of times for classes, but that was after I'd read it for pleasure in a period after I'd discovered Beloved and needed to read everything that Morrison had written.  I read it a couple of years after college to see if it held up for me (it did).  And I listened to the audio version on one of my road trips last year, if that counts.  It's definitely a desert island book for me even though it's short.  Sula not Morrison's best work according to the critics, but it's my favorite.