New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 13

Day 13: Your Favorite Writer

Gianna:

My favorite writer is Flannery O’Connor, but I’ve written about her too many times on this blog. In fact, her estate in Milledgeville has asked me to stop. [I'm keeping all of our cease and desist letters in a large file.]

Miranda July

Instead, I thought this was a great excuse to write about my favorite writer this very minute, Miranda July.  She’s a genius, a creative monster, and a tour de force. She’s filmmaker, a writer, and an artist. It’s actually pretty sickening. What I love about her, well one of the many things I love about her, is that she takes art very seriously, even when she’s being absurd. She’s someone you can’t imagine ever not being creative. She’s inspiring. 

From July's Website 

Geez, now after all that I hope you’ll give her a chance. She’s written and directed two films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (starring John Hawks, yea, I love him too) and The Future. I highly recommend both films.

It Chooses You

Now, since this is a book blog, let's get to her books. She published a fantastic collection of short stories called, No One Belongs Here More Than You. It’s just breathtaking, and is in my top 50 books of all time. No Liz, we shouldn’t do a month long blog listing our favorite books in order. No. [Too late. I'll remind you repeatedly that it's your idea, too.]  

She wants to be my friend

Last year she published a book, and this is going to sound weird, but it's related to her film The Future, but she called up people who were advertising items for sale in the local The PennySaver newspaper, and asked if she could interview them. I know, it sounds trite, but these interviews, these stories are, sure, at times funny, but mostly just really moving. Anyway, it’s called It Chooses You.

One last thing about Miranda: please check out her website. It's really fantastic and she has lots of cool things including video of some of the folks she met while writing It Chooses You, and she answers readers' mail. [Really? Will she answer my questions? Like, why doesn't Gianna appreciate my singing?]

If  you like Karen Russell, George Saunders, Jennifer Egan, Chris Adrian, Sheila Heti, or Aimee Bender, Miranda July is for you. 

Rabih Alameddine

Liz:

Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell.  None of these people are surprises really. We do seem to write about this topic quite a bit. That's fine. One should never shy from praising wonderful books. Still, for the sake of variety, I am going to pick the guy I most wish would complete a new book.

Rabih Alameddine wrote a book that held me in awe when I read it--The Hakawati. I couldn't shut up about it. It's been five years and I am still obsessed.  I love books that weave together layers of stories, and The Hakawati (which is Arabic for storyteller) manages to blend more threads together than any other novel I've read.  It's the story of a man returning to Lebanon to be with his dying father and his family.  It's the story of a land told through myth and history and culture, told through the hakawatis who entertain listeners everyday in the tea houses of Beirut.  It's Arabian Nights, and jinns, and princes, and Scheherazade. It's an adventure story, a drama centered around the aerial battles of the Beirut pigeon teams, a war story in a land of religious turmoil, a romance, a comedy, a tragedy.  But like my favorite books, The Hakawati isn't just a feat of literary magic.  It has a soul, and Alameddine treats history, country, and characters with compassion.

I, the Divine is divine.

But let's go back. Before I read The Hakawati, and before I was a Random House rep charged with selling it, I was a bookseller and stumbled upon a book called I, the Divine.  I'd never heard of the author, but the premise sounded interesting and I gave it a shot. The main character here is Sarah. This is a novel, the story of Sarah's life, as told through her attempts to write her memoir. The problem, though, is that Sarah never manages to get through the first chapter of her book, so through her false starts we slowly discover her whole life. It's innovative and moving.  (The title is a reference to the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt, what Sarah the protagonist's grandfather used to call her.) After I'd read and fallen for The Hakawati, it dawned on me that the author's name was familiar, and I realized that Rabih Alameddine had also written I, the Divine.

Alameddine has written other books too--Koolaids, his first novel, and a collection of short stories called The Perv. But four titles isn't enough for my obsession. My question is, Rabih Alameddine, what are you writing for me now? I'm not known for my patience.  I can be whiny.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day 27

Day 27: Favorite Fiction Book

Gianna:

In my quest not to repeat, I won’t pick O’Connor or Toni Morrison here (but forced to pick I would have to say that Beloved is my favorite novel; we will stretch the meaning of this question as always). Too many great books to really pick, so I again thought of something I couldn’t let go of in recent memory.  I came up with Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply. I still get a bit giddy when I get to talk about this book. It is so delicious, beginning to end, that it makes me sad that I will never get to read it again for the first time. It is a book that at the end you say “son of a bitch!” and then if you are anything like me, you start backtracking. In a word, the novel is about identity, but it is oh so…chilling. Here are the first few lines, and if you can move on with your life without wanting to read more…well…I don’t know if Liz wants to be friends with you.  [In general I probably don't want to be friends with you, but I do love this book too.]

We are on our way to the hospital, Ryan’s father says.

Listen to me, Son:

You are not going to bleed to death.

Ryan is still aware enough that his father’s words come in through the edges, like sunlight on the borders of a window shade. His eyes are shut tight and his body is shaking and he is trying to hold up his left arm, to keep it elevated. We are on our way to the hospital, his father says, and Ryan’s teeth are chattering, he clenches and unclenches them, and a series of wavering colored lights – greens, indigos – plays along the surface of his closed eyelids.

On he seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

The hand weighs less than a pound. The nails are trimmed and there are calluses on the tips of the fingers from guitar playing. The skin is now bluish in color.

This is about three A.M. on a Thursday morning in May in rural Michigan. Ryan doesn’t have any idea how far away the hospital might be but he repeats with his father we are on the way to the hospital we are on the way to the hospital and he wants to believe so badly that it’s true, that it’s not just one of those things that you tell people to keep them calm. But he’s not sure. Gazing out all he can see is the night trees leaning over the road, the car pursuing its pool of headlight, and darkness, no towns, no buildings ahead, darkness, road, moon.

So yeah….Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon is my favorite fiction book of 2009 and certainly makes the list of all time.

Liz:

Listen. Allow me to be your god.  Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining.  Let me tell you a story.

As I read the opening lines of The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine I knew I would be in the assured hands of a master storyteller, and I knew that this novel would hold a special spot among the many great books I've read.  "Hakawati" means storyteller, the traditional storyteller who, like Scheherazade, spins stories ending with a cliff hanger each day to lure back listeners, and Alameddine's book is a splendid weaving together of multiple tales and the history of a modern Lebanese family.  Here are tales of the Arabian Nights and genies and great warriors and cunning princesses given a modern flavor as they relate to the story of a young man returning to his native Beirut to help with his dying father.  Here are stories of the wars in Lebanon and the great pigeon wars that take place over the buildings of Beirut and of princes and demons and magic carpets.  I was mesmerized.

I had really just started at Random House when I read The Hakawati, with the company only about a year.  I had stumbled across Rabih Alameddine's earlier novel, I, the Divine years earlier when I was a bookseller and loved it (that book is the story of a woman's life told through her multiple attempts to write her autobiography but she only ever writes the first chapter), so when I learned that Knopf would publish his new novel I dove right in.  The Hakawati was my favorite book I read that year, one of my desert island book picks, and the book that helped me realize what the most rewarding part of my job of a sales rep is.  I have the power to discover incredible books and then spread that love to the right booksellers.  The pleasure of working with the books I most love makes my job, for all of the frustration I sometimes feel, magical.  Booksellers at BookPeople in Austin, Brazos Bookstore in Houston, and Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi, in particular, all shared my passion for The Hakawati, and through their efforts numerous readers across my territory discovered themselves the genius of The Hakawati.