New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 23

Day 23: A Book You've Wanted to Read for a Long Time but Haven't

Gianna:

There are many books that I have never read. Some of those books I have no desire to read, others I am somewhat ashamed that I haven’t read, and one of the books below, Liz is terribly ashamed that I haven’t read. 

Giant by Edna Ferber goes on top of my list. Every time I make a trip out to west Texas I regret not having read this novel, but until I actually read it, I refuse to see the film…and I really want to see the film. Maybe this summer?

 

Collected Stories by William Faulkner. I have read a handful of Faulkner novels, but just a few well-known stories, which are included in anthologies ("A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning" for example).

Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter.  This has been reviewed as an incredibly well researched and exhaustive history through segregation and integration in Birmingham.

Hollywood by Gore Vidal. Truth be told I have only read two Vidal books, Point to Point Navigation (memoir) and Selected Essays. So now you’re thinking that Hollywood is a strange novel to choose over his numerous other works of fiction, including Lincoln. Well, to that I say, “Why so judgy?”

No Logo by Naomi Klein.  This book ties branding with globalization and how corporations began targeting younger markets to earn the title of cool. Someone recommended this book to me after a discussion on the novel Jennifer Government, which shares many of the same topics of No Logo. 

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by William Lee Adams. I suppose this is the book I am most embarrassed that I haven’t read. I have no excuse, let's move on. [No excuse.]

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. I have only read a few books on Vietnam, (Bright and Shining Lie, Dispatches, and Rumor of War) and I was told this is the book to read on the subject.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion. I have read Miami, and The White Album, but California in the 1960’s has long been a fascination with me. Of course the collected book of essays, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, includes all of the above and more essays, so this is actually the book to get. 

Tana French – I have never read a Tana French novel!

And that’s it, that’s my list. Nothing missing at all. I know, except Lonesome Dove. I get it, I get it. Get off my back, Liz!  I have looked through this gorgeous Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove, that counts for something. [You don't deserve to appreciate this book until you read the masterpiece. Humph.]

Liz:

I love these covers

There are books that I want to read but haven't yet, and there are books that people seem shocked that I haven't read but I have no motivation to read. I've never read the Harry Potter series. That's most likely not going to change. As for books I do want to read, here's a sampling:

Clarice Lispector's novels. These have been on my list for a long time, and the new covers from New Directions are cool. I don't have much of an excuse--Agua Viva is only 88 pages long--but I keep moving books higher in my pile. Someday....

I've never read Catch 22. I feel like I should. Growing up, I read mostly American Lit since that's what my mother taught, and then in college, feeling like I needed to balance out, I took mostly British Lit classes. Somehow a lot of the 20th Century American Lit classics have slipped through. I only read Slaughterhouse Five last year. I'm catching up.

George Orwell--never read him. I know that everyone reads 1984 or Animal Farm in school, but my school was in the backwoods and had a limited budget, so there were definite holes in our curriculum.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. I think this is the one that's going to invoke my friends' rage. At least I've read Lonesome Dove, though. It's not like I've been selling a book on the making of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and haven't read the source material, right?

Best of 2011 Countdown: #2

Silver medalists!  We're so close to #1 that Gianna might pee herself in anticipation.  Too much information?

Gianna:

Blue Nights
Joan Didion
Knopf

After a devastating personal loss earlier this year, I had little intention of reading Blue Nights. I knew that this book would be the last thing I needed. But after a particularly bad night thinking of the friend I lost--and then thinking as I so often do, about her mother--I opened the first pages where I read, “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.” This would be the first of many sentences that took my breath away.

I am a slow reader; this book, which is under 200 pages, took me nearly a week to read. It was too much for me at times. In fact I set it down at least twice not intending to pick it up again. Yet each day I would go back to it, needing it, maybe on some level knowing that like The Year of Magical Thinking, this would be a book I would need and think about often.

Raw, direct and powerful, Blue Nights reads like Didion is dreaming. She is offering us slices of the most important parts of her life; a real gift considering she claims writing is no longer easy for her. I do hope it has offered her some sense of solace though, as I know it has, on some level given me some.

Simply the best non fiction book I have read this year, from any publisher. 


Liz:


Swamplandia!
Karen Russell
Knopf


There were two novels published in 2011 that I couldn't shut up about--Swamplandia! and my pick for #1 (all shall be revealed tomorrow).  When Gianna and I started this countdown a month ago, I made a spreadsheet of my favorite books, ranked in order, and in the past 30 days I've changed the book in the #1 spot at least eight different times.  I am therefore considering Swamplandia! as #1-A in my mind.  I think Karen Russell's novel is one of the finest I've ever read.

Gianna wrote about Swamplandia! yesterday, and this book represents the closest that our Top 30 lists came to duplicated book and rank.  This is a book that spoke to me in the way that The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao did a few years ago...and that book won the Pulitzer.  It's the story of an American family, and perhaps representative of the times in which we live, the dissolution of that family.  It's a coming-of-age story, a loss of innocence story, a survival story.  And it's set on a tourist trap alligator wrestling park.


When the alligator-wrestling matriarch of the Bigtree clan dies, her 12 year-old daughter Ava attempts to pick up the slack and wrestle the reptiles.  What's excited about watching a voluptuous adult wrestle gators is disturbing when swapped with a kid, and the park--and Bigtree family is sent reeling financially and emotionally.  Ava's father disappears, her older brother Kiwi runs off to work for the rival theme park on the highway, and her sister starts dating a ghost for lack of actual suitors in the swamps of the Everglades.  Ava then goes on her own odyssey with the Birdman.  This is a book full of quirky characters and scenes, but don't be fooled--this is a serious literary novel that is often heartbreaking.  

Best of 2011 Countdown: #11

Home stretch! Today we have a couple of great memoirs.

Gianna:

Chinaberry Sidewalks
Rodney Crowell
Knopf

Several musicians wrote books this year, and Random House was lucky enough to publish a few of the best (Joe Henry’s Lime Creek was on my top 30 and Josh Ritter’s novel is a favorite as well). What separates Crowell’s biography from so many others is that he worked on it for about a decade and wrote every word himself. Thoughtful and authentic, two words not normally associated with music memoirs, but Crowell digs deeper.

His book is more along the lines of The Liars Club or even All Over but the Shoutin’ (and clear influence from Kardashian Konfidential). This memoir is funny, sweet, dark, and in parts quite sad. He is the son of an alcoholic father and an epileptic, Pentecostal mother who also had a temper. Let's just say…there were fights in that house.  You will in fact get a good sense of his young life when he recalls a story of having to break up his parents New Year's party when gunfire broke out.   It is where the saying “It's not New Year's until there is gunfire” comes from! Well that should be a saying.

It's all here in this incredibly well-written memoir; love, sex, violence, music, drinking, poverty, more music, and then a little more music on top. If you’re like me (if you are, try to change) you’ll hope Rodney has another book on the way.

Visit his website to see an interview with Mary Karr:

http://rodneycrowell.com/

Liz:

Blue Nights

Joan Didion

Knopf

Nothing says "Happy Holidays!" like...a memoir about a woman coping with the death of her daughter.  Blue Nights, however, is written by Joan Didion, literary giant.  Following her memoir about the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion manages to keep going only to once again find herself immersed in tragedy months later when her daughter Quintana passes away.  

Didion's grief is raw, but she intersperses her tough moments with a striking elegy to her daughter's life, from growing up in Malibu to her life as an adult woman, newly married.  Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne were friends with Vanessa Redgrave, and their daughter Quintana was a friend of Natasha Richardson.  Redgrave's own loss of her daughter (Natasha Richardson died after a skiing accident) weaves into Didion's story; Vanessa Redgrave actually played Didion in the Broadway show of The Year of Magical Thinking.  

I am not a parent.  Zorro the cat is already too much responsibility for me.  I have, however, recently experienced the loss of a family member.  To read Joan Didion's memoirs about grief is to find one's own sorrow and pain and hope and strength.  Death is the universal experience; Joan Didion gives a voice to ones still living.