Knopf 100--Day 22

I'm in Oklahoma tonight, and previously I posted from Colorado, so officially this series has spanned three states. Also, we've made it to the 80's! The end is nigh.

81. The Secret History by Donna Tartt, originally published in 1992. I have a long history with this book. The first time I tried to read it was around 1998, when I had just graduated from college, and for whatever reason I couldn't get into it. I tried again around 2003 or so because many of my friends never shut up about it. The third time was the charm, though, and once I dove in with both feet I was hooked. I got it. And it's great. The Secret History features one of my favorite settings for a book, a school campus, and is about a clique of classics students under the spell of a professor. They grow close and their relationships extend beyond the classroom...until things spiral out of control and into dangerous territory.

82. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, originally published in 1923. We'd be remiss not to include this classic on a list of Knopf books. We're approaching its own 100th anniversary and it's a favorite of many, many people worldwide. Gibran's essays are an inspirational philosophy for life. Topics from religion to love to death to knowing who you are in the world make it a moving, personal read for all those who come to its pages. If you're looking for one book to hold up as an emblem of what makes Knopf great, The Prophet would be a good one to champion.

83. Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, originally published in 2009. Chris McDougall created magic with Born to Run, a blend of history, science, and personal narrative. What started as an exploration into why his feet hurt when he ran turned into a journey into the history of running and the human anatomical features that make us uniquely able to run great distances. The author talks to Harvard scientists, ultra-marathon runners, and an indigenous tribe in Mexico where running through the Copper Canyons is a way of life. Born to Run also helped ignite a huge barefoot running craze.

84. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, originally published in 2010. Jennifer Egan is high on my list of favorite authors. I met her once and typically was starstruck. I think I grunted a little. A Visit from the Goon Squad is an experimental novel that moves back and forth in the lives of Bennie, an aging music executive, and Sasha, his assistant. Part of the story is told as a PowerPoint presentation and it works; Egan is a genius. Goon Squad gathered up a heap of awards including a Pulitzer Prize.

An Author a Day for Thirty Days: Day 6

I confess it. I am late to the Donna Tartt party.  I think we may have mentioned her in passing on the blog,
but I'm pretty certain that we've never dedicated a entire post to her. I'm sure that Gianna will read through all of our previous posts to make sure I'm playing by the rules. It's about time she starts following this blog.

Donna Tartt

I've read two Donna Tartt novels, and the word is that she'll have a new book hitting shelves this fall. Tartt's second book, The Little Friend, was actually the one I read first, when it came out about ten years ago. Here's what I remember: creepy, and snakes. I was never scared of snakes when I was a kid, but then they became the subject of some of my recurring nightmares and I can't even read about them without horrible dreams. If your primal fears don't mind the reptiles, though, and you enjoy plucky child protagonists and a fair amount of Southern Gothic, you'll enjoy The Little Friend.

Tartt's better known book, though, is The Secret History, and many of my five friends list it as a favorite novels set in schools. Tough. I'm not starting over. I was sitting on a plane at 6:20 this morning, I have an altitude-related headache, and I am grumpy. You're stuck with Donna Tartt. (You're so lucky that you're stuck with Donna Tartt.) I love books that take place on school campuses because everything is amplified in these environments. They are insular worlds full of competition, stress, and every real world issue you could imagine, but often clouded by friendships, rivalries, and secrecy. I was an RA in college and I'm still trying to forget some of the things I saw.  Anyway, Richard is the California guy who transfers to the elite east coast liberal arts college. Richard falls in love with a group of Greek students and their professor, but the tight knit group fractures. Alcohol, sex, betrayal, murder. Sweet!
book. Crap. I just remembered that I wrote about this book in a blog post about

Read Donna Tartt.

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

(Liz)

Allow me to explain sales conference preparations.  At least for Random House, we are sent lists of the titles that will be discussed at conference and that we will then sell to stores afterward.  There is an expectation that we will sample most of the books--pretty much everything for which their is edited material available.  On top of that reading, their are books called out as priority titles for my channel--the independent bookstores around the country.  These priority titles are divvied up among the reps so that by the time we get to sales conference at least a couple of people in the room have read the book and can offer sales handles and impressions.  And then there are a few titles which we're all supposed to read.  These are the books that, in a perfect world for the publisher, would become huge bestsellers or award winners or cultural milestones (or all of the above).

Back in February, the Random House reps were buzzing about a book assigned as a top priority for the fall season.  We were all assigned to read it, and my boss, Valerie, already raved about how compelling a read it was.  I was interested, and it's part of my job to read the priority books, and I'd met the author years earlier at a bookseller meeting when I was working for BookPeople.  He was Will Schwalbe, and at the time he was the editor at Hyperion.

Will Schwalbe

I started reading The End of Your Life Book Club on a Thursday.  I read about 30% of the book, and then I emailed my boss and told her that I felt like I understood the book and could sell it, but I didn't think I could finish it.  It hit too close to home.  All day Friday I tried to work, and to start reading another book, but I was distracted.  I couldn't get Will's book out of my head.  I ended up reading it over the weekend, and then I tracked down Will's email and sent him a letter about how much his book moved me.

The End of Your Life Book Club is an incredible memoir that details the relationship between Will and his mother Mary Anne, and how the two of them shared books in a two person book group after Mary Anne was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  The first thing to know--Mary Anne was an incredible woman; she was the first female head of admissions at Harvard University, and she was a lifelong leader in championing education and literacy around the world.  She taught her children to love books, so it was a natural question for Will to ask his mother "What are you reading?" as they waited for a doctor's appointment.  Thus began their journey together through cancer and family as told through the books they shared.  From Crossing to Safety to The Hobbit to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, they ranged freely from book to book, discussing the unimaginable--the knowledge of life and death and fear and anger and faith--through the stories they shared.

Mary Anne Schwalbe passed away a couple of years ago, and then Will began to write.  From the emails we exchanged after I'd finished reading his book, he shared this: "I had all sorts of reasons for wanting to write this book. Selfishly, it provided a way to keep Mom's voice in my head for years after her death. But more than that, I also wanted to provide a springboard for people to share their stories of people they love who have died, and also to engage around topics so many people shy away from: not just death, but dying."

Mary Anne Schwalbe raised money for mobile
libraries in Afghanistan later in her life.

My mother had passed away from cancer just six months before I read The End of Your Life Book Club, in August, 2011.  She was a high school English teacher and she shared her passion for literature and education to several generations of students, including my siblings and me.  I credit Will's memoir with allowing me ways of thinking about the void left after my own mother's death, and a means of processing my own grief.  I found myself thinking about how I relate to people through books, from tumultuous teenage years when my mother and I could still agree that Beloved and The Great Gatsby were brilliant works and that Twain was a safe space for us to argue (I hated Huck Finn, she loved it).  I have found friends through book conversations--hate Confederacy of Dunces? We can hang out--and strengthened those friendships through the books we shared with each other.  "What are you reading?" is the ice breaker, and the language spoken in the world I inhabit, and chances are that if you're reading this blog, you inhabit that world too.  (Or, you know, you're looking for porn and were woefully misled in that Google search.)

Since reading The End of Your Life Book Club, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the books I wish that I could discuss with my mother.  I've been reading other books that friends have recommended in the past that have sat on my shelves for years; reading The Secret History helps me feel closer to a friend because it's a book she loved, even though I've been traveling for work quite a bit recently and haven't seen much of this friend recently.  People ask if Gianna and I hang out or talk frequently, particularly since Gianna left Random House and we weren't actually working together anymore.  And yes, Gianna and I talk (or text, or email) all the time, but frequently we're talking about the books we're reading.

Will Schwalbe and I exchanged a handful of emails in February, and then recently I contacted him again to ask permission to write about this contact on this blog.  And those emails, an exchange floating from careers to grief and loss to sleep difficulties and hotels, those emails also always contained a discussion of the books we're reading.  It's the language we speak.

I'm including the long list of books and authors Will and Mary Anne Schwalbe discussed during the two years she battled cancer.  I encourage you to read The End of Your Life Book Club, and then to keep reading.  This list is a great place to start.


Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)
W. H. Auden (“Musee de Beaux Arts,” from Collected Poems)
Russell Banks (Continental Drift)
Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson)
Ismael Beah (A Long Way Gone)
Alan Bennett (The Uncommon Reader)
The Bible
Roberto Bolano (The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer)
Geraldine Brooks (March; The People of the Book)
The Book of Common Prayer
The Buddha (The Diamond Cutter Sutra, translated by Gelong Thubten Tsultrim)
Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking)
Karen Connelly (The Lizard Cage)
Pat Conroy (The Great Santini)
Colin Cotterill
Roald Dahl (Charlie and Chocolate Factory)
Patrick Dennis (Auntie Mame)

Joan Didion (A Book of Common Prayer; The Year of Magical Thinking)
Siobhan Dowd
Dave Eggers
T.S. Eliot (Murder in the Cathedral)
Ian Fleming (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)
Ken Follett (Pillars of the Earth)
Esther Forbes (Johnny Tremain; Paul Revere and the World He Lived In)
E.M. Forster (Howards End)
Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank)
Nikki Giovanni
William Golding (Lord of the Flies)
Gunther Grass (The Tin Drum)
The Haggadah
David Halberstam (The Coldest Winter)
Susan Halpern (The Etiquette of Illness)
Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist)
Khalid Hosseini (The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns)

Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train; The Price of Salt; The Talented Mr. Ripley)
John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)
Christopher Isherwood (The Berlin Stories; Christopher and His Kind)
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat)
John Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living; Wherever You Go, There You Are; Coming to 
Our Senses)
Walter Kaiser
Mariatu Kamara (The Bite of the Mango, with Susan McClelland)
John F. Kennedy (Profiles in Courage)
Larry Kramer
Munro Leaf (The Story of Ferdinand, illustrated by Robert Lawson)
Dennis Lehane
C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia)
Jhumpa Lahiri (The Interpreter of Maladies; The Namesake; Unaccustomed Earth)
Anne Lamott (Travelling Mercies)
Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, translated by Reg Keeland)
Victor LaValle (Big Machine)
Donna Leon
Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley)
James McBride (The Color of Water)
Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)
Alistair Maclean (The Guns of Navarone; Where Eagles Dare; Force 10 from Navarone;
Puppet on a Chain)
Thomas Mann (Tonio Kroger; Death in Venice; The Magic Mountain;
Mario and the Magician; Joseph and His Brothers, translated by John E. Woods)
W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage; The Painted Veil; Collected Short Stories, including “The Verger”)
Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)
JR Moehringer (The Tender Bar)
Toni Morrison
Daniyal Mueenudeen (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders)
Alice Munro (Too Much Happiness)
Nagarjuna (Seventy Verses on Emptiness, translated by Gareth Sparham)
Irene Nemirovsky (Suite Francaise, translated by Sandra Smith)
Edith Nesbitt (The Railway Children)
John O’Hara (Appointment in Samarra)
Mary Oliver (Why I Wake Early, including “Where Does the Temple Begin,
Where Does it End?")
Frances Osborne (The Bolter)
Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
Susan Pedersen (Elinor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience)
Harold Pinter (The Caretaker)
Reynolds Price (Feasting on the Heart)
Thomas Pynchon
Arthur Ransome (Swallows and Amazons)
David R. Reuben, M.D. (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex: But Were
Afraid to Ask)
David K. Reynolds (Constructive Living)
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead; Home)
David Rohde
Tim Russert (Big Russ and Me)
David Sedaris
Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are; In the Night Kitchen)
Peter Shaffer (Five Finger Exercise)
George Bernard Shaw (Saint Joan)
Bernie Siegel, M.D. (Love, Medicine and Miracles)
Alexander McCall Smith (The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: The Miracle of Speedy
Motors)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)
Natsume Soseki (Kokoro, translated by Edwin McCelland)
Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
Edward Steichen (The Family of Man, prologue by Carl Sandburg)
Wallace Stevens
Lydia Stone (Pink Donkey Brown, illustrated by Mary E. Dwyer)
Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge)
Josephine Tey (Brat Farrar)
Michael Thomas (Man Gone Down)
Mary Tileston (Daily Strength for Daily Needs)
Colm Toibin (The Story of the Night; The Blackwater Lightship; The Master;
Brooklyn)
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings)
William Trevor (Felicia’s Journey)
John Updike (Couples, My Father’s Tears)
Liv Ullmann
Marina Vaizey
Sheila Weller (Girls Like Us)
Elie Wiesel (Night)
Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire)
P.G. Wodehouse
Geoffrey Wolff (The Duke of Deception)
Herman Wouk (Marjorie Morningstar)

School Reading

(Liz) Rarely do I have trouble getting into a book.  I'm the opposite of ADD with my reading; I don't drift off, and I devour almost everything I begin.  But then occasionally there's the book that doesn't click and I end up pushing it to the back of the pile for another day.  One such book is The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  EVERYONE loves this novel.  My closest friends.  My colleagues.  Go into a bookstore and ask.  They will tell you it's great.  So what the hell's wrong with me?

Last weekend I gave a book presentation to a parents group at St. Thomas High School in Houston.  It's an all boys Catholic school, and I was the special guest for the meeting that coincided with Homecoming and the school's annual book fair.  Had I known it was Homecoming I would have worn a corsage.  I've given presentations at several private schools and find myself impressed by the differences between my high school (fall carnival involves mazes of cardboard boxes taped together) and these schools (fall festival involves mechanical bulls).  Their school: future Hall of Famer Craig Biggio is the baseball coach.  My school: my basketball coach taught my biology class, but we had the seventh period class and the school could only afford six class sets of dissection materials, so I never had to hack into critters.

You're sending your kid to
an elite private school! Congrats!
Either he's going to break down or
die! Bring on Harvard!

After my presentation, I started thinking about school themes in books and movies.  I'm a sucker for a Dead Poets Society and School Ties.  Somehow poetry and Latin are far less tedious in film form.  And so I decided to give The Secret History another try.  This time, finally, after years of abortive attempts, the book clicked for me.  It's great.  So here's a quick list, by no means complete, of some of my favorite novels set in the fascinating, disturbing world of the elite education institutions.  Some common trends: the new kid/new teacher is always the focal point, never join the exclusive organization because you'll end up involved in scandal (and possibly murder), language classes are torturous, and the charismatic artists and geniuses are always trouble.  In short, should you find yourself in private school, find the Gianna and stick close to her.  She'll moon you, but you won't end up pregnant, plotting to kill anyone, or reciting poetry in the woods.


The Secret History.  Let's start with the book it took me so long to discover.  Richard, the average guy from California, transfers to a small, liberal arts college in Vermont. Once there, he ingratiates himself with the elitist group of five students and their teacher who are obsessed with the study of Greek.  The idyllic life turns Greek tragedy, though, as a night of bacchanalian frolicking starts them down the slippery slope to murder.  It's smart, dark, and worth all of the bookseller love.  I haven't finished it yet, so don't tell me what happens, 'kay?

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.  Like your books too smart and clever for their own good?  Most of the time, aggressively clever stylizing in books irritates me, but this one is the exception.  The protagonist, Blue Van Meer, is a wise-cracking master of all things literary and cultural, and Pessl's first novel uses parenthetical asides masterfully (and in almost every sentence).  Blue enrolls in the elite St. Gallway School and connects to the popular kids (the "Bluebloods") and their favorite teacher.  A murder or two later, though, and Blue is in the midst of her own nightmare.  Special Topics was one of those books I couldn't quit talking about when it came out.  Lots of fun.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles.  It's pretty much required reading, right?  But I admit that I haven't read it since I was in high school and don't remember much beyond the charismatic Phineas (is that right?) and the quiet intellectual Gene.  They are attending the ubiquitous all boys prep school in New England, it's World War II, and everything changes after one summer.  Sure, your kids will get into the Ivy League if they attend these prep schools, but there's also the chance that they'll end up suffering or dying.  Is it worth it?

Cracks by Sheila Kohler.  New girl?  Check.  Private school?  Check.  Popular teacher/exclusive club?  Check.  Dark side of adolescence?  You betcha.  Cracks deals with the adult members of a girls' school swim team returning to their alma mater for a weekend when the school attempts to raise some money by rekindling their school girl nostalgia.  They instead are confronted with the kids they were, from cliques to swim meets to betrayal and darkness.  This is a great read and probably off most radars.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark.  Dead Poets Society owes quite a bit to Miss Jean Brodie.  Welcome to the private girls school in Scotland, and meet Miss Brodie.  She's the woman with the unorthodox teaching methods who takes the best students under her wing.  She's a woman who isn't afraid to live (she has her romantic liaisons) and isn't afraid to bring out the best in "her" girls, but one of them will betray her.  Great book, and it's Muriel Spark, who's a great writer.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.  Last year's Booker Prize Winner was on our best of the year lists and quickly found its place among my favorite books.  It's also a book about school chums, the philosophical genius kid who's new, and the dark secrets that shake their world years later.  Required reading, and at about 150 pages, it's required reading that doubles as a nice way to spend an evening or weekend.

Others?  What am I missing?  It just occurred to me that these books would make a great series for reading groups.