New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 10

Day 10: Favorite Classic Book

Gianna:

Gianna has NOT read this!

Another impossible question, so I will modify it. Instead of choosing a favorite classic, and as everyone knows, mine is Lonesome Dove, I have decided to choose a classic or two that I really love but that I have neglected to write about on this silly little blog. Okay, that’s unfair…this crappy little blog. 

The Ellen and Portia of their day

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (I call her Gerts or Gertie) is the type of book I adore because it puts you on the path to a zillion other things. You can’t read this book, which features a cat fight between Matisse and Picasso, without wanting to know more those clowns, or of course art in general. I hadn’t read Hemingway until I read Alice B., and everyone should read at least one Hemingway novel (although his short stories are remarkable).  [One can't properly hate Hemingway until one reads him.] On the down side, after reading Alice you may think, “Why bother going to Paris now? All the good shit already happened."  And that may be true. 

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1936).  I don’t know if young people read this or not anymore; I hope so. [I'm younger than Gianna and I've read it. That counts, right? I don't know why old people are so resistant to reading Lonesome Dove.] As Roosevelt’s New Deal programs began making their way to the poorest Americans during the height of the depression, Agee and Evans traveled the South on a magazine assignment. They photographed and interviewed white sharecroppers, focusing mainly on three desperately poor families.

As I look at these photographs now, I think of the current conversation of government assistance, and I am reminded of how important not only this book is, but how important journalism can be. I know this book has a bit of controversy surrounding it--the truth being that some of these photographs may have been posed--but for me it hasn’t changed my affection for it at all. 

Liz:

I love Hemingway so much. Like, there's the man and he goes fishing and he fights a marlin and talks endlessly about DiMaggio--and I just love the Yankees too--and then the sharks eat the marlin before the man can bring it to shore, and what the hell happened to the afternoon of my life that I lost reading this book?*

I love Mark Twain so much.  Like, there's a boy with ADHD who plays with the life of a slave while running away from home, and it's supposed to be the greatest book in American literature and really funny, but mostly it's just silly and rather abusive and kinda racist.*

I love Norman Mailer so much.  It's so awesome the way that he makes anal sex sound like so much fun for the woman being raped.  But who wouldn't want to be buggered by a guy who's already murdered his wife?*

Yeah, I'm going with Virginia Woolf for this one.  

*The Old Man and the Sea, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, An American Dream

Days of Love...and Lack Thereof, Day 12

Gianna:

In Evening by Susan Minot, sixty-five year old Ann Grant only has weeks to live. Surrounded by family, she begins to talk about her life, crisscrossing the years from her childhood, to her three unsatisfactory marriages, to the death of her son.

Susan Minot

She is perceived by friends to be extraordinarily private, in complete control of her life, and perhaps even a little cold. Ann begins to describe a passionate (but ultimately doomed) affair when she was twenty-five, a weekend that ends in tragedy and changes her life forever yet she considers these to be the happiest of her life and where she found the only true love she has known.

This is my favorite of Minot’s books; it is in my opinion the most complete work of fiction she has done to date. Speaking of which, this woman needs to write another book. It’s been forever since her short novel Rapture. 

Liz:

If I were to name my all time favorite books--and I'm sure that I have somewhere in this blog in the last six months, I would always, always pick Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway in the top tier.  I don't know why, exactly, but this book spoke to me. It's beautifully written, and it's also full of longing and what-might-have-beens.  I love this book, but it is most definitely not a love story in the traditional sense.

I also liked the movie version
of Mrs. Dalloway. 

Clarissa Dalloway is going to throw a party, and she's going to buy the flowers herself.  She spends the day planning her party and reminiscing about the young woman she once was and the loves of her life that she turned from in order to marry the steadier Richard Dalloway.  She chose the businessman over the artist, over the unconventional girl/girl relationship.  As she plans her party, Clarissa begins to believe that a failed party will signal the failure of her life, and that perhaps she should end it.

Interwoven with Clarissa's day is one for Septimus, a World War I veteran who cannot shake the post-traumatic stress he developed when he saw his friend killed, when he saw hundreds of soldiers die in the trenches.  Septimus is facing commitment, and he too faces his own mortality.

Mrs. Dalloway is an amazing book.  I love this book.  Nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" like a book about contemplated suicides and fractured lives, right?

30 More Days Book Challenge: Day 24

Day 24: The Books We Wish We'd Written

Gianna:

Our pal Emily Bruce suggested a few questions for our challenge and this one is my favorite.

I guess if you wanted to be a gazillionaire you would have wanted to write Harry Potter or Twilight. [Wait, Gianna didn't write Twilight? But she's all about the teen angst and bloodsucking.  And unrequited love.  For the record, Gianna's love for me is quite unrequited.] If you wanted critical attention and to be on the cover of Time Magazine you may say Franzen’s Freedom and if you wanted to write a book that people would be reading for generations you may say War and Peace or The Cat in the Hat.

My answer came very quickly, though it offers none of the above (but who knows, maybe people will be reading it for generations…). [Are you suggesting that this blog doesn't generate bestsellers out of thin air?] The book I wish I could have written is Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. It is everything I love in a novel. It is intense, passionate, lyrical, fresh, and doesn’t have a sliver of cliché. It is the book I go to when I have a broken heart. [I send her there often.  Almost nightly.] It is the book I go to when I just need a quick fix of something less ordinary.

Written on the Body is the story of an affair between a married woman and an unnamed narrator. We don’t know if the narrator is male or female, but in the end it does not really matter. The book is a gorgeous and original meditation on love.

As far as first lines go, this has a pretty good one:

Why is the measure of love loss?

Winterson has a passage in here about death that I think about often these days:

Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you’re not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?

If you are like me and the thought of reading a love story has always made you cringe a bit, give this a read. This one sneaks up on you. You don’t realize it until you’ve finished, but you’ve just read a very sexy, beautiful, simple, love story. [I too love this book.  LOVE IT.]

One more taste:

You said ‘I love you.’ Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? ‘I love you’ is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

Liz:

Gianna and I were talking earlier today and I mentioned how much I loved Written on the Body too.  Great book.  I very well might have picked it, but for the sake of variety I'm going to pick A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf.  Never has someone so eloquently articulated the struggles of women trying to forge lives as writers (and as professionals in general).  Every single time that someone argues that women don't write great literature, I want to point them to this book as explanation and contradiction.  It is beautifully written, it is inspirational, and it is passionate.  Why aren't there more women in the canon?  They're cooking your fucking grits and squirting out kids, you assholes.  Give her money and a room of her own and she'll rule the world.  Why isn't there a woman Shakespeare?  Woolf imagines Shakespeare's equally talented sister, Judith, and makes the argument for her life. 

Woolf, unlike me, is professional and succinct, and she changed the world.  If I were going to write a book, I'd write a semi-fictional story about my Hideous Aunt Tub of Lard who lives in a shack in the woods and has dogs that commit suicide in order to escape her company.  And if I were going to write a second book, I'd write a photo essay about Zorro's greatest poses.  But my third book would be A Room of One's Own.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day 11

Day 11: A Book by Your Favorite Author

Gianna:

 

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

  

It's important to know who your friends are. It's also important to know who your friends may not be before you even bother to try. So if someone says, "Oh, I don't like short stories," I think, "Well maybe they just haven't read a good one...or are even embarrassed to say they haven't read any." Now if someone says "I don't like Flannery O'Connor," I know right off that I won't be friends with that person. Lovers? Yeah, probably. But we will not be friends. I have pretty high standards (very low morals). This concludes my lesson in pre-judging people and before you ask...yes it's worked pretty well for me. I have two friends.[I'm her friend!  Not her lover.  I actually have a similar book/friend test, but it's a negative correlation: my close friends are the ones who loathe Confederacy of Dunces.  Unlike Gianna, though, I won't be sleeping with Dunce lovers either.  And yes, I'm still single.]

Liz

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Yeah, I'm one of those people.  I'm fascinated by her life, and I love her writing, and she's one of the few authors I'll reread.  I know there are better reviewed, more academically revered works by Woolf, but Mrs. Dalloway is the book that sings to me, and it's the basis for one of my other favorite books, Michael Cunningham's The Hours.  Hell, I even like the movie version of Mrs. Dalloway.  There's a strong chance that I'll some day have a cat named either Clarissa or Septimus.  If I won the lottery, the first thing I'd do is purchase a signed first edition of Mrs. Dalloway.  As for Virginia Woolf, I admire her talent and her courage.  And she signed books with a purple-inked pen.  I love the purple.