Knopf 100--Day 26: This Is It! We Hit 100!

Whoa! We've made it to the end! I'll post the complete list tomorrow, but here are the last four picks of our Knopf 100, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Alfred A. Knopf. Despite Gianna's habit of choosing books I'd already selected, we're concluding this list knowing that there are pooty loads of excellent books that could have made this list. It's been a challenge, an adventure, and a daunting task.

97. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, originally published in 1993. When we first discussed this project, Gianna and I both immediately thought about Written on the Body as a perfect pick...and then proceeded not to pick it for 25 days for fear of stepping on each other's toes. This is a novel with a narrator who is never named nor assigned a gender. The narrator is caught up in an intense love affair with a married woman, and the book weaves around and within that relationship. Winterson's fluid wordplay makes it a remarkable read, but her gender play makes Written on the Body a masterpiece. We both love this book fiercely.

98. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, originally published in 2013. Jhumpa Lahiri has written four published books thus far (the fifth comes out in the spring of 2016), all of which have been terrific. She is a powerful and thoughtful writer whose work explores the idea of being an outsider within the society surrounding her characters. In The Lowland, a National Book Award and Man Booker Prize finalist, two brothers lead totally different lives. One finds love but is a revolutionary, stirring up trouble in the turbulent 60's. The other is the obedient son, immigrating to America. Between them, though, is the woman they both love, who is haunted by her past.

99. The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham, originally published in 2012. It kills me that The News from Spain isn't better known. If you take one "I've never even heard of that" book away from this list, let it be this one. This is a collection of seven short stories all relating to the theme of love--parent and child, husband and wife, friends, caregivers. All seven stories are titled "The News from Spain," and together they perform like a literary concert around the love theme. One that sticks in my memory involves a cantankerous old woman sparring with her in-home caretaker. Her hurts from the past are revealed, but also the love between two people thrust into a relationship because of a job. It's tender and heartbreaking, and Wickersham's writing is on a level with masters like Alice Munro.

100. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, originally published in 2014. How could I not include Station Eleven when I raved about it for months last year? Truth be told, I'd been holding it for the end for awhile, but then in the process of creating these posts and looking for books to feature, it had slipped my mind. Fortunately a friend following the blog reminded me yesterday. I would have hated myself if it had been excluded. Station Eleven is the novel that proves a book can be "literary" without being dull, that it can be "post-apocalyptic" within being a novel of despair. There are several narrative threads blending together in this book, all in some way connected to an actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear. That same night, a mutant flu virus wipes out most of the world's population. Much of the book is set twenty years down the line from that point and follows a troupe of traveling performers. They move from settlement to settlement playing orchestral music and performing Shakespeare's plays, and their motto is "because survival is insufficient." I love that Emily St. John Mandel manages to talk about loss and all the things we take for granted in our modern lives, but also offers hope that culture--art, music, theater, words--live on and are what makes us human. On that note, this is an ideal book to round out our list.

Days of Love...and Lack Thereof, Day 7

Gianna:


Written on the Body

You want sexy, we’ll give you sexy. If there is one thing you know about me and Liz…we know sexy. [Actually, since I wrote about bestiality yesterday, I'm not claiming any expertise on this subject.] We also know lazy [now that is true], so for today’s romantic valentine we offer a previous snippet on a book we both love, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson

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. It’s also heartbreaking, so gentlemen get your hankies out. [Is that what the boys are calling them these days?]

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 just need a quick fix of something less ordinary. [Yep, we all know that last sentence is a euphemism, right?]

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.

Liz:

You know how some books and movies take classic Shakespeare and riff on the plots, like Shakespeare in Love and Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead?  Let's talk about John Fowles and The Collector. This novel takes characters based on those in The Tempest, specifically Caliban and Miranda.  A deranged man goes from collecting butterflies to, well, collecting the woman of his dreams, his Miranda.  He is a Caliban--brutal, incapable of empathy, and monstrous.  He reduces his victim to the equivalent of a pin-up through horrifying psychological abuse.  The Collector is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read.  Naturally I loved it.

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.