New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 9

Day 9: What book did we surprise ourselves by loving?

Gianna:

I am sure that there were many books that I liked more than I thought I would. In my former job I was often assigned books to read and sometimes lacked enthusiasm for books I thought “weren’t my thing.”  Three or four books come to mind right away: Welcome to Utopia by Karen Valby (I thought small town America, who cares?), Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajib Chandrasekaran. I thought it was going to be dry and difficult to get through. Very, very wrong.

Ah, I had no intention (and actually very little desire) to read American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. I was in fact told by my manager at RH that I had to read it due to the fact it was loosely based on Laura Bush and unless I planned on moving my ass out of Texas, the book was a priority for me. Ok, so that is embellished, she just told me to read it.  So I did...in fact, I read it in one sitting. It had just enough literary chops and gossip to pique my interest. 

The book that took me by the most surprise though, was Patti Smith’s absolutely amazing memoir, Just Kids.  I know, ridiculous, but the thing is, I really don’t care for her music and I didn’t think the book would be of any interest to me.  I picked it up on the way home from my dear friend’s funeral, read the first few pages and had to put it down.  It took me about two weeks to finish because of the timing, but it became an instant favorite, and I cannot wait for her next book. 

Liz:

I'm struggling a bit with this topic.  I do have to read a bunch of books that assigned for work, and sometimes these books surprise me because I love them more than I expected. Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, for example, was much better than I'd anticipated for a post-9/11 novel about cricket, written by a guy I'd never heard of before. I hope that I'm pretty neutral about books before opening them (except for Twilight).

One book that definitely surprised me was Look at Me by Jennifer Egan. I'd never heard of Jennifer Egan before this book was nominated for the National Book Award. If I recall, it was a year with several nominees I didn't know, and I confess that for some reason I was confusing Egan with Susan Isaacs (the woman who wrote Shining Through). Don't ask me; my brain does odd things sometimes. I just looked it up, and the 2001 NBA nominees introduced me to Dan Chaon and Susan Straight too; the other finalist was Louise Erdrich, and the winner was Jonathan Franzen for The Corrections. Anyway, I couldn't imagine how the author of a book that was turned into a movie starring Melanie Griffith could be an NBA finalist (because, as I said, I thought she was Susan Isaacs).  I really went in thinking that Look at Me would be the biggest travesty in awards nominating history.

I'm an idiot sometimes. Look at Me remains one of my favorite books, and Jennifer Egan is one of my favorite authors (and now a Pulitzer Prize winner). I love this book so much that I'm willing to guarantee that you'll like it too. If you hate it, tell us, and Gianna will bake you cookies as an apology for my confidence. [Gianna will not bake you cookies.]

New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 8

Today we are writing about overrated books.

Gianna:

 Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Oh, and also anything else by Jonathan Franzen.

well...

LaMorte out!

Liz:

Okay then. I'm sitting in an airport and have 23 minutes of battery life on my laptop, so let's see.  Overrated: The Catcher in the Rye. Ooh, and I hated Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.  And I panned Yellow Birds a couple of weeks ago.  I hate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and also pretty much all the Mark Twain I've ever read.  See, something like this is tough for me because I hold grudges against books (and people....many, many people).  Ooh, here's a crappy one that won a major award.  Let's go with this:

Hated it.

New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 7

Day 7--Most Underrated Book

As usual I am not going to follow the rules to the letter. Instead of offering a book that is underrated, I am going to choose an author. I know, scandalous.

If you Google Twilight + novel, you will get page after page, well probably over one hundred pages, of the Stephanie Meyer series (and if you’re lucky a steamy shot of Jacob!). Persevere my friends; click your asses off for another few hundred pages and you will be introduced to Twilight by William Gay. He had none of the Twilight movie connections, never had girls screaming over him, fans didn’t flock in the thousands to William Gay’s Twilight convention, but on the bright side (as if that wasn’t the bright side), William Gay never urinated on the floor of an airport terminal.

William Gay

William Gay was a rare thing, truly. He wrote southern gothic fiction set almost exclusively in the 1950’s. His books are unsettling, violent, creepy, and of course darkly funny. To me though, his writing is mostly just beautiful.

The good Twilight

We do too many lists on this blog [no we don't], so it seems like a good idea to write you a list of reasons to love William Gay.

1. He didn’t have a goddamn MFA; he was self-taught. [Um...language!]
2. He didn’t publish until he was in his mid-fifties. He was rejected for over thirty years by my count. Thirty odd years of rejection but he continued to write because this son of a bitch was a writer. [Your profanity makes unicorns cry.]
3. He lived in a honest to god log cabin.  [My aunt lives in a portable storage building and no one's calling her a genius.]
4. He was William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Flannery O’Connor all rolled into one. He was the real deal.



Gianna's favorite 

5. He was a painter, a musician, and an unassuming literary genius. And if you walked up to him to say hello, he’d say hello right back to you. [Which is more than I would do.]

When Gay died last year at the age of 70, it just seemed so young, and too soon. We only have a few books from him, and it's just not enough. He is a rare thing though; he wrote books that can be read over and over. Classics really. At least we have that.  The Long Home (1999), Provinces of Night (2000), I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down (2002), Twilight (2006), and Wittgenstein's Lolita?The Iceman: Stories (2002).

Liz:

I'm not sure how to address this topic.  Do I pick something that I loved but critics panned?  Do I pick a book that I enjoyed but most people haven't yet discovered?  Do I pick the most offensive book I've ever found at a bookstore and then pretend that I moved it? (Admittedly tempting, that last one....) I'm going to pick the relatively undiscovered book that, in the right hands, could prove to be a real delight.

I like paperback originals.  (A "paperback original" in book industry terms refers to a book that debuts in this format rather than the hardcover-to-paperback track that most books take.) They are affordable.  Often they are experimental, or feature younger novelists who deserve a readership.  Or they are novels in translation bringing some of the world's greatest writers to English readers. Cloud Atlas was a paperback original in the US, and it was a Booker Prize Finalist. I think an interesting book group project would be to spend a year focusing exclusively on paperback original novels.

One of the young novelists writing interesting and enjoyable fiction is Jesse Ball, and I thought his first novel (and paperback original) Samedi the Deafness was bad ass.  It's a spy thriller written by a poet who likes to riff on Kafkaesque plotting. Hang on to your hats.  Here we go.

Jesse Ball

People keep committing suicide on the White House lawn, and they ominously warn that the shit is going to hit the fan in seven days. The protagonist, James Sims, happens upon a man dying in the street, and when James leans over the dying man, he utters a word: "Samedi." As James tries to work out the puzzles and unravel the plot threatening the world, he's confined to an asylum for chronic liars (and you know I love books set in mental institutions).  The pressure is on.  Truth? Lie? Something in between? It's not just another weirdo plot twister, though.  Jesse Ball is a poet and creative writing instructor and this novel displays his fondness for words.  

New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 6

Day 6: A Book That Makes You Sad (well this should be fun....)

no, not sad like this...

Gianna:

Today we are going make you sad. More than normal, if we do it right! We are choosing books that make us sad (yes, Liz has a heart). [Libel is a felony, LaMorte.] 

sad like this!

We are going to have to do some major narrowing down here because any good book worth its weight should make you sad. No, not Nicholas Sparks sad, but truly deep, can’t-get-away-from-it sad.

We have to disqualify memoirs and biographies because where would we begin (or end)? In fact, let's disqualify any non fiction because the first two titles that come to mind are We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch, and Alex Kotlowitz’s There are No Children Here, a book which is (sadly) still relevant all these years later. Let’s not go down the non-fiction road. [Coward.]

too sad.

The perfect kind of sad

I will stick with fiction. Perhaps I will simply choose the saddest title and go with the classic, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Wait, we just want sad not suicidal. The Road by McCarthy is too obvious so that’s out. I guess any John Steinbeck will do, but how to narrow his work down to saddest? Oh, geez, how about Anna Karenina? Yea, you’re right, it’s too obvious again. In fact lets just stay away from the Russians altogether.

Ok, I have decided that it has to be a book I read at least two years ago, that I still can’t think about without getting sad. I end up with a three-way tie: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

The "this could happen"
 kind of sad

"can't shake" kind of sad

All three are fantastic books…all three are incredibly sad. Who wants to read these back to back to back with me? Show of hands? Yea, me neither. [Um...Liz?]









Liz: 

Okay, let's face it, I would guess that 98% of the books I love are "sad" according to most people. Gianna already picked several of my favorites for today's post.  No problem.  Let's talk Joyce Carol Oates.  Has she ever written a "happy" book?  I certainly hope not.  

I've decided to pick one of my favorite JCO novels, and the one that follows the life of one of the most tragic lives of the celebrity-obsessed 20th Century.  Blonde fictionalizes Marilyn Monroe's troubled life, making her both a believable, intelligent woman of aspirations, and a woman abused, scorned, dismissed, and destroyed. People sometimes are shocked to learn that Monroe was a book lover, but since all of you reluctant readers of our little blog shouldn't struggle with the idea of sex symbols as bibliophiles.  People are often overwhelmed by my beauty.  Shut up.  Hollywood is beating me down. Elton John wrote a song about me ("Tiny Dancer," obviously).  Marilyn Monroe married a baseball player...and my future husband is Hunter Pence. Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller...and I like to sing showtunes to the cat.  The only question to ask now is who is sadder, Liz or MM?

You don't have to answer that question.