My Full List: Reading Women In 2019

For those of you just joining, or those of you who have better things to do than to scroll though my assorted posts, below is a full accounting of my reading (29 books!!) from last year with comments, of course.

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion) — Real and really heartbreaking.

Americanah (Chimamanda Negozi Adichie) — Funny and self-aware with a squirmy view of ‘Murica for us natives.

The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri) — Lahiri captures that feeling of being between two worlds with a longing you can’t really explain. A vivid book.

Still Life With Breadcrumbs (Anna Quindlen) — Good beach read.

Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Guilded Age, and the “Powerless” Woman Who Took on Washington (Patricia Miller) — This should be made into a full-length feature film (like Bombshell, but set before the invention of television).  A great book bringing together the people and social movements that brought a wave of Progressive change — the work never ends, does it?

Vox (Christina Dalcher) — Dystopian fiction! My favorite!  In this story all women are limited to speaking no more than one-hundred words a day.  Yeah, really.

The Bus on Thursday (Shirley Barrett) — Aussie Gothic where the bus takes center stage. Goofy and scary at the same time.  

White Houses (Amy Bloom) — Beautiful story, beautifully rendered with great heart. Reminder that love is love is love is love.

The Emissary (Yoko Tawada) — Don’t let the slimness of the pages fool you;  a powerful yet beautiful dystopian story of love between a grandparent and his grandchild.  

What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (Mona Hanna-Attisha) — This should be required reading for EVERY citizen.  What happened in Flint can (and does) happen anywhere.  The need for water is basic for survival — environmental justice is too.

Good Bones and Simple Murders (Margaret Atwood) — “The name’s Atwood, Dame Atwood if you’re nasty.”

Under the Table (Stephanie Evanovich) –– I CANNOT wait to see what new stories she’s got cookin’. 

The Nest (Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney) — It took me until the end to appreciate this book, but it will make a terrific movie because it has just the right amount of schadenfreude with a scoop of redemption.

Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (Nell Irvin Painter) — This is an ambitious memoir of an accomplished woman who, despite all the accolades of an academic career, is still plagued by self-doubt (just like the rest of us). To write about that takes guts.

The Woman in Cabin 10 and The Death of Mrs. Westaway (Ruth Ware) — I preferred Mrs. Westaway over The Woman in Cabin 10 — but maybe I’m just tired of all the Girl/Woman titles?

The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai) — Just exquisite.  If you came of age in the early 80’s your heart will break along with these characters’.  

Feel Free: Essays and Grand Union: Stories (Zadie Smith) — If you’ve spent any time with me you know I love Zadie Smith.  She’s real and she keeps it real.  Essays or stories, it don’t matter — she writes so you get it.  

Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens) — Not sure if I get the hype over this.  Beautiful descriptions of Nature, but for Narrative and Nature I’d recommend Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer.  

Private Life (Jane Smiley) — A wonderful surprise. A story of a woman underestimated by everyone who makes a life for herself in spite of them all.  

The Female Persuasion (Meg Wolitzer) — I love when an author creates a whole contemporary world out of thin air that makes me swear I remember when that (fictional) event happened.  My favorite Wolitzer.  

My Sister, the Serial Killer (Oyinkan Braithwaite) — Tight as a drum and sharp as cut glass.  I read it in three hours.  Braithwaite better be writing more of these.  

Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying (Sallie Tisdale) — Both practical and poetic.  A must read for anyone with a body.  

At the Wolf’s Table (Rosella Postorino)— Fiction that reminded me a bit of The Handmaid’s Tale in that these “things” did happen (women were recruited as food tasters for Hitler).  A story of survival in a strange time.  

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Rebecca Traister) –– The title says it all.   A good book-end to Bringing  Down the Colonel and very topical as the E.R.A. was just ratified by the the state of Virginia, Harvey Weinstein is going to trial, and it’s an election year,  so there’s some stuff going on.  

Daisy Jones & The Six (Taylor Jenkins Reid) — Were you alive during the Fleetwood Mac years?  Daisy Jones & The Six are coming to VH-1 with a “Behind the Music” episode just for you.  The narrative is told as a series of interviews with the members of the band.  Join the stunt casting round robin here! 

Frankissstein: A Love Story (Jeanette Winterson) —  If you have not read any Winterson yet I highly recommend this as your first.  Not a word out of place.  You got Mary Shelley talking about her monster story and then you have AI and sex dolls and it all makes sense.   

The Museum of Modern Love (Heather Rose) — This was a really lovely year-end read that I added via Hoopla.    The author is another Aussie who asked the artist, Marina Abramovic, if she could incorporate her true-life story into her fictional story.  I remember when this installation, The Artist Is Present, was running at MOMA –concurrently with a Tim Burton retrospective strangely enough, and I’m a sucker for any New York story.  

Well, that’s a wrap — I’ll see you at the library, after a nap.   

 

Are You New Here?

During January I read three books: Americanah by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and Still Life With Breadcrumbs by Anna Quindlen. I bought all three at the public library book sale for $5 with the intention of leaving them behind in the game-room library of the resort where I escaped with dear friends for a sunny week of tropical R&R. I was shocked and embarrassed by the dismal number of English language books on the sad and empty shelf (Dutch and German books overflowed their respective spaces), but noticed the books I left were snapped up within a day. Come on, people, beach reading is the best reading!

Both Americanah and The Namesake speak to an immigrant’s experience. Both have protagonists who leave feel compelled to leave the place where they were born, to seek opportunities in America. The lens of the “Other” is always a draw for me. The ability to see another perspective — the writer’s delivered through a cast of characters — is the magic of books. Steeping the reader in views of race, in views of things I take for granted, reminds me that no matter how much of the world I directly experience, it’s not even a thimble-full of the fullness of human experience.

Still Life With Breadcrumbs has a different focus, but does center around the displacement and reinvention of a creative woman (photographer Rebecca Winter) who thinks she’s moved beyond her “sell by” date. Touching on the “sandwich generation” phenomenon of supporting both kids and parents we see Rebecca and the infuriating way she’s subtly pushed to the sidelines, diminished in the minds of others’ whose opinions she eventually realizes aren’t so important. The hard work of creating your own life, of being open, of believing in your own efforts — these are messages that women at every age need to hear. Quindlen’s a prolific writer (and Pultizer prize-winning journalist) so her writing is clear and engaging, but this is a story of a white, upper-class woman’s struggle. And although I ascribe to the Deamgirls philosophy of “Effie, we all got pain,” this makes the book feel a bit narrow in scope especially after reading Americanah and The Namesake. (Still Life With Breadcrumbs was published in 2014, Americanah in 2013, and The Namesake in 2004 )

I’m not going to review these books in this space, but I would recommend them without hesitation. They are beautifully written, thoughtful and humorous.

Next up is Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Guilded Age and the “Powerless” Woman Who Took on Washington by Patricia Miller.

“When There Are Nine”

That title snippet is an homage to Supreme Court justice RBG, and I’m shamelessly using it to introduce this literary post.  It’s part of her answer to the question of  “when will you feel we have enough women sitting on the Supreme Court?”  It’s not that men aren’t any more or less qualified than women, but nobody has ever raised the thought that there was anything wrong with an all-male court.

For 2019 I’m only going to read books written by women.  Just because I want to. I’m a fan of male writers, John Irving, Gary Shteyngart, Michael Chabon are high on my list, but there is a whole lot of lit out there that doesn’t get enough attention and much of it is from voices that aren’t amplified by mainstream criticism or the book-selling industrial complex.  I made a list of my picks below.  I suppose I’m setting myself up to give you some of my own literary criticism as the year unwinds (talk about blog accountability).  These works are in no particular order and they encompass fiction and non-fiction so you’ll be as surprised as I am as my year of female writers unfurls.   I only have twenty books here so do feel free to tack on your recommendations.  Happy New Year and Happy Reading, Nappers, see you in the library.

1.  Baracoon The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neal Hurston.  Hurston is the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, which blew me away.
2. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai.  Early days of the AIDS crises in the 1980’s.
3. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.  First book of the MaddAdam trilogy.
4. We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby.  Essay collection laced with autobiographical humor.
5. The Street by Ann Petry.  Published in 1946 and I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of Ann Petry until recently.
6. The Cost Of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy.  Self-described, ’nuff said.
7. Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories by Christine Schutt.  Because short stories are the satisfying fast-food of the lit world.
8. Southern Lady Code by Helen Ellis.  I liked her first short story collection American Housewife, so much I read it in the library in one sitting so maybe I’ll buy this new one when it comes out in April. Or not, bless my heart.
9. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.  Lap dancer in a women’s prison ~ what’s not to like in literary fiction?
10. Under The Table by Stephanie Evanovich.  For obvious reasons of blood.
11. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez.  This sounds interesting. And won the National Book Award. Nunez became an “overnight literary sensation” after a 20+ year career and 8 books.  And she grew up on Staten Island??! WHAT!
12. The Future Is History:  How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen.  Published in 2017 I’m always curious how books like this age in both the long- and short-terms.  But I think Masha Gessen is a most fearless journalist in a time when journalism really needs to be fearless.
13. I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows.  Survival in the Dust Bowl.
14. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.  Again, ashamed I have not read any Didion, ever.
15. Becoming by Michelle Obama.  Because this lady has had to watch every word she ever said, every day, for eight years.  I can’t even do that for eight hours.
16. What The Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City by (Dr.) Mona Hanna-Attisha.   Memoir by the pediatrician who exposed the Flint, Michigan  water crisis.
17. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy.  Self-explanatory title, don’t you think?
18. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro.
19. Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith.
20. Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the “Powerless” Woman Who Took on Washington  by Patricia Miller.   A story about the hypocrisy of America’s control over women’s sexuality….sound familiar?

Libraries

I am a huge fan of the library.  In one of my past lives  if I were traveling solo on a business trip, I’d try to find a community library to visit during my downtime.  It made me feel more “at home” than eating room service in my hotel room.  My parents fanned the flames of my library -love by taking me to the children’s room at our local library when I was just learning to read.   The first book I ever checked out on my own library card was about the friendship between a pig and a little girl. (I guess it was a precursor to Charlotte’s Web?)   And I remember feeling quite grown up when I “graduated”  to the stacks.

To this day I can easily get lost for hours in our town library.  The library is more than just a book repository.  It’s a welcoming port in a storm — when Super Storm Sandy hit and some communities lost power for over a week, the libraries were one of the places you could go to get warm and charge your phone.  Checking in with your neighbors is as much a part of library life as checking out books.

And in addition to “big” community libraries there is the grass-roots, “little” library movement.  Check out these pop-up libraries at Little Free Libraries.   Paper and ink books are still important — not just to the individual reader, but to the community at large.  And I can’t think of a better way to make and strengthen connections than debates and discussions over characters and stories.

So please support your library — be it big or small.  Visit often and bring a friend with you.  I’ll meet you there.

 

 

 

Can You Please Be Quiet? I’m Tryin’ to Create Here

Starting off this cold January with some warm & wonderful book quotes from Flavorwire.com as a lead in to the meat of my post:

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” — Confucius

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.” — Nora Ephron

“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. Don’t sleep with people who don’t read!” – John Waters

“Read! When your baby is finally down for the night, pick up a juicy book like Eat, Pray, Love or Pride and Prejudice or my personal favorite, Understanding Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy and Apnea; A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my “plan” was for taking down the Christmas tree.” — Tina Fey

And class, what do we need to read successfully?  Anybody?  Why SILENCE (at least in your own head) is critical to good reading.  Why else were we taught to always have a “personal reading book” in our desks when we came in from recess back in the Stone Age?  So we could read SILENTLY and return to a more scholarly frame of mind after running around on the playground (or avoiding mean kids on the playground).  An actor friend tells a story about going on auditions where you could sit and wait for 7-8 hours before you were called to read.  Once she saw a woman sit and wait that long without a book…..either she could meditate with the intensity of an ancient monk, or she didn’t have that much upstairs to require distraction from boredom.  Or maybe she heard voices in her head, but that’s the subject of completely different type of post.

In the past few weeks I’ve noticed a “silent” trend.  On Sunday, January 1, Pico Iyer had the NY Times Sunday Review feature with “The Joy of Quiet.”   I had to chuckle a little bit when I read that some folks pay a premium NOT to have Internet connectivity in their hotels rooms.  Gee, they could stay with my parents for a week.  On the rare occasion the OG’s need the Internets, they have dial-up. (which means they have no phone so you could get crazy calling them with an incessant busy signal, because, you guessed it, they don’t have cell phones either.)    Will self-imposed silence and the ability to get “off the grid” become the new status symbols?

In a somewhat related piece on the same day, Nick Bilton, the Times’ personal tech  guy posted this piece about Disruptions.    The gist is that we’re so caught up in using our devices capturing and sharing our moments, that we totally lose the moments we’re supposedly enjoying.  Nick is resolving to take 30 unconnected minutes a day to get back in touch with his day-dreaming self.   Now I know there are a great many of us who welcome our digital overlords, but if memory serves, don’t these things also come with an “OFF” switch that the user controls?  Or does our inner child just like the feeling that with all this technology in our hands we won’t miss anything?  The problem is that we never really allow the  boredom and down-time to generate any creativity when we fill all our time with Twittering and swiping.

Like many of my proletarian siblings, I sit in front of a computer all day at work.  When I come home I like to decompress and check my e-mail (and blog stats!), but then I like to eat and enjoy my family.   To date, that means we need to use fire and organic materials to make our dinner.  And after dinner we need to clean up the organic detritus and settle down with a juicy book, or some exercise or banal chore that makes for civilized living.  Some of those activities lubricate my creativity — and I rush to my computer to get them down before they seep away.  Every once and a while they turn into something worth sharing….. and sometimes I re-read them and shiver (not in a good way) and hit delete.  But in any case, I do give a little prayer of thanks that my creative juices haven’t totally dried up.

Head In a Book…

This is totally subjective, but below is a list of 10 books that I have found memorable.  I enjoy reading and am frequently overwhelmed by all the choices so I rely on good friends to steer me into safe harbor.  If you have any books you’d like to add, please feel free.  The  virtual bookshelf is unlimited.

Super Sad True Love Story— Gary Shteyngart.  This is fiction, but everything in it is coming true!  Gary must be some sort of supernatural being with an incredible agent.

Let the Great World Spin — Colum McCann.  Story and characters so beautifully crafted that I ached when I finished it.  … or maybe it was just jealousy?  Writing that appears effortless is anything but.

The Corrections –Jonathan Franzen.  The funk in dysfunctional families always makes for a great story.

Middlesex — Jeffrey Eugenides.  I wasn’t a fan of The Virgin Suicides, so I’m glad I read Middlesex first. Skip the Virgins and go with the hermaphrodites is what I always say.

Zeitoun — Dave Eggers.   Non-fiction, but unbelievable in a way that will leave you shaking with anger.

The Zookeeper’s Wife — Diane Ackerman.  Also non-fiction, but an incredibly brave and believable story.

Bossypants — Tina Fey.  I wanted to grow up to be Tina Fey, but didn’t know how.  So she deserves to be the Boss of Me.  No hard feelings though, and if she ever reads my blog I know we will be BFFs.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay — Michael Chabon.  Chabon is an excellent story-teller, and I was sad to finish this one.  The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a close second.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — Junot Diaz.  I had never read anything like this before, and that’s the minimum standard for awesomeness. Plus, dude is a Rutger’s grad from home-state where we need more Pulitzer Prize winners to counteract all those reality TV characters who DO NOT represent the real NJ.

Hell  — Robert Olen Butler.  Everybody had their own version of Hell, don’t they?  This was a recommendation of the very literary Dr. Blog, who has never steered me wrong (pretty decent record since she’s been recommending books to me for more than 30 years).