A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All in Contemporary Fiction
Told from the first-person perspective of young Patroclus, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2012) reanimates the classical story of famous Achilles for today’s reader.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep that has carries many more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa massacre of migration out of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future.
One of José Saramago’s famous novels, Blindness (1995, English translation in 1997), explores the brutal fall-out of a world beset by a pandemic of blindness.
After reading it slowly over the course of nearly six months, I realized that Richard Powers’ The Overstory is in many ways a book that defies categorization. It is so novel in its craft and so touching in its humanity. The Overstory challenges its human reader to look beyond the human and greet all the living.
Set predominately in the far northern town of Vardø, in Finnmark, Norway from 1617-1621, this is a novel punctuated by the harshness of both the natural world and human viciousness. The Mercies fictionalizes historical events. A devastating storm on Christmas Eve of 1617 killed nearly all of the town’s men; Hargrave begins her novel on that day. In the pages that follow she weaves two women’s stories together and The Mercies builds toward brutal witch trials in the years after the great storm.
From its dedication page on, it is clear that Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop (2013) addresses grief and mortality. Yet themes of love, human connection and self-healing percolate as the adventures of George’s protagonist bookseller, middle-aged Jean Perdu, develop.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) is a beautiful novel about two Nigerian kids who fall in love but whom life separates as young adults. Adichie’s novel follows the young adult lives of Ifemelu and Obinze, as they grow up in Nigeria, study at Nigerian university, and ultimately find ways to leave Nigeria in the hope of making a better life. Their love story, coupled with their individual experiences maneuvering new cultures and countries, make this novel compelling and illuminating.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a story about the complicated nature of mother-daughter relations, compounded by the unshared, unknown, unspoken backgrounds of the immigrant mothers. The novel takes the reader through all eight women’s perspectives, from late 20th century San Francisco to China many years prior.
Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel The Far Field (2019) transports its reader to modern day India. This novel is a confession by thirty-year-old Shalini. She self-consciously tells her story as she leaves her native Bangalore in search of one man from Kashmir who touched her childhood. Her journey is a sort of coming-of-age even though she is in her mid-twenties when she sets off. Intertwined with her travels, Shalini reflects on her childhood and the lives of her mother and father. Ultimately her trip leads Shalini to the poverty, community, and brutality found in conflict-rife Kashmir.
Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012) brings a Russian fairytale amidst the Alaskan wilderness. The novel begins in the 1920s when Mabel and Jack, recently transplanted from their native Pennsylvania, face their second winter on their Alaskan homestead.
Book review of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ debut novel The Water Dancer (2019). From its first sentence—the rambling, fluid 100-word sentence/paragraph—Coates establishes The Water Dancer (both in diction and style) as a story about memory and one closely tied to water. This novel eloquently re-frames the Underground Railroad story, placing it in the intimate and profoundly personal experience of his protagonist, Hiram Walker.
Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 novel, The Great Believers, explores themes of trauma, lost generations, parenting, death, emotional inheritance, and the repetition of generational struggles as its weaves two stories throughout. One storyline begins with Yale Tishman in Boystown, Chicago circa the mid-1980s as AIDS lays waste to the gay community. The other takes Fiona (who was a very young woman affiliated with Yale’s world in the mid-‘80s) to Paris in search of her missing adult daughter, Claire, in the year 2015.
Eleanor Oliphant is certainly a socially-awkward, vocabulary-rich, first-person narrator, but her story is not just a witty one. It becomes quickly apparent that Eleanor Oliphant is not completely fine.
Through a melting pot of storytelling traditions that explore the uncanny, the prophetic, Shields’ The Cassandra, scrutinizes the sheer inhumanity of Hanford site’s project, the nuclear arms race, and environmental contamination, both in Washington state and across the world in Japan, that followed.
Last week I listened to the audiobook of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman narrated by Reese Witherspoon (HarperAudio, 2015) as I finished a baby quilt. As I stitched and cut and ironed, Witherspoon’s lovely reading brought Jean Louise Finch to life. And some of Lee’s passages were so moving, I paused in quilting to listen to them over and over again, writing them out for use here.
Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River: A Novel came out in 2018, but as I began to float through its pages, it felt very Victorian in style. Appropriate for its nineteenth-century setting, Setterfield populates her lyrical narrative with characters who embody archetypal roles: good or evil, liminal or privileged, young or old. Also, like Dickens or Hardy, Setterfield’s novel unravels slowly as she introduces various characters whom the story eventually brings together—like tributaries of the river Thames—and it took me a while to get into the flow of the story.
Diane Smith’s Letters from Yellowstone (1999) is a delightful, compelling and educational story about a fictional botany expedition into the wilds of late-nineteenth-century Yellowstone National Park. Smith inserts historically accurate details about the early years of Yellowstone National Park including cavalrymen stationed at the park and a young Native American family living quietly in its back country.
