A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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Set in the early twentieth-century English county side, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, is the first-person journal of Cassandra Mortmain in year of her eighteenth birthday.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe serves up recipes for good living and good eats as it weaves two story lines together. It reflects upon the complicated history of a tiny Alabama town during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the struggle of one middle-aged woman’s attempts to love herself near the century’s end.
Humankind interweaves anecdotal evidence and extensive research to prove that humans are, in fact, kind, cooperative, and trusting, even if we are doubtful of that fact ourselves.
Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020) is a collection of six essays in which she ruminates upon her myriad mental wanderings during this unprecedented year.
John Williams’s Stoner (originally published in 1965 and re-released in 2003) follows the life of titular character William Stoner from his childhood home on the Missouri plains to the University of Missouri where he found his calling in the study literature. Williams’s prose is as plain and straightforward as is his protagonist, but the emotional depth of this novel as it weaves through decade upon decade from the 19teens onward, is deeply moving.
Max Porter does something both unique and disquieting in his novel Lanny (2019). Set in a sleepy English village (within commuting distance of London) in modern time, Lanny is family drama set amidst the cacophony of villager voices as overheard by mystical, other-worldly Dead Papa Toothwort.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s debut novel The Fruit of the Drunken Tree (2018) is a powerful articulation of life in Colombia in the 1980s and 90s and is a wonderful example of Own Voices narrative. Told predominately from young Chula’s perspective as she looks back on her comfortable life in a gated community in Bogotá, from the refugee life she comes to inhabit in LA, this story shines light on the traumas many immigrant families veil in silence once they arrive on American soil.
Desperate Remedies (1871) was Thomas Hardy’s first published novel. Written chronologically by date, from 1835 to the 1860s, the chapter title move the reader through “The Events of Thirty Years,” “The Events of a Fortnight,” “The Events of Eight Days” and so on. With every passing hour, day, week, year, Desperate Remedies leads its reader through the coming-of-age events in young Cytherea Graye’s life.
In Alka Joshi’s debut, historical fiction novel, The Henna Artist (2020), Lakshmi Shastri, the henna artist premier in 1950s Jaipur, recounts her story.
Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings (2020) presents a beautiful, and at times raw, look at the life of women in first century Israel and Egypt. Ana, from whose first-person perspective the story unfolds, is the daughter of the local regent’s head scribe. She comes of age in a world of strict social and class roles, rigid along gender lines, in Sepphoris of Galilee in the early years of Common Era.
Through the intimate voice a sister writing her closest living brother, as well as the thoughts in her Marriage Diary, The Wright Sister (2020) describes and unpacks the most private of life’s details, but in succinct, often poetic or humorous, terms. The novel progresses through Katharine’s letters to Orv and her marriage diary entries from fall of 1926 to spring of 1929 when she faces her first truly solo flight.
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) includes some of the most moving fictional explorations of courtship and childbirth, maternity and pandemic, grief and loss, that I have read of late. Ultimately, this novel grapples with the ways that parents can move on after the unthinkable happens and they lose a child to illness; a part of that story, O’Farrell’s novel argues, as literary critics before her have, is William Shakespeare’s penning of his famous tragedy Hamlet, an act that may provide healing for both himself and his relationship with Agnes.
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.
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (originally published in 1927) is the story of Fathers Jean Latour and Joseph Vaillant as they arrive in the New Mexican dioceses in 1851 as its new, young Bishop and Vicar respectively. The novel follows their lives as they grow to love and respect the land and its people: the various indigenous groups with their many ways of life, the Mexican families who settled the land generations before, and the newly arrived Euro-American settlers.
Thomas Hardy is famous for his later novels like Tess of the d’Urbevilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, but this winter I decided to pick up one of his early works, A Pair of Blue Eyes (originally published in 1873) and I did not regret it. A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s third novel (published serially) and the first he published under his own name.
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.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is at once startlingly gritty and wildly sci-fi. Somehow it is both a critical response to the wartime atrocity of Dresden’s bombing, and also a trippy, ironic, even disturbing thought-experiment about the nature of nonlinear time. Originally published in 1969, Slaughterhouse 5 looks back at the end of WWII’s European conflict from the perspective of a handful of American prisoners of war held in Dresden (in slaughterhouse building 5 or, in German, Sclachthof-funf).
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.
