Now that school has started back I have time for a very limited amount of what I like to call “fun reading.” Modernist literature has taken over my life (what’s up William Faulkner) as well as plenty of Elizabethan poetry. SO when I do have time to sit down and read something for fun, I have been turning to short stories.

One super easy read that I know Emily has already raved about is Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson. I just finished reading “Blowing up on the Spot,” the second story in the book. The story was about a guy who works at the Scrabble factory all day searching for the letter Q. I loved the story because it was so random-  but really, who thinks about the letter Q more than the person who’s job it is to find it all day?

This is why short story books rock:  You can skip around. I usually pick ones based off of the title. I’m flipping through the table of contents of Wilson’s book right now and I think “Go.Fight.Win” will be the next one I hit. It just sounds catchy, doesn’t it? The good news is, so far all of Wilson’s stories are easy to read and a good mixture of thought-provocation and lightheartedness.

See Lisa’s comments on Tunneling.

Another great “casual read” is Sloane Crosley‘s book of essays. It had me doubled over laughing when I read it. Her writing reminded me of Dave Sedaris if Dave Sedaris was a straight female with a penchant for creating awkward situations and then living in them to the fullest. Crosley writes for Playboy sometimes and that witty and sexy humor permeates the entire book. The cynicism is reflected in the title, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, and the title story is one of the best. In it, Crosley reminisces on the abject misery she felt being a bridesmaid to a girl she couldn’t stand. Her take on weddings is reason enough to read the book, but look out for “The Ursula Cookie” if you are hoping for pointers on how to charm your boss (note to self- do not bake a cookie that resembles your boss’s profile).

If you are feeling slightly more literary, a great pick is Growing Up in the South. This compilation of short stories hits a ton of awesome writers in one cheap paperback volume. You can read the best short stories by Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Anne Moody, Ellen Gilchrist, Flannery O’Conn0r and Alice Walker without buying a Norton anthology or taking an entire college course. Each story has a brief introduction that gives you a little bit of background about the writer too, so you can sound extra-smart at cocktail parties (or sitting around drinking beer and talking about literature…I am such an English major). I just finished reading “The Old Forest” by Peter Taylor, a writer who deserves more hype than he gets. The story is set in Memphis in the 1930’s, and at 60 pages it’s a doozy in the world of short stories…but well worth your time.

And finally, if you are really feeling super literary, grab a copy of Dubliners by James Joyce. I will go ahead and boldly recommend the Norton Critical Edition mostly because of the footnotes, which are priceless. For example, in one of the stories a man is wearing patent leather shoes and there is a footnote. There it tells you that patent leather is “a sort of  leather with a shiny finish.” How helpful is that? All sarcasm aside, James Joyce is a beautifully calculated storyteller. Read “The Dead” and “Araby,” both of which are flashbacks to high school English class for sure but stand out once you cover them for a second time. Everyone should say they’ve read some Joyce.

(If you have a favorite short story book or essay collection, I welcome the feedback. Doesn’t look like I’m going to have time to sit down to a 600 page novel anytime soon. Lisa, I admire your courage.)

-Nell

Today the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize 2009 was announced. The panel of five judges originally started out with 132 books, narrowed it down to the longlist of 13 and today the shortlist consists of six novels. The winner will finally be announced October 6, 2009. The Booker Prize also has a great website with author interviews, past prize winner lists, and mention of upcoming novels.

The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, October 1, 2009

A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize-winning author of “Possession,” spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves. See my blog for more info. You’ll see that I really love this book.

Summertime by J. M. Coetzee, January 1, 2010

A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.
“Summertime” is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, “Summertime” is a compelling work by one of today’s most esteemed writers.

The Quickening Maze by Adam Cape Foulds, not yet released in the U.S.

From 1837 to 1841, John Clare, the peasant poet, was a patient in a private asylum in the Epping Forest.  Clare and his wife Patty had six children and life was proving increasingly burdensome to Clare, who began to suffer bouts of severe depression, leading to alarmingly erratic behaviour and serious delusions.  In The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds has written an imaginative recreation of Clare’s years in the High Beech Asylum, and while the result is firmly fictional, the picture presented is realistic and consistent with the known history.

The book is sparsely written.  Foulds does not write lengthy descriptive or scene-setting passages, but each small vignette contributes to a rich picture of the cloistered life of a 19th century private asylum.

This is no mad-house.  The asylum is run on orderly lines by Dr Matthew Allen, a thoughtful man who likes to get to know his patients.  However, the finances of the asylum are precarious and Foulds describes Allen’s attempts to mix the cure of souls with mechanical invention and patents.  Poor Allen finds his time increasingly spent trying to “diversify his business”, but without success. Click here to read the full review.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, October 13, 2009

In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, not yet released in the U.S.

Simon Mawer’s latest book is a historical novel set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. Historical novels are usually possessed of horrid, obvious and multiple weaknesses and flaws – bogus dialogue, fetishistic images and scenes, ignorant conflations: sinister, ersatz entertainment. And although Mawer is the author of a number of rather fine novels – including The Gospel of Judas and The Fall – he is probably best known for his Peter Mayle-ish A Place in Italy (1992). So the omens are not good. And all the initial signs are unpromising: The Glass Room is a book about a culture slipping from decadence into catastrophic decline. It’s a study of a marriage. It concerns itself with art, music, architecture, indignity, loneliness, terror, betrayal, sex. And the Holocaust. It should, therefore, be pretentious, unbearable schlock of the most appalling kind. But it’s not. It is, unexpectedly, a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry . . .

The architect employed by Viktor is a man named Rainer von Abt, a disciple of Adolf Loos. “I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air,” Von Abt proclaims. “I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.” The house, when it is built, has vast windows, an onyx wall, white ceilings and white floors. It is the definitive modern house, for definitive modern people. Viktor is a great believer in inovace and pokrok – innovation and progress. “Everywhere he takes with him the new creed and proclaims it with all the enthusiasm of a prophet. ‘This is where the world of commerce is leading us,’ he explains. ‘Into a world of peace and trade, where the only battles fought are battles for market share.'” It’s the late 1930s: Viktor is woefully mistaken.

The Glass Room is not merely a piece of architecture within the book: it is the architecture of the book. All the characters interact with and within the house in some way; all plot revelations take place within its shimmering walls; history doesn’t take place outside it, it comes to it. Abandoned by the fleeing Landauers, the Glass Room is taken over by the Nazis for scientific experiments, and then claimed by the communists, before becoming a museum, and the site for a final scene of recognition and redemption. This could easily be over-ingenious or simply absurd, a device ripe for parody. Exactly how Mawer manages to avoid the many potential embarrassments and pitfalls he sets up for himself is worth considering . . .

Click here to read the full review.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, May 2009

A chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, by the bestselling and award-winning author of “The Night Watch” and “Fingersmith.”

Sarah Waters’s trilogy of Victorian novels “Tipping the Velvet,” “Affinity,” and “Fingersmith” earned her legions of fans around the world, a number of awards, and a reputation as one of today’s most gifted historical novelists. With her most recent book, “The Night Watch,” Waters turned to the 1940s and delivered a tender and intricate novel of relationships that brought her the greatest success she has achieved so far. With “The Little Stranger,” Waters revisits the fertile setting of Britain in the 1940s-and gives us a sinister tale of a haunted house, brimming with the rich atmosphere and psychological complexity that have become hallmarks of Waters’s work.
“The Little Stranger” follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline-its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

My confession:  I have never read Pat Conroy, John Grisham or James Patterson.  There are some authors who I don’t feel like I need to read before their books come out because there is going to be so much media on the books that I don’t have to “work” to hard to sell them.  The books basically sell themselves.  I can read the fly leaf, a few reviews and some articles in the newspaper and I basically have the “gist” of the book and go from there.  I’m not saying that the books aren’t worth my time but I have a whole store of books to read and want to give some other lesser known authors a good fighting chance…so to speak.

This month though I decided to read Pat Conroy’s new book, South of Broad.  I decided I WANTED  to know what all the excitement was about.  Everyday people would come in the store with this thrilled look in their eyes and tell me how fantastic Conroy is, which book is their favorite and why.  Then immediately chastise me for not ever reading him!!

I had an ARC of South of Broad at home that my nice, sweet and oh so lovely sales reps from Random House had sent me and said ok today is the day!  I got in my reading spot, turned on the light and started reading!!

Ok…I will be taking a trip to Charleston, SC as soon as I can!!!  Conroy is in love with the city of Charleston and does a wonderful job of describing the city for me.  I could totally imagine everything and I have never laid eyes on the city.

The story is about a group of friends who met during their senior year of high school in the late 60’s.  It is a very eclectic group of people. They all grow up and become journalists, movie stars, cops, lawyers, mothers, fathers, husbands and wives.  Some move away some stay in Charleston but they keep in touch and when they get back together it is like they never left.  I could relate to this type of relationship because I have a group of friends (and we live all over the place) but when we can get together it is just as fun as when we met each other so many years ago.  We have all gone our own way but we are all still the same.

It is 20 years after graduation for this group and they have some together again to search for their friend, Trevor.  His twin sister, the glamorous and wild movie star, Sheba, has asked for everyone’s help.  They travel to San Francisco to find Trevor who is dying of Aids.

As I was reading I began to realize that I liked the chapters that were set during the high school years better and at first couldn’t figure out why.  It dawned on me that I am 20 years out of high school this year!!  Even though the time period was different in the book and my own life the feelings and problems are the same.  It was fun remembering the carefree feelings of youth and maybe hit close to home with the problems (money, marriage, children and work, etc…) that the friends are dealing with as adults.

Overall,  I am glad that I read South of  Broad and want to thank all my customers that chastised me for not reading Pat Conroy before.  It is nice having a book “sold” to me for a change!!

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout is truly a treasure–an immensely satisfying and deeply affecting work with one of the most full realized fictional characters I’ve encountered in some time.

Call by some “a novel in stories,” these thirteen linked stories set in a small town in Maine, focus on an acerbic, rather unlikeable retired school teacher named Olive Kitteridge. Not a particularly promising beginning, I’ll grant you. But in the hands of a gifted writer like Elizabeth Strout, Olive’s story comes alive, as do the stories of the lesser characters in the book. As the book progresses the author subtlety peels away layer upon layer of Olive’s protective armor–revealing finally, a much more complicated character. Ultimately Olive emerges as–yes–still irascible and blunt to the point of rudeness, but also as vulnerable, often fearful, sometimes compassionate, always complex–a very real human being.

Despite Olive’s larger than life presence throughout the book, the short stories themselves could stand alone. As one reviewer puts it: “Crosby, Maine, may seem like nowhere, but seen through this brilliant writer’s eyes it’s in essence the whole world, and the lives that are lived there are filled with all of the grand human drama–desire, despair, jealousy, hope and love.”

The same reviewer concludes: “As the townspeape grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys and the endurance its requires.”

Lest you be deterred by the thought of tackling such hefty themes, rest assured that Olive Kitteridge remains a remarkably accessible book–an easy read–if you will–which is, of course, yet another testimony to the genius of Elizabeth Strout. You’ll end up loving Olive and thanking Strout for offering a reading experience you won’t soon forget. -Billie