Fiction

Top Ten Books on My Holiday Wishlist

For this week’s Top Ten (hosted by The Broke and The Bookish), we’re asked to list the top ten books we’d like to receive for the holidays. Hm. Seems like this topic should have come around in November when people were putting together their shopping lists. I rarely receive books as gifts, so this list is probably more like what I’ll buy myself if I get a gift card, but why quibble? It’s still a gift, from me, to me.

Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler. Everyone’s saying all the good things about this one. I am number 140 on the library waiting list. I don’t want to wait!

Let Me Tell You, Shirley Jackson. I have had a sudden urge to read all things Shirley Jackson. I’ve only read We Have Always Lived in the Castle (and of course “The Lottery,” in school). This seemed like an interesting second choice.

News of the World, Paulette Jiles. National Book Award Finalist. Western. You do the math.

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Legs McNeil. You would never know it to look at me, but I love punk rock. For a music lover, I don’t do a lot of reading about music. I wouldn’t mind starting here.

A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles. I loved Rules of Civility so much, and everyone has had nothing but good things to say about this one. Number 52 on library hold list. See, “Do not want to wait.”

The Summer That Melted Everything, Tiffany McDaniel. Sounds like such gothic, twisty fun.

Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn. This novel about Jamaica has been on everybody’s best-of lists this year.

Nobody’s Fool/Everybody’s Fool, Richard Russo. I love Richard Russo and I plan to re-read Empire Falls this year. For some new Russo, I’d love to knock these out. Love his writing.

Novels, 1930-1942: Dance Night / Come Back to Sorrento / Turn, Magic Wheel / Angels on Toast / A Time to Be Born, Dawn Powell. Powell is a writer I have long been meaning to read. It would be great to start with this collection of some of her best works.

How about you? What’s on your wishlist?

Ten Books on My Fall TBR (Or, Getting My Diversity On)

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) asks us about books on our Fall TBR. I’ve had a particularly good reading experience so far this year. I haven’t been following any kind of plan. Typically a book pops into my head when I’m getting closer to the end of my current book, and that’s the one I pick up next. But sometimes, when we just follow our whims, we get caught in a rut. The kind of rut I’m talking about isn’t the kind where you don’t know what to read next and nothing satisfies. I’m talking about the exact opposite kind of rut—the kind that’s so easy, you never really think about getting out. It’s like having spaghetti for dinner every night (well, if you like spaghetti. I do. A lot.). It’s nutritious enough, satisfying, tasty. But probably you need a little variation, and you could pump up the nutrition a bit and still eat something yummy. Okay, enough with the food metaphors.

Basically, I had a pretty sad realization. When it comes to reading women authors, I do just fine. I’ve read 42 books so far this year, and 21 of them were by women (not counting the book I’m currently reading, which is also by a woman). But the diversity stops there. I’ve picked up exactly TWO books by by authors who aren’t white (Marlon James, Louise Erdrich). I have plenty of books on my TBR by non-white authors, so I have no excuse, really. Some of my choices were driven by picking up new books from authors I really like (Bonnie Nadzam, Megan Abbott, Maggie O’Farrell, Liz Moore, Ann Patchett). Some of my choices were driven by the fact that I like a good campus novel (The Headmaster’s Wife, The Pursuit of Cool, A Dual Inheritance). Some were driven by my desire to finally try and finish a series (The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay…Too much Ferrante for me all at once; I did not make it to book four). Some things, too many to mention, were just on sale, and some were physical books that have been sitting on my shelf for way too long.

So. Excuses, excuses. This needs to remedied. We all know I’m not great at reading from a list, but here are my top ten diverse reads for the fall, all picked from my current TBR or books I already own:

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, Sunil Yapa
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (I own this one)
Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry
The Turner House, Angela Flournoy (own this one)
Behold the Dreamers, Imbolo Mbue
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
Slumberland, Paul Beatty (I know The Sellout is big this year and up for the Booker, but I own Slumberland already)
Long Division, Kiese Layman (another one I own)
The Thief, Fuminori Nakamura (and another one I own)

I’m excited about all of these books, otherwise they wouldn’t be on my shelf/Kindle/TBR list. I know this list hardly makes a dent, and so many groups/nationalities aren’t even included. The thing is, it’s so easy not to pay attention, to pick up what everyone else is reading, to follow favorite authors, to stay in that comfy zone. Is this racism? I think probably it is. Not the kind that comes from a place of hatred or intentional exclusion, but certainly the insidious kind that comes from being very comfortable with seeing much of what you already know in the world reflected back at you and never thinking much about it. Time for me to wake up and fix it. This is a start.

Ten Books I Picked up on a Whim (Or Every Book I Ever Picked Up, Ever)

The thing about being a reader who has a (mostly neglected) book blog and a Twitter account where I follow all sorts of bookish accounts (book bloggers, critics, authors, publishers) is that it’s very, very difficult to avoid being influenced in some way when it comes to what I read. Everything on my TBR is something I’ve seen recommended somewhere else, however fleeting the recommendation might be. But almost everything I buy or pick up next is based on a whim (well, a whim based on a list). I rarely plan or schedule or commit (as evidenced by the blog) to anything except the very few authors whose books I will pre-order without question (Alice Munro, Tana French, Donna Tartt, and so on and so forth), and even the arrival of one of these titles doesn’t guarantee it will be my automatic choice for what to read next. Couple this tendency with my willingness to set any book aside that doesn’t grip me at the moment, and you can see, whim is where I live.

Let’s face it: I’m a freewheeling reader. Perhaps I should consider changing the blog name.

Instead of listing every book on my shelf (because that would be way more than 10), for today’s Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish), I thought I’d list the last ten books I bought, and the reason why (if I can remember it). Here goes:

Late One Night, Lee Martin. You may or may not have heard me sing the praises of Martin’s Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Bright Forever. Martin has a way with quiet moments in small-town America that renders them both universal and unforgettable.

Mongrels, Stephen Graham Jones. Okay, I’m not even going to pretend that horror is up my alley, or that I’m very well-versed in werewolf tales much beyond An American Werewolf in London. I read Jones’s Not for Nothing back in 2014, and let’s just say he has a way with story that makes me think this will be one of those genre-busting books for hardcore horror and literary fiction fans alike.

Mr. Splitfoot, Samantha Hunt. It was on my TBR, and it was on sale for $2.99 on Kindle. That said, I don’t purchase every book on my TBR that comes up for sale, and I have to say this one was going to end up in my hands one way or another. It just sounds too deliciously unusual to ignore.

Wilde Lake, Laura Lippman. I have at least three unread Laura Lippman titles that I could have picked up to read, but instead I had to have Wilde Lake. Why? I read an interview where she mentioned that someone at a reading asked a question about her choice to write the book in alternating first and third person. I’ve been thinking a lot about novelistic structure lately and was so intrigued I felt like I had to read it. Right. Now. So I bought it and I read it and I still don’t know the answer to that question….but this is probably the best Lippman I’ve read, maybe ever.

Into the Darkest Corner, Elizabeth Haynes. One of you told me to check out Elizabeth Haynes. It was Wendy at Musings of a Bookish Kitty, as a matter of fact! And this one was on sale and occasionally I do what I am told, so I bought it and will be checking it out. Eventually.

The Round House, Louise Erdrich. I have been meaning to read this book for ages. Every time I read an interview with her, I am left with the feeling that I want to read all of her books. Maybe someday I will.

The Circular Staircase, Mary Roberts Rinehart. Sarah Waters said this was one of her influences for writing The Little Stranger. Oh, when are we getting new Sarah Waters?

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, Joan Chase. Okay, rare instance where I cannot remember where I heard about a book, but it was one of those “I have to have this NOW” purchases through Better World Books. And of course I haven’t read it yet, but I hope to, very soon.

Wild Life, Molly Gloss. Because I loved The Jump-Off Creek, and also was interested in reading more books set in the American West just after I finished Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.

The Last Child, John Hart. Um…I can’t remember why I bought this. Another used purchase from Better World Books. I have three of Hart’s titles on my TBR wishlist, so I picked one at random. Ta DAH!

So there you have it. What about you: do you plan your purchases? Is reading on a whim unusual for you?

Top Ten Books on My TBR This Spring

This week’s Top Ten (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) asks us about the top ten books on our TBR. While many people might list new books being published this spring, I have an eye on my backlog of books. Of course, the slightest shift of the wind will change my reading mood, so take this list with a grain of salt. You may or may not see reviews for these books in the coming months…and given that I am officially FIVE books behind in reviews this year, even if I read them, you may still not see reviews. Ahem. Anyway.

Today I’m in the mood for deep books, even some rather big books, and I know that as slowly as I read that this list also an ambitious one I’d be lucky to finish by the end of summer. I’ve included two books I started but never finished (The Plot Against America, which should be interesting in context of what’s happening politically these days, and The Blind Assassin), and the only remaining book left to read by one of my favorite authors, Kent Haruf (Where You Once Belonged). Without further ado, here’s my full list:

Jumping on That #Weirdathon Bandwagon

I think everyone is probably well aware of this by now, but Julianne from Outlandish Lit is hosting a month-long Weirdathon. After seeing all the chatter in my Twitter feed (and seeing all the fun books people are choosing), I decided to hop on the bandwagon and get my weird on. o what, you may ask, constitutes a “weird” book? Let’s see what Julianne has to say:

What counts as weird? Anything that’s weird to you. Maybe that’s aliens. But for others maybe it’s bizarro fiction written in a created dialect starring a talking fruit. Click here to see my lists of weird books for inspiration and TBR padding!

Admittedly, when I first heard everyone talking about this a few weeks ago, my initial thought was simply that I couldn’t join because I don’t read weird books. But Julianne is giving people a lot of room to decide what’s weird for them. I highly recommend taking a look at her lists, I found a couple of books that were on my shelf and my TBR and that got my creative juices flowing. I also realized that I had read far more “weird” books than I realized. In fact, I was able to tweet out a few suggestions based on my own reading the last few years:

#weirdathon suggestions for anyone looking: WIDE SARGASSO SEA, THE MANUAL OF DETECTION, NORWEGIAN WOOD, THE COLLECTOR, AWAIT YOUR REPLY

— Priscilla Walter (@eveningreader) March 2, 2016

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More #weirdathon suggestions: THE PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS (real life weirdness), BIG MACHINE, THE WORD EXCHANGE

— Priscilla Walter (@eveningreader) March 2, 2016

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The challenge for me was going through my current books and trying to figure out what was “weird” enough for the challenge. Here’s what I selected:

Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay. I put this on my TBR when I first heard about it last year, and I just happened to snag it for $1.99 on Kindle (deal still happening as of March 3!). And guess what? It was on Julianne’s list of recommendations, so there you go! “The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help…Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface–and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.”

Traveler’s Rest, Keith Lee Morris. You all know how much I loved The Dart League King, and I also loved Morris’s surreal short story collection, Call It What You Want. Traveler’s Rest is his latest effort, and it fits the weird bill to a T: a family stranded in a blizzard decides to spend the night at the Traveler’s Rest hotel, where “Once inside the hotel, the family is separated. As Julia and Tonio drift through the maze of the hotel’s spectral interiors, struggling to make sense of the building’s alluring powers, Dewey ventures outward to a secret-filled diner across the street. Meanwhile, a desperate Robbie quickly succumbs to his old vices, drifting ever further from the ones who love him most. With each passing hour, dreams and memories blur, tearing a hole in the fabric of our perceived reality and leaving the Addisons in a ceaseless search for one another. At each turn a mysterious force prevents them from reuniting, until at last Julia is faced with an impossible choice. Can this mother save her family from the fate of becoming Souvenirs-those citizens trapped forever in magnetic Good Night-or, worse, from disappearing entirely?” Creepy, right? [Updated to add: Morris also put together an awesome 70s playlist for the novel on Largehearted Boy.]

Stay Awake, Dan Chaon. Dan Chaon is one of those writers who simply doesn’t get the attention he deserves. I loved both of his novels, You Remind Me of Me and Await Your Reply, and I’ve had this book of his short stories sitting on my shelf for years. I’ve been wanting to get back to reading more short stories, and this collection is said to be “haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.” Fit the bill? Yep.

Undermajordomo Minor, Patrick deWitt. I honestly think The Sisters Brothers is one of the best books I’ve read in the last decade, so I snatched up a hardcover of deWitt’s latest novel only a few weeks after it was published. The last novel was a Western, but this one is more of a strange fairy tale: “Lucy Minor is the resident odd duck in the hamlet of Bury. He is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for begetting brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts employment assisting the majordomo of the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux. While tending to his new post as undermajordomo, he soon discovers the place harbours many dark secrets, not least of which is the whereabouts of the castle’s master, Baron Von Aux. Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery, and cold-blooded murder. Undermajordomo Minor is an ink-black comedy of manners, an adventure, and a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behaviour, but above all it is a love story. And Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.” A little more lighthearted weirdness is never a bad thing.

The City & the City, China Miéville. Okay, I’ve had a copy of this book on my Kindle since 2011, so I think it’s high time I read it. This is a backup pick for me. I don’t read that quickly and will be lucky to get through four books, let alone five, but I’ve heard so many bloggers praise Miéville that I thought this would be a terrific choice. I may be continuing #weirdathon on my own in April just to mark it off my list and see what all the fuss is about. “Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad finds deadly conspiracies beneath a seemingly routine murder. From the decaying Beszel, he joins detective Qussim Dhatt in rich vibrant Ul Qoma, and both are enmeshed in a sordid underworld. Rabid nationalists are intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists dream of dissolving the two into one.”

Are any of these on your #weirdathon lists? I can’t wait to read everyone’s updates this month—not that my (virtually) creaking TBR shelf needs any more books added to it!

Top Ten…Er, Top Eight Tuesday: Reading Outside My Comfort Zone

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, asks us to list ten books we read in the last year or so that are outside our comfort zone. A simple enough question, but looking at the list of books I read over the past 15 months or so, not an easy one to answer. I don’t spend a lot of time reading outside my comfort zone, probably because the last few years reading has seemed like a struggle, so when I read, I don’t want it to be a challenge. Whatever book I pick up, I want it to be THE book.

That said, I do try to get outside my comfort zone now and again. None of these books are a huge stretch, but they are outside what’s been my more typical fare lately, which I guess I’d call modern literary fiction with a twist.

Nonfiction. I read very little nonfiction, but in 2015 I read three books I’d normally not pick up: I read Into Thin Air because my mother (cough**book pusher**cough) kept insisting that I read it. She said it was terrific. In this, she was correct. I read Assassination Vacation as part of an effort to read from the TBR pile. I picked it because I bought it in 2005 and you know, figured it was time. I loved the way Sarah Vowell writes so much that I immediately bought two more of her books (thereby thwarting my efforts to read what I already had) and followed up Assassination Vacation with Unfamiliar Fishes, a book about the colonization and eventual statehood of Hawaii. (And weird aside: I kept picking up books last year that took me to the South Pacific during times of exploration and colonization: this one, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, and Landfalls by Naomi J. Williams. I highly recommend all three, and reading them close together gives you a rich experience.) I have Lafayette in the Somewhat United States sitting on my bedside table and am hoping to read it soon.

Chick Lit. I don’t know. Maybe the “chick lit” label isn’t completely fair to Liane Moriarty. She’s just this side of writers like Gillian Flynn, Sophie Hannah, or Paula Hawkins, only because she deals more in the domestic space and focuses less on mystery. Either way, she has a razor-sharp way with characterization that makes her books compulsively readable. I liked Big Little Lies the best, but they were both solid efforts and would be perfect travel or beach reads.

Historical Fiction. Okay, first: look at those covers! So gorgeous! Second: do you ever decide that you just HAVE to read a book RIGHT THIS SECOND? That’s what happened to me last year with The Signature of All Things. The joke was on me, because the used copy I bought turned out to have a whole set of pages missing in the book’s final section. Lucky for me, the people at Viking are wonderful and when I tweeted about the problem, they sent me a new copy immediately. This story of a female botanist in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries was absolutely captivating–the characters, the narrative, the science all swept me away.

The same thing happened to me with A.S. Byatt’s Possession—I decided I just had to read it so I bought a used copy. I think I should note here that while plenty of things are outside my wheelhouse, probably nothing is further than Victorian poetry. But this story of two modern scholars uncovering the mystery of a relationship between two Victorian poets through their poems, letters, and journals was outstanding.

Landfalls I bought for two reasons. First I read this post on the author’s blog about the origins of the story (I found the blog via an interview with the author, but I’ve lost that link), which starts with a map she believed was the San Francisco Bay but turned out to be some other place altogether from an Eighteenth century expedition that was ultimately lost. Second, even though I’m terrified of the ocean, I’m completely fascinated by maritime exploration during The Age of Discovery. I was so excited to discover this book that I pre-ordered it, and I was not disappointed. Told from various points of view of people on board the two ships that took that fateful journey, Landfalls is completely absorbing. This was Williams’s first novel, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

What genres are most outside your wheelhouse? Do you read historical fiction? If so, give me some recommendations!

Reader’s Journal: Girl Waits With Gun

Charming is a word I would like to see restored. These days when people say “charming” they often mean quaint, or old, or precious. For me, the word evokes the idea of having grace and spunk in equal measure, and knowing when it’s appropriate to use more of one and less of the other, or—to use a gun metaphor—when to fire from both barrels.

Amy Stewart’s debut novel Girl Waits With Gun is a charming book based on a true story that Stewart uncovered when doing research for her non-fiction book, The Drunken Botanist. The Kopp sisters—Constance, Norma, and Fleurette—live alone on a farm outside Paterson, New Jersey. The story begins in July 1914, when their horse and buggy are struck by a motor car driven by one Henry Kaufman, a wealthy hooligan who owns one of the silk factories in town. In the street, Constance asks nicely for—and then demands—compensation for the accident. Kaufman and his thug friends scoff at her and then threaten her. All of this sets off a chain of events that upset the quiet lives of the Kopp sisters, but Constance in particular refuses to back down and fights for justice for herself and her sisters. Her case falls on deaf ears at the local prosecutor’s office, but the sheriff of a nearby town becomes her ally, offering the Kopp sisters protection and even teaching them to shoot revolvers.

A less skilled author could have made caricatures of the Kopp sisters, but Stewart does a terrific job of making them each interesting and distinct. At one point, Constance, who narrates the story, describes them as three women with nothing in common and little to say to each other. That they love each other and are fiercely loyal to one another is without question, but Stewart cleverly uses their singular responses to events and their interactions with one another to show how times are changing (but also lagging)—especially for women. Their late mother, an Austrian who never cared for America or bothered to pursue citizenship, had a habit of sharing news headlines about women who were disgraced, injured, or killed in some way, all to convince her daughters that the world was a terrifying place and they were better off at home:

I can’t look at our childhood samplers without remembering the disgraceful fate of Laura Smith, age seventeen, who was lured away from her home by the grocer and ruined by him, or that of thirteen-year-old Lena Luefschuetz, found dead for reasons having to do with her “undesirable companions.”

This upbringing affected the sisters in vastly different ways. Norma, 31, dislikes any and all intrusions from the outside world, preferring to spend time with the homing pigeons she raises on the farm (she trains the pigeons by fastening news headlines—for example, ”Girl Scalded in Kitchen,” on a day when Fleurette is cooking—to their legs). Fleurette, 16, is such an ingenue that it almost seems she believes the stories she reads in the paper are actually fictions just awaiting her embellishment. And Constance, the oldest at 35, is at once restless and pragmatic. With secrets of her own, she is aware of both the lack of opportunities for and the very real threats to women that the world holds. However, she longs for something more than what she has, even daring to picture a life for her independent self apart from her sisters.

Aside from the threat presented by Henry Kaufman and company, a bit of a mystery occurs that draws Constance further into danger and helps develop her relationship to Sheriff Heath in an interesting way. The mystery also brings Constance’s past into play, which helps to explain why she reacts the way she does at the accident scene in the beginning of the story.

Somehow this novel manages to be both lighthearted and serious at the same time. Stewart manages to create comic situations about women in very real peril–and not as a result of Henry Kaufman so much as from being a woman in a society still clinging to Victorian ideas. The sisters’ quirks offer some comic relief. Fleurette is forever twirling and selecting special outfits to suit the occasion, even when that occasion is being the well-dressed target of a kidnapper, and Norma is fully devoted to her pigeons. Constance even has the occasion to manhandle Henry Kaufman to comic effect. However, even in moments of humor, we’re always reminded that the sisters face serious trouble. They are running out of money and have no foreseeable means of making income, which means that they may lose their farm–and if they lose their farm, what will happen to them? Fleurette is young enough still to find a husband, but she knows very little of the world as she was schooled at home and has been kept away even from people her own age. Norma and Constance are both essentially spinsters who are not trained in any skill, and Norma especially would rather not spend time with other people if she can avoid it. As the oldest, Constance feels the most responsible, but Stewart makes it quite clear that the options for her are limited on almost every front except the most unexpected.

This book was absolutely so delightful I did not want it to end. Halfway through the novel I was already sorry about saying goodbye to Constance, Norma, and Fleurette, so I was very happy to learn that Stewart is writing a sequel to Girl Waits With Gun called Lady Cop Makes Trouble, to be released in September 2016. Keeping my fingers crossed for a series!

The Evening Reader

Thoughts on books to read in your spare time…