2010 Holiday Gift Guide!

There is something about giving a book as a gift - the intention that went behind it as the selection was carefully tailored to please the recipient, the heft of a new book in one's hands, the pleasure of discovering a new author or topic of interest. Thus, I present to you the 2010 Holiday Gift Guide:

For the escapist:  The beloved Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl has recently released Book Lust to Go, with books recommended for "travelers, vagabonds, and dreamers."  This would be a great reference guide for any book lover, with both fiction and non-fiction categories.  The Atlas of Remote Islands, by Judith Schalansky, is a beautiful book I stumbled upon recently.  Featuring fifty islands, you learn a bit about the history of each island, just enough to awaken the romantic in each of us.  Rebecca Solnit's colorful Infinite City is a must for any lover of maps, urban history, or San Francisco.  It strikes me as the perfect coffee table book that you would want to flip through again and again.  It features all different kinds of maps of San Francisco with different themes, and tells you the history about the city's many neighborhoods.  

For the chef:  What better wintertime activity is there than eating a hot loaf of bread that you've made with your own bare hands?  I present to you two bread making books - one old, one new.  I recently had a friend visit and, a San Francisco local said to her, "have you been to Tartine at 5 o'clock yet?"  The reason, of course, is that this is the hour that Tartine's breads are ready.  I remember a cold night in San Francisco in which I had Tartine bread in a paper bag, clutched to my chest, and it kept me warm all the way home.


Tartine Bread, written by Chad Robertson (co-owner of the famous Tartine Bakery and Bar Tartine), is a book featuring many different types of bread for both the home chef and the professional bread-maker. An old-school option is A World of Breads, by Dolores Casella.  I've had both the corn bread and the country wheat bread and they are not only impossible to screw up, but also very delicious.  No need for a bread-making machine any more - this is the real deal!

For the budding Buddhist:  Pema Chodron is an American Buddhist nun and teacher.  The Pocket Pema Chodron features short passages from her best-selling titles, and is designed for when you need that bit of extra inspiration or inner quietness to get you through the day.  Taking the Leap explores the patterns that we find ourselves in, and provides tools for breaking them.  While some of Chodron's books go heavily into explanations of Buddhist concepts and practices, these two are easily accessible to those with no knowledge of Buddhism.  These are not to be labeled as "self-help."  Rather, these are wise writings from one of the foremost Buddhist thinkers today, helping us navigate through our fears, challenges, and destructive patterns.

For the magazine reader:  The Sun, published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, features essays, short stories, photography, interviews, poetry, and my favorite section, one in which readers write in each month about a different topic.  The Sun is also independent and free of ads.  What I like most about this magazine is that the stories are raw, intimate, and powerful.  

Orion explores the intersection of nature, culture and place,  It is published in Great Barrington, MA, and is also free of ads.  Orion has an impressive list of advisors, including Wendell Berry, Jane Goodall, Van Jones, Winona LaDuke, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Bill McKibben, and Terry Tempett Williams.  It is a beautiful magazine, in both its design and its contents.  Orion was the winner of the 2010 Utne Independent Press Award for General Excellence.  


I recently visited my local magazine store and asked for some suggestions.  In this way, I learned of Cultural Survival Quarterly (CSQ), published in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a satellite office in Guatemala.  CSQ was founded in 1972 and covers indigenous rights issues. All of the writers are indigenous or work closely with indigenous groups.  CSQ features essays, interviews, and photographs.  

  

For the classicist:  I've recently taken to reading more classics, and what a treasure they are.  While friends or family may have read these titles long ago, they may enjoy having a fresh copy or getting a chance to finally re-read one of their favorite books of yesteryear.  For classics, consider consulting the Modern Library website for their list of the "100 Best Novels" (which is not to say that I agree with this list, but it is a good starting point), or visit the NYRB Classics website, to see a list of classics that may be more obscure but nonetheless important and good reads.  Some author ideas - McCullers, Capote, Yates, Baldwin, London, and Maugham. 


http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/
http://www.nybooks.com/books/

  

For the anthology enthusiast:  The Poets Laureate Anthology, the first anthology every published that features all forty-three American poet laureates, would be a great gift for anyone who loves poetry or has been curious to read poetry but doesn't know where to start.  Featuring a sampling of our great poets, this book pays homage to some of the finest poets not only in the U.S., but in the world.  New Stories from the South (2010) features stories from some of the best Southern writers today - Ron Rash, Rick Bass, Tim Gautreaux, and Dorothy Allison, to name a few.  There is something wonderful about Southern writing, going back to such classic Southern writers as Faulkner, O'Connor, Capote, and McCullers.  This anthology follows in that tradition, and allows the reader to be exposed to writers both prominent and lesser known.

For the crafter:  I'm not a crafter, but I think Amy Sedaris is one of the funniest people around.  Her ideas are off-the-wall, and with her new book Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People, she combines frugality, kitsch, and DIY home projects bound to keep you entertained for hours on end.  

  

For those seeking rays of light in dark times:  Tracy Kidder is one of my absolute favorite authors of non-fiction.  I particularly enjoyed Hometown (about an eccentric array of people living in Northampton) and Mountains Beyond Mountains (about Paul Farmer's work in health care around the world), and his newest book, which is entitled Strength in What Remains.  This book tells the true story of Deo, who fled Burundi in 1994 due to genocide in his country and landed in New York City with $200 in his pocket and no contacts.  From sleeping on park benches to becoming a student at both Columbia University and then medical school at Dartmouth, this is a story of triumph against the odds, the kindness of strangers, and one young man's humility and persistence.  A deeply inspiring and moving book.  I haven't yet read Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously, but it has been getting rave reviews.  Danticat, a Haitian American known for her evocative novels (and one of this year's New Yorker's "20 under 40"), has written a non-fiction work about Haiti.  For a review by Julia Alvarez on NPR's website, please visit:  


http://www.npr.org/2010/09/15/129880022/-create-dangerously-the-heart-and-healing-of-haiti

Happy reading, and happy holidays!

Two Brooklyn Backdrops, Two Different Eras

Brooklyn is one of my favorite places.  I can't resist the tree-lined streets, brownstones, and charming neighborhoods.  For me, it is a place to enjoy a vacation, but for the characters that inhabit these books, it is a place fraught with struggle and facing the unknown, but also of expansive possibility.


In Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, we follow Eilis Lacey on her journey across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1950s from Ireland to Brooklyn to forge a new life for herself, independent of her sister and mother whom she left behind.  Working in a department store by day and taking bookkeeping classes at night, she starts to carve out a life for herself and becomes further rooted in Brooklyn when she meets the love of her life there.  But a tragic event pulls her back home, raising the question of whether her new life in Brooklyn was the start of something new and permanent, or just a short-lived attempt to redefine herself.  This was a very readable book that can be read in just a few sittings, and the love story and the theme of the pull our past has over our future make for an intriguing story.


Paul Auster's Oracle Night is classic Auster - story lines within story lines, a very normal day quickly turning into a sinister or extraordinary one, the power of the imagination to help shape one's everyday life, and a sense of never knowing where the story might end up.  Oracle Night takes place in the 1980s and tells the story of Sidney Orr, who is recovering from a mysterious illness and nursing himself back to health by writing, though a quick trip to the neighborhood stationery store sets into motion a series of unnerving events.  Now that I have read three Auster novels, I can say that his inventive and engaging writing is among the best I have read in a long time.  Furthermore, his books are concise but not sparse. Rather, they are rich with emotion, intensity, and downright great storytelling.  

Paying it forward

Last weekend I was in a bookstore and saw a free book, a new novel called Rut, by Scott Phillips.  I immediately assumed there was a catch.  I went home and googled the Concord Free Press (CFP), and was intrigued with their concept, which they call their "generosity-based approach to publishing."  CFP publishes one book at a time, which can be obtained at participating bookstores or sending a request via their website.  


There is a catch, but a good one.  CFP asks that rather than paying money toward the book, that you instead make a donation or give to someone in need and that you subsequently chart that donation on their website, and then pass the book along so that the next reader can do the same.


To read more about their business model or order Rut, check out their website:
http://www.concordfreepress.com/

Finally, a bildungsroman!

 

Truman Capote published Other Voices Other Rooms in 1948, at the age of 23.   A classic bildungsroman (aka "coming of age story"), Capote tells the story of Joel Knox, a boy who is sent to live with his father in Noon City, a small town in the American South.  While Joel tells his friend that he and his father "will hunt possum and eat possum stew" come wintertime, Joel finds out shortly after arriving that his father is severely disabled.  Watched over by the ambiguously gendered Randolph, in cahoots with Zoo, the hired help, and befriended by rowdy Idabel, Joel is left to his own devices and takes to exploring the world around him.

Capote was a true literary talent, with an ability to write boldly and pen some very beautiful passages such as this one:  "Before birth; yes, what time was it then?  A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now:  these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned heart, change only."  This is a classic book that deserves its place in the canon of great American literature.  While not as dense and gripping as In Cold Blood, the fact that it was written by a young prodigy makes it ever the more impressive.

I am left with one question - why have both Southern books I have read this past month had possum references?! 

Review: How to Read the Air

This past July, Mengestu was chosen as one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40" writers.  Mengestu, born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois, tells the story of four main characters in their search for a sense of ease and comfort though their histories make this difficult to attain.  Jonas Woldemariam lives in Brooklyn and teaches at an Upper West Side private school.  He is faced with his own troubled marriage which is intertwined with the story line of his parents' even more troubled and violent union. A passage that I feel captures Mengestu's voice as well as the rootlessness and isolation that it seems to me many of us feel but don't want to expose for fear of appearing vulnerable or weak is as follows:  "...I had begun to sense that my place in the world was rapidly shrinking, that this was not an age for idle drifters or starry-eyed dreamers who spoke wonderfully but did little.  A time would come soon, I was convinced, when I would be politely asked to step off board the ship that was ferrying the rest of the population, and in particular my generation, forward.  If I didn't latch on to something soon, I'd find myself thrown overboard, completely adrift, bobbing out to sea with nothing, not even so much as a life vest of companionship to hold onto."  

Mengestu captures life as it often really is, for example by featuring characters who feel numbness when society expects us to be wracked with emotion, and by not shying away from the messiness of marriage and the difficulty in finding a space in the world that one can occupy comfortably.  Really wonderful writing which will leave you unmoored, like the characters in the novel.

Auster this World: Another Great Read

"Reading was my escape, my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head," writes Auster in The Brooklyn Follies.  What I realized about Auster is that you ever know what to expect in his stories from one page to the next, or whose backstory he will choose to focus on as he tends to shift protagonists.  This is what makes his books nearly impossible to put down.  There are so many interesting characters and subplots in this book.  So as not to give anything away, I'll just say that this is a story about an ordinary man named Nathan Glass who decides to live out his retirement years in Brooklyn.  Yet, everything that happens to Nathan once he makes this decision is far from ordinary, from the people he meets, to the places he travels, to the range of emotions he feels and the memories he conjures up.  I highly recommend Auster, and The Brooklyn Follies in particular.