Monday, December 29, 2014

Reading Roundup: The Best Books of 2014

Here's my list of the best books I read in 2014 (out of a total of what I think will be 89, still have a few days to go!):

1. The Selected Letters of Willa Cather
2. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere - Poe Ballantine
3. My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
4. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
5. The Sound of Things Falling - Juan Gabriel Vasquez
6. The Dogs Bark - Truman Capote
7. The Night in Question - Tobias Wolff
8. The Wind - Dorothy Scarborough
9. The Descendants - Kaui Hart Hemmings
10. The People in the Trees - Hanya Yanagihara
Honorable mentions: 
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories - Norman Maclean, One Foot in Eden - Ron Rash, First Comes Love - Marion Winik, The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles, In a Narrow Grave - Larry McMurtry, In the Place of Justice - Wilbert Rideau, The One-Room Schoolhouse - Jim Heynen
Most looking forward to reading in 2015:
1. Dorothy Day, Selected Writings
2. Faces in the Crowd - Valeria Luiselli
3. The Barracks - John McGahern
4. The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
5. The Story of a New Name - Elena Ferrante
6. My Struggle - Karl Ove Knausgaard
7. The World and the Parish - Willa Cather
8. Two Serious Ladies - Jane Bowles
9. Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
10. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Suzuki
And as many of the other 80+ books on my "to read" list as possible!

Friday, December 12, 2014

The Wild West, Two Ways

I recently read two books back to back that prominently feature the American West, in two very different ways.  The first was Molly Gloss' Falling From Horses, which is a straightforward and really touching story that follows the lives of two young people setting out to California to try to carve out a life for themselves in Hollywood - one as a screen writer and the other as a horse rider in Western movies.  The year is 1938, and Lily Shaw and ranch hand Bud Frazer meet on the bus as they travel to Los Angeles for the first time, and ultimately become life long friends.  We learn about Bud's difficult past regarding his sister and his family, and about his coming of age in Hollywood.  It was the first book I read by Gloss, and I plan to try another one.  The writing style reminded me in a way of Kent Haruf.  

The second book was John Williams' Butcher's Crossing.  Set in the 1870s, the book tells the story of young Will Andrews, who drops out of Harvard and heads West to explore his own "wildness" and learn more of the natural world.  He finds himself in Butcher's Crossing, Kansas, where he decides to put together an outfit of four men who will travel on a buffalo hunt.  The book perfectly captures the restlessness and sense of adventure of men in those times.  The men encounter difficulties along the way, and ultimately end up snowed in, in a valley in the Colorado Rockies for the winter, as they were so caught up with the greed and excitement of killing buffalo that they lost track of time.  

Both of these books caught me off guard - they were well written, captivating, and just plain old fashioned great story telling.  Both are recommended!

A Breath of Fresh Texas Air

William Goyen's The House of Breath (published in 1950, and Goyen's first work) was recently listed as a recommended book in Texas Monthly magazine, of which I am a subscriber. I also finally figured out how to use "LINK +" with the Oakland Public Library system, so was able to get this book on loan from another library system.  It was a book like none I have ever read before - the narrative structure and writing style is wholly unique to Goyen.  It is poetic and evocative, and brims with memories of small town life in Charity, Texas.  The style reminded me a bit of Faulkner and a bit of Garcia Marquez.   These days I'm more drawn to realistic fiction, so I didn't love the unconventional style but I appreciated some of the beautiful phrases in the book.  Here are some of my favorite passages (with spelling as it appears in the book):

"Everything then, working with and upon everything - with accompanying resistance and damage and error but turning out something changed, finished, prepared to receive something more, to take in and take on something more:  pain, wisdom, love.  This great, mysterious chemistry going on - praise it."

"Aunty just got up from her chair on the gallery and said in at the front door, "Seven years bad luck little feist," for the broken mirror.  (Oh, she had it, seven and more.)"

"I'd lie there in my bed and want to die, and think - is this what parents have to come to, a creepin at night through room and room with a shotgun after the ghosts of their children who've gone away and left them lonely and sleepless and chokin in the night?"

"O what's the meanin of it all?  There must be some meanin somewhere - it cain't all be just this rabblement and helter-skelter."

"We ought to see it that we make good memry for ourselves, like a slow and perfect stitchin, as we go along, and embroidry a good and lovely memry out of all the tread we one day have to set, alone, and unravel, stitch by stitch."

"You didn't want to flicker around East Texas, you wanted to blaze in the world, to sparkle, to shine, to glisten in the great evil world."