Christmas Book List

December 22, 2008

From The Writers Almanac–on NPR:

On this day in 1953 William Faulkner was vacationing in St. Moritz, Switzerland. He wrote a letter to his mother:

Dear Moms –

This is right in the middle of the Alps, snow on them and moonlight, very beautiful, much ski-ing and bob-sledding, place full of American movie people, plus King Farouk of Egypt — Gregory Peck, Charles Feldman, my California agent, many others — actors, writers, etc. I don’t like it. I am going to England then Paris for Xmas and New Year’s, wish I was home which is the only place to spend Xmas. I love you all and miss you all.

(photo courtesy of the Mississippi Writers Page; Faulkner was quite the hunky with a beard, no?).

Though I have at least five books on my night-stand that I want to read this winter break, I still have more on my wish list.

Currently on my night stand:

Disquiet--by Julia Leigh (this is a novella getting awesome reviews; creepy and fun)

Bright Shiny Morning–by James Frey (i’m about halfway through the nearly 500 page novel; We all have something to say/think about Mr. Frey, but I’m digging that there are hundreds of characters who pass through the viewfinder, and that we focus/return to only a handful throughout the book).

Words in Air– The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (i’ve only just flipped through this book but I cannot wait to get into it; 800 pages of their beautiful letters–read the NYTimes Review)

A Place To Stand– a memoir, by Jimmy Santiago Baca (i’ve assigned this in my Creative Nonfiction class for Spring).

Have You Seen Me?--stories by Elizabeth Graver (I read a brief, funny interview with Graver and HAD to buy her first story collection–it’s out of print).

Trans-Sister Radio–Chris Bohjalian– a student gave this to me this semester; it’s sort of a modernized version of The Danish Girl, by David Ebershoff. A woman supports the man she loves through his sex-change operation.

ok, and now the wants/wish list:

Don’t Stop Believin’: How Karoake Conquered the World–Brian Rafferty; from Publishers Weekly review:

Entertainment journalist and karaoke connoisseur Raftery celebrates the medium as both a democratization of our overprofessionalized entertainment culture and a kind of therapy that transforms shamed self-consciousness into brazen, talentless self-acceptance. He traces the industry’s history from its early struggles to cajole club goers into making spectacles of themselves to its rise as mockery-proof nightlife mainstay. Delving into the stringent engineering of instrumental backup tapes, he explains why Bobby Brown’s On Our Own (from Ghostbusters II) is a greater karaoke song than Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. Intertwined in his world tour of karaoke bars is a personal saga of singing badly for drunken audiences from Manhattan to Tokyo, a habit that eased the forming and breakup of relationships and prodded him into a blissful state of not caring about how I look or sound. Raftery vividly evokes the boozy, semimelodic pathos that makes karaoke a profound group-bonding rite, while acknowledging—nay, toasting—its tackiness. The result is an entertaining, exuberant homage that’s anything but off-key.

American Buffalo–by Steven Rinella; from EW Review:

The lottery that journalist Steven Rinella won in 2005 wasn’t an ordinary one: He didn’t score money, or a car, but the right to hunt buffalo in the Alaskan wilderness. As he drags a carcass across the frozen terrain, dodging wolves and grizzlies who smell the 
 fresh meat, Rinella places his journey in context with buffalo hunters of the last 14,000 years in American Buffalo. The history lesson — never dull — is studded with bizarre buffalo facts. (Did you know that burning buffalo dung smells a little like cinnamon and cloves? Or that there was an actual model for the buffalo-head nickel?) The story of our country, Rinella shows, is inextricably intertwined with the story of this animal. A–

and a novel

Clash of Civilians over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous, translated by Ann Goldstein; read Maud Newton’s blog post about it here, where she says It’s a satirical but not unsympathetic examination of the events leading up to a murder in a modern-day Roman apartment building where immigrants, transplants, and multi-generational locals can’t seem to stop arguing about the elevator.

and a collected works

William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories–

This Library of America edition of Maxwell’s early fiction collects his lighthearted first novel, Bright Center of Heaven (1934), out of print for nearly 70 years, and nine masterly short stories. It concludes with “The Writer as Illusionist” (1955), Maxwell’s fullest statement on the art of fiction as he practiced it. (I had only remotely heard of Maxwell, but then read a wonderful article about him in a recent New Yorker).