Best of 2011 Countdown: #26

...Awkward.

You know what's fun about associating with Gianna?  The various ways such a connection pops up in my life.  Random House recently launched a cool book recommendation site called Everyday eBook, and our RH pals asked if they could use some of our blog's reviews on their site.  Who are we to say no?  However, it was a real delight for me to discover that the site also pulled Gianna's biographical statement off of our blog, and it reads:

i am the sales manager for the university of texas press. previously i worked as a sales manager with random house for about 8 years or so until liz sullivan made my life so miserable i had to change jobs. we are now married, have 9 children and vote republican. we are not happy.

It's my fervent hope that everyone I know now knows of my miserable love with Gianna, so you should follow Everyday eBook (even if you don't read eBooks; they have great picks that are available as print books too).  Anyway, moving on to our picks....

Best of 2011 Countdown: #26

Gianna:

Close Your Eyes
Amanda Eyre Ward
Random House

This dark novel was inspired by an actual double murder that happened in the author’s neighborhood when she was a teenager. Ward grew up in a small, quiet town (Rye, NY where I have attended a couple of Random House sales conferences…I could have been killed!), and the fact that such a brutal (and for many years, unsolved) crime could happen would be enough to shake you. As it would turn out, the crime was committed by a drunk teenager that Ward and her group of friends actually knew. The specifics of that crime are bizarre enough that you will want to read about it, trust me, so here is a link to Amanda Eyre Ward’s website where she explains the murder (and there is a picture of Amanda at the tender age of 17…worth the trip to the website).

http://www.amandaward.com/Close_Your_Eyes_For_Readers.php

Amanda Eyre Ward
(the adult version)

Close Your Eyes doesn’t use that plot exactly; it takes that idea and makes it more intimate. Young Lauren and Alex are sleeping in their tree house when their mother is brutally murdered. Their father is convicted of the crime and their lives are forever changed. The books moves ahead twenty years and while the sister and brother remain close (who else would understand this kind of life?), Lauren is convinced that her father is guilty while her brother is sure he is not.  While it would of course be easier for Lauren to try in some way to move forward with her life--her attempts at normalcy--she begins to dig into the past, and things get…interesting.

Amanda has hit a home run with this novel. It's dark, it's creepy, the characters are rich, and the story is perfect. A good comparison is Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places or Sharp Objects…and if you didn’t like those two books, well, what the heck is wrong with you?

Liz:

Your Voice in My Head
Emma Forrest
Other Press

I admit that I am fascinated by memoirs that are heavily psychological.  Just like I'm drawn to damaged characters in fiction, I am most intrigued by memoirs that are more internal, and at the risk of being flippant, the crazier the better.  It's the same reason that I love the HBO series In Treatment, too.  What can I say?  I've got my issues.  So there was no question that I'd be reading Your Voice in My Head when I heard the editor discusses it at our sales conference.  It didn't disappoint.

Emma Forrest

Emma Forrest has composed an intimate--sometimes uncomfortably so--memoir about the two major relationships in her life at a time when she was most vulnerable.  She was 22, living a furious existence in New York that spiraled out of control and toward depression and suicide.  Salvation came in the form of a psychiatrist, a man who became her touchstone as she began to dig herself out of the psychological hole into which she'd slipped.  In the meantime, Forrest meets and falls in love with another man, her "Gypsy Husband," an A-List Hollywood actor (Google Emma Forrest and you'll find out who it is).  Their romance is intense and idyllic...and then troubled.  One day Forrest attempts to make an appointment with her psychiatrist, only to discover that he's died.  The Jiminy Cricket on her shoulder, this man who'd seen into her darkest thoughts without flinching, the voice in her head, was gone, and she realized she'd never known anything about him.

Your Voice in My Head belongs in the same category as Girl, Interrupted and The Glass Castle, though I think that Emma Forrest is a more talented writer.  It's unsettling, loving, moving, and brilliantly written.  I love this book.

 

30 More Days Book Challenge: Day 19

Time to sharpen that toothbrush into a shank, it's

Day 19: Favorite Prison Books

Somehow you knew this day would come, right?  How could we resist? 

Gianna:

I likes my prison books, that’s no lie. I also enjoy prison TV (I was no stranger to Cell Block H), so I am pretty excited about this question.

I have read two or three really great books about prison.

The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison by Pete Earley is the most recent prison book that I have read. Hot House was recommended to me by Tracey K. with the promise that I wouldn’t be able to put it down and she was absolutely right. This is the oldest of my choices, published in the early 1990’s; it is based mostly on interviews with inmates and guards, although you do get the history of Leavenworth. Although the writing is not of the same caliber as my next two choices, I definitely put this on the must read list for anyone who likes true crime.  

You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish by Jimmy Lerner is a fantastic chronicle of his first year in prison on a manslaughter charge. Before his crime Lerner is a model citizen, middle class with a good white-collar job. He describes prison in great detail: the violence, the corruption, the living conditions, the racism and the boredom. [The soap-dropping?] Lerner’s longtime cellmate is Kansas, a white supremacist who takes a strong liking to him and serves as protector. The beginning of this book sets the tone when Lerner describes what happens to a teenager when he is put in with the general population.  [Birthday party with balloon animals?]

My favorite prison book is Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award). The author’s original desire was to follow a new guard for several months and write this book from that vantage point. His request was denied. Not one to give up, Conover actually ends up applying for and eventually getting a position as a guard at Sing Sing, the notorious maximum security prison. Conover exposes rampant drug use, gang violence (outright gang wars really), rapes, and the very real dangers that face prison guards every hour of every day. Conover comes to the conclusion that while the idea of prison guards is to care for and control prisoners – what is really happening is that they are simply warehousing people without even a hint of real rehabilitation.

Liz:

While Gianna went for nonfiction, I'll take on the prison fiction.

Sarah Waters is better known for her books Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, but it's the book she wrote in between, Affinity, that I prefer.  Affinity is a dark story set in a 19th Century prison, the story of a Selina, a woman sent to the slammer because she's a medium and her last seance didn't go according to plan, and Margaret, one of those Victorian prim-and-proper types who comes to the prison to counsel the criminals.  Selina may or may not be a con artist, but the women's relationship develops nonetheless.  Waters offers a masterfully ambiguous narrative, and who can resist a 19th Century jailhouse and spiritualists?

Austin author Amanda Eyre Ward's first novel, Sleep Toward Heaven, takes on the women's maximum security prison in Texas.  One character is loosely based on Aileen Wuornos (remember the Charlize Theron character in Monster, and that super-gross hair?), a woman with a troubled past who ultimately becomes a killer.  One character is the mentally fragile doctor at the prison.  And one character is the widow of one of the victims.  Every book group in the country should read this book, and then read all of Ward's other books for good measure.

Sticking to the women-in-jail theme, Susanna Moore's The Big Girls has everything I love in a prison book.  First, it's set in a prison.  Second, the main characters are a psychiatrist at the prison and her mentally ill patient, fulfilling my unending fascination with shrink books.  Third, the prisoner is there for drowning her kids, echoing the Andrea Yates case.  This book is dark, but beautifully written.  It also may be evidence of the many psychological problems that warp my mind, that I liked it so much.

I'm trying to decide what roles Gianna and I would take if we were cellmates, and what crimes would land us in the joint.  On the one hand, I am significantly larger than G and have 35 years of swallowed down rage looking for an outlet.  On the other, Gianna is feisty and can be a bully.  Regardless, though, I call dibs on the top bunk.