30 More Days Book Challenge: Day 2

Day 2: Favorite Short Story

We're fans of the short form.

Gianna:

Short stories are my favorite format. Not because I am lazy (well…not only because I am lazy), but because I am completely mesmerized by the art. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about some of my favorite story writers and some of the first stories I read before I get to what will surely be an obvious choice for me.

When I was thinking about the first collection of short stories I bought and read on my own, it was – brace yourselves literary snobs - Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes. Still have it, still love it. Deal with it. But the two stories that really got me hooked on the “stuff” were "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "Where are You Going ,Where Have You Been?" by HRH Joyce Carol Oates. After reading the Oates, I went oh, so … and forgive me if you aren’t a literary person for using a pretentious book biz term…but I went “ape shit.” Then I read every JCO story I could find. From there it was done. James Joyce’s "The Dead," Raymond Carver (I went through a major Carver phase; shut up), "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Marquez broadened the stories that I read, Alice Munro remains one of my favorite writers (is she under-read or is that my imagination?), the oh, oh so beautiful The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (this book takes my breath away – I will forever read whatever he writes – write it down - I am a sucka for Tim). Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri is a favorite. Amy Bloom, though I loved the novel Away, I will always prefer her stories – amazing story writer. Miranda July is insane – so sick with talent – her collection No One Belongs Here More Than You makes this list because she truly reignited my love of stories when I hadn’t read an amazing collection in a couple of years. She made me a believer again. July’s book would make my list of top 20 ss collections. Period. Lorrie Moore is a master and Birds of America is a work of art to the highest degree. If you have not read Birds of America, go buy it. If you have never read short stories, of if you think you don’t like short stories, or if you tried stories and didn’t love them, or if you think you don’t like me [I'm doubting my like at the moment], Birds of America is going to change ALL of that…MOST of that. It’s perfect. It is.

After all that it’s a little, well, awkward to now mention my actual favorite short story is not by Lorrie Moore; it is by Flannery O’Connor. Listen, it’s not easy to pick one O’Connor story, so I may change my mind later. "Good Country People." The thing about this story is you’ve got a woman who you sort of want to feel bad for because she has a prosthetic leg from a childhood accident, but she really is not very likable because she feels and acts pretty superior to everyone around her. She has a PhD and the country folk just aren’t up to her standards. Well, she meets a Bible salesman and she wants to uh… spend some time with him in the barn as the kids say. [They really do say that in my podunk hometown.  The auction barn was the place to party when I was in high school.  And more than one girl lost her virginity behind an auto repair garage.  I'm surprised more babies are named Ford or Mercedes in classy Woodville.  I digress....] Classic ending. Not one of the more gory O’Connor stories, but I would say it's actually her sexiest story. And by sexy there is a barn in the story….how’s that?

PS: Second favorite O’Connor story: "The River" which will break your heart (actually this may be my favorite...see it's hard to pick one. I hate this.)

Liz:

GREAT book.
You should read it.

Many of my favorites overlap with Gianna's.  I've already written of my love for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" here, and I also think that Amy Bloom is a story genius, particularly with "Silver Water."  There's a chilling, Gothic story called "How Far She Went" by Mary Hood that will make you hold your breath at the end.  Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" is required reading; I mean, Miss Emily's been sleeping with the corpse of her boyfriend for years.  You can't really beat that.  I love Annie Proulx's collection Close Range, which gave us "Brokeback Mountain."  Nam Le's The Boat and Andrew Porter's The Theory of Light and Matter are two amazing debut collections that declared two major talents emerging on the literary horizon.  Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro are genre masters.

My favorite short story, though, is "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  A story with Gothic tendencies, a woman's increasing insanity, and feminist relevance?  Yes, please.  (For the record, "feminist," contrary to the current backlash with women who seem afraid they won't land a man, is not a dirty word.  Neither is "liberal."  Moving on....)  A young married woman, struggling with hysteria (depression), is taken to the country for a rest cure.  Her husband positions her in an upstairs room in a house.  The room is decorated with a distinctive, ugly, yellow wallpaper.  As the woman's isolation becomes more and more extreme, she slips further into madness and the wallpaper becomes her fixation.  It's a creepy, compelling, perpetually relevant story.  It's also one that I heard read to me by my mother's students when I was a kid.  Yes, my childhood was screwed up.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day 11

Day 11: A Book by Your Favorite Author

Gianna:

 

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

  

It's important to know who your friends are. It's also important to know who your friends may not be before you even bother to try. So if someone says, "Oh, I don't like short stories," I think, "Well maybe they just haven't read a good one...or are even embarrassed to say they haven't read any." Now if someone says "I don't like Flannery O'Connor," I know right off that I won't be friends with that person. Lovers? Yeah, probably. But we will not be friends. I have pretty high standards (very low morals). This concludes my lesson in pre-judging people and before you ask...yes it's worked pretty well for me. I have two friends.[I'm her friend!  Not her lover.  I actually have a similar book/friend test, but it's a negative correlation: my close friends are the ones who loathe Confederacy of Dunces.  Unlike Gianna, though, I won't be sleeping with Dunce lovers either.  And yes, I'm still single.]

Liz

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Yeah, I'm one of those people.  I'm fascinated by her life, and I love her writing, and she's one of the few authors I'll reread.  I know there are better reviewed, more academically revered works by Woolf, but Mrs. Dalloway is the book that sings to me, and it's the basis for one of my other favorite books, Michael Cunningham's The Hours.  Hell, I even like the movie version of Mrs. Dalloway.  There's a strong chance that I'll some day have a cat named either Clarissa or Septimus.  If I won the lottery, the first thing I'd do is purchase a signed first edition of Mrs. Dalloway.  As for Virginia Woolf, I admire her talent and her courage.  And she signed books with a purple-inked pen.  I love the purple.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day 1

So we're stealing one of those list thingies from the FaceSpace and posting it here in tandem--the 30 Day Book Challenge.  I think the idea is to let people know you better through the books you read.  It might also be a way to find books that will become favorites (or topics of ridicule).  Both Gianna and I will participate, and since I (Liz) do all the of the posting, there's a strong possibility that I will make fun of Gianna's selections on occasion. 

Day 1:  Favorite Book

Not an easy question for either of us.  I know that I could fairly easily narrow down to a list of about five, but beyond that I struggle.  Eventually we just had to go with something.

Gianna

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (Fitzgerald)

I always say this is my desert island book, so I guess it must be my favorite book? I don't know that I really have one favorite book. I think if I had children I would certainly have a favorite (and I would tell that child often that he or she was/is my favorite - I just think that is good solid parenting)..but books, for goodness sakes now that is just too hard! But for now we will say Habit of Being because Flannery is my favorite writer. She pleases me on many levels (mostly she is easy on the eyes) and after thinking you know O'Connor because you've read everything she's written - and maybe you've read some critiques and interviews and blah blah blah..then you get your hands on these letters and its an entirely new world. She is really funny, she really had an interest in the business side of writing (as in where is my check?), and you get a real idea, maybe for the first time, how frustrated (and brave) she was in her battle with Lupus. Recently it's been revealed that Betty Hester is "A" in Habit of Being, a very interesting tidbit considering Hester was a lesbian and O'Connor did try to save her good friend's soul more than once. But those things are hard to do...

Liz:

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Like Gianna's pick, Cloud Atlas is my desert island book.  I read it during a time when I was reticent about sharing my book tastes with others, but found myself exuberantly telling my coworkers, including some uber-book snobs, how much I loved it.  Six interwoven tales that defy genre boundaries, Cloud Atlas is a virtuosic composition that manages to be clever, funny, frightening, philosophical, and moving.  It's a book that I probably should dislike for some of the reasons I dislike some of the overly clever McSweeney's Press books.  Mitchell plays with style and format and narrative...but he doesn't become trapped by the trickery.  I loved Cloud Atlas so much when I first read it that I sent a fan letter to a generic feedback email address at Random House, and my message eventually made its way to Mitchell's editor David Ebershoff and then to Mitchell himself.  Two weeks later I received a package in the mail from Ireland, and inside was a personalized copy of the UK edition of the book.  David Mitchell is tops on my list of writers I haven't yet met and I've liked all of his novels, but this one's special.

Identity Issues

It's eerie how often Gianna and I agree on books. Considering that we barely knew each other a little over two years ago (she actually walked up to me at Book Expo several years ago before I worked for Random House and I didn't have a clue who she was until she reminded me that we'd met before), we nonetheless seem to love many of the same books. We'll have these discussions where she'll call me and ask if I've read a book that I haven't thought about in years and I'll remember that I loved that book, and it turns out that she loved it too. So when Gianna recommends that I read a book, when she's so enthusiastic that she's sputtering with delight, I KNOW that I must read that title. She doesn't steer me wrong.

Back in January we began to find out what titles Random House planned to publish for this coming fall, and it's a phenomenal list to say the least. Gianna found out that there will be a new book from Dan Chaon, so she called me to see if I had read his previous books, AMONG THE MISSING and YOU REMIND ME OF ME. Of course I had, and of course I loved them. Chaon is one of the best writers out there and in a just world he would be a literary superstar and I would read about him on my cousin's Facebook posts instead of...the gagging drivel she reads and claims is "profownd" (sic). The new book, Gianna told me, was called AWAIT YOUR REPLY. Because it was on her side of the company, and because I needed to read about 15 other books before sales conference, I refrained from diving into the new Chaon book, the dessert to my meal of books that I would actually sell myself. Gianna kept teasing me, though. She sent me the first page of the manuscript, and she constantly asked, "Have you started it yet? You need to read it. I need to talk about it. Read it, read it, read it...."



So finally I read it. Holy crap! I love this book. The early comparisons among the sales force are authors like Patricia Highsmith (Talented Mr. Ripley series) and Flannery O'Connor, and in the acknowledgements Chaon mentions writers who've inspired him such as John Fowles and Joyce Carol Oates. AWAIT YOUR REPLY contains elements of all of these masters of fiction. The novel focuses around identity and what it means to exist (or not) in this world. The opening page Gianna sent me? Let me set the scene for you. A son is cradling his arm and drifting in and out of consciousness. His father is driving the car and trying to reassure the kid that they'll make it to the hospital. And sitting between them in an ice chest is the boy's hand, cut off at the wrist. AND the boy isn't convinced that his father's even taking him to the hospital. Who doesn't want to keep reading a book that starts this way?

There are three stories swirling around each other through AWAIT YOUR REPLY, and what Gianna didn't tell me when she kept harassing me about reading the book is that one story line focuses on a set of twins. Twins are freaky and weird and a bit of an obsession for me and I'll read just about any book that features the multiples. It makes lots of sense that twins feature prominently in Chaon's book, too, since the theme is identity. Without giving away too much of the story, how do you know who you are? Say you don't have your name. Are you the same person? What if I weren't named Liz? Wouldn't I be a totally different person if I went by, say, Stephanie? I would have missed out on all of the elementary school "lizard" names. And people named Liz, in my experience, are smart asses. Nice, vapidly sweet Elizabeths are usually shortened to Beth. I am not a Beth. So twins further complicate self-identification. Here's your carbon copy(if you're identical, but to a lesser extent the same holds true for fraternals), yet you are two distinct people. At the same time, though, you cannot separate your identity from that of your twin. Twins know each other before they even meet their mother and they grow up with a mirror image of themselves against which to measure. Your life is a jumbled mess of identity politics. It's fascinating...and weird...and perfect for Chaon's book.

So, confession, I am a twin. I sometimes hate it, but I cannot imagine my life otherwise, and I hate to think of a world in which my twin no longer exists. I look at her and marvel that we're even siblings (she's an aerospace engineer) and I try to imagine what I would be like if I had followed her course in life. I still respond to her name when someone calls it because growing up people constantly confused us even though we're fraternal and she's friggin' blonde for crying out loud. More often we were just "the Sullivan twins." So I personally related to the parts of AWAIT YOUR REPLY that deal with twin brothers on different paths, seeking each other and running away. What if my twin were a hustler, or a Broadway singer, or Lindsey Lohan? Wouldn't I have a different identity if she were someone else? (The answer is yes.)

Dan Chaon is a terrific writer. I can't emphasize this point enough. This book works on so many levels--literary exploration, character study, thriller--and both Gianna and I are giddily anticipating the publication in August. AWAIT YOUR REPLY may be the best book I read this year.