Best of 2011 Countdown: #7

Gianna:

Blood Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Gabrielle Hamilton
Random House

I am not a “foodie." I have no obsession or even great love of food. I don’t ever have conversations about it or dream about what I am going to make for dinner. I don’t wax poetic about recipes…and no, I don’t take pictures of my meals (unless I suspect that the $4.99 Chinese buffet I came across on the road may come back to haunt me. In that case I take a photo of the buffet, the health inspection, and the manager on duty).   Now before you think I am complete animal…I do believe I enjoy a large bowl of pasta (every night if I could) more than the average person. I’ve never read a food memoir…no not even Ruth Reichl or M.F.K. Fisher. I did however read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and my literary senses tell me Roald Dahl was the Anthony Bordain of his time. [Having traveled and eaten with Gianna for years now, let me state this: she's Italian and she LIKES the Olive Garden.  Let that sit on your tongue and dissolve for a bit.] 

Gabrielle Hamilton...
who's lost her shoes?

So why, Gianna, why do you love Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter so much? I mean, it’s your #7 for the love of pasta! Well, first of all Hamilton is an amazing writer.  She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan and she has written for The New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, and The New Yorker. Her work has been included in six volumes of Best of Food Writing. In other words, she has writing chops (get it “chops”? Like pork chops or some other food chop…or just chopping…? Hilarious). [Kill me, you hateful punner.]

Hamilton writes beautifully about her parents, particularly about her mother (who she credits with giving her the love of food), and the parties they would throw. It seems their house was never empty, and the year’s highlight was their annual spring lamb roast where they would have over 200 guests.  Hamilton’s parents divorce, and her life changes quickly and dramatically. She and her siblings are left alone an entire summer foraging for their own food and, left to their own devices, Hamilton discovers drugs at the age of 13.  The book picks up again as we follow Hamilton through the kitchens of her life, ending with her own restaurant, Prune, in New York City.

This memoir is lyrical, honest, funny, thoughtful and a bit dark (Hamilton has not spoken to her mother in about 20 years). For me the read was The Liar’s Club meets The Glass Castle meets the best food writing you’ve ever experienced.  [...Like the instructions on a Hot Pocket?] Don’t take my word for it (always a mistake); here is what Anthony Bourdain says: “ Magnificent. Simply the best memoir by a chef ever. Ever.” 

Liz:

The Tiger's Wife
Tea Obreht
Random House

I can't remember a year more heavily dominated by terrific first novels.  Just looking at my list, have five in my top ten, and I'm not alone.  Of The New York Times Book Review's five best fiction works of 2011, four were first novels with Stephen King as the noted veteran.  One of those NYT best books is Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife.


Since the beginning of the year, I've engaged in an ongoing debate with a bookseller friend about which book--The  Tiger's Wife or Swamplandia! by Karen Russell--would win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.  He was right--The Tiger's Wife was a finalist for the National Book Award (and I still think that Swamplandia! will win the Pulitzer).

Tea Obreht

The 25 year-old Tea Obreht writes much more maturely than her age suggests, and The Tiger's Wife is the novel most writers never manage to achieve.  It is splendid--a literary work with passion and memorable characters and beautiful storytelling.  Blending history, family, and folklore, The Tiger's Wife tells the story of a young doctor, Natalia, grieving for her grandfather's death through the memory of his stories.  Interwoven is the history of the Balkans from World War II to the present, her grandfather's love of Kipling's The Jungle Book, and of the tiger wandering through the darkness.  This is a book of secrets and family and love.  It's a masterpiece.

Best of 2011 Countdown: #9

Gianna:

The Informationist
Taylor Stevens
Crown

Enter the only thriller on my list! This book makes my list for several reasons but first and foremost it makes my list because it re-invigorated my love of thrillers  (and I really was sort of done with this genre).

Here is what you need to know about Vanessa Michael Munroe.

Taylor Stevens

1. She can kick your ass. Don’t test her; trust me.

2. She is smarter than you.

3. She’s hotter than you. [No one's hotter than me! Right?  RIGHT???]

4. She’s dark, she’s a loner, she’s damaged…just my type. [Why Gianna loves me...and I spurn her.]

5. She speaks over 20 languages. Told you she is smarter than you.  

Vanessa Munroe can get you the information you need… if you can pay. The daughter of a millionaire has been missing for several years and Munroe is hired to find out what happened to her. The coolest thing about The Informationist is the exotic places it takes you--Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea among others [Perfect for a family vacation!].  Munroe is an expert of infiltrating cultures, of fitting in and moving without being noticed (until she is noticed and then things go bad).  The plot is intricate, incredibly fast paced, and has several holy crap moments (lets just say Munroe’s weapon of choice is a knife). If you love Lee Child or Stieg Larsson you will not be able to put this book down. And yes, you will casting the movie in your head too.

The Informationistis available in paperback and the sequel, called The Innocent, is due on December 27^th. I am just starting The Innocent now so look for another blog on this Taylor Stevens series soon. 

Chinaberry Sidewalks

Rodney Crowell

Knopf

Gianna has already included this book on her list, so there are two votes of approval for you.  Here's what you need to know.  Did you read and like Mary Karr's The Liars Club or Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle?  Then you need to read Chinaberry Sidewalks.  Actually, I'm going to say it--Rodney Crowell's book is BETTER than The Glass Castle.  Set aside that Crowell is a singer.  I loved this book and it should be painfully obvious to anyone who knows me that I'm not a music person.  My favorite song was in The Muppet Movie for crying out loud.  Focus on the fact that Crowell is a simply brilliant writer.

Rodney Crowell performing at
BookPeople in Austin

The story of Rodney Crowell's working class upbringing in Houston and East Texas is filled with humor, love, violence, and insanity, hard drinkers and religious extremists.  It's the sort of rearing that a some kids never survive.  He encounters hurricanes in a house filled with holes, guns and fights. Crowell does survive, though, and salvation mostly comes through music.  As a 12 year-old he was playing drums in a honky tonk.  And here's where you should consider Crowell's career.  He's a genius songwriter and that genius shows through in his prose.  That genius landed him in Nashville and led to a terrific career with such luminaries as Guy Clark, Emmylou Harris, and Johnny Cash.

I like this book so much I've made it my favorite nonfiction book of 2011.  I guarantee its genius.  Read it.

Best of 2011 Countdown: #11

Home stretch! Today we have a couple of great memoirs.

Gianna:

Chinaberry Sidewalks
Rodney Crowell
Knopf

Several musicians wrote books this year, and Random House was lucky enough to publish a few of the best (Joe Henry’s Lime Creek was on my top 30 and Josh Ritter’s novel is a favorite as well). What separates Crowell’s biography from so many others is that he worked on it for about a decade and wrote every word himself. Thoughtful and authentic, two words not normally associated with music memoirs, but Crowell digs deeper.

His book is more along the lines of The Liars Club or even All Over but the Shoutin’ (and clear influence from Kardashian Konfidential). This memoir is funny, sweet, dark, and in parts quite sad. He is the son of an alcoholic father and an epileptic, Pentecostal mother who also had a temper. Let's just say…there were fights in that house.  You will in fact get a good sense of his young life when he recalls a story of having to break up his parents New Year's party when gunfire broke out.   It is where the saying “It's not New Year's until there is gunfire” comes from! Well that should be a saying.

It's all here in this incredibly well-written memoir; love, sex, violence, music, drinking, poverty, more music, and then a little more music on top. If you’re like me (if you are, try to change) you’ll hope Rodney has another book on the way.

Visit his website to see an interview with Mary Karr:

http://rodneycrowell.com/

Liz:

Blue Nights

Joan Didion

Knopf

Nothing says "Happy Holidays!" like...a memoir about a woman coping with the death of her daughter.  Blue Nights, however, is written by Joan Didion, literary giant.  Following her memoir about the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion manages to keep going only to once again find herself immersed in tragedy months later when her daughter Quintana passes away.  

Didion's grief is raw, but she intersperses her tough moments with a striking elegy to her daughter's life, from growing up in Malibu to her life as an adult woman, newly married.  Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne were friends with Vanessa Redgrave, and their daughter Quintana was a friend of Natasha Richardson.  Redgrave's own loss of her daughter (Natasha Richardson died after a skiing accident) weaves into Didion's story; Vanessa Redgrave actually played Didion in the Broadway show of The Year of Magical Thinking.  

I am not a parent.  Zorro the cat is already too much responsibility for me.  I have, however, recently experienced the loss of a family member.  To read Joan Didion's memoirs about grief is to find one's own sorrow and pain and hope and strength.  Death is the universal experience; Joan Didion gives a voice to ones still living.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day 12

Day 12: The Book That Is Most Like Your Life

Gianna:

My Friendly Giraffe

This book was written in 1972. It was about a little girl named Gianna who one day met a giraffe and how they became friends. I loved this book and read it all the time. The reason its most like my life is because the girl lived at 508 Tulip Drive .... my address. Okay, this was a personalized computer book - and it may have been one of the first. I LOVED THIS BOOK! Everyone is in this book, man--my pets, my brothers, my bff (Joyce Ewers - hi Joyce!). The giraffe's name by the way is Annaig which I never loved and still can't pronounce.

[This thing is a true work of art (I LOVE the type writer look), but more importantly, it explains quite a bit about our friend Gianna.  I always wondered why she liked me and it turns out that she likes all things that remind her of her giraffe.  It's also why she calls me 'Annaig.']

Liz:

The Liars' Club by Mary Karr

Back when I was in college I would recommend Karr's groundbreaking memoir as a means of explaining my background.  Sure, Karr is several decades older than me, and my childhood wasn't quite so hardscrabble, but no book has managed to capture Southeast Texas quite so well.  These are the people and towns I knew from a voice that could have been one of my friends'.  How do you explain to someone who grew up in an affluent suburb of Dallas or went to a private high school in Houston what it's like to live in a town where the first day of hunting season is a school holiday and the Tyler County Dogwood Festival is a bigger deal than any holiday except Christmas?  How do you explain spending weekends running through miles of woods with no supervision, or that the hot spot for high school parties was at the local auction barn on the catwalks above cattle pens that reeked of poo?  Karr gets it, and she also gets what it's like to be the literary kid in that environment.

Memoir, East Texas Style

Back when I was in college I recommended Mary Karr's The Liars' Club to my friends because my version of childhood in rural East Texas, a place where getting drunk on the catwalks above the livestock at the auction barn was considered a fine way to spend a Friday night, was so foreign from the movie theaters, malls, and restaurant meals my city friends experienced.  I still hold that book in high esteem as one of the best memoirs--and arguably the best book about East Texas--ever written.  I didn't expect to find another revelatory memoir moment resembling my first reading of Mary Karr, that feeling that the author just got it--that place, that time--and then was able to articulate that it with such grace, poetry, humor, humanity, and resilience.  Truly, I loved The Liars' Club, and I loved Karr's follow-up efforts, Cherry and Lit.

And then I read singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell's new book, Chinaberry Sidewalks.  I read it because I work for his publisher, and I read it because I live in Houston now and Crowell writes about growing up here in the Bayou City.  I picked it up because it was my job.  I discovered, though, that this book belongs in the canon of Texas writings and in the hands of all of those memoir readers out there.  Crowell's use of language is masterful, and just as I related Karr's book to my childhood, reading about the rougher parts of Houston in the 50's and 60's presented a version of the city and era in which my mother was raised.

Rodney Crowell is best known as a songwriter (and former husband of Roseanne Cash), a member of Emmylou Harris's back up band, a member of a band The Cherry Bombs which included Vince Gill as well, and an award-winning producer.  He's worked with Johnny Cash, Crystal Gayle, Guy Clark, Wynonna Judd, and Chely Wright among others, and scored a series of chart-topping singles in the late 80's and early 90's as a solo artist.  In 2004 he won the AMA (Americana Music Association) Song of the Year award for "Fate's Right Hand," and in 2006 the AMA gave him a lifetime achievement award for songwriting (an honor that went to Willie Nelson the following year).  He's a member of the Songwriting Hall of Fame.  I knew who Crowell was--growing up in the sticks, country is about the only radio option--but I didn't know that he'd grown up in Houston.



Hurricane Carla



Chinaberry Sidewalks recalls Crowell's childhood in East Houston, opening with a stunning scene in which a five year old Rodney breaks up his parents' rowdy party by firing a gun.  His is a story of heavy drinking adults, fighting, humor, and love.  He writes about the threat of a hurricane barreling down on Houston and the enormous holes in the walls on the dilapidated house in which he lives.  He details a harrowing scene with his best friend and his friend's unstable father.  He talks about his mother's devout Pentecostal beliefs and going to church with her, and his father's aspiring musical hopes and spending nights in honky tonks as an 11 year old drummer.  And he tells about the route of a kid who grew up along the ship channel to Nashville.  It's a terrific tale, but what really sets apart Chinaberry Sidewalks is Crowell's amazing use of language.  Technically this book is a celebrity memoir, but he is not your typical celebrity writer.  He's a poet; he writes as if he's been writing books his story for his whole life.  And I guess he has, set to music.

Around the time that I read Chinaberry Sidewalks last fall, I noticed that Mary Karr began posting comments about Rodney Crowell on Twitter and YouTube.  It turns out that the two know each other, even collaborate.  These two great writers could have been long lost siblings, otherwise unique voices detailing a part of the world I know too well.  I love Crowell's book, and I'm happy to write that Chinaberry Sidewalks hits bookstores today (Jan 18th).  Rodney Crowell is touring all over the country, including Mississippi, Houston, and Austin--if he's nearby, you absolutely MUST check him out.