It’s been a while since I read a book focused on writing. Many writing books are useful for thinking about creativity in general or for applying to any type of writing, but this one is geared toward fiction, at least in the specifically advising sections that are technically the core of the book. I actually skipped much of those, as I didn’t find much of the advice helpful and appreciated the memoir parts more. Both the beginning section of how King became a writer and the “On Living” postscript that tells the tale of getting hit by a car while he was working on this book are more interesting to me than a few paragraphs about how adverbs should be avoided. It’s actually kind of a curious structure to me to wrap advice about fiction between memoir (even if it’s focused on writing fiction), and I think few people will appreciate the whole book equally. Most will likely find something in one or the other.
You Are Here
Katharine Harmon
A curated exploration of “Personal Geographies And Other Maps of the Imagination,” I appropriately read and browsed through this while visiting a city that I used to live in, wandering old neighborhoods, piecing together streets, and layering new experiences over the mental cartographies. There are a few essays and textual maps in this book, but most of it is visuals.
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
I remember hearing about Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Katherine Anne Porter
I stole this book from the responses to a friend’s request for book suggestions for my own reading list not too long ago. While trying to determine what to read next, I browsed some synopses and reviews and found this comment: “Katherine Anne Porter is a woman who spent a great deal of time fretting over semicolons.” That was the deciding factor.
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The Orphan Master’s Son
Adam Johnson
After no Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded last year, people who care about such things worried that it could happen again. Instead this novel set in North Korea was recognized for 2013, one of a few awards it’s garnered so far. Initially I wasn’t too intrigued by the reviews, but I guess I was swayed by the accolades.
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Grace
Grace Coddington
As someone who first learned of Grace Coddington from her feisty presence in The September Issue, I felt appropriately chided by the introduction where Coddington declares it “the movie that is the only reason anyone has ever heard of me.” That claim is mostly untrue in terms of the fashion world, but then the average person who saw that documentary is unaware of who edits the spreads in fashion magazines.
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson
I loved Winterson’s first, semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
It’s hard not to think of Benh Zeitlin’s beautiful film Beasts of the Southern Wild while reading this book that is also centered around an impoverished bayou community bracing for an approaching hurricane. The heroines also have similar fierceness nestled in vulnerability and struggle with the absence of their mothers but the presence of wounded fathers.
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Building Stories
Chris Ware
I assumed that I’d love this graphic novel due to its book-as-object nature, so much so that when I recently read Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s description of it being “not an actual book so much as a twee art project,” I also assumed that was an unnecessarily harsh opinion. Yet once I spent some time with it, I found myself agreeing with her more than I expected.
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The Long Goodbye
Meghan O’Rourke
When I read the excerpt from this book in The New Yorker a couple years ago, I wasn’t particularly drawn to read the whole thing. But a copy showed up in a giveaway pile at work, and I wound up turning to it between library holds. I thought I’d put it aside when something else came along but instead wound up determined to finish, staying up late to get to the end.
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This is How You Lose Her
Junot Díaz
Partway into this collection, Teri tweeted a link to this comment thread on a Hairpin advice post, prompting a brief discussion of Díaz and how autobiographical his work might be. Since I haven’t read much about him as a person before, I wasn’t aware that his character Yunior, who is the centerpiece of this collection of stories, is really quite similar to him, making much of his fiction pretty true-to-life.
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Tenth of December
George Saunders
I always feel I should like George Saunders more than I do; when The New York Times emphatically declared this “the best book you’ll read this year,” I thought perhaps these would be the stories that would teach me to love him. The flaw in this thinking being that I read several of them when they ran in The New Yorker.
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The Round House
Louise Erdrich
For some reason I’ve never read any Louise Erdrich novels before, so I was glad to get to The Round House and later find out that many of her books are centered around the same fictional North Dakota reservation and the community there. It’s impressive to know that this book is grounded in a well-established history, but yet it can effortlessly draw in a reader unfamiliar with any of the preceding stories.
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Snow
Orhan Pamuk
Feeling pleased at the wintry theme at the time, I bought Snow with Winter’s Tale — now the association with Helprin’s novel is not at all flattering, but luckily they have little in common beyond cold weather. And whereas Winter’s Tale is best at the beginning, Snow felt rather tedious at the start and got better after the story was established.
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Calling Dr. Laura
Nicole Georges
It’s that time of year when I tend to think of Portland and my time living there — now five years distant; so it was fitting that Nicole’s new book came out right now. I read it in one snowy evening, finding many old familiars of that city and of the people. Nicole is someone I knew there, through mutual friends as well as crossing paths at the IPRC, but not incredibly well. I wasn’t aware of most of the story she captures in this graphic memoir, but I suspect that my relative closeness has a lot to do with my enjoyment of the book.
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Storming the Gates of Paradise
Rebecca Solnit
I started reading Storming the Gates of Paradise early last year, but since it’s not a light read, the library wound up wanting it back before I could finish. Only thanks to having added it as my “currently reading” book on Goodreads was my memory jogged enough times to get another copy and finally read the rest. An anthology of essays over a number of years, the book is grouped by subject matter with a fair amount of overlap — each essay was originally written to stand alone, so key facts or concepts tend to get rephrased across them.
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The Englishman who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects
John Tingey
In many ways W. Reginald Bray could be considered a mail art pioneer, as he sent a bevy of interesting items through the post including, as the title reveals, himself —twice! He also posted his dog and various objects with addresses and stamps applied directly to them, as when he traveled to Ireland and dug up a turnip and etched his address into it (the turnip itself didn’t survive to be documented). His experiments seem more inquisitive of the abilities of the Royal Mail than artistic though.
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Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin
In 2006, a New York Times poll asked “a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages” What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?, and Winter’s Tale incredibly received multiple votes.
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Smoking Typewriters
John McMillian
For the past couple years, I’ve been pretty focused on fiction, so I determinedly picked this history of the 1960s underground press off my to-read list in an attempt to seek a bit of balance, plus the alternative media angle still had my curiosity piqued two years after I first flagged it for later reading.
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Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan
I imagine this quirky novel would be a talking point for people interested in the “digital humanities,” as it pits dusty, old books and their creaky scholars against shiny, electronic devices and their optimistic geeks. That’s definitely both exaggeration and simplification as there are characters that walk the analog-digital line, but then it’s also a lighthearted narrative in which many of the characters are archetypal.
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Wild
Cheryl Strayed
Like many people, I first came across Cheryl Strayed through her column Dear Sugar on the Rumpus, though her identity was still a secret at that point. Sugar’s advice is so unsparingly raw, honest, and compassionate — I think I read all the entries the first time I came across one of them.
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