Woke up this morning to snow in Oregon. Youngest and I are down here delivering him back to school with reams of paperwork for his European Year. Last week was spent either organizing or being ill with the flu none of which is conducive to reading much. I did sort through some of my books trying to figure out which ones I have read and don’t want to keep and which I have that I don’t think I will ever get to spurred on by a to-read list of over 150 books which doesn’t even count the books on my shelves. And here it is another Sunday and I have more books to put on my list.
Here is what caught my interest this week:
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose is one of my favorite books. When I read it some years ago I fell in love with Stegner’s language, the way he paints with word, how he can show the complexity of a person as they deal with their circumstances. I then read Crossing to Safety and felt the same way. Matthew of A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook has shown me the next book to try with his review of All the Little Live Things the story of an elderly retired man living with his wife on a small ranch. Feeling guilty about the death of his son, he lets a hippie move onto the property and becomes platonically close to a young woman living near by. It sounds like a simple story on the surface, but it also sounds like the rest of Stegner’s work, when you mine a simple tale, you reach gold.
Somehow I haven’t heard of Denis Johnson who has won a National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a poet, novelist, and short story writer as well as writing plays and non-fiction. Train Dreams, his novella, was first published in The Paris Review and won the O’Henry award in 2003. Trevor of The Mookse and the Gripes writes a beautiful review of this 100 page work depicting the life of Robert Granier in “snapshots and pictures” starting in 1917. Trevor wowed me with his review as did this excerpt from a review in The New Yorker:
[A] severely lovely tale . . . The visionary, miraculous element in Johnson’s deceptively tough realism makes beautiful appearances in this book. The hard, declarative sentences keep their powder dry for pages at a time, and then suddenly flare into lyricism; the natural world of the American West is examined, logged, and frequently transfigured. I started reading ‘Train Dreams’ with hoarded suspicion, and gradually gave it all away, in admiration of the story’s unaffected tact and honesty . . . Any writer can use simple prose to describe the raising of a cabin or the cutting down of tress, but only very good writers can use that prose to build a sense of an entire community, and to convey, without condescension, that this community shares some of the simplicity of the prose. Chekhov could do this, Naipaul does it in his early work about Trinidad, and Johnson does it here, often using an unobtrusive, free indirect style to inhabit the limited horizons of his characters . . . A way of being, a whole community, has now disappeared from view, and is given brief and eloquent expression here.” —James Wood, The New Yorker
Looking for a nostalgic read centered around a 1950’a drive-in theater? Leeswammes’ Blog Reviews Marjorie Reynolds’ novel The Starlite Drive-In. In 1990, when bones are found at the Starlite Drive-in, Callie Anne Benton thinks she knows what happened. In the 1950’s she lived at the drive-in with her father, the caretaker and her mother, and agoraphobic. When her father is injured a young man is hired to help things get complicated. This is a more coming-of-age story set in a summer of hot nights and movies rather than a simple mystery.
Finally, Danielle of A Work In Progress highlights thirteen diaries ranging from the known to the more obscure. If you like this format to read, this post and its comments will give you plenty of material to choose from.
Happy Reading.
W. Stegner is an author I’ve enjoyed in the past and you just reminded me that I have a few more books on his on my shelf. I need to get to these soon.
have a wonderful week.
We have a dusting of snow in Seattle. I loved Crossing to Safety but haven’t read Angle of Repose. It is sitting on my shelf along with Stegner’s Wolf Willow, a wonderful memoir of growing up in southern Saskatchewan. I read and enjoyed Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and am waiting for the library receive Train Dreams. I hope you are feeling better!