Sunday Caught My Interest

It was a hectic week with getting ready for the XC awards night as well as the local Junior Olympics race yesterday. Himself was the coach for several young people and spent the day making sure athletes had what they needed when they needed it. As for me, I am hopping on the road this morning and made it down to my mom’s. My brother came in for a short visit so I extended my Thanksgiving in Oregon so I could see him.

Here is what caught my interest this week:

Through Cerebral Girl in a Redneck World I found that Publisher’s Weekly has put together their list of the best books of 2011 and some of these were already on my list (State of Wonder and There but for the)) and others caught my interest this week:

I don’t think I have heard of Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff (a short story collection) and the listed novel The Devil all the Time. The author has lived all his live in southern Ohio working as a laborer in a paper mill until he was fifty. At that time he enrolled in a creative writing program at The Ohio State University. The Amazon pages for both books are full of critical acclaim. The Devil all the Time is a southern Gothic tale “with a terrifying cast of rural characters: the haunted WWII veteran, the husband and wife serial killers who target young men along the Interstate, the predatory revival preacher and his wheelchair-bound guitar-playing cousin, all tied together with violence, sin, and gorgeous prose into a mesmerizing slice of Americana.”

I am a big fan of Robert Massie ever since reading Nicholas and Alexandria when I was in high school. I still have my copy of Peter the Great which I have re-read more than once and I remember devouring Journey by Robert and his wife Suzanne which is an account of their son’s hemophilia and an exploration of the medical and political aspects of the disease at that time.   Massie has written a new biography – this time of Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. Massie has the ability to make biography very approachable and readable and I can’t wait to read this one. And I find that it is one of Swapna Krishna‘s favorite reads of this year.

Someday I will Write about this Place is a memoir by African writer Binyavanga Wainaina who has written Vanity Fair and the New York Times and winner of the Cannes Prize. The blurb at Publisher’s Weekly is short but attention-grabbing, “A Kenyan Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this sublime word-drunk memoir from the Caine Prize–winning author describes a coming-of-age rent by political troubles and suffused by a love affair with language.”

Happy Reading

 

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