I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it. But I can take CARE of myself by COMMUNICATING my feelings, making good CHOICES and CELEBRATING myself.
看了一本让我超级开心的书Will My Cat Eat my Eyeballs?从来没有想到一本谈论死亡的书能够写得那么欢乐。这是我在晚上10点以后写的一小段：Hahahaha. This book is so humorous that I never thought that I would be so cracked up reading a book about death. The illustrations in the book are also very funny and full of imagination. The Q&A is like a conversation between two friends, it is very easy to understand yet at the same time also offers a lot of knowledge, which I won't seek myself if not reading this book. Bravo.
自然，又顺藤摸瓜地找到了这篇演讲的原稿： SPEECH AT THE STADIUM LYRICS JOSEPH BRODSKY Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose. I am not totally oblivious to the pressures the so-called modern world exerts upon the young, I feel nostalgic for those who sat in your chairs a dozen or so years ago, because some of them at least could cite the Ten Commandments and still others even remembered the names of the Seven Deadly Sins. As to what they’ve done with that precious knowledge of theirs afterward, as to how they fared in the game, I have no idea. All I can hope for is that in the long run one is better off being guided by rules and taboos laid down by someone totally impalpable than by the penal code alone. Since your run is most likely to be fairly long, and since being better off and having a decent world around you is what you presumably are after, you could do worse than to acquaint yourselves with those commandments and that list of sins. … But I am not here to extol the virtues of any particular creed or philosophy, nor do I relish, as so many seem to, the opportunity to snipe at the modern system of education or at you, its alleged victims.To begin with, I don’t perceive you as such. After all, in certain fields your knowledge is immeasurably superior to mine or anyone’s of my generation. I regard you as a bunch of young, reasonably egotistical souls on the eve of a very long journey. I shudder to contemplate its length, and I ask myself in what way I could possibly be of use to you. Do I know something about life that could be of help or consequence to you, and if I do, is there a way to pass this information on to you? The answer to the first question is, I suppose, yes — not so much because a person of my age is entitled to out-fox any of you at existential chess as because he is, in all probability, tired of quite a lot of the stuff you are still aspiring to. (This fatigue alone is something the young should be advised on as an attendant feature of both their eventual success and their failure; this sort of knowledge may enhance their savoring of the former as well as a better weathering of the latter.) As for the second question, I truly wonder. The example of the aforementioned commandments may discourage any commencement speaker, for the Ten Commandments themselves were a commencement address — literally so, I must say. But there is a transparent wall between the generations, an ironic curtain, if you will, a see-through veil allowing almost no passage of experience. At best, some tips. 1. Now and in the time to be, I think it will pay for you to zero in on being precise with your language. Try to build and treat your vocabulary the way you are to treat your checking account. Pay every attention to it and try to increase your earnings. The purpose here is not to boost your bedroom eloquence or your professional success — although those, too, can be consequences — nor is it to turn you into parlor sophisticates. The purpose is to enable you to articulate yourselves as fully and precisely as possible; in a word, the purpose is your balance. For the accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis. On a daily basis, a lot is happening to one’s psyche; the mode of one’s expression, however, often remains the same. Articulation lags behind experience. That doesn’t go well with the psyche. Sentiments, nuances, thoughts, perceptions that remain nameless, unable to be voiced and dissatisfied with approximations, get pent up within an individual and may lead to a psychological explosion or implosion. To avoid that, one needn’t turn into a bookworm. One should simply acquire a dictionary and read it on the same daily basis — and, on and off, with books of poetry. Dictionaries, however, are of primary importance. There are a lot of them around; some of them even come with a magnifying glass. They are reasonably cheap, but even the most expensive among them (those equipped with a magnifying glass) cost far less than a single visit to a psychiatrist. If you are going to visit one nevertheless, go with the symptoms of a dictionary junkie. 2. Now and in the time to be, try to be kind to your parents. If this sounds too close to “Honor thy mother and father” for your comfort, so be it. All I am trying to say is try not to rebel against them, for, in all likelihood, they will die before you do, so you can spare yourselves at least this source of guilt if not of grief. If you must rebel, rebel against those who are not so easily hurt. Parents are too close a target (so, by the way, are sisters, brothers, wives or husbands); the range is such that you can’t miss. Rebellion against one’s parents, for all its I-won’t-take-a-single-penny-from-you, is essentially an extremely bourgeois sort of thing, because it provides the rebel with the ultimate in comfort, in this case, mental comfort: the comfort of one’s convictions. The later you hit this pattern, the later you become a mental bourgeois, i.e., the longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you. On the other hand, of course, this not-a-single-penny business makes practical sense, because your parents, in all likelihood, will bequeath all they’ve got to you, and the successful rebel will end up with the entire fortune intact — in other words, rebellion is a very efficient form of savings. The interest, though, is crippling; I’d say, bankrupting. 3. Try not to set too much store by politicians — not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those — say, just one person — who won’t profit from this improvement. The world is not perfect; the Golden Age never was or will be. The only thing that’s going to happen to the world is that it will get bigger, i.e., more populated while not growing in size. No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius. Yet in doing this, you must also prepare yourselves for the heart-rending realization that even that pie of yours won’t suffice; you must prepare yourselves that you’re likely to dine as much in disappointment as in gratitude. The most difficult lesson to learn here is to be steady in the kitchen, since by serving this pie just once you create quite a lot of expectations. Ask yourself whether you can afford a steady supply of those pies, or would you rather bargain on a politician? Whatever the outcome of this soul-searching may be — however much you think the world can bet on your baking — you might start right away by insisting that those corporations, banks, schools, labs and whatnot where you’ll be working, and whose premises are heated and policed round the clock anyway, permit the homeless in for the night, now that it’s winter. 4. Try not to stand out, try to be modest. There are too many of us as it is, and there are going to be many more, very soon. Thus climbing into the limelight is bound to be one at the expense of the others who won’t be climbing. That you must step on somebody’s toes doesn’t mean you should stand on their shoulders. Besides, all you will see from that vantage point is the human sea, plus those who, like you, have assumed a similarly conspicuous — and precarious at that — position: those who are called rich and famous. On the whole, there is always something faintly unpalatable about being better off than one’s likes, and when those likes come in billions, it is more so. To this it should be added that the rich and famous these days, too, come in throngs, that up there on the top it’s very crowded. So if you want to get rich or famous or both, by all means go ahead, but don’t make a meal of it. To covet what somebody else has is to forfeit your uniqueness; on the other hand, of course, it stimulates mass production. But as you are running through life only once, it is only sensible to try to avoid the most obvious cliches, limited editions included. The notion of exclusivity, mind you, also forfeits your uniqueness, not to mention that it shrinks your sense of reality to the already-achieved. Far better than belonging to any club is to be jostled by the multitudes of those who, given their income and their appearance, represent — at least theoretically — unlimited potential. Try to be more like them than like those who are not like them; try to wear gray. Mimicry is the defense of individuality, not its surrender. I would advise you to lower your voice, too, but I am afraid you will think I am going too far. Still, keep in mind that there is always somebody next to you, a neighbor. Nobody asks you to love him, but try not to hurt or discomfort him much; try to tread on his toes carefully; and should you come to covet his wife, remember at least that this testifies to the failure of your imagination, to your disbelief in — or ignorance of — reality’s unlimited potential. Worse comes to worst, try to remember how far away — from the stars, from the depths of the universe, perhaps from its opposite end — came this request not to do it, as well as this idea of loving your neighbor no less than yourself. Maybe the stars know more about gravity, as well as about loneliness, than you do; coveting eyes that they are. 5. At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim. Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo — the opposite of the V-sign and a synonym for surrender. No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody: history, the state, superiors, race, parents, the phase of the moon, childhood, toilet training, etc. The menu is vast and tedious, and this vastness and tedium alone should be offensive enough to set one’s intelligence against choosing from it. The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything; it could be argued even that that blame-thirsty finger oscillates as wildly as it does because the resolve was never great enough in the first place. After all, a victim status is not without its sweetness. It commands compassion, confers distinction, and whole nations and continents bask in the murk of mental discounts advertised as the victim’s conscience. There is an entire victim-culture, ranging from private counselors to international loans. The professed goal of this network notwithstanding, its net result is that of lowering one’s expectations from the threshold, so that a measly advantage could be perceived or billed as a major breakthrough. Of course, this is therapeutic and, given the scarcity of the world’s resources, perhaps even hygienic, so for want of a better identity, one may embrace it — but try to resist it. However abundant and irrefutable is the evidence that you are on the losing side, negate it as long as you have your wits about you, as long as your lips can utter “No.” On the whole, try to respect life not only for its amenities but for its hardships, too. They are a part of the game, and what’s good about a hardship is that it is not a deception. Whenever you are in trouble, in some scrape, on the verge of despair or in despair, remember: that’s life speaking to you in the only language it knows well. In other words, try to be a little masochistic: without a touch of masochism, the meaning of life is not complete. If this is of any help, try to remember that human dignity is an absolute, not a piecemeal notion, that it is inconsistent with special pleading, that it derives its poise from denying the obvious. Should you find this argument a bit on the heady side, think at least that by considering yourself a victim you but enlarge the vacuum of irresponsibility that demons or demagogues love so much to fill, since a paralyzed will is no dainty for angels. 6. The world you are about to enter and exist in doesn’t have a good reputation. It’s been better geographically than historically; it’s still far more attractive visually than socially. It’s not a nice place, as you are soon to find out, and I rather doubt that it will get much nicer by the time you leave it. Still, it’s the only world available; no alternative exists, and if one did, there is no guarantee that it would be much better than this one. It is a jungle out there, as well as a desert, a slippery slope, a swamp, etc. — literally — but, what’s worse, metaphorically, too. Yet, as Robert Frost has said, “The best way out is always through.” He also said, in a different poem, though, that “to be social is to be forgiving.” It’s with a few remarks about this business of getting through that I would like to close. Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those — in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can’t escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists; most likely they are counting on your being talkative and relating your experience to others. By himself, no individual is worth an exercise in injustice (or for that matter, in justice). The ratio of one-to-one doesn’t justify the effort: it’s the echo that counts. That’s the main principle of any oppressor, whether state-sponsored or autodidact. Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don’t allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time than it took for it to occur. What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react. Therefore, rush through or past them as though they were yellow and not red lights. Don’t linger on them mentally or verbally; don’t pride yourself on forgiving or forgetting them — worse come to worse, do the forgetting first. This way you’ll spare your brain cells a lot of useless agitation; this way, perhaps, you may even save those pigheads from themselves, since the prospect of being forgotten is shorter than that of being forgiven. So flip the channel: you can’t put this network out of circulation, but at least you can reduce its ratings. Now, this solution is not likely to please angels, but, then again, it’s bound to hurt demons, and for the moment that’s all that really matters. I can’t divine your future, but it’s pretty obvious to any naked eye that you have a lot going for you. To say the least, you were born, which is in itself half the battle, and you live in a democracy — this halfway house between nightmare and utopia — which throws fewer obstacles in the way of an individual than its alternatives. The speech is included in the 1997 collection On Grief and Reason: Essays by Joseph Brodsky.
在纽约时报上看到一个很有意思的书单，就是发生在每个州的有爱的故事：
50 States, 50 Love Stories
From sea to shining sea, here’s a tour
of unforgettable fiction that explores matters of the heart.
Forrest Gump and Jenny Curran
meet in their first-grade class in Greenbow, Ala. They walk home from school
together and quickly become the best of friends — but Forrest (later to be
played by Tom Hanks in the movie) will carry a torch for Jenny (Robin Wright)
for the rest of his life. As he puts it, “I may not be a smart man, but I know
what love is.” And that’s smart enough for us.
Alaska
Eowyn
Ivey, “The Snow Child”
“A childless couple struggling
to adapt to the harsh Alaskan wilderness in the 1920s are heartened by the
arrival of a young girl who hovers between reality and fantasy,” the Times
review said of Ivey’s “evocative retelling of a Russian fairy tale.”
Barbara Kingsolver’s debut
novel stars Taylor Greer, who wants to escape rural Kentucky and avoid getting
pregnant. How hard can it be? Along the way she inherits a 3-year-old Native
American girl named Turtle, and the two of them make their way to Tucson. As
Kingsolver writes, “In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make
things as right as we can.”
“This is an exceptionally fine
novel about a young girl whose mediocre parents don’t like her, precisely
because she is an inconveniently exceptional human being,” The Times said in
its 1973 review. “Twelve-year‐old Patty Bergen begins to learn to her genuine
surprise that she is a lovable person, ‘a person of value,’ from a German
P.O.W. escapee in Arkansas during World War II.”
Our critic described “Daughter
of Fortune” as “one of those event-crammed sagas featuring a beautiful, plucky
heroine, a mysterious, elusive lover and a cardboard supporting cast of
thousands. The resulting book reads like a bodice-ripper romance crossed with
Judith Krantz, with plenty of feminist and multicultural seasoning thrown in to
update the mix.”
Kent Haruf’s final novel opens
with an evening visit between neighbors in their 70s. Our reviewer wrote: “Both
are widowed — Addie is 70, Louis about the same — and Addie makes the
surprising proposal that they begin sleeping together, without sex, just to
talk in the dark and provide the sleep-easing comfort of physical company. … We
get to watch these two, night by night, pass through phases of awkwardness,
intimacy and alliance.”
Welcome to the unimaginable
heartbreak of June Reid, whose home is destroyed in a fire on the eve of her
daughter’s wedding. “Tragedies tunnel through life, and the suspense comes from
seeing how these spaces will be filled,” our reviewer wrote. “This is what
excites us about books that begin with a sorrowful bang. Grief is sad — we know
that — but what now? How will these particular characters respond? What else do
you have to give us?”
“The question of how
communities of immigrants form is prominent in this tale centered on a young
and (what feels early on to be) fatal love,” our reviewer wrote. “‘The Book of
Unknown Americans’ is less about the actual trek of its characters than about
how they settle in, make do and figure things out. … Despite the travails that
any of us have in these unsure times when traveling or relocating — who among
us wouldn’t want to be able to say we are home at last?”
Our reviewer described
“Swamplandia!” as a wild ride, “vividly worded, exuberant in characterization.”
The action centers on a family-owned gator-wrestling theme park in the
Everglades, where love blooms in many forms — some deeply rooted, others
mystical and fantastical. You read it in our pages first: “Russell has style in
spades.”
“‘An American Marriage’ tells
us a story we think we know,” Stephanie Watts wrote in her Times review. “Roy,
a young black man, is tried and wrongly convicted of rape while his wife,
Celestial, waits for his return. But Jones’s story isn’t the one we are
expecting, a courtroom drama or an examination of the prison-industrial
complex; instead, it is a clear vision of the quiet devastation of a family”
and the intimate story of one couple’s relationship.
Matt King, a wealthy Honolulu
attorney, has had the worst kind of shock: His wife, Joanie, has been injured
in a boat-racing accident and now lies in the hospital in a vegetative state.
In the painful depths of this crisis, King tries to repair his relationship
with his two daughters, then struggles with the revelation that before her
accident his wife had been in love with another man.
In 1971, our reviewer wrote:
“Reading this new novel by Wallace Stegner is like watching the swallows return
to Capistrano. Summer warmth and pleasant holidays lie ahead.” We challenge you
not to underline passages and dog-ear pages as you read this iconic story of
the American West. Here’s Stegner’s take on one of our favorite senses: “Touch.
It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy,
gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are
betrayed, and betray others.”
Illinois
Sandra
Cisneros, “The House on Mango Street”
Cisneros’s classic
coming-of-age story is a pillar of middle school curriculums — and deservedly
so. But adults will also enjoy these poignant vignettes about Esperanza
Cordero, a 12-year-old girl growing up in Chicago, and they’ll be reminded of
the ways in which loyalty to family can add up to its own kind of romance.
Warning: This novel about
teenagers who fall in love at a cancer support group is not for the faint of
heart. Hazel has thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs; Augustus is a
former basketball player who has lost a leg to osteosarcoma. Our reviewer wrote,
“Green’s characters may be improbably witty, but even under the direst
circumstances they are the kind of people you wish you knew.” Their slow-burn
romance is one for the ages.
The Times wasn’t a big fan of
“The Bridges of Madison County,” calling it “a bodice-heaving,
swept-away-by-love romance, a soft-focus fantasy.” But plenty of people loved
Waller’s novel — so many, in fact, that this novel about an affair between an
Iowa farmer’s wife and a National Geographic photographer planted itself on the
best-seller list and remained there for three years.
This is the story of an
African-American boy growing up in the early part of the 20th century in mostly
white Stanton, Kan. (which was based on Hughes’s actual hometown of Lawrence).
In a 2018 essay, Angela Flournoy wrote that “‘Not Without Laughter’ crystallizes
some of the themes introduced in Hughes’s first two poetry collections and
examines in detail subjects he would return to throughout his decades-long
career, among them the experiences of working-class and poor blacks, the
importance of black music to black life, the beauty of black language and the
trap of respectability.”
“Ann Patchett has written such
a good first novel that among the many pleasures it offers is the anticipation
of how wonderful her second, third and fourth will surely be,” Alice McDermott
wrote in her review. On its surface, “The Patron Saint of Liars” may not appear
to be a traditional love story — after all, it takes place at a home for
pregnant teenagers — but you won’t have to look very hard to see the beating
heart behind this story of friendship and healing.
Welcome to the first in Anne
Rice’s beloved Mayfair Witches series, where readers get acquainted with
generations of New Orleans witches. “We watch and we are always here” is the
motto of the Talamasca, the group that chronicles the lives of this dynasty.
This saga is equal parts sexy, scary and seductive, and it always goes for the
jugular.
“We are hooked from the moment we
meet Maude Gascoigne as a 17-year-old tomboy,” The Times said in 1992 of this
bittersweet family saga. “Her life changes forever when Peter Chambliss, her
brother’s Princeton classmate and a New Englander, accompanies her to
Charleston’s Saint Cecilia Ball. Maude is a match for anything that’s thrown
her way — and plenty is,” especially at the Chambliss family’s summer compound
in Maine, where most of the novel takes place.
Of this story of a refreshingly
abnormal family, our reviewer wrote: “For Tyler, the quality of mercy is
anything but strained. By her own admission, she’s a chronicler of sad failures
and unhappy marriages.” And yet, “A Spool of Blue Thread” provides an
unexpected sense of uplift. You read it and realize your family’s not so bad —
and those ties that bind can also lift you up when you least expect it.
Massachusetts
Erich
Segal, “Love Story”
“You can resist the charm and
bounciness of ‘Love Story’ on the ground that it should have stayed in Ladies’
Home Journal, where portions of it first appeared; on the ground that it isn’t
even semi‐serious literature,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in his review of
the “12-hanky” weeper about a pair of star-crossed lovers who meet at college
and marry over his family’s objections. “Nevertheless, about two-thirds of the
way through, a lump forms in the throat and starts growing until it feels like
a football coming up sideways. You either fight it or let it out.”
Set in Grosse Pointe in the
1970s, Eugenides’s debut explores the deaths of the five Lisbon sisters from
the perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys who struggle to make
sense of what happened. In her review, Suzanne Berne wrote, “Mr. Eugenides is
blessed with the storyteller’s most magical gift, the ability to transform the
mundane into the extraordinary.” One could say the same of true love.
Stradal’s sophomore novel is a
love letter to beer. It begins in 1959, when 15-year-old Helen Calder takes her
first sip. She becomes obsessed, both with drinking beer and brewing beer,
until eventually she bets the family farm on beer. What unfolds from there is a
sprawling tale of loyalty and sisterhood, with a good cold one easily
supplanting bubbly as the beverage of romance.
This novel might be our
favorite about the love of a mother for her child. Under the headline “Blessed
Are the Ordinary,” our reviewer described it like this: “In this sweeping and
beautifully written book, Mr. Lott has given us something unusual — an unsentimental
account of the life of a woman from rural Mississippi who transcends poverty
and ignorance to become part of a pioneering movement in the treatment of
children with Down syndrome.” The woman is Jewel; her daughter is Brenda Kay.
You won’t forget them.
File this one under “love story
gone wrong.” Our critic wrote: “Gillian Flynn’s ice-pick-sharp ‘Gone Girl’
begins far too innocently by explaining how Nick and Amy Dunne celebrated their
fifth wedding anniversary. Amy got up and started making crepes. Nick came into
the kitchen, appreciating his wife’s effort but wondering why Amy was humming
the theme song from ‘M*A*S*H.’ You know, that ‘suicide is painless’ thing. ‘Well,
hello, handsome,’ Amy says to her husband.” And the rest, as they say, is
history.
Our reviewer had mixed feelings
about Rick Bass’s story of a geologist sent to find oil in northern Montana:
“‘Where the Sea Used to Be’ is encased in an aesthetic of such contrived,
overelaborated meaningfulness that the effect is stock melodrama rather than
genuine human struggle.” But who can resist a yarn that knits up a love
triangle smack dab in the snowy wilderness? (For example: “He could feel the
pleasure coming straight through her — could feel it like heat conducted, as if
it were his.”)
“I have never seen anything
quite like ‘Eleanor & Park,’” John Green wrote of this unlikely love story,
which became an instant classic. “Rainbow Rowell’s first novel for young adults
is a beautiful, haunting love story — but I have seen those. It’s set in 1986,
and God knows I’ve seen that. There’s bullying, sibling rivalry, salvation
through music and comics, a monstrous stepparent — and I know, we’ve seen all
this stuff. But you’ve never seen ‘Eleanor & Park.’ Its observational
precision and richness make for very special reading.”
“Three generations of Hendrix
women are all, for a time, residents of the Calle de las Flores, a dust-choked
Reno trailer park where violence and sexual abuse abound, and an unlocked door
is an invitation of the worst kind,” our reviewer wrote. “Though Rory seems
heir to all the disadvantages in the world, her grandmother Shirley Rose makes
her expectations clear: ‘Someone’s got to make it and it has to be you.’” Will
she? Won’t she? The heart of this story is in the details — the diary entries,
social workers’ reports and arrest records that show the trajectory of a girl
who wants — and deserves — better.
Our reviewer wasn’t sold on “A
Prayer for Owen Meany.” She wrote: “‘A Prayer for Owen Meany,’ which asks to be
judged on old-fashioned terms, has high-minded hopes and some vitality. It just
doesn’t give you the shivers.” (Shivers are a recurring theme throughout the
novel.) We would argue that this sprawling tale of two boys from Gravesend is
one of the more moving portraits of friendship we’ve ever read — and one of the
few novels with a main character whose voice you can hear so clearly, it’s as
if he’s sitting right next to you.
In 1959, our reviewer described
Roth’s novella as a “somewhat incongruous mingling of conventional
boy-meets-girl material and a portrait-of-the-intellectual-as-a-young-man.” He
said, “There is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion.”
What better ingredients for a story about summer love?
“The plot follows a far-flung
conspiracy of displaced tribal people to retake North America toward the
millennium’s end,” our reviewer said, adding: “There is genius in the sheer,
tireless variousness of the novel’s interconnecting tales. … ‘Almanac of the
Dead’ burns at an apocalyptic pitch — passionate indictment, defiant augury,
bravura storytelling.”
Before Audrey Hepburn shimmied
into that iconic black dress and dangled her cigarette holder between two
fingers, the story of Holly Golightly existed only between the covers of Truman
Capote’s beloved novella. Way back in 1958, our reviewer summed it up in words
that hold true to this day: “‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is a valentine of love,
fashioned by way of reminiscence, to one Holly Golightly … a wild thing
searching for something to belong to.”
Inman is a wounded Confederate
soldier who “had seen so much death it had come to seem a random thing
entirely,” so he “resolves to reclaim himself and his humanity by fleeing the
hospital where he is recovering, returning to his home and to Ada … whom he intends
to make his wife.”
“The story opens in 1981 when
June Kashpaw, an attractive, leggy Chippewa prostitute who has idled away her
days on the main streets of oil boomtowns in North Dakota, decides to return to
the reservation on which she was raised,” our reviewer wrote in 1984. He went
on to say that the novel is about the “enduring verities of loving and
surviving, and these truths are revealed in a narrative that is an invigorating
mixture of the comic and the tragic.”
Margaret Atwood put it best:
“‘Beloved’ is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, and another triumph. … There are
many stories and voices in this novel, but the central one belongs to Sethe, a
woman in her mid-30s, who is living in an Ohio farmhouse with her daughter,
Denver, and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. … The farmhouse is also home to a
sad, malicious and angry ghost, the spirit of Sethe’s baby daughter, who had
her throat cut under appalling circumstances 18 years before, when she was 2.
We never know this child’s full name but we — and Sethe — think of her as Beloved,
because that is what is on her tombstone.”
“To the conventional scene of a
boy and his dogs, Mr. Rawls has brought a fresh eye, a quick phrase and a
close, specialized knowledge of the ways in which hounds hunt coons and coons
deceive hounds,” our reviewer wrote in 1961. “If you care for the sort of
writing too often dismissed as ‘folksy’ and soft, then you will find this a
rewarding book.”
Oregon
Gayle
Forman, “If I Stay”
One February morning, a family
goes for a drive and everything changes in an instant. There’s a car accident
and the sole survivor is 17-year-old Mia, who must decide (from her hospital
bed, through a pea soup fog of grief) whether she can carry on without her
family. This is a love story about friends and community — and music.
“Hornby seems, as ever,
fascinated by the power of music to guide the heart, and in this very funny,
very charming novel, he makes you see why it matters,” our reviewer wrote. The
music at the center of the story is from a 20-year-old album called “Juliet,”
known to be one of the greatest “breakup albums” of its time. How do these
songs still influence and move Hornby’s characters? Read the book to find out.
Rhode
Island
Beatriz
Williams, “A Hundred Summers”
Lily Dane, nursing heartbreak,
is summering at her family’s house in a moneyed Rhode Island enclave when her
former fiancé and former best friend unexpectedly show up — as husband and
wife. Complicating the high-society tale of love, loss, gossip and duplicity is
the great New England hurricane of 1938, which is barreling up the Atlantic
coast straight toward them all.
Tom Wingo is a middle-aged
former high school teacher who can no longer outrun the demons of the “grotesque
family melodrama” of his childhood. Encouraged by his sister’s psychiatrist
(described as “one of those go-to-hell New York women with the incorruptible
carriage of lionesses”), he agrees to talk about his childhood. What he reveals
and whom he falls for are classic Conroy — improbable, yet … who can resist?
South
Dakota
Nora
Roberts, “Black Hills”
Childhood
friends-turned-sweethearts Coop and Lil first meet as grade-schoolers when he’s
dispatched to spend summers on his grandparents’ ranch. Though their
relationship ends in heartbreak, they meet again years later when Coop — now a
retired New York City police detective — returns to South Dakota and finds that
Lil, a wildlife biologist, is being stalked, possibly by a serial killer.
There’s a reason people call Roberts “the queen of romantic suspense.”
Agee’s posthumously published
novel, which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize, is a study in grief and love. After a
young husband is killed in a terrible car accident on a sticky summer night in
1915, the family struggles to come to terms with his loss. “Agee’s book cannot
be judged as another novel of the week,” Alfred Kazin wrote in his review of
the book for The Times. “It is an utterly individual and original book, and it
is the work of a writer whose power with English words can make you gasp.”
This racy, larger-than-life
love story of a bookish Virginia socialite and a Texas rancher — famously made
into a movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean — was the
“it book” of 1952. “‘Giant’ makes marvelous reading,” The Times wrote. “Wealth
piled on wealth, wonder on wonder in a stunning, splendiferous pyramid of
ostentation.”
This novel is about two wives
in polygamous marriages: the real historical figure Ann Eliza Young, who was
much younger than her husband, Brigham, the founder of Salt Lake City; and
BeckyLyn, a fictional contemporary woman accused of shooting her husband dead.
Ebershoff’s book sets out to give a history and critique of polygamy, shedding
light on the dynamics it creates and how the practice has evolved.
In Tartt’s gripping debut, a
handful of students at Hampden — an idyllic but isolated liberal arts college
in Vermont — form intense bonds with one another and with their classics
professor, “who nurtures both their sense of moral elevation and an insularity
from conventional college life that ultimately proves fatal,” our reviewer
said. “The writing throughout ‘The Secret History’ is at once lush and precise,
and it keeps the more preposterous aspects of the plot in check. Ms. Tartt is
especially adept at showing how Hampden’s ‘hermetic, overheated atmosphere’
leads to a melodramatic inflation of emotions that in turn results in acts of
violence.”
You might have read this one in
fifth grade, but this Newbery Medal winner is always worth a revisit (and no,
we’re not talking about the movie). Two friends conjure an enchanted land in
the woods behind their houses. It’s a place to escape the real world — until
the day one of them doesn’t come home. Paterson writes: “She had tricked him.
She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then
before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him
stranded there — like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”
On an island in Puget Sound in
1954, the body of a fisherman is pulled out of the sea, trapped in his own net.
A Japanese-American man is charged with his murder, and the ensuing trial
leads the town’s newspaper editor to reflect on his long repressed love for the
accused man’s wife. The novel, which became a best seller and was adapted into
a 1999 feature film, explores the sometimes porous line between unrequited love
and resentment, and how deep-seated animosity and fear can erode a community.
Phillips’s fourth book unfolds
in the 1950s in Korea and West Virginia, where a teenage girl named Lark cares
for her half brother, Termite, who can’t walk or speak, after their mother
abandons them and their father dies while serving in Korea. Told in alternating
points of view, the novel explores the ferociously protective love that can
grow between siblings, as Lark worries that Social Services might take her
brother away.
“Repeated images and leitmotifs
link these people’s stories together, lending the novel a haunting musical
quality, even as they suggest the unconscious, almost magical bonds shared by
people who are connected by blood or love or memory,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in
a review for The Times.
“If it seems a stretch for a
baseball novel to hold truth and beauty and the entire human condition in its
mitt, well, ‘The Art of Fielding’ isn’t really a baseball novel at all, or not
only,” Gregory Cowles wrote in these pages in 2011. “It’s also a campus novel
and a bromance (and for that matter a full-fledged gay romance), a comedy of
manners and a tragicomedy of errors — the baseball kind as well as the other
kind.”
“Brokeback Mountain,” the
standout story in Proulx’s “gritty, gleamy” collection “Close Range,” is about
the “sudden flare-up of sexual passion between two ranch hands herding 1,000
sheep in summer upland pasture,” Richard Eder wrote in his review. “The passion
continues painfully — long separations and rare but explosive consummations —
after they marry and for the rest of their lives. It is a story told with
equanimity: the sheepherding, the mountains, the strained marriages, the
divergent itineraries are not a backdrop but as real as the affair itself.”
