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On the surface, The Sheltering Sky could be read as a novel that explores the relationship between America and other countries. Or you could read it as a story of a young, married couple trying to stay in love. You could even read it as a travel narrative of sorts, since it does have some of the most beautiful descriptions of far away places. The novel is actually all of these things and more.
The Sheltering Sky, first published in 1949, follows Port and Kit Moresby on their travels through deserts in Africa. The troubles they face on their trip mirror the troubles they have in their relationship. They never seem happy with their surroundings, so I was frequently left wondering when they would just pack up their things and go back to America. Fortunately for the reader, they continue their journey and their struggle, providing more room for intrigue.
I read this for an assignment for an American Studies class, so I couldn't help but read it through an "American" vs. "the Other" sort of lens. I think that it stands out as a good read even without any perspective or looking for a deeper meaning. You should read The Sheltering Sky if you are in the mood for something that is unlike much of what is published today. Plus, the Police wrote a song called "Tea in the Sahara" about it, so you know you're a little curious.
Learn more about the author and his other published works:
Paul Bowles Site
"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road."
Ahh, the beat generation. I don't think their level of intellect, creativity, daring, and non-conformity can ever be matched. My generation seems apathetic and bland in comparison.
On The Road was published in 1957. At the time, America was experiencing television, Marilyn Monroe, and the civil rights movement. Kerouac's America was different. He was a young, restless writer who didn't feel like he fit in. His hitchhiking journey became an iconic novel and possibly the most memorable novel of any of the beat writers.
Sal Paradise, the main character that Kerouac modeled after himself, embarks on a trip with the intention of getting away from his dull life. Today, we might say he was trying to "find himself." He intends to drive across the country with his best friend, Dean Moriarty, and eventually see the West. They meet eclectic, unexpected people who always add drama and humor to the tale. There is friendship, love, loss, jealousy and betrayal... just like real life.
One of the best parts of the book is the poetic language that Kerouac uses. His style is a little "stream-of-consciousness," but not so much that the writing becomes confusing. This novel is more like a work of art than a book.
The story of Sal, Dean, and all the other characters they meet is not only brilliant, but moving. It made me wonder what I was doing with my life and why I hadn't driven across the country to "seize the day." What can you learn by experiencing life Kerouac's way that you simply can't in college? A lot. But since hitchhiking just isn't as safe as it used to be and we all know that a college education is important, live vicariously through Sal and learn from his 
story.
Jack Kerouac
I don't know if I could ever say enough to convey how much I adore and admire Zadie Smith. I have rarely seen the level of creative genius that she seems to have effortlessly.
Smith is currently my favorite writer of fiction. I used to read Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood when I wanted an escape from memoir or other non-fiction, but now they seem dull and depressing in comparison. Smith is always fresh and clever.
The Autograph Man is the story of Alex-Li Tandem, an autograph collector. In a world obsessed with celebrity, he makes a living buying and selling autographs. It all seems straightforward at first, but Smith has a way of complicating matters and giving her stories layer after layer of fascinating drama. For example, Tandem wants to meet an older actress, Kitty Alexander. He yearns to meet her not only as a fan, but also because her signature is one of the most elusive and expensive. He has copies of every movie from the forties that she starred in and also has them memorized.
One of Smith's trademarks is the ability to paint an incredibly detailed portrait of her characters. And the details are sometimes odd, so you are not likely to forget them (his girlfriend has a pacemaker). I fell in love with these unpredictable details that have seemed so hard to come by in most of the modern fiction I have read. Another part of her charm as a writer is that her characters are quirky and sarcastic. Tandem was so vivid in my mind because of the quality of her writing that I wished he were real so that I could be friends with him.
"Did you ever think that historically we may have reached a saturation point as far as ease is concerned? So there's actually no way you could've made that breakfast any easier than it was? Unless we, like, took it intravenously." Alex-Li Tandem
I think once you read anything by Zadie Smith, you will fall for her style and wit. I only wish she would write more!
Also by Zadie Smith:White Teeth (2000)On Beauty (2005)
www.contemporarywriters.com
Through this blog, I have realized how much I read biographies and autobiographies. I guess at some point real people became more interesting than fiction. I still read a lot of fiction, but I got into a habit of doing reviews about my favorite books (I don't want to have to say anything bad about a book), and suddenly realized they are almost all nonfiction.
I read a review of this book in one of my most trusted magazines, Bust. I bought it without looking inside first, so when I got home and opened it, I was shocked to see that it was a graphic novel. I shouldn't have been shocked, given the fact that Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and has been for years and I already knew that. I was a little bummed at first. "A cartoon? What am I going to do with an entire book of cartoons?"
Then I began reading, and I didn't stop reading until I got to the end. I knew Bechdel was capable of making cute cartoons, but I didn't know she was an amazing storyteller, also. And she has quite a story to tell. Her memoir is mostly amusing, but sometimes brutally honest about the troubling parts of her life.
Fun Home revolves mainly around her relationship with her distant, cold father who reveals that he is gay when Bechdel is an adult. The family politics related to this admission are tense and it seems that she was still working through her confusion about her father while writing the memoir. The story begins when she is young, follows her into her teen years when she discovers that she is gay, and ends with her beginning to come to terms not only with her father's homosexuality, but also his suicide.
I wondered how, as a cartoonist, Bechdel would be able to convey the personalities of the characters. I wasn't sure how, with such limited text, I would be able to really understand the dynamics and intricacies of her relationships. She proves that you don't need much text to let your readers get to know the people you are writing about. From the first chapter, I felt like I was in the same room with Bechdel and that I experienced everything she experienced. It helps to have her drawings that can convey emotion through expressions or body language on the page, but her writing is also exceptional.
Despite the dark material she has to work with, including the fact that her father owned a funeral home which he operated out of their home (I couldn't help but picture the Fisher home in Six Feet Under), Bechdel manages to tell a lighthearted story of growing up with the harsh realities we are sometimes faced with.
"Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of 'Airplane.' As he launched me, my full weight would fall on the pivot point between his feet and my stomach. It was a discomfort well worth the rare physical contact, and certainly worth the moment of perfect balance when I soared above him."
In the end, I decided that I would search for more graphic novels, since they are sort of the same as a short story, only with fun pictures to go along with the story. I hope that Bechdel will continue on the graphic novel path. She has not only perfected the art of being a cartoonist, now she has become an award-winning writer, too.
Alison Bechdel
You may have heard of Augusten Burroughs since his memoir Running with Scissors sold millions of copies and was even made into a Golden Globe nominated film with Gwyneth Paltrow and Alec Baldwin. While Running with Scissors is still my favorite, I have enjoyed all of his other books, including Possible Side Effects, a collection of short stories.
If Augusten Burroughs weren't such an incredibly talented writer, I'm sure he could also make it as a stand-up comedian. He is, however, such an entertaining writer that I don't think he'll ever have to consider a change of career. I have every book he has ever written and even went to hear him speak at a sold-out book-signing. I am, I just realized, a huge fan. I have also realized, through my book review blog, that I tend to enjoy memoirs or biographies slightly more than fiction. I'm not sure when this happened, but I guess it is because human nature is fascinating and it seems like a privilege to get to see into someone's life or get a peek at what they feel and think.
If you also like to read about other people and the way they operate, Possible Side Effects is a good place to start. His life is, to me, just about as interesting and entertaining as a memoir could be. I'm not sure how to describe his tone, exactly. Maybe a mix of sarcasm, wit, and disbelief. He is a storyteller with an impeccable sense of humor.
His stories about his childhood are particularly fun to read since he was an odd child. "What I loved about Wonder Bread was that if you peeled off the crusts and fed them to the dog, you could compress the remaining bread into a dense mass, then roll it in your palm to create a prefect sphere." His tales from working as a copywriter for an ad agency are priceless. "It was a low point in my career when I fund myself as the sole copywriter on the Junior Mints account," he writes. There are also more recent stories, like the account of the less-than-perfect bed and breakfast he visits with his partner, Dennis. "Standing there in the foyer, on the inch-thick maroon carpeting, I stared directly at a human baby girl doll, seated in a high chair. Now maybe I'm just ultrajudgemental, but I really feel that only two groups of people have any business collecting dolls: little girls and grown women who lost all their children in fiery car accidents."
Possible Side Effects covers a lot of territory and I was certainly never bored. His sense of humor is one that I have never experienced before and have never been able to find another author capable of replicating.
www.augusten.com
April 29, 2008 Release of new memoir A Wolf at the Table, which focuses on his father
You may have heard of The Virgin Suicides, the film by Sofia Coppola that starred Kirsten Dunst. As is the case with so many great movies, it was first made in book form... and also, the book is better than the movie, which is saying a lot because it is one of my favorite movies.
The novel tells the beguiling and haunting story of the five Lisbon sisters. On the surface, the girls lead a typical, middle-class lifestyle. They talk about boys, criticize each other, and have parents that don't understand them.
Told from the perspective of the boys that dream of dating the Lisbon sisters, we hear about them as outsiders, in the same way that neighbors exchange gossip.
"The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecilia,) and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese). They were short, round-buttocked in denim, with roundish cheeks that recalled that same dorsal softness. Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils. No one could understand how Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had produced such beautiful children."
Eugenides has the quality that most writers strive for: the ability to transport the reader to another time and place. While I read eagerly, I felt like I, too, was a teenage girl in the 70's. I could feel the tension in the room when Trip asks Lux's father if he could take her to prom. I could picture their house perfectly, and even their bedrooms and their clothes. The detailed, yet lyrical style is one that I have yet to see matched in any other novel.
Eugenides later won the Pulitzer Prize for his other novel Middlesex, which was published nine years after The Virgin Suicides.
At 543 pages, reading this biography allowed me to learn everything I could have ever wished to know about E.E. Cummings and more. Sawyer-Laucanno had the unique opportunity of having full access to diaries, letters, drawings, and first versions of poems. By using these documents as a backdrop to the personal life of Cummings, Laucanno tells the turbulent and fascinating story of one of American culture's greatest poets.
I think the most appealing part of this book is that it includes draft versions of the poems that are my favorite. The chance to see the poems exactly how Cummings first wrote them was engaging, as well as seeing several of his drawings and sketches (did you know he was also an accomplished artist?)
I should mention that I am certainly not a big fan of poetry. In fact, E.E. Cummings is the exception for me. His poetry is the only poetry that appeals to me. It is unpredictable and at the time that it was being published it was quite a slap in the face of traditional poets. His irreverence for tradition is yet another intriguing point about his life that I found in this biography. Much of his art and poetry was overtly sexual in nature, making many around him uncomfortable and even causing him to lose a few publishing deals.
What a great life to read about... his loves, travels, fears, family problems, friends, opinions... all are revealed in this book by Sawyer-Laucanno, who seems to have left no stone unturned. Other biographies of Cummings only scratch the surface of the amount of engrossing information there is to tell.
More to read:
Tulips and Chimneys (1938)
1 x 1 (1944)
XAIPE (1950)
Ninety Five Poems (1958)
Prose:The Enormous Room (1922)i, six nonlectures (1953)
Fairy Tales (1965)
"A black man had owned them, a strange thing for many in that world, and now that he was dead, maybe a white man would buy them, which was not as strange."
The Known World was published in 2003 and Edward P. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 2004. The setting is Virginia in the 1800s. The subject matter is difficult to accept- the bizarre (but apparently true) idea that there were some African-American slave owners. The story involves the outcome of this scenario, but also so much more than that. Jones manages to create one of the most lyrical, detailed, emotional stories I have ever read. By interweaving the history of slavery, the deep emotions and personalities of many characters, and a message of overcoming what you thought you could never overcome, The Known World will stay in my top ten favorite books for a long time.
The long list of characters can be confusing at times, but I fell into the novel and could not put it down. Sometimes, just when I had forgotten about one character, they would reappear unexpectedly and play a role in another chapter and another character's life. I learned to not focus so much on the names, but the overall feelings of each character and what they added.
The Known World took me to places I had never thought of. He begins with the shock value of an African American slaveholder with a bustling plantation, as well as the reality of the violence and racism of the time. He holds the reader's attention all the way to the end with not an ounce of boredom in between.
Also by Edward P. Jones:
All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006)
Lost in the City (1992)
If Jonathan Franzen's name sounds familiar to you, it might be because his novel The Corrections was briefly part of Oprah's book club in 2001, only to be taken off the list when he was quoted in an interview as saying that he was uncomfortable with his book being part of the club. Even without Oprah backing his novel, The Corrections was still a best-seller.
Since I enjoyed The Corrections so much, I thought I would give some of his other books a try. I read a collection of his essays called How To Be Alone and loved it, which led me recently to his memoir The Discomfort Zone. I was not disappointed.
I love memoirs, especially ones that are written by interesting, quirky people. Franzen and his tales of growing up are, like most human stories, funny and sad. This memoir deals with his childhood, of course, and that portion is entertaining as he writes about awkward and embarrassing situations. But what I got more out of in the book were the parts of his adult life that were difficult, including the end of his marriage and the death of his mother. I think human beings are curious about how others deal with the stresses and traumas of life, so I eagerly read the passages about dealing with grief and recuperating after the end of a serious relationship.
By the end, Franzen seems to have gotten through the worst part of his troubles and enters into a part of his life when he is mostly alone. Alone, except for birdwatching. "Then my mother died, and I went out birdwatching for the first time in my life," he writes. Initially, I thought "Birdwatching? Really?" But it was a great insight into how he coped with being alone and used the birdwatching as a window into human relations. It was even humorous to read about the way he saw so many human characteristics in the birds and the way they interacted.
Overall, Franzen's memoir is the story of an average guy with what might be considered an average life, but the way he weaves the unexpected into the story is satisfying. It was even a little random sometimes, but given the fact that life is random, I grew to appreciate this quality. The memoir has the elements of most memoirs: growing up, love, learning, and death. But you will also find a lot of substance and his humor in the middle, like the travel stories, bits about global warming, and Franze
n finding his way through college.
www.jonathanfranzen.com
Includes a list of books and summaries, an author bio, book reviews, and even an address if you want to write fan mail!
"I never fall apart because I never fall together" -Andy Warhol
I think it is safe to assume that most people have probably heard of Andy Warhol and are probably familiar with his famous art work (Campbell's soup? Portrait of Marilyn Monroe?) Yes, Warhol is quintessential American art. He was also a filmmaker, magazine editor, and all-around genius. But some people might not know that Warhol became a published author in 1975 when he wrote an autobiography called The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.
The book is certainly not a typical autobiography. It doesn't involve long anecdotes about his childhood in Pennsylvania (although there are some funny bits involving his awkward adolescence), his parents, or any of the run-of-the-mill history one might expect. Instead, the book is really more like a journal or maybe a letter to a friend. It is full of his opinions about often important topics- relationships, love, death, success. But those topics are just so serious and draining, so Warhol works his magic and ends up writing about drag queens, famous friends, psychiatry, candy and television. "When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people," he writes.
Every page is witty, sometimes sarcastic, and always fascinating. This book is an opportunity to learn more about the man behind the pop art phenomenon. For anyone who might be curious to know what was going on in the mind of Warhol during the height of his fame, his autobiography is a great resource. You will laugh out loud at least once, I promise.
www.warhol.org
Andy Warhol Museum
Pittsburgh, PA
Keeps you up-to-date about other events and collections at the museum.
Also has a fun online shop with all the Warhol merchandise you could ever dream of.
This is a blog for book recommendations and reviews, as well as other literary randomness and interesting news. Some film and music information might be included sometimes, but mostly I'd like to tell everyone about great books I've read and why I thought they were so great in the hopes that they might discover something they might not have otherwise. That is, in fact, the way I have come across some of my favorite books and authors.
Enjoy!
