Books in our Brain Wrinkles

We all have them. They attached themselves to our curious minds and tucked into brain winkles with their slippers and PJs on. For young readers today, maybe they’re wearing Snuggies.

Think back to your childhood, to that moment you marveled, you wondered, your tear ducts opened, or you held your breathe in suspense. We all have that one book that did it for us, that one book that made us view the force of words in an entirely new way.

For me, in 4th grade, Where the Red Fern Grows was the first book to make me cry. I honestly thought something was wrong with me. I was reading in bed, comfortable and warm. I could hear my family talking downstairs. My world was just fine, but I was bawling over my homework reading. This couldn’t be normal.

In 6th grade, Lois Lowry’s The Giver agitated my vision of the world. I closed that book curious, wanting to know more, wanting to figure out all of the ‘what if’s, wanting to know what was possible… Lois Lowry made me want to be a writer.

All grown up now, I suppose, I look at myself as a writer. How much did these books affect what I write today? If not in style, how did they affect my purpose? Can books read in adulthood shake you to the core like they could when you were a child?

I’d like to create a list of great titles here. Please help my cause. These are the books that made you want to write, that showed you the power of literature. These are the books that we should share with our children and the ones we should explore further ourselves.

I’ll add two more to my list:

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

How about you?

For the cold, cozy, curl-up-on-the-couch days ahead...

Now I will sadly admit that a hectic year hasn’t allowed me to read many 2010 book releases. I’m still catching up on 2008 and 2009, as well as working on the biggest release of 2012 (a writer can dream, right?).

But for those of us always adding to our reading list of books we just have to read, I thought the following lists were pretty interesting:

http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/3957.Best_books_of_2010

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazoncom-editorial-team-unveils-best-books-of-2010-list-2010-11-04?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Cold breezes have begun along with those wet nights that make you want to just stay home and curl up on the couch, a cup of tea, and a cozy blanket. Winter is coming soon. After the holiday madness that ensues every year, there are those months of cold, of tucking away from the world with a good book.

I know it’s only November, and I suppose those slow winter days are still far in the future, but after a year of busy, the idea of me, my couch, and some of the above titles just sounds a bit glorious, doesn’t it?

And just in case you, like me, have those aspirations to be on these lists in a few years, check out James River Writers’ Best Unpublished Manuscript Contest:

http://www.jamesriverwriters.org/jrw_programs/unpublishednovel/

Happy reading and writing everyone!

A Decade in Books

I stumbled across this recap of books 2000-2009 (http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2009/12/a_disjointed_but_dazzling_deca.html), and it got me thinking about my own list. I’m not qualified to discuss all literature and the movements that followed in the past decade, but there have been a lot of books that made me love the capabilities of language and stories in one way or another. My list of favorites isn’t academic or researched. I haven’t spent months debating the following results, but a rather thoughtful hour was spent examining the possibilities:

2000 – Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Language that drips with wit and beauty, popularly and critically acclaimed, who knew non-fiction could be so captivating? To be honest, I didn’t until stumbling upon this one.

2001 – Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. The New York Times Book Review proclaimed, “Life of Pi could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life,” and I whole-heartedly agreed.

2002 – Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. The voices of the characters are so startling different, yet so telling of truths and history. My own family’s Ukrainian background and stories of World War II perhaps brought this book closer to me, but it touches chords of reality and language that any novelist can admire.

2003 – Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Timely and astonishingly powerful, Hosseini takes his readers to an unknown world and fills that world with tumultuous emotions and transforming lives.

2004 – James Lee Burke’s In the Moon of Red Ponies. When a mass market fiction writer also attains the critical success of being considered a ‘literary writer,’ some people raise eyebrows in suspicion. This fourth book in the Billy Bob Holland series was not only a compelling story; it was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Writers also can take heart in the fact that Burke was rejected 111 times over a period of nine years before The Lost Get-Back Boogie (1986) – also nominated for a Pulitzer – was published.

2005 – Steve Berry’s The Third Secret. In the words of the New York Times, “The links to religion in The Da Vinci Code and [Dan Brown's] previous, Angels and Demons, pale beside those in The Third Secret.” In a world hungry for intelligent, international thrillers, Berry succeeds masterfully.

2006 – Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. This novel is a demonstration of the power of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). While surely editing ensued outside of the bounds of November, the majority of this book was written in a month’s time. Impressive, motivating, and awesome.

2007 – J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 2007 marked the completion of the seven-book series that entranced children into reading hundreds of pages and that peaked the imaginations of adults who remembered the power of children’s literature. Rowling can’t be ignored.

2008 – Paulo Coelho’s The Winner Stands Alone. Coelho has been one of my favorite authors since my first reading of The Alchemist. Yet while this novel is the Brazilian writer’s first thriller, it still retains the beautiful writing, the examination of the human essence, and the social commentary which seeps into his work.

2009 – Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. 2009’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel is woven from short stories. The New Yorker wrote, “Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . .” Isn’t that what we all attempt to achieve as writers? Kudos to Strout for giving us further inspiration.

The more I debated and researched the above, the more I realized how many books really are on my reading list. Perhaps I’ll add on that as another resolution in 2010: find more time to read! What a torture that would be (note the sarcasm here).

Now, this is only what I’ve been reading. I know I’ve left off so many great works. What do you think? What would you rate as the top books or authors of the past decade?

Antiques and Traditions

My husband and I have a Christmas tradition. Every year, we go to a holiday show and purchase a new nutcracker for our mantle. This year we saw David Sedaris’ The Santaland Diaries, but what we discovered in historic downtown Petersburg, Virginia was not just the cozy Sycamore Rouge Theatre.

What won me over about Penniston’s Alley Antiques was not the blue and white china, the antique secretary desks, or the Staffordshire porcelain dog figurines that I felt like I knew all about from Emyl Jenkins’ latest mystery The Big Steal. What won me over was that scattered throughout the entire shop, on shelves, on counters, on tables, and on chairs, were small stacks of books. We found our perfect Santa-clad nutcracker, but we uncovered so much more. As I said to my husband, my weakness could be so much more dangerous than old books.

As I debate whether I’m okay with the idea of e-books, there is something so comforting and personal about holding ninety year old leather binding in my hands. The gold font on the cover is slightly cracked with age, but the printed fleur-de-lis on Rostand’s Cyrano De Bergerac gives it strength. My new book was copyrighted in 1920, and a faint sticker inside shows it once sold for ninety-six cents.

Whose hands did this play pass through? Did an actor practice these lines in the Roaring Twenties? Did these words distance a reader’s mind from the Great Depression? Was this blue cover hidden and covered in dust for decades? The stories of tangible books are almost as intriguing to ponder as the stories contained between the covers. I can’t help myself.