Random Reading Thoughts: War, what is it good for?

[Cricket]

Some literary award news:

Hilary Mantel becomes only the third writer (after Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee) and the first woman to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize twice, for Bring Up the Bodies. Unlike Carey and Coetzee, who at least had to wait a while and wrote books in between, it only took Mantel three years to triumph again, and for her follow-up. Bodies is definitely one of the most successful and acclaimed novels of the year, but I didn't think she'd win again, especially for a direct sequel. It's a safe choice, in a way, but also a bold one, since it does really push Mantel into the highest echelons of English-language writers. The question now is: can she win an unprecedented third Booker, for the third and final volume of her projected Thomas Cromwell trilogy? It's amazing to think that, until 2009, Mantel had never even been shortlisted for the prize, and now, only four years later, she's 2/2!

Also, the National Book Award nominees were announced a few days ago. Here are the fiction finalists:

Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney's Books)
Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown and Company)

It's interesting that the NBA, after a couple years of embracing small presses and more obscure talent, has largely returned to bigger names, like Díaz, Eggers and Erdrich. Fountain and Powers are newcomers, but their books have received quite a bit of coverage too. Seems like a pretty open race.

[Artimus]

The New Yorker has a...unique...portrait of Mantel in their current issue (also online for free).

[Artimus]

Just finished Gone Girl. I liked part one a lot (interesting play between the two voices) but the second and third were really nasty? I kind of detested them. On the whole it's just a mean and nasty and unpleasant book. And really trashy in a soulless way.

[ladylurks]

Arti - Have you read anything else by Gillian Flynn? Just wondering if you had the same reaction to her other books. I thought Sharp Objects was pretty nasty, but compelling.

[Artimus]

Nope. I thought this was just needlessly nasty—it didn't have a point or a theme justifying how icky it was.

[Cricket]

I'm sure everybody has heard about the Random House/Penguin merger by now. People seem to be viewing this as bad news for both publishing and literature (Jamie Oliver cookbooks galore!). Hopefully, not too many will lose their jobs.

Anyway, Alice Munro's new collection is coming out in the US in a couple weeks, but if you just can't wait, you can read the opening story, "To Reach Japan", here. I personally think it's the weakest story in the book, but that's probably just me. I can't imagine Munro or her editors would choose to open the collection with what they think is a clunker. And subpar Munro is still better than most of what's out there.

I also recently read the texts of a couple plays. One is Sons of the Prophet by Stephen Karam, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer. I enjoyed it. Karam infuses his essentially tragic play with a deft sense of comedy and the absurd. I'm looking forward to whatever he does next. And the other is Alan Hollinghurst's new translation of Racine's Berenice, which is currently being used in a production in London starring Anne-Marie Duff (who is married to James McAvoy). I love Berenice, which is my favorite Racine play, and Hollinghurst predictably does a beautiful job with it. I wish I could see the production.

Right now, I'm reading The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, which has gotten great reviews and was nominated for the National Book Award. I'm not crazy about the style of writing so far (it strikes me as very writers' workshop), but it's a short book, so I'll try to finish it. Plus, the author is kind of cute? :shallow:

[jjj]

Amazon's Best Books of the Year is out. #1 is The Round House by Louise Erdrich. #3 is my favorite book of the year Gone Girl: "Masterfully plotted from start to finish, the suspense doesn’t waver for one page. It’s one of those books you will feel the need to discuss immediately after finishing. The ending punches you in the gut." [EW's grade: A. Jeff Giles wrote, “It’s an ingenious and viperish thriller — and no matter how smart you think you are, it’s going to bite you."]

I read #10 - The Fault in Our Stars (a bit cloying), a decent chunk of #16 - McEwan's Sweet Tooth (kinda stupid and unsatisfying), #33 - Every Day (eye-rolling in its Very Special Lesson), #56 - Shadow of Bone (run-of-the-mill YA dystopia).
I also read a fair chunk of their T20 Teen Books - Grave Mercy, Code Name Verity, Throne of Glass, Cinder, Son, Insurgent, Raven Boys, Days of Blood & Starlight, Seraphina, Pandemonium, and the aforementioned Stars/Every/Shadow. The only really satisfying one was Days of Blood & Starlight, which is AMAZING - beautifully written, balancing many tones & genres very well, shockingly dark/twisty/morally ambiguous for a "teen" book, full of nuanced realism in its characters and world-building...so, so great.

Arti - Have you read anything else by Gillian Flynn? Just wondering if you had the same reaction to her other books. I thought Sharp Objects was pretty nasty, but compelling.

I personally found Gone Girl to be a lot less needlessly nasty than her other books. And a lot better-written and more interesting.

[Artimus]

What's so clever about the second half of Gone Girl?

[guido]

I'm reading Alice Munro's Runaway. Her prose is simply stunning.

[crazyfists3600]

So, while in Europe I read 6 books. Wonder Boys, Homesickness, The Talented Mr. Ripley, A Pale View of the Hills, Life of Pi and The Old Man in the Sea. Honestly, Life of Pi is one of the most brilliant novels I've read in a long time, and I looked like a fool crying on the plane ride home.

[Bean]

I'm currently tearing through Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. I don't know if you all realized this, but the 14th Century really, really sucked. Like...just tremendously awful.

[Artimus]

I picked up a Mo Yan just because the Nobel Prize committee is totally legit.

[lazarus]

So far, David Mitchell for me is 3 for 3. Ghostwritten seems like a bit of a warmup for Cloud Atlas, but it has its own merits for sure, and focuses its themes on the state of the world at the millennium instead of looking backwards and forwards. It in no way feels like a debut novel, either. Very impressive.

Black Swan Green was also a delight and one of the better books I've ever read written from a child's perspective. Set in the early 80's, I could have done without some of the winks at modern readers knowing what the narrator doesn't, but really my own complaint. I also love how each chapter is a bit of a contained episode and the main events within aren't picked up immediately at the beginning of the next, but only referred to (if at all) in passing later on.

number9dream is next on my list.

[affy18]

I'd like to get into Alice Munro but I don't know where to start. I'm heading to the bookstore tomorrow, so...any recommendations on which of her works I should read first?

[Artimus]

I'd like to get into Alice Munro but I don't know where to start. I'm heading to the bookstore tomorrow, so...any recommendations on which of her works I should read first?

Anything, really. She's pretty consistent. If you can find a "best of" that might be a good start.

[Cricket]

I'd like to get into Alice Munro but I don't know where to start. I'm heading to the bookstore tomorrow, so...any recommendations on which of her works I should read first?

Yes, one astonishing characteristic of Munro's career is how consistent it's been. But I personally wouldn't just start anywhere. I agree her Collected Stories might be the best place to dip in. Her two first collections, Dance of the Happy Shades and Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, are good, but probably more for Munro completists. I usually recommend people start with either Lives of Girls and Women (her breakthrough work and the book that is most commonly taught in Canadian high schools and colleges) or Who Do You Think You Are?, because they the closest things she's written to novels; they're interconnected stories featuring the same central character.

Munro critics have generally formed the consensus that her mid-later collections are her strongest, starting with Open Secrets (which some, including myself, consider probably her best book) and continuing with The Love of a Good Woman and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. These books contain her most ambitious, baroque stories -- stories that are often much longer than the traditional short story and structurally quite daring . But Munro herself has advised that new readers probably shouldn't start with a book like Open Secrets. So yeah, I wouldn't start with any of those three, but all the other ones are fine. I personally really love The Moons of Jupiter, which contains many of my favorite Munro stories.

[hurricanesmith]

It's not the collection Munro fans prefer (indeed, I think it's one of her weaker ones, when all are stacked up against each other), but I've found Runaway to be one of her more accessible works. I've brought a lot of people to Munro via that.

HS

[Scarmi]

Re: Munro: I just finished reading Dear Life and, obviously, thought it was perfect in basically every way. It was a slightly different experience, though, because it was the first Munro collection I've read where I'd already read most of the stories (I only started subscribing to the New Yorker and Harper's and actually reading the fiction in 2009 or so). I got a sense that a lot of them had changed quite a bit, although I couldn't really put my finger on how except for with "Corrie", where I noticed that the ending was completely different. Anyway, there were a couple toward the beginning that I didn't love, but more than half of it is just exquisite. I think it's certainly a major work, though it's hard to identify which Munro collections are "minor", really.

I'd also vote for Runaway to start because it's the one I started with and I can't imagine falling in love with Munro a different way, and I've brought several friends to her by telling them to start with that one as well. I don't have any idea what I think is the best or most accessible one, though (I've only gone as far back as Open Secrets and, separately, Who Do You Think You Are?). I'm really not sure it matters.

[Cricket]

Yeah, Runaway is a good place to start, and perhaps of special interest for cinephiles, since Jane Campion has optioned the title story and Pedro Almodovar bought the rights to the triptych of "Juliet" stories. Personally, I feel like the collection is a bit of a drop-off from the dazzling heights of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (which, incidentally, contains "The Bear Came Over the Mountain", which was the basis for Away from Her -- and the title story is also currently being made into a film starring Kristen Wiig). I think almost every story in Hateship is a masterwork, whereas some in Runaway didn't work for me, like the title story and that one with the twin brothers.

Scarmi, I'm in the same boat re: having read most of the stories already. It was also the case for me with Too Much Happiness (I started reading the New Yorker regularly roughly around 2006). It's interesting to read the stories with revisions. Many of the changes are pretty nominal, and I presume are due to TNY's rigid editorial standards (word choices, comma placements, etc). In some cases, though, whole paragraphs are removed or inserted, and I would imagine those are Munro's decisions. Interestingly, I often find myself preferring the New Yorker versions. I thought, for instance, that "Corrie" was pretty perfect when I read it in the magazine, and I'm not sure about the way Munro has altered the ending. Though, I should say it's not just the New Yorker. I read "In Sight of the Lake" in Granta, and I think ending's different there too. Writers revising their work is obviously nothing new, but it's fascinating to get a little insight into a great writer's process nevertheless.

[affy18]

Thanks for all the recommendations.

I got The Love of a Good Woman, will probably get Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, as well.