New Classics Challenge

Joanna at Lost in a Good Story is hosting The New Classics Challenge, and I figured it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to join since I've already posted and discussed this list of new classics compiled by Entertainment Weekly here on my "Pondering the Classics" post. Also, I have 6 of books—the required number—already on my TBR list, so I don't have to add any to my list. I am, however, adding a couple of alternates.

So the challenge rules are:

1) Copy the list and bold the titles that you have already read.
2) Choose at least 6 other books from the list , read and review them between 1 August 2008 and 31 January 2009.
2) Go back to Lost in a Good Story and post links to your reviews.
3) In January 2009, cast your vote for which one of the 100 books on the list is your favorite (and write a post on why). The winning book will be sent to a lucky winner chosen by the scientific method favored here in the blogosphere, i.e. names in a hat.

Below is the list (with books I've read already in red), and here are the books I'm planning to read for this challenge:
The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995) Read and reviewed 8/08
Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002) Read and reviewed 8/08
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)

My alternates:
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)

EW's List

1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)

7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)

8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)
26. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
29. Bel Canto, Anne Patchett (2001)
30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)
31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)
35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998)
39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
49. Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
56. The Night Manager, John le Carré (1993)
57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987)
58. Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
61. Money, Martin Amis (1985)
62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
63. Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
64. Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
65. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
69. Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)
70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)
73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983)
76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984)
81. Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
82. Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)
84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)
85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
87. The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)
89. Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999)
90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)
93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)
94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003)
97. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)

You can take part in the challenge by following the links above.

The Sunday Salon: Bookshelves and TBR Discipline

Part 1: Bookshelves
I have a fun challenge ahead of me when we return from vacation in mid-August. We have an apartment attached to our house. For the past 8 years, it's been my parents' winter home. Recently, however, they bought a house down the street from us. As soon as they sell their house in upstate New York, they'll be moving down here full time. (Looking for a spacious home located right on one of the Finger Lakes? Shoot me an email and I'll hook you up!)

So we've decided to turn the living room of the apartment into our library. Right now we have bookshelves scattered throughout our house, literally in every room. We'll leave the bookshelves in the bedrooms and one in the living room for now, but the rest of the shelves we'll consolidate into a single library. I'm looking forward to doing that. Before we had children, I was precise about organizing books alphabetically, and of course we kept hardbacks and paperbacks separate. But with three kids with their own overflowing bookshelves, homeschooling, and our own books, my organizational system has become quite haphazard.

I've been shopping around for bookshelves.
Bookshelves has photos of the 30 Most Creative Bookshelf Designs. And the blog fittingly called
Bookshelf is solely devoted to bookshelves. What I really want is something like this photo from Seattle-based Ballard Bookcase Company. I wonder if I could get Dr. H to build me something like this? He's pretty handy with such things, but the thought of staining a whole wall of shelves stresses me out. The reality is that we'll probably go to Target and get a few shelves for $29 each. Then again, I could easily be talked out of that. What would you do if you had limited funds and a whole empty wall to fill with bookshelves?

Part 2: TBR Discipline
Last I went to our library's used book sale and bought three books not on my TBR list: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, Songs in Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris, and The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif. Yesterday I had the unusual opportunity to go to the library all by myself (sans children), but I gave myself a stern lecture first. I made myself swear that I'd only go to the "temporarily shelved" stacks (books which were just returned by patrons but not yet put on the ir proper shelves by library workers). Furthermore, I promised myself that I'd only check out books that are on my current TBR list. And I did it! I found: The Secret Between Us by Barbara Delinsky, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, A Death in the Family by James Agee, Atonement by Ian McEwan, and The Serpent Handlers by Fred Brown and Jeanne McDonald (OK, those last two weren't on my actual physical TBR list, but they were in my head).

I'm going on a 12-day vacation at the end of this week (2 of those days will be spent in the van— 15 hours each way), so I have a nice fat stack of books to take with me. If you have reviewed any of those titles, please feel free to put your link in the comments!

Part 3: This Week at SmallWorld Reads
Apparently I haven't posted much on my reading blog this week. I moved my "at-home" blog from one site to blogspot, so I've been concentrating on that this week. Yesterday I took part in Sunday Scribblings and listed my latest reviews at Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books. Earlier this week I reviewed Felicia Sullivan's fantastic memoir, The Sky Isn't Visible From Here. I highly recommend adding that to your own TBR list.

To my own TBR list I'll be adding some of the books I acquired this week, plus:
Hope's Boy by Andrew Bridge (reviewed on In the Shadow of Mt. TBR)
Liar's Club by Mary Karr (recommended by Words on the Page)
Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver (reviewed at The Bluestocking Society)
Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas (reviewed at Lesa's Book Critiques)
Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (reviewed by Lines-In Pleasant Places)

And that's all for this week's Sunday Salon! Next week I'll be posting from upstate New York, on the shores of Seneca Lake (see photo; House for Sale)!

If you'd like to participate in The Sunday Salon, you can sign up here.

Sunday Scribblings: Solace

“Keep close to Nature's heart...and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
~John Muir

This week's prompt at Sunday Scribblings: solace. Solace for me is synonymous with the mountains. Used to be Buffalo and Unaka back in college in upper East Tennessee; now we are at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

The mountains have always held something inexpressible for me. There are days when all I want to do is be in the mountains, to inhale woods, river, and earth. I can breathe here, great gulps of something wild just at the edge of my view.

Solace: Mountain, Wood, River

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
~Psalm 121:1-2

“No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being”
~Ansel Adams

“Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.”

~George Washington Carver

“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”

~Winnie-the-Pooh (A.A. Milne)

Book Review: The Sky Isn't Visible From Here

In a recent post I mentioned my love for memoirs. Done well, a memoir reads like carefully crafted fiction, redolent of storytelling at its best. (Done poorly, a memoir makes you want to throw the book violently, or perhaps have a book club session in which you roll your eyes a lot and seriously question the veracity of the author.)

The cool thing about a memoir is that it's not fiction. When we get caught up in fiction, we readers understand that, while the characters and events may be based on fact, it's still just a story. Happy ending or tragic ending, it's made up. But a memoir: this is real stuff. Felicia C. Sullivan is a real person (here's her blog to prove it) who survived an incredibly rough, volatile childhood only to battle her own drug and alcohol abuse, ultimately emerging—fiercely—into this "author, foodie, and rockstar."

The Sky Isn't Visible From Here alternates between Felicia's childhood in Brooklyn and her college and post-college years. Central throughout each chapter is Felicia's relationship with her mother: a manipulative, unstable, selfish, drug-addict. The chapters are neatly compartmentalized for much of the novel, just like Felicia's post-Brooklyn life:

I had been in perpetual chrysalis for most of my life, but during college I'd become an expert at transformation. I turned into a walking J.Crew catalog: preened, preppy, and audaciously New England. Lake a barnacle, I clung desperately to my affluent Waspy friends, most of them blonds who owned platinum Rolex watches that cost more than used cars. Unbeknownst to them, they were my teachers on all matters of etiquette and style. I mimicked their expressions and copied their wardrobes. … And I never let down my hair. Literally. I have curly hair— the kinky, unruly kind — but I wore it ironed straight. The difference between wearing my hair straight or curly was the difference between life and death.

Like Jeannette Walls in The Glass Castle, Felicia Sullivan takes great pains to keep her childhood separate and secret from her Ivy League friends. Eventually, though, the two worlds collide and Felicia crashes, ultimately losing friends and love when her cocaine and alcohol use spins out of control. The scenes of alienating her friends and of her losing Ben are painful and heartbreaking:

I am afraid I'll never kow this love again; never hold it between two fingers, because I'm busy letting myelf slip away from myself. From a distance, love seems entirely too hard, always a mopping up, a sweeping down. Who you are is never enough. You need a catch phrase, a story that makes everyone laugh.

You can't help but root for Felicia. You might even stalk occasionally visit her blog, anxious to read that she is still okay. Her blog also has a great collection of interviews, including this one here at All Things Girl and this oneon Ploughshares Blog. Felicia Sullivan's story is fascinating in itself, but her writing makes the memoir breathtaking.

My creative writing thesis was a mixture of poetry and memoir. It was a requirement that we have one person outside of the English department be a part of our defense committee. One of my professors suggested a woman in the architecture department. She wore a shiny yellow rain slicker to my defense and looked angry to be there. Put out. "Why," she said, "Would I care about this? Why do I care about any of what you have to say? This has no relevance in my life." Both being writers of creative nonfiction themselves, my other professors/committee members were horrified and momentarily speechless (as was I). How do you defend the need to tell? How do you convince your readers that your memoir is worth reading--that you have something valuable to say?

I can't remember how the awkward silence was filled, but my major professor apologized profusely to me after my defense, assuring me that this woman obviously had no clue about writing and no lyrical gene in her body. And I know that this woman's reaction is every memoir writer's fear: that her work will be considered self-indulgent and irrelevant. A cathartic outlet.

But I think it is a risk that has to be taken. What do we as readers gain from memoirs? A greater sense of humanity. A reminder that the world is so much bigger than our own backyard. A gratefulness for our own lives, or perhaps a reassurance that others have shared the same struggles. A rejoicing in the strength of an individual, in one's ability to overcome adversity and not just survive, but thrive. Or in some cases, like in Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, a simple delight in ordinary things.

If you aren't much of a memoir reader, this is a great place to start. Other suggestions are here and in the comments of this recent post.

The Sunday Salon: On Memoirs

I love memoirs. I suppose I was particularly drawn to the genre of creative nonfiction in graduate school because I am so fascinated by memoirs, and I am rarely disappointed. Some of the ones I've read and loved in the past couple of years are:

The Horizontal World by Debra Marquart (she was my major professor at Iowa State)
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Night by Elie Wiesel's
The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith Hahn Beer
I Have Lived a Thousand Years by Livia Bitton-Jackson
The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan
The Color of Water by James McBride
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
A Very Small Farm by William Paul Winchester

Last night I finished another one which will go right up there in my list of favorites: The Sky Isn't Visible from Here by Felicia C. Sullivan. This is Sullivan's memoir of growing up in Brooklyn with an unstable, selfish, cocaine-using mother. I'm going to give this a proper review later this week, but my recommendation is to go out and buy or borrow this book. It is beautifully well-written and mesmerizing.

Books I've reviewed this week:
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
Blue Ridge by T. R. Pearson
More Than You Know by Beth Gutcheon

I have unbelievably added only one book to my TBR list this week: Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian, reviewed at The Magic Lasso. Of course I haven't yet read 90% of this week's Sunday Salon posts, so I'll no doubt have a few new titles to add later today.

If you'd like to participate in The Sunday Salon, you can sign up here.
Also, I'm just linking to this post because I think it's so excellent: Becky's Book Reviews: The Sunday Salon: Finding Yourself in Books

Sunday Scribblings #120: Ghosts

On Poplar Street at the foot of our bed, we feel it pressing on the mattress, like a cat kneading. We sit up to brush the cat off the bed, only the door is shut. No cats. We remember that insistent push and the next one, too. There is no denying that it happened. We don't even speculate on what it could have been. Who.

No cats in the room, too, when our roommate feels the tap-tap-tapping on her head. Like water dripping, she says. Only, no water. No cats. What happened in this apartment? We don't speculate.

In a dream he beckons, outside my bedroom window. Two stories up he floats in his gray corduroys, gesturing with his hand for me to come. Tossing his hair off his forehead in that certain way and that small smile. His crooked teeth.

The cats hiss, fur like porcupines and tiny sharp teeth. They see what we can't, and we laugh uneasily. Crazy, we call them. Psychotic fur balls. We shiver and toss those thoughts away, although we are not bold enough to say, "There's no such thing."

I can't come now, I tell him in my mind. I shake my head and will myself to waken. In my sorrow, I banish him. Like a proper ghost, he sinks, bare feet on the soft brown soil.

(Need a writing prompt? Got something to say about ghosts in your life? Check out Sunday Scribblings.)

Book Review: More Than You Know

This is yet another of the stack of books I picked up at my favorite used bookstore a while back. I'm actually making a dent in the physical TBR pile that waits beside my bed. More Than You Know (2000) is the first novel I've read by Beth Gutcheon, although she has eight or nine others. I loved this novel, and I will try to remember to find more by this author.

The stories take place on the coast of Maine in a tiny fishing village and a nearby island. There are two stories here that span several generations but are beautifully interwoven. One story is a long-ago murder/love story and the second is the memory of one summer in the life of Hannah Gray, who looks back on her one true love and the ghosts that haunted her. During that one summer when Hannah was 16 and hounded by an cold and hateful step-mother, she becomes fascinated by the long-ago murder of Danial Haskell. By talking to the townspeople and reading old newspapers, she pieces together the story. While she uncovers this sad story, she finds a kindred spirit in the Conary Crocker. The ghost-story component of the novel actually spooked me (in a good kind of way), but I am a lightweight. The characters are well-developed and richly described, the language both lyrical and sparse, perfectly reflective of the Maine setting.

Last week I read three novels. Interestingly, each novel used the chapter-by-chapter (for the most part), alternating-stories technique. With Briar Rose, the contemporary story of the sisters was aggravating and tangential but the "real" story was excellent. With Blue Ridge, the two stories, while following the same theme, had nothing to do with each other and both were disappointing. But Gutcheon makes this technique work in this novel. The stories are both rivetting, and they are tied together in a most satisfying way. I love a novel with good closure, in which everything comes together.