How do you choose the books you are going to read? she asked

A few days ago, when Amy Riley and I were taking a wee break from techno talk (Beth:  HTML code?  Amy (long distance):  Okay.  I'm doing it with you.  Are you on the Feedburner screen?  Do you see the box next to the words ....?), I told her that I'd just returned from the bookstore with an armload of new books.  She, being a great reader herself, asked me which ones.  I listed Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, John Green's Looking for Alaska, and Jane Mendelsohn's American Music.

There was a bit of a pause, as Amy searched (I imagine) for some pattern in my selections.  "Interesting," she said at last.  "How do you choose what you are going to read?"

In answering the question I realized just how many influences weigh upon me.  The fact that I work in multiple genres, that I teach, and that I care a whole lot about language has me scurrying after the books I hope will teach me—in every genre.  The fact that I sometimes wonder why the rest of the world reads what it reads (e.g., The Help, Girl in Translation, Loving Frank) gets me curious enough to buy.  Blogs influence me (hence my purchase of My Name is Mary Sutter).  Friends do (Kate Moses has led me to The Names of Things; Jane Satterfield to The Importance of Music to Girls).  Reviews do (The New York Times Book Review led me to Forest Gander's As a Friend, Kim Echlin's The Disappeared, and Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds).  I trust imprints, like Graywolf, because they publish friends like Alyson Hagy and so I read and not surprisingly love Jessica Francis Kane's The Report.  I trust editor friends like Laura Geringer, Jill Santopolo, and Alane Mason, and so I read, respectively, Virgin Territory, Between Shades of Gray, and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and Nothing Happened and Then it Did.  Many, many authors send me their books, and I do all I can to read them.  On lovely afternoons, I drift through bookstores and find titles that appeal, and some of my favorite books have come to me this way:  Michael Ondaatje's work, The Book Thief, The Cellist of Sarajevo, to name just a few.

This time around, my reasons were thus:  Maile Meloy because my writing friends adore her work and because I've been impressed by earlier stories.  John Green because he is John Green.  Richard Russo because I always meant to read him and because bloggers I respect insist.  Libba Bray because two minutes in her presence and I adored her.  Jane Mendelsohn because I absolutely loved her first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, which begins: "The sky is flesh. The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends behind the line of the horizon...."

Marketers would love to know the why behind book selling.  Pundits speculate (interestingly, following the recent New York Times story suggesting that book trailers are highly influential, my in box was full of readers saying they never watch trailers).  I can only tell you what I do.  I wonder what your methods are.

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My Name is Mary Sutter/Robin Oliveria: Reflections

I have spent much of the last two days impressed into the world of Robin Oliveira's making—the immaculately researched and thoughtfully conveyed story of a Civil War midwife-cum-surgeon named Mary Sutter.  I hadn't thought I'd like this book as much as I most assuredly did.  I had wondered about its title, a first-person declaration that does not capture the close-over-the-shoulder third-person chorus that carries the story forward.  Within the first two dozen pages none of that mattered.  What mattered was how brilliantly Oliveira captures the details of that time, those years, when blunt artillery plowed through shins and germs were not understood, when amputations were performed on dirty, blistering battlefields with little more than chloroform, whiskey, a saw, and a needle to see both patient and doctor through.

We get cameos of Abraham Lincoln and Dorothea Dix and John Hay in this novel.  We get Albany in winter and love at first blush and love at the end of too much knowing.  We get Mary Sutter's determination to enter into the ranks of surgeon, indistinguishable in talent and mastery from any male peer, and the price that is exacted for entry.

Oliveira lists her Civil War, history, and medical resources at the start of this book; she is graceful with her abundance of knowing.  The big, hard details of war, midwifery, and amputation are laid out, unflinchingly, before us; but so is the rising and falling of the sun, and the look and feel of Albany ahead of storm:

Now, in the distance, thunder rumbled. A day of contradiction: Mary's bonnet shaded her from a sun bright enough to strain her eyes. The alley percolated: a privy tilted a half block away; the neighbor's poorly kept chickens flapped in protest at the confusion. An ice wagon lurched into the narrow ruts and climbed the slow rise, its wintered-over ice blocks crusted with sawdust. The last of the last, before winter set in and ice would be everywhere. The verge of deprivation and plenty.

Beautifully done.  And did I mention this book has twin sisters at its heart.  An historical novel with twin sisters at its heart.  Just my kind of thing, as it ultimately turns out.

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Traveling Library

Over the next ten days, I'll be back and forth to New York City on behalf of a fundraiser for Penn, the BEA (thank you, Egmont, and can't wait to see any of you who may be there on Thursday, May 27th), and the Book Blogger Convention (thank you, Amy Riley).  Travel means time to read, and at the moment, I've got these books to choose from, thanks to some aggressive recent book buying:

On Whitman (Writers on Writers) by the extraordinary (in person and on the page) C.K. Williams

Old Friend from Far Away by Natalie Goldberg

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

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