The Books on my Shelves

The fabulous Holly Cupala of Brimstone Soup tagged me on this meme, and since I was musing just yesterday about bookshelves and friendships, it seems an appropriate Sunday launch. The question is, What's on your bookshelf?, and the specifics are these:

Tell me about the book that has been on your shelf the longest...

A beaten, brown thesaurus (the pages unbound now and out of order) and the bible my mother gave me. In fact, however, most all of my books have been acquired during the last 20 years. I was not a bookish kid (I was a writerly one, not a bookish one, which is truly not the right order of things) and did not come from a bookish family, which is not to say that I did not come from an educated one. It's simply that the home that I grew up in was not furnitured with books.

Tell me about a book that reminds you of something specific in your life ...

Natalie Kusz's Road Song was the first memoir I ever bought—the first I ever read. I was pregnant with my son. I was in a Princeton bookstore. The book was revelatory (you can write about your life? like this?) and I wrote to Ms. Kusz, never expecting a response. A few weeks later, one came. "As I am sure you know (because, judging from the elegance and insightfulness of your letter, you must be a writer yourself), writers are in the business of attempting to expose the human condition in such a way that our description resonates in the souls of other humans ... " A writer myself? Not then. Just someone who loved the sound of words, their puzzling together. By announcing to me a new genre—memoir—and by suggesting to me a possibility—an actual writer—Ms. Kusz and Road Song changed my life.

Tell me about a book you acquired in some interesting way ...

This past Friday six books arrived in a brown box, chosen by an editor with whom I've lately had the privilege of corresponding. I had mentioned that I sought, in my life, books that "put faith in the reader." She responded with generosity and with a telling eye and ear. Every one of these six books appears to be my kind of book. You'll be hearing about them here, over time.

Tell me about the most recent addition to your shelves...

Since the books in that box aren't yet on my shelves (but on the coffee table, where I will leave them until they are read), the newest books were three: Book of Clouds, The Frozen Thames, and The Cradle. I've written of them all here. Book of Clouds also, in its way, changed my life, my way of seeing what is possible in story.

Tell me about a book that has been with you to the most places...

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I've read it several times, in several places—in El Salvador while visiting my husband's family, in Orlando while helping to oversee a corporate launch conference, on the train to New York City.

Tell me about a bonus book that doesn't fit any of the above questions...

Two books that I felt strongly should win the Pulitzer Prize did, and they sit eloquently on my shelves: March by Geraldine Brooks and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. There were shouts of joy here when both were announced. Both winners aren't just enormously talented writers. They are gracious people, which counts just as much.

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Brief Lessons from Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout in person is just as interesting, complex, and ultimately original as her own Olive Kitteridge. I liked her at once, and very much.

She read from "Security." She spoke of the ways that writing involves one's whole heart, also one's liver. She said that every sentence counts, and also: There is no room for sogginess. You put down your coffee cup when you write, she said. You step past and through.

Oh, Libby, I said to my friend afterward. She makes me want to write an entirely different kind of book. Makes me want to write. Again.

I should have had my fill of books by now. I should have. I have not.

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Readerly Pursuits, and on seeing Elizabeth Strout with Elizabeth Mosier

With Dangerous Neighbors, my novel about 1876 Philadelphia, now safely in my agent's hands and Small Damages, my novel set mostly on a cortijo in southern Spain, now fully formed, I can again turn my full writerly attention to the stories that others tell. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, had me laughing (and marveling) this past weekend. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol is (at long last) next on my list. After that I'll be reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, just because many have and I haven't; subsequently I'll re-read Paul West's Master Class.

But what is in store for tonight is something truly special—a trip to Swarthmore College to see Elizabeth Strout, in the company of my writer/teacher friend, Elizabeth Mosier. Those of you who read my blog post on Strout's Olive Kitteridge know how deep my respect for this writer runs, particularly for this collection of linked short stories. You know how much I think this collection teaches.

A thank you, then, to Libby Mosier, for alerting me to Strout's appearance. The last time Libby and I ventured out into the world of literature together, it was dark and cold and we were sharing a meal with the spectacular Patricia Hampl, a writing heroine who lived up to every one of my expectations. I expect tonight to be just as glittered.

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Olive Kitteridge: Shadow and Light

I was not prepared for the power of Elizabeth Strout's extraordinary novel-in-stories, Olive Kitteridge. I'd read Abide with Me in total and Amy and Isabelle in pieces, and while both of those earlier Strout books are well-made, they aren't nearly as inhabited as Kitteridge, which brings to forceful life a retired schoolteacher who has not made it her business to please. Olive Kitteridge has been herself—her hands the size of a man's, her height unnatural for a woman, her bulk an unapologetic presence. She is frequently disappointed in others. She's not in the habit of honest self reflection. Her husband, Henry, was the good one, the kind soul. She was the undeterred realist.

Novels in stories often don't work—can feel like grab-bag constructions, a publisher's label applied to loosely related themes. This one does. In stories that don't seem to be much about Olive (they are about neighbors, rather, about a piano player or illicit lovers or a young anorexic), she is revealed, and in this lies suspense (one feels her on the horizon, one awaits her knock on the door). In stories in which Olive claims every page, she is transfixing, appalling, somehow sympathetic. She is the shadow and light, wholly given up and over.

Strout's writing here is superb, by which I mean not just her style, but what she has to say about the messy gist of things. I share with you this:

... She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

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What I'll Be Reading Next

In which I share (under terrible light on a rainy day, with my hair in my face and...(well, I could go on and on, but we're speaking of books here not fashion, and I've run out of parentheses)) a few words about the books that sit here on my glass-topped desk. I've not had time to read like this in perhaps 20 years. Each book making me hungrier for the next.

After thought: Roy Blount Jr. would never be my friend were he to watch this vlog. Because I use the term "of course" too much, for starters. Because I keep saying the anemic "I'm looking forward to...." I'm looking forward, of course, to improving my spontaneous speech in the year to come. I can and will resolve to resolve the same on New Year's Eve. I'm looking forward to that. Of course.

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