Hey Nancy!
(sorry I haven't emailed you for a while, I have spent two weeks doing nothing but read student papers, meet students in conference to discuss their papers, analyze the stories with them again, nurture their aching minds, etc, etc! Phew, the semester is nearly done and then I will be able to surface and check email)
Listen, I teach literature and how to read it for a living!!!! So I am surrounded by books, spend loads of time in Borders browsing, always on the lookout for a read to lose myself in...
Of course what I teach and what I research is different from what I read for pure pleasure, without a pencil in hand! Nothing of the material I research appears in the list below!
When Connie posted a request for reading material last month, those are some of the titles I would write to you here, and I have expanded the list. Under the title "books I have found totally absorbing, couldn't put down, made me think, moved me" would be:
1. Girl's Guide (as above) Melissa banks
2. The Bone People by Keri Hulme (TOTALLY FABB-O!)
3. Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
4. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
5. The Blind Assassin and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
6. Anil's Ghost and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
7. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson (purely for laughs)
8. Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse by VIrginia Woolf
9. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (Penguin Classics)
10. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
11. The Three Marias (As Tres Marias) by Rachel de Queiroz
12. The Truth about the Savolta Case (La Verdad sobre el Caso Savolta) by Eduardo (aargh! someone's stolen my copy and skipped town!!!)
13. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
14. Al the short stories of Julio Cortazar (Argentinian, available widely in translation: this guy will make you think! A challenge)
15. All the stories of Jorge Luis Borges (Argentinian, available widely in translation: this guy will also make you think! If you like Poe, this is your man, a challenge)
16. Wise Children by Angela Carter (hilarious, full of a kind of "up-yours vulgarity" which I find appealing!)
16. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hing Kingston
17. Going to meet the Man by James Baldwin (especially title story, harrrowing)
18. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
19. The House of Mirth Edith Wharton (a supreme novel, cry your heart out, rage at the injustice, man oh man! See the film with Gillian Anderson in lead role, ABSOLUTELY ROCKS!!!)
20. The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter
21. Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray (but first rent the video, I have seen this film about 15 times over the years......)
22. Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
23. The Lovely Bones and Lucky by Alice Seabold
(I could go on......)
Some of these I have read over the last 11 years and they were the highlight of some grad course I took. They were the book I couldn't bear to finish, or refused to analyze because I loved it too much to pull it apart!
No-one should ever feel guilty about reading. It is an education. It is the way I understand my place in the world, how this world has come to be how and what it is, and if it were not for redeeming moments in great literature documenting the sublimity of human struggle, creating epiphanic moments of insight, moments that crystallize and truth appears suddenly illuminated, I would have written humanity off long ago.
There is enough here to keep anyone going for a while!!
So, maybe after the holiday Turkey dinner.......curl up on the couch and travel away from the mundanity of 21st century USA realities....
Enjoy!
Clare