“What should I read next?” I feel like I ask myself this question all the time. Since fall is the perfect time to snuggle up with a warm drink and a good book, I asked ten of my book-loving friends to answer that question for me. I’ll be posting their answers throughout the month of September. Today we’re starting with three friend/reviewers.
So what should I read next? Time to get some answers!
photo by Anna Constantino
Oh, and I thought it would be fun to have each reviewer introduce themselves before their review. Enjoy!
Book: Lying by Lauren Slater
The following is an excerpt from Lauren Slater’s controversial memoir Lying:
“I exaggerate.”
That simple sentence is the whole of chapter one, and the rest of the memoir jumps down the rabbit hole into a slippery narrative exploring those the two words– the construction of the I and the meaning of exaggeration. Essentially, Slater explores whether or not telling a lie can actually allow you to create a truer portrait of the self.
A daunting task, perhaps — but Slater makes the exploration fun.
A thoroughly postmodern look at distinguishing the fictive nature of fact, Slater’s memoir is frustrating at worst (one friend, when describing her fraught relationship to this memoir, stated that she threw the book across the room) and fascinating at best.
Here’s the lowdown on Slater: she is a sufferer of epilepsy, Munchausen’s disease, and an overly involved mother. Or maybe she is not. Each time you begin to believe Slater, to empathize with her, she forces you to question the veracity of all that you have read.
The content of Slater’s memoir does not simply twist and turn; the syntax also does. Slater is not just playing mind-games with her readers; she is composing a thoroughly beautiful narrative that, even if the memoir did not contain controversy and confusion, would have stylistic merit due to the strength of the many literary devices employed.
This book is, with no competition (and I am a constantly-reading English grad student!), the best book I have read this year. It is page-turner that is thought provoking, and when’s the last time you have found a book with that combination?
(Lauren’s darling Etsy Shop and pretty blog)
Book: Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
I was 15 when I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Keep in mind, this was well before the Da Vinci Code craze, when Dan Brown became both a household name and a curse to all youth group leaders. I didn’t read Holy Blood, Holy Grail to make my mom mad or because I honestly believed Jesus had great great (etc.) grandchildren hidden away somewhere. I read it because it was an interesting story filled with rural folklore, treasure maps embedded into the walls of a church, centuries-old orders of knights, and exotic European locales.. that, and it was the subject of my favorite adventure computer game at the time and I needed to know more.
Fast forward three years. I’m halfway through my senior year of high school, working in a little used bookstore pricing books and categorizing them. In the middle of a stack of romance novels and paperback thrillers, I find a copy of Foucault’s Pendulum – an ominously thick volume written in the 1980s by Umberto Eco (of The Name of the Rose fame). Eco, like me, had read Holy Blood, Holy Grail. He became enamored.. not with the validity of the conspiracy theory, but with the effect the story had on its believers and its critics. His opinions on Holy Blood, Holy Grail are written in fictitious form as Foucault’s Pendulum, a story pitting book publishers armed with primitive computers against hermetic mysteries and the men who would kill to keep them secret. Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jesuits and cabalists, even the Comte de Saint-Germain.. they all make an appearance here.
Foucault’s Pendulum is as much a social commentary as a conspiracy fiction, pointing out our inherent need for the unknown or unexplainable in our lives. And like The Name of the Rose, its conclusion is refreshingly simple (this coming from a book where having a dictionary handy while reading is required). It pokes fun at the very intellectual superiority it had a hand in creating, ending as a novel that doesn’t take itself altogether too seriously and encouraging its readers to do the same.
Nowadays, I’m all about atmosphere when it comes to a book or a game or a film. If I’m going to like a movie, it has to transport me somehow – suck me in, take me to another time or situation. Foucault’s Pendulum forces you into hiding at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in the middle of the night, seats you at an unassuming Milan sidewalk cafe drinking whiskey and discussing Bacon’s New Atlantis, guides you along the keys of a computer the size of a living room as you pen an anthology of mysteries, throws you into the heat of a Brazilian umbanda dance. No other novel has that same power over me, which may be why I keep revisiting those vivid places about once a year.
Book: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
This is the sentence – near the bottom of the first page – that caused me to fall in love with Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner: “…Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the bidding and dreamy and victorious dust.” If you’re still with Mr. Faulkner and I after that I suggest you give this book a shot, since an appreciative and sincere read of this novel will be more than worth it.
Published in 1936, it is a story of the South told over the span of a hundred years, following the residents of Yoknapatawpha county through the plantation days, the Civil War, and the aftermath of the war. If you are starting to tune out, it’s anything but a history book, but it has enough legacy and tradition that it appeals to me (History major… what can I say). Other than the setting, I would feel bad giving any other information about the story, as most of the interest comes from piecing together the clues Faulker gives you to form one cohesive narrative. He is purposely vague in his storytelling, putting together the whole mosaic one tile at a time. It is this also which makes the book an even better read the second time through.
His style of writing, of which the above sentence is a good example, forces attention and focus.
I loved the amount of intention I needed to approach the story with, needing a dictionary on hand for words like recapitulate, indomitable, and ratiocination; sprinkled liberally throughout even the simplest sentences. At times with a stream-of-consciousness feel, Faulkner invites you to step on board his raft through the literally whitewater, but I promise if you hold on you will come out at the end satisfied and safe. It is one of those books I can turn to and enjoy reading a few pages on their own merit, not concerned with the overall story, just absorbing it.
It’s seasonality is also something that endeared itself to me. It opens on a September afternoon, and reading it on a fall day, you feel yourself transported into Faulkner’s world. Some books are better read during certain times of the year, that is undeniable. Also, as I recently moved to the South, the imagery is so much more effective and potent.
So I suggest you pick up Absalom, Absalom! as soon as you can and hopefully it will become as well worn a piece of your library as it is mine.
Tags: books, fall guest blogger series, reading
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