Sonya Unrein's Open Salon Blog

Six months of reading, 2010

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:06:34 -0400

The best books I’ve read this year:

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury. First time I’ve read this an adult. It’s not quite cohesive as a novel, but wallops a double-dose of nostalgia: Bradbury’s for his childhood, and mine, for reconnecting with an old beloved book.

Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin. Love this simple, rich story of a young woman’s maturation-through-immigration. Caution: there is one section that will make you cry buckets of salty, sad tears.

Underworld by Don DeLillo. Epic monster of a story that seems to presuppose the horrors of the 2000s by looking at the less-but-still horrific 1950s through the 1990s.

True Grit by Charles Portis. A close relation has insisted for many years that I should read this Western. I refused until this year, when of course I had to admit that she was right. Funny, scary, and dare I say gritty story of vengeance, guns, horses, and a courageous but somewhat obnoxious teenage girl as protagonist.

When I Came West by Laurie Wagner Buyer. Memoir about a shy and naive woman who drops out of college to live with a Vietnam vet in Montana. He’s paranoid, controlling, and completely self-reliant. She’s eager to learn and finds her own capacity for surviving the harsh environment, inside the house and out.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, stories by Robin Black AND Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. These titles are powerful and spare and gripping, collections I will give to other people and return to for my own pleasure. Even if you’re one those people who say they don’t like short stories, I urge you to try these on for size.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro is gifted and has complete control of his narratives. This dystopian novel about the ethics of cloning is a psychological and emotional minefield. It’s going to be a movie. It won’t make as much sense as a movie. Just read it.

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. This is one of the weirdest and most compelling novels I’ve read in years, with lots of twists, gorgeous narrative, and outlandish behavior on behalf of its arrogant, selfish narrator, Charles Arrowby. I couldn’t put it down. Fun fact: It was not reviewed in the New Yorker, even though several of her earlier novels were, with varying degrees of insults.

Open Call: 10 books I'll always love

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:03:51 -0400

I have a long list of all-time favorite books, but not every book on my list is one I'd recommend to a general audience. Here's a qualified list of ten books I've read as an adult that have stuck with me. All are recommended, depending on your mood. Inspired by Silkstone's post, found here.

1. William Boyd's Any Human Heart
When you start out, you'll think you might not like this book. The main character is arrogant and, well, young. Brash. But keep going through this fictionalized journal that keeps track of seventy years of a man's life, including his heartbreaks and strongest loves. Other reviewers bash it for its "Forest Gumpness," yet to me it's not all that unbelievable that an upperclass intelligence officer might have contact with influential persons during one of the world's most tempestuous and active periods in history. I've read several William Boyd titles now and he has repeatedly shown his ability to invent worlds I like inhabiting. It's a good winter read, fully sad, sweet, and satisfying.

2. Philip Roth's I Married a Communist
I was riveted by Roth's take on the McCarthy red scare. It's part of
Roth's American Trilogy, and this was my favorite of the three, though all are well worth your time.

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Fabulous epic of comic books and coming of age, spiritualism and sex. Funny, tragic, hold-your-breath good.

4. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
By far the best artistic memoir I've ever read, marking V. Nabokov's idyllic Russian childhood and his eventual escape during the Russian Revolution. Every word is necessary; every evocation of memory as an integral part of the human experience wrenching.

5. A Passage to India by EM Forster
Everyone should read one or another of Forster's novels. They are psychological and mystic, questioning the idea that state (through Colonialism) should trump individualism. In particular, A Passage to India contains both fully-realized and stock characters, painting a rich world of conflicting philosophies.

6. Postcards by Annie Proulx
I've enjoyed all of Proulx's novels, but Postcards' prose grabbed my collar and wrenched me around as I followed the tragic and sometimes funny life of Loyal Blood through the 20th century West. It evoked for me the wildcat Western persona that I romaticize were my own ancestors as they filtered into Colorado from points east. Proulx has her own language and tics and rhythm.

7. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
A haunting, mysterious, and visceral novel about the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust. Sebald uses photography, maps, blueprints and other print media as counterpoint to the jumble of memory and observation of the novel's protagonist. This book will influence the way you see, the way you think about your own past, and ruminates on the collective, which connects and holds us together even as external pressures try to pull us apart. Who are we, in the shadow of the unspeakable? Sebald's narrator searches, and we follow with trepidation and wonder.

8. The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
I like everything about this nonfiction narrative. Rory Stewart chronicles his foot march through Afghanistan right after the first fall of the Taliban. I knew close to nothing about the history and culture of this region, but Stewart's clear and often wry prose both entertains and instructs. I like books where people are willing to be unconventional and stubborn. Excellent book group choice, if you're looking for social relevance.

9. Stoner by John Williams
It was on many Best Reads of 2009 lists and there is good reason for its resurgence. Stoner is a slim novel about a young, incurious man in 1910 or so who gets sent off to college by his very poor parents to study agriculture, with the expectation he will return to the farm when he graduates. However, Mr. Stoner instead falls in love with literature and decides to become a teacher. The novel is about his life from college and beyond, and is written in spare but beautiful style. There are small moments of contemplation as Stoner chooses his life's paths and then lives out the consequences of those choices. You might recognize parts of yourself through his eyes, and you will be so sorry when you've reached the last page. Please, somebody, read this book.

10. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
I've only recently finished this weird and wonderful novel written in the late 1970s. It starts out as a seeming elegiac for lost love, and then meanders into the dark trenches of obsessive and obstinate unrequited love. The main character, Charles Arrowby, is judgmental and offensive, yet unafraid to chart his own path of crazy action as spurred on the by moods of the nearby sea. It's a long, winding story that would be excellent fodder for a book club discussion.

Seymour Glass prepared me for life

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:01:39 -0500

My mom had a copy of Salinger's Nine Stories, a mass market paperback of short stories, sitting among her small collection of tomes about reincarnation and the UFO spirituality of The Chariots of the Gods and hypnosis and hypnosis combined with reincarnation in Seth Speaks and John Fowler's The Collector. We were never forbidden to read any book, and that little library, which followed us from place to place in our unending search to find home, was beguiling. For months in sixth grade, I read their back covers, trying to be convinced that anything from the adult realm was ready to nudge its way into my Laura Ingalls and Judy Blume universe. Finally, the Salinger prevailed, and I read A Perfect Day for Bananafish. When I got to the ending, bam! Never had I considered the finality of suicide, or of death, and Seymour had, and did. I hadn't gotten that far on the life experience scale, though a lot of life's biggest disappointments were just around the corner.

Oh, that flying trapeze

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:01:35 -0500

The post I would write
tells all about me
falling in love with a dwarf, how
we run off to meet with his crew,
where I make friends with his aged mother
and she tells how her own husband tamed her
and the wanderlust and the wine.

In the middle, we'd make babies and mayhem
as the country falls victim to bad judgment
and proclivities. Grapes of Wrath and Tristan Smith.

It couldn't end well,
all Anna Karenina and Geek Love
and the inevitable boredom from RV life.
Trains, you know,
aren't big anymore.
So the babies grow and flee
and our goodbye kiss is mixed;
some love, more regret, one final leap beyond.

It's the stuff in between you'd really like.
My post, I'd caution right at the forefront,
Not safe for work, too racy.
Too sad.
Too merry.
Too free.

New Years Eve, 1957-style

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:12:35 -0500

My family's version of Baby New Year, 1957. This is my uncle. Love the sofa fabric.

This one might not be from 1957, but it's the same era, and it shows the same wacky spirit of small-town celebrations. My grandfather, with his arms in the air:

Here's one of my grandparents looking stunning by the tree:

And finally, this is what all those preparations really look like without makeup or hair:

(Note: My new banner is a series of book covers I designed back in my publishing days. Those are some of my favorites.)