The Vine: May 27, 2011
I am not looking for one book, but for many books. I tend to read mostly fiction, with some non-fiction thrown in. I am looking for ideas for fiction books and thought I would come to you and the readers.
I tend to find all of my new books through Amazon, looking at what other people purchased/lists/guides. I particularly like fiction from or about other countries/cultures (world literature), multi-generational family stories, and Jewish fiction, although I read other types of fiction as well. I enjoy books that have an unusual concept or style (such as The Last Samurai and Cloud Atlas) and books that are challenging, but I am not looking to read only difficult books.
For world lit, I am looking for good authors I have not heard of before. I have also recently started to get into classics and would like to get beyond Jane Austen. I did not get into Harry Potter or Twilight, so nothing like that please. Here is a list of books I read recently and really enjoyed, to give you a better idea of what I like:
- Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
- Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann
- The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Sepharad, Antonio Munoz Molina
- The Last of the Just, Andre Schwarz-Bart
- The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric
- The Three-Arched Bridge, Ismail Kadare
- Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
- Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
- The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
- Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec
- A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
- Germinal, Emile Zola
- The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt
Thanks for any ideas you can give me.
Books
Dear Books,
What a way to kick off a the first holiday weekend of summer — a book list!
I will suggest the novel I’m buried in right now, We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. It’s amazing and gripping (thanks for the rec, Wing!) but it’s a pretty tough read from an emotional standpoint, so try a somewhat lighter novel next: The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green by Joshua Braff.
I’m torn on a third rec, but I’ll go with a “classic” that I don’t hear people talk about much outside of an academic setting: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. It’s one of the most beautiful, infuriating, sad, evocative books I read back then; the writing is unbelievable. It has a lighting design, nearly. Try to get a William Weaver translation, and if you watched the movie and thought, “Meh,” try the book anyway.
And this is where the TN reader is a Viking. Readers: recs based on Books’s list above, or stuff you can’t wait to crack open (or Kindle-boot) on the beach. Three per person, please!
Tags: Andre Schwarz-Bart Antonio Munoz Molina Ask The Readers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie David Mitchell Emile Zola Georges Perec Giorgio Bassani Helen DeWitt Isaac Bashevis Singer Ismail Kadare Ivo Andric Jane Austen Jorge Luis Borges Joshua Braff Lionel Shriver Mikhail Bulgakov popcult Thomas Mann Tsitsi Dangarembga Vikram Seth William Weaver
Middlesex by Eugene Stephanides (he wrote The Virgin Suicides). It’s multigenerational and the first half is set in greece (very wordly like).
What a fun question! If you liked A Suitable Boy you may also like “A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry. It’s a beautiful and gripping story set in India during The Emergency.
I would also recommend goodreads.com–you can rate books you’ve read and see what your friends recommend. I use it more than Amazon recs now. (Librarything.com is similar, I believe).
I’d try Cutting for Stone, and Let the Great World Spin. Both span generations, touch on key social issues at their times (race, religion, country of birth vs. “adopted country”) and are just plain great story telling.
Also, as a New Yorker, it was strangely healing to read about the tightrope walker crossing between the twin towers in the 80s (this is a plot point in Let the Great World Spin) and the (fictionalized) retelling of how the city reacted.
I haven’t read any of the books on your list, so a recommendation coming from me might not actually be very helpful. However, I did just read a book that fits the “other countries/cultures” criteria. I really liked Cutting for Stone by Abraham Varghese. It’s about a boy who is ethnically Indian and English, but raised in Ethiopia. Quite an interesting perspective.
OMG, We Need to Talk About Kevin! We do need to talk about it, ’cause that book freaked me out!
I’d recommend Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon — I just finished it. It’s an adventure story set around the Caspian Sea in 950 A.D. Chabon says his working title was “Jews With Swords,” because it offers a view of Jews that is somewhat foreign to modern pop culture. It has great characters and was a fun read.
Also, have you checked out goodreads.com? You can list and rate your books, write reviews, and “friend” people with similar tastes, which can expand your to-read list exponentially.
I know he’s an American, so it doesn’t really qualify as “world literature” but Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a book that has haunted me since the first time I read it. Nazis, Golems, comic book heroes, love stories (both gay and straight)… Look, it’s pretty awesome. I wish all his books were that well written.
Also,Terry Pratchett’s Nation is probably the best fiction story I’ve read in the last two years. It IS technically YA, but that makes it a fast read and, in some ways, makes it better because it pushes the author to avoid some adult-fiction cliches (“let’s put a love story riiight…here… yes. PLOT POINTS BE DAMNED!”)Again, British author, but the book takes place on a fictional south Pacific island (beach reading!) after a tsunami (…maybe not…) and the themes in it are definitely mature.
I haven’t read it yet – it’s sitting in my big stack o’ books to be read – but Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife has gotten fantastic reviews. It’s set in the Balkans.
I haven’t read Cloud Atlas yet either – another one in my big stack o’ books – but I loved David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten.
Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball is like a Borges short story stretched to novel length. Great House by Nicole Krauss, is also a bit unusual structurally, but definitely could be considered Jewish fiction.
You might also enjoy books by Italo Calvino or Umberto Eco — I was introduced to those authors in the same college class in which I first encountered Borges. Calvino is a bit more whimsicial, Eco is a bit more cerebral (sometimes to a fault, but it’s definitely “challenging”).
I am very happy about this question as I really need some good books. I’m in a rut of distopian futures right now and it’s getting depressing.
I second the recommendation for The Adventures of Kavilier and Clay. It is an incredible book. My recommendation for finding books is to go with the Pulitzer Prize list. I’ve found that the Pulitzer winners are normally books that I really enjoy much more so than the Man Booker or Nobel prize winners.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (and all of her other books, for that matter) is an excellent look at women in China, and for a classic that is also world literature, I liked The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.
Ditto goodreads. I’d recommend Zola and George Eliot for classics. Also, Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin (caveat: I knew nothing about his politics when I read it, so if you have strong feelings about political authors, despite the book not having a really political slant… just a note). I haven’t read it in a while, but remember it being really absorbing.
Wow. I thought I was fairly well-read but…I guess I’ve been pursuing other avenues, because I’ve read NONE of these. I hang my head.
However, to check the classic/multigenerational boxes, I recently read “The Forsyte Saga” by Galsworthy. It really, really resonated with me because of some of my own family history, so perhaps you won’t connect with it the way I did, but it’s a great book.
Others in the classics – I read a LOT of Thomas Hardy and Graham Greene; also Willa Cather, and Alan Paton. Two of the classics that I’ve read multiple times are “The Rise of Silas Lapham” and “Of Human Bondage.” I find new things to relate to in these books every time I read them, as I get older.
Holy crap — no joke, I just finished Kevin yesterday. It’s likely to get a lot more attention now because they just released a film version of it at Cannes, starring none other than Tilda Swinton (whose own twins are 14, which is freaky given the subject; but she’s SWINTON so her kids probably rock seven different ways)…
Books! If you like multigenerational stories, you might want to look at I Stay Near You by M.E. Kerr. I know she’s a YA author, so the book is also considered as such, but I found it a deep, haunting read.
Also, really terrific, good, smart authors you might want to try: Kate Atkinson and Liz Jensen. I wish I could describe them in less sycophantic terms, but given their prose, they are both SO smart, SO well-read, SO funny, and SO unpretentious. It’s perfect summer reading.
Apparently I have no new ideas right now, but I’m chiming in to third The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It took me a bit to get into, but I couldn’t put it down after that.
I read Middlesex on vacation a number of years ago, and I actually started rationing pages when I had about 50 left because I was so sad it would be over soon. It is a wonderful read. (The author’s name is actually Jeffrey Eugenides.)
I’ll second the suggestion for “Middlesex”; that book was fascinating and pleasantly weird.
I can also suggest “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones. It spans at least a couple of generations, and the style would definitely qualify as “unusual”. The author has stated that he wanted readers to experience the story “from a God-like perspective”, so the timeline jumps ALL over the place, and you’ll occasionally have a character thinking in detail about a totally unrelated topic in the middle of a sentence. Plus the subject matter, a black, prosperous slave-owner, can sometimes be bleak and tragic, but it’s anything but boring.
Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel. A lot of people who loved Life of Pi seem to hate this book, however, I enjoyed this a lot more. It is quite meta at the beginning, which I very much enjoyed, and the last quarter is quite emotional and powerful (imho)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. In the US this had been marketed/labelled as young adult fiction, which I think has done it a bit of disservice. An incredibly beautifully written book, I don’t know a single person who hasn’t appreciated it.
Both of these are about the Holocaust but they are not trite and they are structurally quite different from the usual.
If you can find it in print ‘Far Afield’ by Susanna Kaysen is set in the Faroe Islands and is funny, touching and has overtones of academia. She wrote Girl, Interrupted as well – which was also funny, not that the movie would have clued you into that.
It sounds like you might also really enjoy Isabel Allende, a Chilean author who tend towards magical realism and multi-generational stories tied to important historical moments. ‘The House of the Spirits’ and ‘Eva Luna’ are my favourites of hers.
If you haven’t read it yet, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is great. Translated from Spanish, it’s sort of a noir-ish mystery about a young man searching for information about a mysterious book and its author. A book about books and booksellers, and gorgeously written. LOVE.
I second Lucy’s recommendation of Winter’s Tale, as it was the first book I thought of when I saw multi-generational families. It’s an amazing book, and I also recommend his Soldier of the Great War. Politics aside, he is a really talented writer with a beautiful voice.
As for strange, and a little twisted, I would check out Borderliners by Peter Hoeg. He’s the Danish author of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, and Borderliners is about a multi-generational family.
Ok, one more (Sars meant three authors, right?) The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus. It’s set in the US, but it’s about an Iranian couple. I’m in the middle of it, and it’s quite good.
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón (great Spanish novel)
Fieldwork: A Novel – Mischa Berlinski (multi-generational (in a way)/world cultures)
No Other Life – Brian Moore (just started re-reading this, if you are familiar with Haitian politics in the past few decades, you might recognize the bones of this story)
The Chosen by Chaim Potok is perhaps my favorite book I’ve read, ever. I can’t recommend it enough – it was even the inspiration for my first Donor’s Choose donation. There’s also a sequel called The Promise.
People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (I also very much liked her March and Year of Wonders)
As for non-Austen classics, The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas (starts off slow, but give it awhile) and Jane Eyre by Bronte are favorites.
Borges! Yay! I almost recommended Collected Fictions without reading your list carefully, haha; it’s on my summer reading list. Maybe on that note try Gabriel García Márquez? I’m so useless here because I haven’t read and don’t own any translations, but his work has gotten so popular in the English-speaking world that I imagine the popular translations are eminently readable. The General in His Labyrinth is a relatively quick read and is a fictionalization of the end of Simón Bolívar’s life.
I’m also useless because I don’t really read fiction anymore, but on the subject of other cultures, depending on whether you really care for history or not, I would heartily recommend a book I think I’ve mentioned before on TN, James Reston’s Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors, which uses the events preceding and during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella to structure the story of the titular events/people. I found it slow to start but it really picked up after a chapter or so and I devoured it in a couple days. And it’s Kindleable! (I just bought myself a Kindle as a graduation present and am only a little obsessed with it.)
The rest of my summer reading list is more Spanish history, Edward Said, and a book on the history of the longbow, so my third recommendation is Goodreads. If nothing else, it’s fun and easy to use. Plus you log in and it unobtrusively nags you with those progress bars under your currently-reading books to guilt you into finishing. Or maybe that’s just me.
Loved Middlesex! But it is by Jeffrey Eugenides. And I always have to recommend A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Secret History, and Bel Canto.
Books here. Thanks everyone for the great suggestions- I can’t wait to look them all up! I have actually read Kavalier and Clay and Middlesex, and I thought both of those were great. I recently bought Cutting for Stone and I have a feeling I will really like that one too. I have been thinking about getting the Bassani book, so that will now go to the top of the list. Also, I had never heard of the goodreads site, but I will give that a try.
I would definitely recommend Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Somehow it’s listed as a children’s book, but: It’s really not a book for kids.
I would strongly recommend anything by Dara Horn. She is a wonderful contemporary Jewish fiction writer and an overall beautiful storyteller.
I recommend The Instructions, by Adam Levin. It’s very long, but definitely fits the “Jewish fiction” and “unusual style” criteria. I enjoyed it a lot–it was absorbing and thought-provoking. It stayed with me for weeks (and not just because of the book’s heft!)
Ditto “Winter’s Tale,” or in fact anything by Mark Helprin. Engrossing, amazing, transport-you-into-another-world kind of writing.
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. It’s the first book I recommend to everyone. It is so good.
If you liked Jane Austen, I’d recommend stuff by Elizabeth Gaskell. I loved North and South and Wives and Daughters the best.
Off to the library to snag We Need to Talk About Kevin.
I don’t know if it quite qualifies, but The Thorn Birds. It is multigenerational, and set in Australia from about the 1920s through late 1970s.
I would recommend anything Jasper Fforde has written. All of his books are written for the intelligent reader, meaning he drops your right into his world and lets you figure out the details for yourself. Love him.
I third the recommendation for Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Phenomenally powerful storytelling, beautiful prose… yes, it is contemporary American literature, but it is the best novel I have read in the last five years.
I second the recommendation for “Middlesex.” Also “Everything is Illuminated.” My favorite novel ever is “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy. You feel like you’re in India reading it. I got a similar feeling about Africa from “The Poisonwood Bible,” by Barbara Kingsolver. A novel I recently read and enjoyed is “The Dirty Parts of the Bible” (can’t recall the author).
How about David Mitchell’s “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet”? It is about the Dutch East India Company in Japan in 1799, the clash of cultures. Historically rigorous and beautifully written. It’s on the long side and would make a perfect summer read.
I am also a fan of Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum,” kind of a DaVinci Code for grown-ups.
If you are brave and want a classic, try “Absalom, Absalom,” William Faulkner’s best. It’s got that post-Civil War southern culture, multiple generations, and Faulkner’s really long sentences. It even has a genealogy and a map in the back to help.
“The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery is one that stuck with me for a while. “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak has an interesting concept. And I would echo the above recs for “Cutting for Stone.”
The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell; I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal; The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier.
You might enjoy The House of Spirits by Isabella Allende (http://www.isabelallende.com/house_spirits_frame.htm) and/or The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan (http://www.amazon.ca/Hundred-Secret-Senses-Amy-Tan/dp/080411109X).
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver: Set in 1960, a family of Baptist missionaries from Georgia move to the Congo.
And I have to add my support for Kavalier & Clay and Middlesex. Both really great books.
“Middlesex by Eugene Stephanides”
Erm, it’s actually Jeffrey Eugenides, if you are having trouble finding it. The characters all have very Greek names though!
I’d highly recommend The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, which is what Big Love should have been (the author actually wrote the magazine article Big Love that inspired the show, though he got no credit for it). Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, about a boy’s boarding school in Dublin, is also FANTASTIC: very funny, but with a seriousness about it (Skippy does, indeed, die — in the prologue no less). LOVED that one.
Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen” left a lasting impression on me, also his other fiction is excellent. Ditto anything by Amy Tan, who gives a lot of insight into Chinese and Chinese-American culture. Also Fay Kellerman’s Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus mystery series, for well-constructed whodunits in an Orthodox Jewish(-American) setting. That’s technically a lot more than three books. You’re welcome!
The Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea (about four young ladies in Saudi Arabia) and Child of Dandelions by Shenaaz Nanji (about a young lady of Indian descent, and her family’s struggles in Uganda as Idi Amin is taking power and throwing the Indians out) are both great.
Limit 3 per person?! Anyway, the classics beyond Austen.
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I know, every description ever written makes it sound all formal and melodramatic, but it totally sucks you in.
Shakespeare may seem daunting, and I know you’re probably haunted by high school memories of people speaking in verse that’s only half-intelligible, but some of the romantic comedies are pretty entertaining. I recommend starting with Much Ado about Nothing, which is almost entirely *not* written in verse.
Finally, Oscar Wilde is just hilarious. The Importance of Being Earnest is an excellent introduction to his work.
Also, I echo the goodreads recommendation.
“A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan,
“Stone’s Fall” by Iain Pears,
and maybe a bit of stretch, since it’s science fiction/fantasy, but so complex and amazingly written, the Bas-Lag Trilogy (“Perdido Street Station”, “The Scar”, and “Iron Council”) by China Mieville, or anything else by him, for that matter.
Books, will you be my new best friend? I love love love The Last Samauri-read it three times so far!
Okay, here’s my recs:
If you like Tartt’s The Secret History, Tara French’s The Double, or other “odd society of facinating young people who warp each other with their specialness”, try Special Topics In Calamity Physics. It’s wild, with a complicated plot that you will accept because the writing style sells it utterly.
If you like “family secrets” books and/o lavishly illustrated books that interact with the illustrations to tell the story, The Selected Works of TS Spivet is for you. It’s got a eccentric brilliant child protagonist but the kid’s not annoying in the way that trope so often is.
And finally, for fiction and non fiction alike, the entire body of work of Alain De Botton. He’s a marvolous writer who started out with novels, but moved onto a lavish world of nonfiction, starting with How Proust Can Change Your Life–which led to me reading all of Proust’s Rememberance Of Things Past, so it works!
….Gahhh, only three??
Try The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. A young Hungarian Jew moves to Paris to study architecture — in 1937. So, half coming-of-age, half war story.
Classics beyond Austen: Anthony Trollope is Dickens with heart, and very strong on the family story. I like the Parliamentary series, starting with Can You Forgive Her?, which follows a number of characters through six novels.
@Tylia: Agreed, Middlesex was AMAZING.
Tina Fey’s Bossypants can’t be beat when it comes to sheer fun.
Anything by Christopher Moore or Jasper Fforde are fun delights, and the book Room by Emma Donaghue was pretty riveting for my money. Happy reading!
The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, as long as you are prepared to have your heart broken in a thousand little pieces, despite the slightly redemptive endings. So, soooo good, plus give you some insight into Afghanistan. (Oh, and I second A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, although again, I wept at the end — partly because of the tragic ending, and partly because it was over and I wasn’t ready to leave that world and those characters yet.)
I also second the Allende rec. Pretty much anything she’s written, really.
I am only about a quarter of the way through it, but Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman is just about the most gorgeous writing I have ever read and I am recommending it whenever books come up in conversation. It’s billed as a novel, but is apparently a memoir of his life with his much younger wife and his life after her death (not spoiling anything).
Chiming in for Middlesex and The Secret History.
Oh, one more, given your request for “World” lit, then I swear I’m done: try Daniel Pennac’s Belleville Quintet, starting with The Fairy Gunmother. I read these in the original French and they were AWESOME. I just hope the translations do them justice… lots of wordplay, it’d be tough to duplicate the full effect in another language, I think.