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
I don’t read much “deep” fiction, but I really like Shusaku Endo, especially his books “Silence” and “The Samurai”.
I have to say first that ferretrick’s rec of “The Thorn Birds” cracked me up, just because my mother forbade me to watch the miniseries in the…late 70s? early 80s? because DIRTY. So I bought the paperback in a resort gift shop on vacation and plowed through it in secret when I was maybe 10. Mom needn’t have worried; the scandalous parts sailed clean overhead.
Might I suggest “American Wife” by Curtis Sittenfeld (who’s a woman)? It’s a fictionalized bio of a very, very Laura Bush-like character, and I resisted it MIGHTILY in the wake of the Dubya era. But once I got into it I devoured it: truly magnificent, multi-generational family saga, in which no one is blameless for how these people’s lives unfold. I recommend it to everyone I know.
You mentioned Jewish fiction and Jane Austen, but I haven’t seen an Allegra Goodman recs yet. I actually didn’t care for her most recent one, but ‘Intuition’ is excellent and Kaaterskill Falls is also quite good.
For fiction from other parts of the world, Censoring an Iranian Love Story.
I really loved Three Views of Crystal Water. It’s about a girl of mixed herritage growing up in Japan.
Besides strenously seconding “Field Work” and, especially, “Winter’s Tale” (seconds don’t count, right?):
“World War Z” by Max Brooks. Yes, it’s about a zombie apocalypse, but stay with me. It’s a fascinating, plausible-seeming survey of how the world responds to that threat, including the geopolitical, social, and epidemiological ramifications.
“A Very Long Engagement” by French author Sabastien Japrisot. It follows a young woman’s search for years to discover what happened to her missing soldier fiance during the Great War.
“The Terror,” by Dan Simmons, is a haunting, suspenseful novel spun from the real-life disappearance of the Franklin Expedition, a 19th-century venture to find the Northwest Passage. It features historical information about survival aboard ship in the Arctic, Inuit mysticism, and the different ways that humans respond to extreme duress.
So. I haven’t read any of the books you mentioned (but will be adding them to my to-read list!), so I am going to suggest you try searching LibraryThing for books you like and seeing what recommendations pop up. The site generates recommendations automatically, and members can also add recommendations, and the links in the Recommendations sectinon for each book will take you to pages for the recommended books where you can see descriptions or reviews. It’s pretty neat.
Also, for whatever it’s worth, if you like your stories a little dark and otherworldly, Helen Oyeyemi is pretty awesome, especially her book White is for Witching. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is also pretty awesome, though I’m more familiar with her short stories than her novels. I’m not sure how well these authors meet your criteria, though.
I’d second the recommendation for Dara Horn, she’s the first person I thought of based on your tastes; The World To Come is amazing and one of my favorites.
Also, I’m trying to get everyone I know to read Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon. I still can’t stop thinking about it I read it weeks ago.
Jen S 1.0…if you liked “The Secret History”, et al. try “The Basic Eight” by Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket).
Rushdie — Try Midnight’s Children, which is about the creation of the state of Inda, or Shame, about Pakistan (or, since you liked Master and Margarita, perhaps The Satanic Verses — Rushdie used Bulgakov’s structure for Satanic Verses). If you haven’t read Rushdie, you should know that he’s funny — for some reason, no one ever seems to mention that.
Ondaatje — In the Skin of a Lion (about turn of the last century immigrants to Canada) or his really lovely and novelistic memoir about Sri Lanka, Running in the Family.
Byatt — Possession, which has parallel stories about contemporary English academics and the lives of the literary figures they study (which sounds deadly, now that I write it, but it’s a Romance — says so right on the cover!) and is lots of fun, as well as beautifully written. Or, if you want a story about family, her series that begins with The Virgin in the Garden.
Generally, you might want to check out the Man Booker prize winners (all three of these authors won Bookers).
In My Hands by Irene Opdyke is amazing.
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell is great too~from the 1850s, having to do with politics and industrialization in England.
We Have to Talk About Kevin is awesome.
Also, Room by Emma Donoghue.
I just finished “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson and Reg Keeland. Its a trilogy written by a Swedish journalist, set in Sweden. I found the mystery, and the history of Sweden to be very interesting. The other two are “The Girl who Played with Fir,” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”
Books here again.
Jen S. 1.0 – I am glad to see that you also like The Last Samurai. I have never talked to anyone else who read it, and I was beginning to think that I was the only person to have found it.
I have read almost everything by Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and love both of them, so good call by those who suggested those two authors. I have seen the Book Thief, which was suggested several times. I had thought it was a kids book, but apparently I was wrong, so I will have to go back and get it.
There are a couple of books mentioned that I have been looking at (the new book by David Mitchell, Skippy Dies, Invisible Bridge), but hearing from people who like them brings them to the top of the list. And now I have a large list of books I have never heard of before- I was hoping to learn about new authors, so thanks for all of your suggestions!
I lead a world lit book club for a while and the favorites from that that were:
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoka Ogawa (awesome story set in Japan about a math professor who has that disease where he can form no short term memories, and the housekeeper he must re-meet every day)
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (set in Norway and deals with multi-generations through flashbacks)
Anything by Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte. We read The Fencing Master, which is set in late 19th century Spain and tells with a fencing master who is commissioned to teach a woman to fence.
I know I’m limited to three, so I’ll just endorse others’ recs of Shadow of the Wind, Kavalier and Klay, Winter’s Tale and Middlesex.
I’ll second the suggestion of The God of Small Things, which is intense. Fair warning, though: it was the first book to make me cry in ages (okay, since last sumer when I reread Anne of Green Gables). It has a similar feel to Garcia Marquez in a lot of ways. For classics, I’d recommend Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which is epic and really interesting. Finally, if you’re looking for light and cheerful reads, I’d send you straight to Wodehouse–the stories are delightful and the language is sparkly fun.
Can’t let a book rec thread pass by without mentioning my girl and handle-inspirer-er Sigrid Undset. My favorite is the Kristin Lavrandatter trilogy, three novels that follow one woman through the course of her life in 14th century Norway. Both the historical setting and characters are drawn with marvelous detail and realism. I often make analogies between artists and authors when I read; I always think of Undset as Rembrandtian. Though the story centers around Kristin, the scope is pretty wide and includes three generations of multiple families (and towns and some world politics of the time.) Her work is humane, sometimes grim and often quite funny. If this appeals, try to find a Tina Nunnally translation.
For a book akin to Borges and even Singer, a little bit, I think you would love Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kis. (trans. from Yugoslavian.) Absolutely stunning, otherworldly short stories.
Both of those are modern classics, so why not one more…Nabokov. Nabokov, Nabokov, Nabokov. Anything, but especially Lolita (so you know what all the fuss is about,) and Pale Fire, because you know how you mentioned liking novels with unusual structures, like how Cloud Atlas was like a set of nesting dolls collapsing in on itself? Yeah. Nabokov, Pale Fire.
Wow, it was hard to keep it to three. (Also, to all of you Fine Balance lovers out there – I am impressed with your fortitude. That book triggered a daylong depressive episode, no joke. Excellent writing, yeah, but gut. wrenching.)
@Jen S 1.0: If you like Tartt’s The Secret History or Tara French’s The Double…
I think you mean Tana French’s The Likeness :-)
For Books, a few that come to mind that haven’t been mentioned:
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts is a wild ride about the adventures and misadventures of an Australian in Mumbai in the 1990s, that’s even wilder when you take into account that the basic bones of the plot (though not all the details or characters) are autobiographical. Caveat: it’s around 900 pages long – but it’s a real page turner, a great summer book.
The trilogy (so far) by Indu Sundaresan about the royal court of the 17th-century Mughal Empire, based on actual historical figures and events (very generational!), The Twentieth Wife, The Feast of Roses, and The Shadow Princess.
Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor, which is historical (in part about a young Marcel Proust and his family), takes place in three distinct time periods, generational, and about things Jewish.
I’d like to recommend “Three Junes” by Julia Glass (multi-generational family story), “The Passage” by Justin Cronin (a dystopian tale that is the first of a purported trilogy), and “Olive Kittredge” by Elizabeth Strout (linked short stories).
I love reading everyone’s recommendations and adding to my library request list – thanks, Books and Sars, for today’s Vine. :)
A couple of suggestions:
A house for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul. It follows the course of an Indo-Trinidian man’s life, culminating in his ambition to own a house. I enjoyed it.
I’m not sure whether Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala would fit the categories you’re after, but again I really enjoyed it. It’s a bit older (1975) and set in British Raj and 1970s India.
I also keep wanting to recommend The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, but that’s because I just finished it and really enjoyed it! It isn’t multi-generational, nor is it Jewish, nor particularly world literature but it does give an (admittedly one-sided) insight into Ned Kelly and the colonial society of the time in Victoria, Australia. He also really captured Kelly’s voice well, which impressed me no end.
Seconding “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns”.
“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel – fascinating re-telling of Henry VIII’s falling out with the Pope from the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell
“The Lacuna” – another Barbara Kingsolver
“Aztec” by Gary Jennings – not exactly highbrow, full of sex, violence and death, but the most vividly-written novel I’ve read in ages. The world of the Mexica was completely alien to me when I started reading. By the end, I felt I lived there.
“Weep Not Child” by Ngugi Wa Thiong o! It’s the story of a young boy in Kenya, and a seminal criticism of British colonialism (and far more subtle, as well as more skillfully written than “Things Fall Apart”).
“Room” by Emma Donoghue is one of the best novels I’ve read in a while. Also “Little Bee” by Chris Cleave. And “Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven” (terrible title, great nonfiction read).
Another vote for Allende and The House of the Spirits…it is magical realism (very odd things happen and everyone just takes them as norma) which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But it is a fascinating family drama set in Chile and sounds like it would be right up your alley.
Someon else mentioned Marquez…all I can say is I threw ONe Hundred Years of Solitude across the room after 100 pages. Ugh. There’s magical realsim, and then there’s weird random shit for no reason. And when a character gives three different generations of characters the same names AND jumps back and forth in time he obviously just hates anyone who reads his books.
@ferretrick – Ha, I had the opposite reaction. I think The House of the Spirits is a load of horseshit — and I had to read it twice, once each in English and Spanish, then watch the movie; almost throttled my poor Spanish professor when he informed me we’d be reading it — but I enjoy Márquez wholeheartedly.
@Books – In that case, having recommended you something you already like once: if you ever happen upon a collection of Arturo Barea’s short stories, pick it up. I think the Spanish title is Valor y miedo, but my Google-fu fails to find a translation published anywhere, if you require one. They take place during the Spanish Civil War and can be a bit weird in where their inspiration is drawn from, but the effect is just smashing, moving, brilliant, etc. I highlighted the crap out of my copy. It’s just excellent writing.
Hi Books,
Nathan Englander’s collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, is probably my longstanding favorite book on the planet.
Even if you’re not a fan of short stories, please give this a shot…they’re all written from the Jewish perspective(Englander was raised an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn and lived, I believe, in Israel so that flavors the whole collection) and the stories take place throughout time and in a variety of locations – such as modern-day getile Manhattan, Stalinist Russia, the Holocaust in Poland, orthodox Brooklyn or Israel. And they are all by turns funny, irreverent, engaging and absolutely heartbreaking.
The writing itself is great even if you’re not interested in his subject matter. His economy of language is fantastic and yet he uses it to beautifully illustrate a world that most of us aren’t familiar with, and which he clearly regards with both love and exasperation.
Cannot recommend this enough.
East, West – Salman Rushdie
Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto (possibly my favourite book ever)
Krik? Krak! – Edwidge Danticat
Enjoy!
A Trip to the Stars, by Nicholas Christopher. It’s a multi-generational family story, and chock full of unusual concepts. Fiction.
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Compelling and conceptually unusual. Fiction.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Multi-generational family story, plus science and medical ethics. The science parts are described so that non-sciencey types can get it. Non-fiction.
I think you might enjoy Jeanette Winterson and Barbara Kingsolver. I also second Michael Chabon.
I too have struggled in the past with the “what to read next” question. Rather than recommend a particular book to you, I’ll tell you how I solved my own problem. There are a ton of great lit blogs out there, catering to all kinds of tastes. My favorite by far is The Millions (http://www.themillions.com/). It covers new and old books in essays, reviews, interviews, and blurbs. I’ve found it to be a great source for inspiration, and given the books that you mentioned above, I think you might enjoy it as well.
I will add my praise to Zafon. Shadow of the Wind was one of the best books I have ever read – I have been buying copies to send to family and friends for months.
For both classic and world lit, have you read Kipling? I recommend both The Man Who Would Be King and Kim.
I would recommend “By Night Under the Stone Bridge” by Leo Perutz.
Oddly enough, when you said “multi-generational family stories” the first thing that popped into my head was Anne Rice’s “The Witching Hour.” Love her or hate her, the woman can write some back stories. She created a family’s history that’s so fascinating, it’s really the one thing that I remember out of that entire, very weird, book. Really really detailed, and very interesting. And weird. Did I mention weird? WEIRD.
My favorite by Vikram Seth is An Equal Music. It’s a great read either way, but it’s especially good if you have any interest/background in music. (A violinist in a classical string quartet runs into a former lover with a secret.) What else? If you liked Buddenbrooks, try The Tin Drum by Günter Grass.
By the way, does anyone still use the Gnod statistics thingy? I used to “discover” new authors that way all the time. Just Googled for it, and it still exists (www.gnooks.com). You just enter the name of an author, and it creates a “map” with other writers’ name arranged around that author by similarity. Yes, its reliability can be debated, but it’s also just cool ;-) and I’ve found it to be close enough in most cases.
Waverly suggested some Haruki Murakami; I wholeheartedly second that. I like “Wild Sheep Chase”, “Kafka on the Shore”, “The Wind-up Bird Chronicles”, and “Underground” (which is non-fiction, about the sarin nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo subways).
I tend to read more fantasy then you but if you want other cultures you might try White Tiger by Kylie Chan which is the start of a series.
or Across the Nightingale Floor (Tales of the Otori, Book 1) by Lian Hearn
Yeesh, acceptable reading comprehension doesn’t tend to mesh with on-the-fly commenting (sorry, Sars!), especially when the Topic du Jour is my favorite type of reading – novels!
Let’s try this again … A couple of recommended authors/novels within the “Jewish Lit” genre:
* Tova Mirvis (“The Ladies Auxilliary” and “The Outside World”)
* Joshua Halberstam (“A Seat at the Table: A Novel of Forbidden Choices”)
* Elinor Lipman (“Inn at Lake Devine”; “And Then She Found Me”)
Also, seconding/thirding/tenth-ing the previous recs for Dara Horn, Geraldine Brooks, Jonathan Tropper, Naomi Regan
Finally … Interesting how many of us happened to just recently finish reading Emma Donoghue’s “Room” – what a cool premise, and how well-executed!
SOOOOO many books, so little time, LOL!
Another Murakami rec: Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Loved that book. Another one I was sorry to put down. And very unusual structure.
Dammit, I swear I had some other idea and now I’ve lost it…
Ah, I remember now! Possession put me in mind of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Never saw the movie, but loved the book. Again with an intriguing structure to it.
And if you want some vacation reading, the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon is loads of fun — time travel, Scottish and American history, some bodice-ripping… Not exactly on the same plane as most of the recs here, but not as lowbrow as it sounds either. It does meet your request for sprawling family history, anyway… Not necessarily your cup of tea, but if you like the first book (some people have a serious problem with how the two main characters end up getting together, fair warning, but I thought it was both believable and sexy), you’ll be reading for a LONG time, as it’s now up to seven books of 500-1000 pages, and she’s now working on an eighth… plus offshoots…
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill was an a-MA-zing book. “Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle – a string of slaves – Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes”. This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata’s eventual return to Sierra Leone – passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America – is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey.” Highly recommended. You’ll never forget Aminata.
“The family orchard”, by Nomi Eve. It’s about several generations of an Israeli family. I should have loved Tel Aviv because it is a young and exciting city, but because of this book I ended up falling for Jerusalem instead.
i heartily second People of the Book. Brooks’ nonfiction is also worth a read — Nine Parts of Desire: the Hidden World of Islamic Women was amazing, and Foreign Correspondence reminded me of my own pen-pal days.
in the same vein as People of the Book, check out The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreelan. instead of a book changing hands, it’s a painting. simple yet heartbreaking.
I also recommend “The Book Thief” by Marcuz Zusak. And if you like that one, I would also recommend his other book, “I Am the Messenger”. It’s a deceptively simple story – key word there being “deceptively”.
You might also like “Please Look After Mother” by Kyung-sook Shin. Originally in Korean, but it’s out in an English translation. My soon-to-be MIL is a librarian in charge of collection purchases for her branch, and she can’t recommend it enough.
I don’t have a book rec, but rather a source for book ideas. The BBC Radio 4 website has a bunch of book series — Book at Bedtime, Book of the Week, Afternoon Reading — that are abridged readings of books. Some are classics, some I’ve never heard of, and lots of times they’ll do readings of books in the Drama section of Radio 4 Extra (used to be Radio 7) as well. There was a version of Gogol’s Dead Souls narrated by Michael Palin that was a riot, an intensely unsettling J.G. Ballard’s Supercannes, and a reading of We Need to Talk About Kevin that was absolutely haunting.
Strangely, I’d have recommended the book I’m reading before I realized it hit both your preferences.
Stations West: a novel by Allison Amend. Several generations of a Jewish family in the American West. Very gritty.
You specified fiction, but I’ll recommend Sue Fishkoff’s books anyway. Non-fiction on the Chabad movement and on kosher certification.
Last, I’ll throw in a plug for Young Adult novels. Don’t dismiss them as “kids’ books.” They tell great stories with way less angst.
Enjoy all your reading!
Two examples of Jewish fiction I’ve liked are The River Midnight and The Mind-Body Problem, though they’re very different. One is set in a European shtetl, the other in the philosophy department at Princeton.
I love Tana French’s first two books, In the Woods and The Likeness.
“The Physician,” by Noah Gordon. It’s about an orphan boy in 12th-century England who first apprentices with a traveling barber-surgeon and then travels to Persia and disguises himself as a Jew in order to study medicine there. The characters are thin and the plot gets improbable in places, but the story is so fascinating that it pulls you in.
David Grossman’s See under love.
Away by Amy Bloom. Oh, anything by Amy Bloom, actually – she’s wonderful.
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
For your return to classics – Steinbeck’s East of Eden
“The Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” by Jamie Ford is told from the viewpoint of a Chinese boy living in Seattle during World War II – his friendship with a Japanese girl and the backlash against all Asians in the wake of Pearl Harbor.