It's a listing-related book meme, and we all know how I feel  about listing. And books. There are several on here I am coming out of the lit-hipster closet about. No, I've never read Catch 22. I have been planning to for a long time. Also it seems I fear and avoid Russian lit. Maybe I should remedy that.
These are the top 106 books most often marked ( Read more... )

The library I work for recently printed a bunch of little tags that say "Ask Me What I'm Reading!" You can then print an image of the book you want to talk about in the space beneath, and pin it to your nametag. They're very excited about this as a way to foster conversation and find new opportunities to provide a reader's advisory.

On Friday I had ( Read more... )

Sometimes it feels as though family dramas are so ubiquitous as to be impossible. With family life and its dysfunctions and failures and disappointments chronicled so frequently, it's inevitable that certain tropes sink into the morass of cliché and bland haven't-we-been-this-way-before recycling. This isn't to say there aren't splendid examples-no ( Read more... )

Deborah Eisenberg was one of the writers I tried most fervently to emulate when I was younger. When I was eighteen I read an article in Harpers' by Francine Prose, about the set of expectations readers bring to female writers of fiction. Prose mentioned a number of contemporary women who write savage, intelligent, complex fiction (as opposed to the ( Read more... )

By the time Suzan-Lori Parks even sat down to write Getting Mother's Body, her very first novel, she'd already won the Pulitzer and a handful of Obies for her playwriting. What a bitch.

No, not really.

Getting Mother's Body is the story of Billy Beede, the teenage daughter of six-years-dead Willa Mae Beede, a con-artist and blues-woman who lived ( Read more... )

Last night I went to a lecture by Suzan-Lori Parks, playwright and author of the novel Getting Mother's Body. It wasn't a very formal lecture--she mostly talked about her creative processes--but it was fun. She was incredibly kind and funny and generous and real, and I bet you anything she's a kickass teacher.

The thing she said that stayed with me ( Read more... )

One of the earliest compulsive habits I can remember is my Book Stack. Every time we went to the library, I’d come home with twenty or so books. I would then spend the next few hours of my life executing an elaborate ritual to decide the order the books had to be read in. It involved multiple rounds of “Eenie Meenie Meinie Moe” eliminations, ( Read more... )

It may be obvious to many that I have a certain obsession with 1) the social psychology of bullying and 2) crimes perpetrated by adolescent girls, so it should be no surprise to anyone that my most recent read was Under the Bridge, which chronicles the true story of the murder of Reena Virk in Vancouver B.C. Reena was beaten by a large group of ( Read more... )

I am not even going to say that woman's name today; never mind that I'm actually sitting here shaking with rage, holding the newspaper in my hand and watching it violently wave back and forth. I'm not going to shriek, or pull my hair (though I may rip up the newspaper later). I am in fact going to ignore her, because she makes money off of people ( Read more... )