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Great Christmas Reading
2006
Happy Holidays to y’all from the English Department
Enjoy
your break. We hope you have some time for reading. Here are
some suggestions, texts that one or more of us have enjoyed
within the last year. They are in no particular order, not even
alphabetical.
William Trevor. A Bit on the Side (2004) A collection by
a prolific Anglo-Irishman, these short stories about choices and
regrets elicit comparisons to stories by Chekhov and James,
José Barriero. The Indian Chronicles (1993) A novel of
the Spanish in the Caribbean told from the viewpoint of an
Indian, Diego Colón, who has translated for and been adopted by
Christopher Columbus.
Rolando Hinojosa. We Happy Few (2006) A series of
sketches that elicit the atmosphere of a relatively small Texas
university in “the Valley” as members of its various
constituencies deal with the death of one president and choosing
another. Along the way, Hinojosa includes some satire and a
number of recognizable human characters whom he treats with his
usual humanity.
Cristiana García. The Agüero Sisters (1997). A novel
about two Cuban-American sisters whose lives take different
paths with the Cuban Revolution yet remain sisters connected to
the generation before and after them. The novel is told from
multiple viewpoints.
A.S.Byatt, Possession: A Romance (1990). A story within a
story, the novel follows both the lives and investigations of a
couple of contemporary literary critics and the 19th-century
writers whose affair they are bent on uncovering. Oh—and Byatt
won a Booker Prize for this one.
Kent Haruf. Plainsong (1999) and Eventide (2004)
Haruf gives us two graceful novels--the sequel even finer than
the first. Set in the prairie town of Holt, Colorado, these
novels are inhabited by tender, dignified characters from whom
you will not want to be parted, as well as a few whose
callousness will make you wince. Haruf's portrait of small town
life could be considered a western Yoknapatawpha. The novels
examine the bravery of everyday life--of trying or not trying to
be good, and of living beyond the natural wounding that life
inflicts. As one of the rancher McPheron brothers says while
separating calves from their mamas, "Every living thing in this
world gets weaned eventually." While true, I hope that Haruf
will give us one more novel set in Holt, just to postpone our
weaning from this skillful storytelling.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2002)
The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish
American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran
Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman
who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his
search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's
grandfather (also called Alex), and a flatulent mongrel dog
named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. On their journey through Eastern
Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the
Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have
implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative
is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran
Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters
that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken
Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains or Latka from
Taxi. Interspersed between these letters are fragments
of a novel by Safran Foer--a wonderfully imagined, almost
magical realist, account of life in the shtetl before the Nazis
destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex, creating
an additional metafictional angle to the tale.
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (2002)
This is the first of four books whose
protagonist is with Thursday Next. Surreal and hilariously
funny, this alternate history, the debut novel of British
author Fforde, will appeal to lovers of zany genre work (think
Douglas Adams) and lovers of classic literature alike. The
scene: Great Britain circa 1985, but a Great Britain where
literature has a prominent place in everyday life. For pennies,
corner Will-Speak machines will quote Shakespeare; Richard
III is performed with audience participation … la Rocky
Horror and children swap Henry Fielding bubble-gum cards. In
this world where high lit matters, Special Operative Thursday
Next (literary detective) seeks to retrieve the stolen
manuscript of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The evil
Acheron Hades has plans for it: after kidnapping Next's
mad-scientist uncle, Mycroft, and commandeering Mycroft's
invention, the Prose Portal, which enables people to cross into
a literary text, he sends a minion into Chuzzlewit to seize and
kill a minor character, thus forever changing the novel. Worse
is to come. When the manuscript of Jane Eyre, Next's
favorite novel, disappears, and Jane herself is spirited out
of the book, Next must pursue Hades inside Charlotte Bronte's
masterpiece.
Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter (2005)
A snowstorm immobilizes Lexington, Ky.,
in 1964, and when young Norah Henry goes into labor, her
husband, orthopedic surgeon Dr. David Henry, must deliver their
babies himself, aided only by a nurse. Seeing his daughter's
handicap, he instructs the nurse, Caroline Gill, to take her to
a home and later tells Norah, who was drugged during labor,
that their son Paul's twin died at birth. Instead of
institutionalizing Phoebe, Caroline absconds with her to
Pittsburgh. David's deception becomes the defining moment of the
main characters' lives, and Phoebe's absence corrodes her birth
family's core over the course of the next 25 years.
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1999)
Brazilian storyteller Paulo Coehlo introduces Santiago, an
Andalusian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant
treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. And so he's off: leaving
Spain to literally follow his dream. Along the way he meets many
spiritual messengers, who come in unassuming forms such as a
camel driver and a well-read Englishman. In one of the
Englishman's books, Santiago first learns about the
alchemists—men who believed that if a metal were heated for many
years, it would free itself of all its individual properties,
and what was left would be the "Soul of the World." Of course
he does eventually meet an alchemist, and the ensuing
student-teacher relationship clarifies much of the boy's
misguided agenda, while also emboldening him to stay true to his
dreams. "My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the
boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a
moonless night.
Seamus Heaney (transl). Beowulf. A great Old English poem
translated by a great modern poet—that’s what it takes to put an
eight-century epic on the New York Times bestseller list!
Gary Paulsen. Winterdance The Fine Madness of Running the
Iditarod. (1995) A
spellbinding account of the 17-day journey (which could also be
read aloud to youngsters). Paulsen, a novice, survived the
journey with his sense of humor intact.
Patricia B. McConnell. For the Love of a Dog: Understanding
Emotion in You and Your Best Friend. (2006)
As behaviorist and zoologist Dr. Patricia McConnell tells us in
this remarkable new book about emotions in dogs and in people,
more and more scientists accept the premise that dogs have rich
emotional lives, exhibiting a wide range of feelings including
fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and love.
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