So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to be and Why it Endures (Maureen Corrigan). Read this for a class, but have wanted to anyway, so good excuse, right? I often hear Corrigan's book reviews on the radio driving home from school, so the first chapter was hard to hear in anything other than her distinctive voice. I enjoyed all the biographical information about FScottFitz, but don't worry: I won't bore you with it. She had some interesting takes on Gatsby as proto-film noir, but I really loved her arguments about Gatsby as a novel about class level. This has been a lens through which I've been teaching the text for the past 5 years, so I felt confirmed. It was a real delight to participate in intensely thoughtful conversation with others who teach this text (and some who are re-reading for the first time in a while). |
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (J.D. Vance)
This non-fiction work was a very readable account of the author's childhood as a white male in economic and social insecurity. He's one who "made it," as he would say: he graduated not just from college (Ohio State) but also from Yale Law. It was a fascinating look at the disadvantages of the working classes/working poor. He recounted attending a law internship interview dinner and being completely bamboozled by the array of forks and spoons and knives. He had to excuse himself, call his girlfriend-now-wife, and get advice. People who have advantages often don't seem to recognize what their advantage and privilege gets them. It's not just simply an examination of DIS-advantage, but also our kind of blindness to the benefits of AD-vantage. It didn't offer any solutions for how to end the cycles of poverty or low wages or economic depression in dying factory towns, but it was an engaging personal account, and a start.
This non-fiction work was a very readable account of the author's childhood as a white male in economic and social insecurity. He's one who "made it," as he would say: he graduated not just from college (Ohio State) but also from Yale Law. It was a fascinating look at the disadvantages of the working classes/working poor. He recounted attending a law internship interview dinner and being completely bamboozled by the array of forks and spoons and knives. He had to excuse himself, call his girlfriend-now-wife, and get advice. People who have advantages often don't seem to recognize what their advantage and privilege gets them. It's not just simply an examination of DIS-advantage, but also our kind of blindness to the benefits of AD-vantage. It didn't offer any solutions for how to end the cycles of poverty or low wages or economic depression in dying factory towns, but it was an engaging personal account, and a start.
My Grandmother Asked me to Tell you she's Sorry (Fredrik Backman) Last summer I was enchanted by Backman's A Man Called Ove. It made the rounds of friends, and I, too, sent it on to be read by others. So I figured this would be equally good. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't as delightful and surprising as A Man Called... It took a bit longer to enter into, somehow, which I thought might be my fault or inattention, but in talking with others who read both, I think maybe it's not just me. Is that because there's just kind of one trick here: that everyone is somehow connected? However, I still cried. (Big reveal: I'm a sap.) Is this why I read fiction so rarely? |
The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman) This might be the best book I (didn't) read all summer. Our family got this on audio book cd for our road trip to WVa, KY, VA, and TN (that last for the 2017 solar eclipse). Oh. My. Goodness. Was this ever good! Almost 8 hours of first-rate storytelling. Loved the touchbacks from one chapter/episode to another. Magical, tender, sad and hopeful all at once. This was enthralling, creepy-but-not-too-much. I might try one of his adult novels next summer. P.S. The family also listened to Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass on the trip. Just shy of 11 hours. I'd already read this series, but it was new to my kids. Don't mean to offend, but this is better writing than Harry Potter.....oops, just lost my daughter. She'll disown me for that. |
One Summer: America 1927 (Bill Bryson) Gotta love Bill Bryson. He's clever and witty, a snappy writer, and he just knows so darn much! Each of those elements deserves a brief statement. This pretends to be a book about the events of the 4 summer months (June, July, August, and September) of 1927, beginning with Lucky Lindy's flight across the Atlantic and through the fabulous season of Babe Ruth, but really it's so much more. He's packed in the history of the rise of tabloids, the then-famous "window-sash murder" case, Sacco and Vanzetti, the great floods in Mississippi and how politically adept Herbert Hoover was at getting himself mentioned positively in all the right places..... and the scandals of Warren G. Harding and how distant, even cold Calvin Coolege was. Bryson goes backwards in time on occasion, to tell of the backstory of the airplane industry (grew in WW1, collapsed suddenly at the end of the war, leaving a bunch of pilots with nothing to do but fly mail or barnstorm for entertainment) and then forwards (we can see the Great Depression looming and see the seeds of it already, even though they can't know it's coming). So much history. But also: so much fun. I love Bryson's snappy writing. He both exaggerates and understates, and the tension between the facts and his snippets of analysis is wickedly witty. One of my favorite reads all summer. |
Still working on Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namsesake. Will update when done / have time.