November Reads

Stacey Swann’s reading:

Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (33 1/3) by Carl Wilson. “This book reminds me why I need to read more nonfiction. I’m about halfway through, and Wilson’s exploration of Dion, pop music, and the weird little monster that is ‘taste’ is wonderful in a hundred ways.”

She’s about to read Quarantine by Jim Crace. (Crace is reading at UT on December 3.) and Jayne Anne Phillips’s Black Tickets.

She’s also buying books from newer writers and independent publishers she wants to support (as we all should, as often as we can), such as:

Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (this seems to be an ASF favorite, several months running now), Stephen Elliott’s Adderall Diaries, and James Arthur’s debut poetry collection Song of the Species (release date of 1/22/10).

Johannes Lichtman’s Likable List:

1) In the Drink by Kate Christensen

2) The Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels

3) The Essays: A Selection by Michel de Montaigne

4) Best American Short Stories 2009 ed. by Alice Sebold

5) That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

6) Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain

7) The Red Room by August Strindberg. “This is a really underrated novel that I think blows Knut Hamsun’s Hunger out of the water when it comes to early Scandinavian Modernism, but it’s been out of print in the U.S. forever. Fortunately it was just rereleased in September in a new translation. Yay!”

Dina Guidubaldi is “currently holing up in Nerdtown with George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, the second book in his twisted A Song of Fire and Ice series. November’s good for stories about hot eel pies and jousting and characters who go hunting with their direwolves in the early morning hoarfrost.”

Stacy Muszynski “just finished Skip Horack’s Bakeless Prize-winning collection, The Southern Cross, and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Book Award-nominated collection, American Salvage. Horack spends his time in the Gulf Coast states, considering and reconsidering memory, faith, tenderness, freedom, and border crossings. At $13.95,  Horack’s the most valuable guide you’ll ever get of the region and its people. Campbell’s stories revolve around meth and dope abuse and Y2K and Michigan communities. Her emotional radar is so exacting she can make you laugh and cry nearly at the same time. The two share in common all the good stuff­—cheap beer, sex, pain, death, and that singular state we call empathy.”