Lit Bits-5/21/2014 Wallace Stegner, Herman Koch, Matthew Revert

Aleathia says:

When I was living in Seattle, after getting comfortable in a new big city, I decided to embark on a journey of reading going against the old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover".  I was feeling a bit rebellious and decided that for an entire year I would only choose books based on the cover art.  I would not read anything about them so as to know what I was getting into.

I found that you could judge a book by its cover and that a nice looking one often tells you visually something about your own aesthetic in the world.  One of the books I chose was a book called "Crossing to Safety" by Wallace Stegner.

I had never read any of his work before and I fell in love with his writing style.  Over the years I sought out many of his other novels.  I will never forget the day I finished his book "Angle of Repose" which won him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It changed the way I looked at writing and about the human condition.  It solidified my love for pushing west, pioneer, down on your luck stories.  After reading that book I decided that I was then going to read all the winners of the Pulitzer for all time.  I have not completed that goal yet, but I have collected all but 25 of the novels and read about 30 of the 80.

Wallace Stegner shapes characters that you can't help but love.  You want them to succeed even when you know in your heart of hearts they are destined to fail.  You feel their pain as if it were your own.  I close the back cover of his books with a sense of satisfaction, that everything ended up where it was supposed to be.

He is one of my top five authors of all time.  You should check out his work if you haven't already.

Addendum by Joe:

If you want to judge books by their covers, pick up anything designed by Matthew Revert. He is a god of graphic designing and has been doing an amazing job of dressing the small press world in dapper outfits for publication.

Ally says:

I like unreliable narrators.

I like them because I feel like when they’re telling me a story it’s not all altruistic bull. You ever notice that about reliable narrators? They’re just dying to have someone fall in love with them – to have someone root for them. They’re like Tom Brady. Or any quarterback. Just a touchdown behind, seconds unraveling from the clock, desperate for that Hail Mary pass which they pray for and then we pray for and then it happens – sails through the almighty air like it’s guided by the hand of whatever god we’ve conjured up for the time being and lands right in the receiver’s hands who is guided over the line, dance and all. We stand, we cheer, we pump fists.

Everybody wins.

Right?

Sure. Except sometimes isn’t it nice to sit at the feet of someone deliciously deceptive and hear a tale that sounds a little bit more like the kind of thing that we would tell? Mostly truthful. A bit of a lie. We’ll pepper it with misconceptions - small things that bend the favor toward us. Altruism is a word we do not understand and therefore we do not obey.

Is it an American thing? Our constant need for happy endings even when life itself dishes up nothing but?

Herman Koch wrote a book called The Dinner. Here’s what it’s about:

A summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness - the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened... Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified - by everyone except their parents. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children and, as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Except it's also about so much more. Cue vicious curdled laugh. Mwha-ha-ha!

Besides chances are good some of your favorite narrators are already unreliable. Hello? Holden? Huck Finn?

It’s easy to love the good guy. Let’s all fall in love with the decidedly complicated human guy for a change. Come on, he's just like you and me.