Lit Bits-1/14/2015 Robert Penn Warren

Aleathia says:

I am working hard at being able to read more books this year.  Last year was the pits and I aim to make time for reading again....even if it is only for 20 minutes.  Presently I am about one third of the way through Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men".  This was a Pulitzer Prize winning book for him and thus on my list of books to read in my lifetime.

I find these episodes of forced reading interesting.  I would have never picked up this book on my own as it does not fall into the usual type of book I gravitate towards.  Having said that, it is a lovely surprise.  Warren has a masterful vocabulary (I have to hit the dictionary at least every few pages) and is spot on with his narrative that is engaging and detailed but not so much that it is burdensome.  I will admit that the dialogue is harder for me as it is set in the 1930's deep south.  Reading in dialect has never been one of my favorite things because I have to hear it in my head in order for it to compute.  Combine this with very small print and you have a slower moving book than I would have liked.  It is slow moving because of me, not because of the content.

In the wee hours last night, when I couldn't sleep and the house was quiet, I sat in my sewing/reading room layered with blankets in negative weather and read this book.  I came across this quote and it made reading the book worth it:

"They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people."--Robert Penn Warren

I had to stop and read these lines over and over again.  There is so much unwanted truth in these sentences.  We want to think that we are the same person no matter who we are around, but in our heart of hearts we know it isn't true.  I am a different version of myself with my child than I am with my lover.  I am a different version of myself depending on which nurses I work with.  I am different at parties than I am at home.  The people in my life and in my environment change me.  We all want to be accepted in the company we keep even if we pretend we don't care.  It is human nature to want to belong to something greater than yourself.  Why do you think religion has such a strong hold in the world?

I look forward to finishing this book and adding it to my list of Pulitzer's read.  The book is about a man in politics from the view of another man who works closely with him.  It is the unraveling of a life.  It is relationships that fall away and leave the narrator as an island.  At least it is so far.  Pick up the book and see for yourself.

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.

Lit Bits-5/7/2014 Russell Banks

Aleathia says:

Many years ago my estranged brother sent me a letter and told me that if I ever wanted to know who he really was then I would read a book called "Rule of the Bone" by Russell Banks.  I took the bait and read that book.  It touched me.  I felt connected to my brother a little bit more.  It touched me enough that I decided to write Russell Banks a letter and thank him for writing the book and giving my lost soul of a brother something he identified with and for giving me the opportunity to understand him a little better.  I didn't expect anything back.  He was a big name writer and most likely didn't have the time.  I wasn't sure he would even get the letter directly, but I needed to send it.

A few weeks after I sent the letter, there was a return letter in the mailbox from Russell Banks.  I opened the letter thinking it would be a form letter printed off by an assistant, but inside was a beautiful hand written letter from Mr. Banks himself.  I nearly cried.  I wasn't star struck by any means, but for that moment I felt important.  Somebody who had made it took the time to notice me as a reader.  He acknowledged me.

This incident changed my life as a writer because it taught me that no matter how big you get, you always started small.  Everyone needs encouragement.  Everyone needs a hand up in the world.  I sent the letter to my brother and he thought I was the coolest chick ever.  That felt nice too.

In the wake of that, I have been reading Russell Banks for years. It has been some years since I had cracked one open though and now I am reading "Affliction".  His writing is familiar.  It looks at harsh, quiet things in people and makes them tangible.  You believe they could happen to anyone.  You know each of his characters as someone in your own life.  You have met these people before; you have been these people.

I suggest you pick up any one of his books.  I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Lit Bits-4/30/2014 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peter McWilliams

Aleathia says:

Literature has been a huge part of my life.  I have been escaping to other worlds for longer than I can remember and the power of words to transport me to another land never ceases to amaze me.  As I have gotten older I have more responsibilities and less time for relaxing and reading all hours of the day.  I have given up, somewhat, on taking chances on new writers because there are still so many works from the writers that I appreciate that I've not read yet.  In essence, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Recently one of my favorite authors died.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a man of great magical wonder.  The detail he placed in each novel made me fall in love with the characters as if they were my own family.  The ends of his books, the deaths of his characters made me weep in a heart clenching way.  I physically hurt when I am done reading one of his works.  That, my friends, is great writing.

I once recommended Love in the Time of Cholera to someone who promptly told me that they had attempted to read the book, but that it was "too wordy" and "boring".  I left it at that, but man, he missed out on something wonderful.

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Michelle says:

A few months ago one of my oldest and dearest friends suggested with great earnest that I read You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought by Peter McWilliams. I purchased it immediately and am deeply grateful I did. At first I thought, "That's a hokey title, seriously?", but I read it with an open mind and learned a lot. It is written with such sincerity and raw truth that I couldn't put it down. This book is straight forward, honest, approachable, and comforting. It's sort of like a manual for negative thinkers, also known as Negaholics. Here are some quotes:

"Negative thinking is always expensive--dragging us down mentally, emotionally, and physically--hence I refer to any indulgence in it as a luxury."

"Fear is something to be moved through, not something to be turned from."

"Pain (any pain--emotional, physical, mental) has a message."

"Our thoughts create our reality--where we put our focus is the direction we tend to go."

"Stubbornness is also determination. It's simply a matter of shifting from a 'won't power' to a 'will power."

"This information it has about our life can be remarkably specific, but it usually falls into one of two categories: We would be more alive if we did more of this and life would be more lovely if we did less of that.  Once we get the pain's message, and follow its advice, the pain goes away."

"When we put things off until some future--probably mythical-Laterland, we drag the past into the future. The burden of yesterday's incompletions is a heavy load to carry. Don't carry it."

This is a thick book!  It is chock full of strategies to combat negative thinking and it is highly relateable. It always feels good to read a book and feel your eyes well up with tears and think, I am not alone.  It took a lot of effort and balls to write this book and many of the reviews I've read say, "This book is my bible".  This is my top 10 favorite reads.  I hope more and more people see how valuable it is.