I need books.
May. 23rd, 2003 07:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabI want everyone to give me five book recs? Do 'em here or in your LJs but comment here so I can find your recs? And little blurbs about each so I can see what suits my fancy?
I'll even go first, if anyone else out there's looking to read. Here's some good worthwhile stuff:
My Secret History by Paul Theroux Being a coming-of-age-as-an-expat kind of story, wannabe writer seeks experience, goes to Africa, learns that all his writing is crap compared to the experiences the people he works with in the African hospital have. Gets to know the environment, has a lot of sex, and then goes to Europe maybe to figure out how to ever write again.
The Fireman's Fair by Josephine Humphreys Being a story told in first person male, by a female author who does a damn fine job. Rob is an ex-lawyer who was never a very good lawyer but somehow was very successful and got rich after being a brilliant student at Yale. Rob tires of the hyperintellectualism and instead dumps it all and buys a house on the South Carolina beach, near his retired (and crazy) parents, and near the summer home of his ex-law partner Hank and Hank's wife, the love of Rob's life. Big flood washes up the beach and we get an exhausted, laid-back, adult season on the coast as Rob tries to figure out what he wants to do with himself.
Music for Torching by A.M. Homes In which we watch a marriage dare itself to unravel, with the wife and husband either fighting, fucking, or conspiring in crime, trying to out-shock one another. He gets a tattoo. She burns the house down. Their quiet Yuppie suburb tries not to notice until the whole damn thing blows up in their faces.
When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant Wherein a young British Jewish girl decides to go be part of the forming of a new city of Israel, prior to and during WWII. The war in Europe is almost nonexistant in the modern white city of Tel Aviv, where the workers come in from the kibbutzes every day to try and generate a market economy and keep their state alive. Our girl Evelyn Sert starts in a kibbutz, meets people, finds kindred spirits and even falls in love, all the while finding her way into an underground army of freedom fighters running intelligence to protect the fledgling city.
Rules of the Wild by Francesca Marciano In which Esme, a disaffected Italian twentysomething, decides to run off to join the lush life of aristocratic expats living in Karen (the town in Kenya named after Isak Dinesen, or Karen Blixen). She settles into the European expatriate community, rubs elbows with artists, wildlife researchers, documentary filmmakers, and war photographers. Of course, she gets too close, becomes vulnerable to the influence of the land, and soon she's torn between two lovers that represent the extremes of Africa -- Adam a soulful hunter and safari leader with a holy worship for the land itself, and Hunter, a war correspondance outraged by the massacres going on in the nearby nations of Rwanda and Somalia.
More more more please? They don't have to be your favorite five. Just five you think I'll like. *g*
I'll even go first, if anyone else out there's looking to read. Here's some good worthwhile stuff:
My Secret History by Paul Theroux Being a coming-of-age-as-an-expat kind of story, wannabe writer seeks experience, goes to Africa, learns that all his writing is crap compared to the experiences the people he works with in the African hospital have. Gets to know the environment, has a lot of sex, and then goes to Europe maybe to figure out how to ever write again.
The Fireman's Fair by Josephine Humphreys Being a story told in first person male, by a female author who does a damn fine job. Rob is an ex-lawyer who was never a very good lawyer but somehow was very successful and got rich after being a brilliant student at Yale. Rob tires of the hyperintellectualism and instead dumps it all and buys a house on the South Carolina beach, near his retired (and crazy) parents, and near the summer home of his ex-law partner Hank and Hank's wife, the love of Rob's life. Big flood washes up the beach and we get an exhausted, laid-back, adult season on the coast as Rob tries to figure out what he wants to do with himself.
Music for Torching by A.M. Homes In which we watch a marriage dare itself to unravel, with the wife and husband either fighting, fucking, or conspiring in crime, trying to out-shock one another. He gets a tattoo. She burns the house down. Their quiet Yuppie suburb tries not to notice until the whole damn thing blows up in their faces.
When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant Wherein a young British Jewish girl decides to go be part of the forming of a new city of Israel, prior to and during WWII. The war in Europe is almost nonexistant in the modern white city of Tel Aviv, where the workers come in from the kibbutzes every day to try and generate a market economy and keep their state alive. Our girl Evelyn Sert starts in a kibbutz, meets people, finds kindred spirits and even falls in love, all the while finding her way into an underground army of freedom fighters running intelligence to protect the fledgling city.
Rules of the Wild by Francesca Marciano In which Esme, a disaffected Italian twentysomething, decides to run off to join the lush life of aristocratic expats living in Karen (the town in Kenya named after Isak Dinesen, or Karen Blixen). She settles into the European expatriate community, rubs elbows with artists, wildlife researchers, documentary filmmakers, and war photographers. Of course, she gets too close, becomes vulnerable to the influence of the land, and soon she's torn between two lovers that represent the extremes of Africa -- Adam a soulful hunter and safari leader with a holy worship for the land itself, and Hunter, a war correspondance outraged by the massacres going on in the nearby nations of Rwanda and Somalia.
More more more please? They don't have to be your favorite five. Just five you think I'll like. *g*
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no subject
Date: 2003-05-23 06:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-23 07:43 am (UTC)Five books.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-23 11:09 am (UTC)Other recommendations, more or less at random:
Blue Heaven by Joe Keenan just for sheer entertainment value. Keenan was the guy who wrote 90% of the funny Frasier scripts, and this novel, not subject to Standards and Practices, is even funnier. (There's a sequel, too, which I haven't read.) The less said about the plot the better, but suffice to say that it involves the exploits of a ne'er-do-well New Yorker who hatches a seemingly harmless get-rich-quick scheme that spirals completely out of control.
Whites by Norman Rush. Rush won the National Book Award for Mating a few years later, but I like Whites better--five short fictions about expatriates in Botswana that vary greatly in their narrative tone and degree of twistedness. And a companion book...
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler, a great collection of 17 short stories, all about Vietnamese immigrants to the US. ROB was an Army translator during the Vietnam War, and his understanding of the Vietnamese language tends to deepen his Vietnamese characters here and elseswhere in really interesting ways.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, which concerns an ill-fated Jesuit mission to make first contact with alien life several years in the future. Not nearly as science-fictiony as it could have been, and the various relationships between expeditioners are well drawn and quite poignant. As for the aliens, Russell is a cultural anthropologist, and she's got a flair for imagining some truly foreign peoples; the potential for misunderstanding between us and them helps the book work its way toward tragedy. There's a sequel to this, too; haven't read it.
And, oh, I'll round it off with...
Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay. Jay is a magician and actor, and you would recognize him if you saw him. This is a bizarre non-fiction book about circus-type human oddities throughout the last few centuries. I've given this book as a gift more often than any other thing.
Enjoy!
no subject
Date: 2003-05-23 06:50 pm (UTC)I will have to think about this, but just for starters: have you read the Lemony Snicket books? Wicked, morbid fun. Don't just try the first one, as it's the weakest -- give him at least till book two, as some of the jokes only develop into full flower with their repetition.
Book Recs
Date: 2003-05-25 02:30 pm (UTC)http://www.livejournal.com/users/prillalar/24945.html