The 2011 Backlist Binge

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

The end-of-year backlist binge I’ve been looking forward to for a while now is nearly over now, and it has turned into a half-backlist, half-not-yet-published binge, as I’ve been alternating books that have been sitting on the TBR for far too long with brand new 2012 titles I simply can’t resist any longer. Here’s a look at the backlist half, so far.

The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst

This novel about a novelist whose new book contains rewritten endings to her seven previously published books is part murder mystery, part analysis of the mother-son relationship, part reflection on the writing life and the ways our experiences shape the stories we tell, and all awesome. I loved the hell out of it. Parkhurst juggles so many things so deftly that the book appears deceptively simple until you realize what she’s doing and that it would be gutsy to one or two of the things she does but she’s doing, like, nine of them.

Highly recommended for fans of books with multiple lines of narrative, story-within-a-story structure, and elements of meta-fiction.

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Drive Like Hell by Dallas Hudgens

My big reading project for 2011 was the Fountain 360 in 365–an attempt to read one book recommended by the staff from every section of my local independent bookstore–and this book was one of the highlights of the experience. The folks at Fountain have been telling me about this one for almost two years, and now I get it. Southern fiction in the truest sense, Drive Like Hell is tragic and humorous and everything in between as it presents sixteen-year-old Luke Fulmer, who just wants to drive a fast car and finally get a girlfriend. Luke moves in with his older brother for the summer and finds out he is in way over his head when he discovers that his brother is a coke dealer, his mother is on the fast track to full-blown alcoholism, and his father is nowhere to be found.

A fast, fun read, Drive Like Hell is the kind of teenage boy coming-of-age story I can’t resist, and it will remind you why just about everyone has a love-hate relationship with the South.

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Talking Nonfiction with Mary Roach

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

I can’t believe I haven’t posted this! After gushing about Mary Roach’s books for years IRL and for more than a year on the Bookrageous podcast, I got to talk to her! I think Josh, Jenn, and I did a pretty decent job suppressing our OMGWE’RETALKINGTOMARYROACH fangirl/fanboy urges, and the conversation was super fun and informative and exciting for the 12-year-old boys that live inside us. Enjoy, subscribe, and keep an eye out for the Zone One Book Club episode, coming soon.

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The Book Lady’s Best of 2011: Best of the Rest

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Without further ado: the final installment The Book Lady’s Best of 2011: the best books I read that didn’t fit neatly into any of my other categories. I never know where to put short stories!

   Other People We Married by Emma Straub (Five Chapters Press) Whatever your experience with short fiction, you’d do yourself a favor by spending an afternoon (and really, that’s all it will take) with Other People We Married. Straub’s collection, full of the kind of quirky, flawed, believable characters that will remind you of your friends, your colleagues, and yourself, begins with “Some People Must Really Fall in Love,” in which a young writer attempts to fight her attraction to a student by dating a real Grown-Up Man (who owns a house and everything) and ends up reflecting on the strange in-between-ness of the stage of life during which one is technically an adult but doesn’t feel like it yet. Straub’s characters wrestle with identity and struggle to reconcile the reality of who they’ve become with who they imagined they would be, and she explores loss—and the things loss makes us willing to believe in—with subtlety and clever insight. Other People We Married is keenly observed, deeply felt, and an absolute delight to read.  Straub’s characters are authentic, and they live in the real world, with all its weirdness, uncertainty, and “well, this isn’t what I expected it to be”-ness.

Ladies & Gentlemen by Adam Ross (Knopf) Dark is what Ross does, and as we saw in his 2010 debut novel Mr. Peanut, he does it remarkably well. The characters who populate Ladies and Gentlemen are complex, cunning, and duplicitous; their relationships nuanced, complicated, brimming with secrets and unspoken fears. They lie to each other for sport, make fools of each other for entertainment, and make reckless decisions with little regard for consequences. Yet they are compelling—even, in some cases, charming—in all their imperfection, and Ross’s ability to explore the underside of all kinds of relationships is noteworthy. As tight and economical as Mr. Peanutwas winding and dense, this collection establishes Ross as a writer unconstrained by format, one who doesn’t need the bells and whistles, twists and turns, regardless of how skillfully he deploys them.

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The Book Lady’s Best of 2011: Memoir & Biography

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

This list gets harder to make each year as I find myself reading fewer and fewer memoirs. They used to be a staple of my reading life, but as I’ve made room for more adventures in genre, they’ve been squeezed out. The upside is that I’ve become super picky about the ones that do make it into my TBR, so the overall quality ratio has been fantastic. Here are this year’s highlights.

   Reading Lips: A Memoir in Kisses by Claudia Sternbach (Unbridled Books) Beginning with the nerves and anticipation leading up to a much-wanted (and even more planned-out) first kiss, Sternbach recalls the pivotal relationships of her life—and not just the romantic ones—by telling a story about a kiss related to each one. She writes about family life with her twin younger sisters and about competing with her best friend, who was always the first to do things like shave her legs and go on dates, and she writes about milestone moments and the kisses that marked them.  And it’s not all rose-colored glasses and fondly remembered experiences. Sternbach is funny when she wants to be, serious when she needs to be, and often quite poignant, and Reading Lips is a delightful gift of a book.

Your Voice In My Head by Emma Forrest (Other Press) This book begins in 2000, when a suicide attempt results in her meeting with a new psychiatrist, whom she calls Dr. R. Forrest sees Dr. R off and on over eight years, and she is devastated by the news that he has died from lung cancer she never knew he had. This achingly raw memoir is just as much about Forrest’s relationship with Dr. R as it is about her personal struggle with bipolar disorder, not to mention her passionate if troubled romantic entanglement with a certain infamous bad-boy actor. Forrest’s book joins a long chain of recent memoirs about mental illness, but hers is refreshingly free of attempts to glamorize it, and she goes her fellow memoirists one better by telling not just her own story but including excerpts of others’ stories as well. Forrest has written a new take on a now-familiar story, and her meditation on the life-changing effect the right therapist can have is not only important but beautifully rendered.

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The Sunday Salon:12.18.11

2011 at 11am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

After a full and busy week, I am officially prepared for Christmas! And just in time, as I seem to have caught the holiday plague. So I’m coming to you this morning wrapped up in a cozy quilt and surrounded by cold medicine and a never-ending mug of Stash lemon-ginger tea. I started reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed yesterday (it’ll be out in March), and so far, it’s really terrific. In fact, I think I’ll hunker down in my comfy burrow until I finish it. Or until Elf comes on. You know, a lady’s gotta have priorities.

My backlist binge has officially become an alternating-backlist-with-not-yet-out-list binge, and I couldn’t be happier. After wanting to read Michael Chabon’s novels in chronological order for years now, I finally got to The Mysteries of Pittsburgh last week. It’s so fantastic that I could hardly believe it was a debut novel, and damn if it isn’t chock full of incredible sentences and awesome conversations. I wrote a spoiler-filled piece for Book Riot about the bad plot twists no author should attempt again, ever, and it got picked up by The Huffington Post, which, you know, sort of made my week in a holy-cow-this-is-crazy way. Then I rounded out the week by revealing my Best of 2011 Genre Busters list and recording an interview with Colson Whitehead for the Bookrageous Book Club. I love this end-of-year flurry of activity, but OH BOY am I looking forward to a couple days off.

The coming week will bring more reading, the final installments in my Best of 2011 series, my 29th birthday (on Tuesday), and some long-awaited time with my family and new nephew. Now I just have to kick this plague so I can enjoy them! Back to the napping go I.

Happy Sunday, all!

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