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The Bare Necessities: Kristen-Paige Madonia [FINGERPRINTS OF YOU]
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Kristen-Paige Madonia is the author of Fingerprints of You, a YA novel out now from Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers. She’s here with a post about the books that have most shaped her as a reader and writer.
I can’t remember exactly when I received my copy of The Giving Tree, but that slick green cover is the first book I think of when I try to retrace my steps as a reader, as the kind of person that curls up with a set of characters for hours with no recognition or care that the “real world” continues to spin outside the pages. The book follows the life stages of a young boy and a tree as the boy ages and the tree provides any and everything the boy asks for: branches to swing from as a child, apples to sell and lumber to build a home with as an adult, and, eventually, a stump to sit and rest on as an old man. Shel Silverstein is a brilliant writer, the first I remember being truly moved by as a child, and I owned all his books. But The Giving Tree is the one I returned to most, the cover torn at the corners, the inside flap wrinkled and water-stained. And now, I wonder if it’s also the book I should credit in terms of my first interest in writing coming-of-age stories. Because isn’t that what’s it’s about? A child gradually loses his innocence and makes his way into that eyes-wide-open phase of life when he realizes things aren’t always what they seem, that life can be devastating and demanding just as often as it can be delightful. And if we believe the tree serves as metaphor for a parent, which I do, the boy, like most children, doesn’t recognize the sacrifices the parent has made; he doesn’t understand how much the tree gives up to take care of him. The parent-child relationship, the loss of innocence, that strange but brilliant time in life when you realize the world is much larger than you thought, those are the ideas that continue to fascinate me as a reader and motivate me as an author.
The second book that comes to mind that marked and guided me as an author is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, a novel I tend to read every few years and a book that feels familiar but simultaneously changed each time I return to it. It seems to me that a book is a different book for every reader, and that once it is published, it doesn’t belong to the author at all. Once it exists in the world, it becomes the readers’ as they bring their own experiences, emotions, and viewpoints into the novel. Great Expectations, which depicts Pip’s struggles and triumphs as an artist as he gradually grows from a boy to a man, changes each time I read it depending on what I’m facing in my own life, which makes it one of my favorite reads.
As a college student, like many college students do, I fell in the love with the Beats, and part of my literary heart will always belong to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It was published in 1957, but there’s something timeless about the spontaneous cross-country road trip, the jazz and the booze, the poetry, and the indulgent sex and drug binges. It’s a spiritual journey, a quest for faith and true friendship, and a search for love as the characters hunt for a sense of an authentic and meaningful life. At the time Kerouac wrote the novel, it was a proclamation for a stripped and nonconformist existent, a reaction against the 1950s culture and social “norms”, but I think the book resonates with young readers across generations regardless of the current national climate.
When it comes to portraying a wry sense of society and utilizing dark humor in literature, Flannery O’Connor’s ominous southern settings and fantastical Gothic plots have always fascinated me. I read her stories and I want to take notes, to outline the plots, to study her methods, and to highlight all the magnificent words she hooks together to form those beautiful sentences strewn on every page. I’ve read A Good Man Is Hard to Find repeatedly when contemplating plot and humor in my own work.
But it is typically the voice I remember most about a good book, the kind of book that sends me to the shelves when I host dinner parties: “You have to read this,” I’ll say, shoving a novel into their hands. “Immediately,” I’ll tell them. So inevitably, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close falls at the top of my list; I’m fairly certain I’ve bought at lease five copies. When I think of the book, it’s Oskar Schell I hear, that raw and frantic nine-year-old that carries the reader through the streets of New York in the wake of 9/11. It’s his humor, his heartache, his honesty, and his grief that haunts me — not just the feel of the emotions, but the SOUND of them. He floats through an adult world as a child fighting the struggle between self-destruction and self-preservation, another coming-of-age novel, I suppose, but the voice is strictly his, Oskar unfiltered and up close, and that’s what stays with you after you close the book. As a writer and a reader, it’s always the voice that leaves me breathless; it’s the voice of the work that serves as my barometer for golden fiction.
I’ve found my mentors on bookshelves for as long as I can remember, too many to list here, and I’ve studied the craft through their successes. I’ve envied their triumphs and tricks, and I’ve attempted to mimic their talents in hopes of somehow getting it right when I return to my own blank page. Chekhov, Irving, and Vonnegut, Kundera and Carver, Tom Robbins, Jhumpa Lahiri, T.C. Boyle, and Zadie Smith… the list is endless and absolutely wide-ranging. But it’s the bravery that I always return to, that leap of faith each writer takes when they begin that amazes me, particularly with authors exploring the pivotal moments in our lives that change our perspectives, the events after which nothing is ever the same. I like to write from that place and I like to read about that place as well, because in the end aren’t we all constantly searching for meaning and for answers? Aren’t we all trying, desperately, to grow up, to grow smarter, and to grow into better people, somehow, in this impossible world? Aren’t we all still coming-of-age?
The Bare Necessities–Amy Reading [THE MARK INSIDE]
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Amy Reading is the author of The Mark Inside, a narrative history of con artistry that also tells the story of one of the largest swindles in American history. It’s one of my favorite reads of 2012 so far, and I couldn’t be happier to have Amy here today sharing her favorite works of creative nonfiction.
I’ve had occasion lately to wonder at the similarity between creative nonfiction and confidence artistry. Creative nonfiction can be broadly defined as a true story told with literary craft, but a good 90% of the books that I’ve read in this category can be even more specifically characterized as stories told in the first person, in which the author is a character in his or her own work.
Like the con artist, the author stands before us spieling her story, reeling us in with suspense and doling out the narrative rewards with time-release gratification. Unlike the novelist who comes before us marked as a fabricator, the creative nonfiction author shares with the con artist a partial relationship to truth. The world she depicts has been framed, set apart from reality, heightened. And how easily we give our confidence to the author as we enter such a book! Luckily, most authors use their powers for good rather than evil.
Nowhere is this better seen than in books which treat deception as their very subject. In Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen Papers (a follow-up to his fantastic play, Copenhagen), the story envelopes the reader until suddenly she realizes that all is not as she had thought, and the story begins to shift. I cannot say more without spoiling the pleasures of these excellent books.
One of the signature moves of the con artist is to invite the mark into the backstage of a deal. The mark believes she is getting privileged insider information, and that causes her to act differently. The creative nonfiction equivalent is for the author to bring the discovery of the story into the frame, showing how the reporting was done. One of my favorite examples is Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land. To research the historical swindle that was homesteading on the Great Plains in the wake of the railroads’ conquest, he takes the reader along as he travels to Montana and walks through abandoned homes, scooping up the books that remain and reading them to discover the ambitions of their long-ago owners. His book is part travelogue, part history, and it works gorgeously because he is such a good tour guide.
Also in this category, I am a sucker for stories of scientists in the field, living their research and showing you how it’s done, and you can’t top Robert Sapolsky’s The Primate’s Memoir, Daniel L. Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes, and Katy Payne’s Silent Thunder. You needn’t be interested in baboons, aboriginal people of the Amazon, or African elephants in order to fall deeply under the spell of these three books, which are alike in the way they combine intelligence, sensitivity to their subject, and great humor.
By now, we’re far from the territory of the con artist, who is disinterested in his tale and weaves it only long enough to seduce his mark. The closer the creative nonfiction writer gets to her own material, the harder it hits the reader. Timothy Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name is at once a muscular argument about the unacknowledged role of violence in the civil rights movement and a highly emotional coming-to-terms with the author’s own childhood as the son of a white minister in a southern town scarred by a racialized killing. Tyson went to college and then graduate school in order to be able to fully understand what he had experienced growing up. His life drives his scholarship.
You don’t need me to sing the praises of Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, but it bears mentioning as the obverse to Tyson’s book. What began for Skloot as a investigation into the life of the black woman whose cells became the backbone of twentieth-century biological study soon turned into something far more personal when she befriended Henrietta Lacks’ descendents. Bringing them into the frame of the book was a political act, an attempt to reverse generations of structural oppression and miseducation of blacks, but it also meant that she herself would become a character in her own book, and that the way Lacks’ family affected her would become part of the story. Her scholarship drives her life.
If these kind of books are your thing, then please allow me to point you to a forthcoming book by my friend Aaron Sachs called Arcadian America. Aaron is a professor of American history at Cornell University, and the book started off as a traditional, if beautifully written examination of a lost school of environmental thought in the nineteenth century which involved a deep appreciation of death, in contrast to our contemporary attitude of denial. But well into the writing process, Aaron was forced to respond to the call of his own manuscript, forced to stop denying how the losses he has experienced in his own life have shaped his scholarship. The result is the bravest interweaving of memoir and scholarship that I’ve read. And that’s no con.
Share your own favorite works of creative/narrative nonfiction in the comments by 11:59pm Eastern, Friday June 8th to enter to win a copy of The Mark Inside
The Bare Necessities–Megan Mayhew Bergman (BIRDS OF A LESSER PARADISE)
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Megan Mayhew Bergman’s debut collection of short stories Birds of a Lesser Paradise is just out from Scribner. Destined to be one of my favorites of 2012, it focuses largely on our complicated relationships with nature and our competing desires to run wild and have control. I’m beyond excited to have Megan here today sharing this list of her favorite books with the Man vs Nature theme.
This story destroyed me—it still does; I choke up instantly upon remembering it. I cried so hard in class that the teacher had to put a chair in the hallway. I sat there sobbing for a long time, sneering at our class’s wonky-eyed self-portraits pinned to a bulletin board, which looked inelegant and crude when compared with Searchlight’s cruel end in the Wyoming snow.
There are two points here. First, I have a weak constitution. The same crying episodes happened when the librarian read Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows. Other kids were teary-eyed; I was ravaged by sadness, unable to go on. (Until lunch time, because, well, HoHos solve all problems.) Second, I realize that the narratives that have moved me most in my reading life include an element of man versus nature, or meditations on the human/animal bond.
I resist the idea that writing about animals is cheesy or a form of commercial pandering, though certainly it can be. I fight my own tendency to anthropomorphize, and meditations on loyalty and primal innocence are hard to make new for a savvy reader. There are obvious heart strings a writer can pluck, but only so many times. Ultimately, I think writing about animals taps into a wellspring of feeling, feeling that is rooted in our biology and historic relationship with them, be they companion animals, beasts of burden, or predators.
A well-written passage about a protagonist running from a predator elicits, I think, a vestigial flood of feeling. Take for example the early Flannery O’Connor’s story “Wildcat”, from her Complete Stories, where blind Old Gabriel believes he can smell a mountain lion. He imagines fighting it and the way he will grip the animal’s head and beat it on the floor of his shack repeatedly. Gabriel sits up all night, convinced the cat is near until he hears the scream of a cow which it has taken down nearby. The threat of predation allows an O’Connor to play with the reader’s anticipation and fear, and she does so to great effect.
(Disclaimer: I should admit now that I have a deep respect and humbling fear of fanged megafauna. I love them and want to see them in the wild, but not when they’re hungry. One thing about being a writer—your vivid imagination does you no favors when hiking in the dark woods.)
My favorite story of all time is William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” a novella and also a chapter in Faulkner’s novel Go Down, Moses. “The Bear” is epic in scope, and there is much I could say about it, but there are two things I think Faulkner does particularly well. First, the animals are well-characterized without a drop of sentimentality. We know that it is unlike Old Ben, the mythical bear the McCaslin family and company have been hunting for years, to kill a horse. We know that Lion, the feral dog Sam has trained, is uninterested in affection and brave enough to go after Old Ben, despite obvious consequences. These characterizations feel true, and contribute to the reader’s emotional investment in the story’s ending.
Faulkner’s story also asks big questions without the reader ever sensing a hidden agenda or shrill advocacy. “The Bear” leaves the reader wondering what will happen when man has tamed or destroyed wilderness, and implies that the absence of wilderness is not just a physical loss, but a spiritual one as well. (A satisfying contemporary read with similar themes is Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding.)
When I was just starting to write short fiction, I read Rick Bass’s The Hermit’s Story. The title story, where a man and woman travel underneath a frozen lake with birds and dogs, stunned me with its sublime setting. I felt that only an author who spent significant, thoughtful time outside could render an unusual physical scenario with such authenticity. I admire E.B. White for the same reason; his complex relationship with animals and genuine familiarity with them is evident in his essay “Death of a Pig.”
I want so much to believe that an author who invests him or herself in an animal-focused or environmental narrative is comfortable outdoors. You can feel, I think, the difference between an author who has walked among a story’s setting and one who has simply researched it on the computer (which, to be honest, I’ve done, too). For all the fights we can pick with Hemingway, he was out in the world, and that hands-on experience shows in his work. Stories such as “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (cowards and fanged megafauna!) and “On the Quai at Smyrna” (where the Greeks, unable to take their animals with them on a boat, break their donkeys’ forelegs and watch them drown) contain convincing, powerful images of human entitlement.
When it comes to authors who have contemplated man’s relationship with nature, Thoreau comes in an easy first. When I read Thoreau, I feel like I’m reading my own thoughts, but written with much more beauty and philosophical soundness than I could ever muster. In Walden he writes, “We need the tonic of wildness…We can never have enough of nature.” One of the great opportunities in fiction is the narrative’s ability to remind and convince us of nature’s power and value, and I’m a sucker for work that does so.
The Bare Necessities–Kayt Sukel (DIRTY MINDS: HOW OUR BRAINS INFLUENCE LOVE, SEX, AND RELATIONSHIPS)
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Kayt Sukel is a freelance science and travel writer as well as the author of Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex and Relationships, out now from Free Press (my review here). She shares how literature, particularly love stories, helped scientists figure out that love had a biological basis—and how some of her favorite novels mesh with the latest and greatest findings concerning the neurobiology of love and sex.
Think about it: how often have you read a poem or book passage about love and thought it could have been written about you and your intended? (Or at least wished it had been—I’m still waiting for the boy who will quote me a Rumi poem). How can certain song lyrics, movie scenes and book excerpts inspire us to cry, rejoice and feel? If you are a reader, you understand that the feeling of love is beautifully, painfully captured in so many books—some written hundreds of years ago, some just this week. And Zeki and his colleague, Andreas Bartel, were inspired to try to find and measure love use a neuroimaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) because so many of us recognize and relate to those descriptions—it suggests there is something common about love and other emotions inside of us, something that is an intrinsic, biological part of our natures, passed from generation to generation, that allows us to both recognize and share in the emotional experiences transcribed to the printed page. Turns out, Zeki and Bartels were right.
It’s probably no surprise that many of the books I count among my favorites made the list just because they capture some aspect of love so well. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind is known for its fiery main character, Scarlett O’Hara—but what has always struck me is how Mitchell describes where Scarlett’s affections lie. Scarlett spends the bulk of the book obsessing about her beloved Ashley, but Mitchell makes sure that we readers are well aware of how much Rhett affects her physically and emotionally, even if she isn’t as quick to pick up on it. While we may never know for certain just who Kurban Said is, this author captured a sweet and poignant love between his Ali and Nino—a relationship that transcends culture, faithlessness and war. Said captures love as it should be. Even, perhaps, if it can’t stand up in the face of real life. Of course, one of the best recognized books about love has to be Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It captures it all—attachment, romantic love and, of course, desire. And I’d dare say Susan Minot’s Evening and Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist manage to keep up with Marquez on that front. Read more
The Bare Necessities—E. (SHMIRSHKY: THE PURSUIT OF HORMONE HAPPINESS)
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
E. is the author of Shmirshky: The Pursuit of Hormone Happiness, a fun and informative book for women of all ages who want to have happier relationships with their ladyparts. I learned a lot from it (and look at that cover!), and I’m pleased to welcome E. here today with this post about books that tell the truth about women.
I should begin with my thoughts on anti-aging. I am against it! I want to get old – I am not at all ready for my journey to end. With that in mind, I picked up Face Itand couldn’t put it down. As I breezed through this book, I found myself wanting to stand up and applaud. This can be tough when you are crammed into an airplane seat – so I was forced to control myself. Through the stories of patients, the reader gains insight and helpful tools to help embrace and love the women they are today. When I finished the book, I wanted to go out and celebrate ME. Growing older is a gift that I want to receive for a very long time.Bossypants by Tina Fey
Tina Fey is one of my favs, so I couldn’t wait to read her book, Bossypants. Just a note of caution on this: You need to read this book in the privacy of your own home, as you will find yourself bursting out with laughter. This might be annoying to others not as lucky to have the book in their hand. It could cause folks who are not privy to the fact that you are immersed deep in Feyville, to run for cover for fear that any moment you might exhibit some bizarre behavior. Read more
