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.

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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.

 I’ve always been a book lover.  I devour novels like others do chocolates—holing up for hours at a time to fully immerse myself in new characters and worlds without interruption.  And one thing that has always amazed me about reading is how I can generate so much feeling—empathy, irritation, attraction and even love—for people who are built only from words and imagination.  This goes beyond relating to a character.  I know that with certain books I physically feel something for the people described within the pages.  I grieve when the story ends and our relationship is cut short (and, more often than not, re-read the book so we can visit again).  So as I researched Dirty Minds, I was intrigued to learn that Semir Zeki, a professor of neuroaesthetics at University college London and author of Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness, based his initial hypothesis that love must have some kind of biological seat in the brain on the fact that love is so often mentioned in art and literature.

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

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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. 

Face it – What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change by Vivian Diller, Ph.D.with Jill Mir-Sukenick, Ph.D.
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

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The Bare Necessities—Joan Leegant (WHEREVER YOU GO)

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.

Joan Leegant is the author of An Hour In Paradise: Stories and a novel, Wherever You Go, out now in paperback from W.W. Norton. She’s here today with a wonderful post that addresses, among other things, books with exotic locales, why she was late to discovering women writers,  and what happened when she did.

  As a woman who came of age during the explosion of feminism in the 1960s; who entered law school the year law schools nationwide made a much-trumpeted effort to raise the percentage of female students from 5% to 20% (they are now the majority); whose first legal job was with the only woman in practice in my western Massachusetts county; and who proudly conducted cross-examinations in 3-inch heels so that, at 5’ 9” in stockinged feet, I’d be as tall, or taller, than most of my male opponents—it’s been something of an embarrassment when, at book talks, my answer to the frequently posed question about authors I loved while growing up includes– take a gulp!—no women.

How can this be? I’ve searched my soul and psyche and find no latent misogyny, no self-hatred, no oxygen-starved upbringing where the only fare was The Hardy Boys and White Fang. The answer, it seems, from the vantage point of 50+ years, has more to do with the expectations of life subtly but powerfully put across in the bookish options available to me in my girlhood than any literary merit. Little Women may have been a great novel, but the girls seemed to mainly stick around the house. (Plus they were “little.” See above.) Jane Austen, perennially loved, terrified me with her message—already so suffocating in real life—that the only route to happiness and respectability was through marriage and, God help us, social climbing. Ditto just about every other female author of the 19^th and early 20^th century who crossed my albeit very limited radar.  Read more

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The Bare Necessities—Matthew F. Jones (A SINGLE SHOT)

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.

Matthew F. Jones is the author of several acclaimed novels and screenplays. His new novel A Single Shot is out now from Mulholland Books and is slated for a film production starring William H. Macy and Forest Whitaker (!). He lives near my neck of the woods in Charlottesville, VA.

Art that inspires me most – through whatever medium, literature, the visual arts, music, etc. – creates for me characters or scenes so affecting I’m drawn to know more about them the way I’m drawn to know more about a new person I meet – or stranger I encounter – who in some way (often indefinable to me) sparks my interest. In the visual arts I find this most in certain photographs (often black-and-white) of people in their everyday surroundings or in the best impressionist paintings that magically ignite my imagination to see a world and story well beyond what is on the canvas. The best blues and bluegrass music (from its pioneers up through today’s masters) moves me in the same way. And though I’m an eclectic reader, the novels I admire most have two common elements; indelible characters whose stories are compelling because of who they are; and a rich evocation of the particular world they live in.

Growing up I loved the fiction of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Dostoyevsky, Bellow among many others. The unifying elements of these authors for me was their ability to drive a story with great characterizations and the way in which their writing didn’t get in the way of itself. Every word in their books was meaningful to the worlds they were creating. They never used words as simple adornment or to demonstrate their own intelligence or adeptness. All these authors had the unique ability to draw me so completely into their fictional worlds that the authors themselves were invisible to me.  Reading them I was never aware of them plying their craft. In their outwardly simple writing styles (though each owned his/her own unique voice) they drew rich, complex pictures that flowed as images rather than as mere words. And, first and foremost, all were great storytellers, not philosophers or belly-button gazers intent on wrapping their stories around particular agendas. Here are four of my favorite authors and/or books, then and now:

Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter Of Our Discontent

Steinbeck was the first author to really turn me on to the world of books.  In his simple, unadorned style, he created worlds at once foreign and knowable to me, worlds populated by people who (though they were from places and a time foreign to me) felt as real to me as the people I encountered in my everyday life growing up on a farm in upstate, New York; people who defied simple categorizations; people who weren’t all good or all bad, all noble or all dastardly, all strong or all weak; people whose motives were sometimes pure and sometimes not; people who sometimes fell prey to their own weaknesses and sometimes managed to rise above them; interesting people who you felt you could never quite entirely know but wanted badly too and thus, like a small child in pursuit of a butterfly to find its home, were compelled to follow, to watch, to listen to. And somewhere in the process of following, watching and listening to them (to George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, to Tom Joad in The Grapes Of Wrath) you realized you were watching a great story unfold that would define them to you more than the mere fact of your knowing them ever could.

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

Some contemporary critics have found fault with this novel, condemning it as a children’s book with inconsistent narration that vacillates between a child’s and an adult’s voice. Others have mocked the ethical purity and exaggerated idealism of Atticus Finch. I can only say I first read the book as a child and, with its simplistic but no less powerful lessons about inequality, injustice and the nature of humanity, it had on me a tremendous affect that remains with me to this day. Not too long ago, with some trepidation for fear it wouldn’t hold up in my somewhat more (unfortunately) jaded adult mind, I reread To Kill A Mockingbird. Even recognizing in it a few flaws I hadn’t as a kid recognized – and certainly wouldn’t have been at all troubled by if I had – I found the novel as compelling now as I did initially. And that to me marks it a great book. It’s probably the best child narrator’s point of view novel I’ve ever read, yet is no more simply a child’s book than is, say, Portnoy’s Complaint or The Bell Jar. And it is the one book I can think of that specifically influenced me in any way. Reading it as a kid had a lot to do with convincing me I wanted to be a small town lawyer servicing the needs of the people in the town I grew up in. Years later I followed that goal to its fruition. It took a few more years for me to recognize it was the storytelling more than the lawyering in To Kill A Mockingbird I was most drawn to. Read more

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