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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.
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
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.
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 19th and early 20th century who crossed my albeit very limited radar. Read more
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.
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
The Bare Necessities—Lenore Zion (MY DEAD PETS ARE INTERESTING)
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Lenore Zion is a therapist, a writer, and the author of My Dead Pets Are Interesting, an irresistible collection of personal essays that range from the profound to the ridiculous, the “that’s so insightful” to the “Ohmigod, I feel so validated by the knowledge that someone else is just as secretly weird as I am.” Zion is about my age, and I’ve overcome my extreme jealousy of her talent (not to mention that the folks behind The Nervous Breakdown, one of my favorite websites, published her book) to bring her here today for this guest post about her the books that make her feel equally validated and understood.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
One of the recurrent themes of misfititude is oppression. Society is oppressive. Your parents are oppressive. Your peers are oppressive. Misfits are expected to respond to the pressures to either conform, if the misfit appears to be unexceptional, or perform, if the misfit appears to be exceptional. Ender, the protagonist of Ender’s Game, is expected to do both. He’s got it worse than your average freak – he represents something so many standard deviations away from the mean that he cannot even remain on Earth. This six-year-old boy has to go to space and spend his entire childhood and adolescence at battle school, where he must conform to the culture of kiddie violence and war while his commanders, sadistic as they are, design a social structure intended to isolate the poor kid even in the face of the demanded conformity. This is because he is, apparently, humankind’s only hope in defeating a terrifying race of insect-aliens that intend to totally f**k us up. Talk about pressure. This is way worse than getting teased in the lunchroom because your pants have pleats. Thank goodness they sent the kid to space – if they didn’t, he’d be an easy recruit to the Trench Coat Mafia.
The Breast by Philip Roth
Acne is an embarrassing condition. People judge you as unclean and unhealthy, even though you totally shower at least once a week and smear creams formulated to dissolve industrial metals on your face three times a day. The zits serve as the tattoos of the freak tribe, and some days it’s so bad you don’t even want to leave the house. You know what’s worse? When you turn into a giant tit. That’s what happens to David Kepesh, the protagonist of The Breast. Not only does the process of metamorphosing into a massive breast leave you feeling a little like the weirdo in the room, but once you’ve completed your transformation, you don’t even have the option to leave that room! Your only respite from your existence as a bona fide freak are your sexual fantasies, which are, frankly, confusing as hell now that you’re a big boob and you’re unfamiliar with what might serve as your erogenous zones. Admit it, you choose acne.
Psychopathia Sexualis by Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebbing
Do you remember the one boy who got caught masturbating into a sock and got called “Fruit of the Loom” for the rest of his teenage years? Those were rough times for that kid. The 238 case studies detailed in Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, however, reveal what might have been a touch more humiliating. I’m certain most of you fellas can freely admit to some silly sexually-motivated acts in adolescence, and ladies, you’re not the conventional little flowers you pretend to be, either. This is not to say that there aren’t some behaviors best kept private – admitting to whatever fringe fantasies you have is wholly unnecessary. My only point is, most of you haven’t met the requirements needed to earn a spot in this collection of the sexually bizarre. And if you read Krafft-Ebbing’s case studies, you’ll be glad for that. You’ll be shouting confessions of your inoffensive abnormalities from the rooftop.
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Your mom is super embarrassing, isn’t she? She’s always just inviting herself right on into the television room when you’re playing Call of Duty: Black Ops with your friends and asking if you guys want sandwiches and lemonade. Well, at least she didn’t purposely manufacture you and your siblings as cash-cow mutants for the traveling freak show she and your dad run. Come to think of it, just as you’re very happy not to be a gigantic breast, you’re also thankful not to have flippers! And look, if you have flippers, you’re still sitting pretty compared to the family around which Dunn’s Geek Love is centered. Because chances are, you’re not also coping with the added element of incest.
Read these books, misfits. And then get together with your weirdo friends and celebrate your good fortune with a burger and a milkshake.
