(Shelf Awareness, 10/02/20)
On your nightstand now:
I'm about to start N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became, and I can't wait to dive into this hugely loved magical sci-fi novel about New York City, where I was born.
Your top five authors:
Alice Munro, whose stories and novel Lives of Girls and Women are at the very center of my reading heart. Toni Morrison: Beloved was one of the first literary novels I chose to read on my own, and it changed a lot for me; I've been slowly working my way through her collection of essays The Source of Self-Regard, with all gratitude for what she gave us. Louise Erdrich: I've been stumping for Erdrich to get the Nobel for several years now--she's an American literary treasure. Carol Shields, whose charming and gutting novels (and stories) are a touchstone for me. Elena Ferrante, whose Neapolitan Quartet was perhaps the single greatest reading experience of my life.
Books you're an evangelist for:
Patrimony, Philip Roth's tender clear-eyed memoir of his father's life, illness and death. There is a scene where he recounts cleaning his father after a bathroom accident that is one of the most loving, humane and beautifully direct passages I've ever read.
Book that changed your life:
My copy of Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems, given to me by my mother when I was a girl. Even at a young age when I didn't understand much of what was in the poems, I knew somehow that they were important to me, and that reading and literature in general would be a big part of my life. On several pages, you can find my childish handwriting with notes and questions, underlined words, and lots of !!! and *** where I highly approved of what Dickinson was up to.
Favorite line from a book:
How can anyone not adore the last sentence of George Eliot's Middlemarch? It's a beautiful tribute to Dorothea Brooke, and to the power of quiet lives, and to the moral value of literature itself. "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Susan Choi's Trust Exercise, which I finished in a state of awe, and then immediately turned back to page one to read again.
