Bookworm 2021, so far
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangello
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Primo Levi
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy
Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny
Elizabeth Street by Laurie Fabiano
Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott
How We Survived by Roz Chast
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Joan of Arc: A Life by Kathryn Harrison
Love and Fury by Samantha Silva
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
On Violence and On Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose
Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo
Snow Falling on Cedars by Dan Guterson
Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours by Sarah Sentilles
The Actress by Anne Enright
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Blackmailer's Guide to Love by Marian Thurm
The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The First Free Women edited by Matty Weingast
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Odyssey by Gareth Hinds
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames
The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup
Wayward by Dana Spiotta
Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher
I thought it was fitting to put up a list of books that I’ve read so far this year and have the first, albeit alphabetic, be Beloved. I wrote a few weeks back that I’m re-reading the novel and teaching it to a high school junior. I think it might be the greatest American novel ever published. Lord knows some woman’s novel is out there, unpublished, that might be even greater, but Beloved is it. It is everything. Along with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I’d take Beloved to the proverbial desert island with me. I’d take it in my grave should I be buried as an Egyptian princess. Those two novels are my favorite novels of all time. Of all time. It’s fitting that it would lead my bookworm list because I’m fuming about the clusterfuck happening in Virginia. If you haven’t read about it and care to, look it up. I don’t feel like giving you the link because it all makes me sick. Sick to death of stupidity and ignorance and racism and bullshit and the dumbing down of the citizenry and the idiots running the whole damn show. Ron Charles of The Washington Post wrote a great article about it. Just the other morning, my student and I read a chapter of Beloved aloud, and when we finished, we both sat in silence. Wow, she said, eventually, and I said, I know. I want to roll my eyes at those who would declare parts of it “obscene” or claim that it “gave my son nightmares,” but a visceral reaction is more appropriate. I’m straining with metaphor, with magical realism, with violence on the page. I want these people dead, metaphorically.
In high school we read (I think this is the title) Johnny Got His Gun, about a young man who had lost all his limbs in war and was lying in a hospital bed asking all the hard questions about what his life now meant, and challenging the reader to think of the horrors of war. It was disturbing. It was supposed to be. No doubt these a-holes in Virginia are the same folks who love to call liberals "snowflakes." Who is the f-ing snowflake now? (Great reading list, btw)
I loved "Beloved" when I read it many years ago. I should probably read it again. The one good thing that comes from these ridiculous campaigns against books is that they raise the profiles of all the novels being questioned. Who knows how many people out there are buying "Beloved" because they want to see what all the fuss is about?
By the way, "Hell of a Book" is a great title!