And rounding out my twelve days of bookish gift recommendations, here are books, magazines, etc., that I just think are cool.
1. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, literary magazine published by twice a year by Small Beer Press. Very fiction heavy and always full of short stories that are unexpected and intense and exceedingly well written, LCRW is a delight for fiction lovers. There is usually a poem or two (or more) included and an essay and other NF extra but it is the stories that truly shine. The current issue (just received) includes an imaginary reading by Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte "The Emily(s) Debate the Impact of Reclusivity on Life, Art, Family, Community and Pets" by Kat Meads. It's exactly what I would expect to find in LCRW - with the caveat that all the stories are always unexpected.
2. Slightly Foxed, literary journal published four times a year in England (and totally worth the money). Every issue includes essays on various books and/or authors and there is always something that I adore. The most recent issue (just arrived) has a piece on Capture the Castle, Nancy Mitford, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Herodotus, among many others. The autumn issue had a piece on Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes that made me long for it all over again and also wonder yet again why being Petrova ("whose passion for aeroplanes and cars was mystifying") was somehow less than being Posy or Pauline.
The issues average just over 90 pages and I have kept each and every one and refer back to them all the time. Bibliophiles need look no further for literary nirvana.
3. Cherry by Sara Wheeler. A very compelling biography of Antarctica explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard who was part of Scott's doomed expedition. My thoughts last June:
But even as significant and compelling as Cherry's book was (and is), Sara Wheeler has done something equally impressive with her biography of him. Wheeler goes far beyond the expedition to include Cherry's whole life (the trip is only a few chapters) and spends a great deal of time showing just what that journey did to him and many of the others. There were nervous breakdowns aplenty among the survivors and a longing to always return to the story of Antarctica; to never forget. While this makes sense, it is not something commonly discussed especially back then. Scott's wife was furious with Cherry because he dared to suggest that Scott was fallible in Worst Journey (he did not however lay the blame of the tragedy at his feet as history has proven he could have and as Cherry pretty much knew). You were never supposed to suggest that the commanders did anything wrong, or unseemly or unbecoming a British officer and gentleman. That's just not the way exploration literature worked, not then, not for any of them. Wheeler wants to show just what happened to Cherry however, and how he lived in the years that followed.
4. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Gerald Durrell is a genius and his books are must reads for anyone interested in being a naturalists or having their own zoo. (Or wishing they could pursue either of those dreams.) I also highly recommend the PBS movie of his memoir, My Family and Other Animals. It's a great family film.
5. Sarah Vowell is one of my writing gods, not the least because she makes history both interesting and funny. For nonfiction writers, she is someone to learn a bit from and for history readers, she is pure pleasure. (I haven't read her latest, The Wordy Shipmates, but I hope to see it under the tree in a couple of weeks!)
6. The book that shocked me this year was the YA nonfiction title Ain't Nothing But a Man by Scott Reynolds Nelson with Marc Aronson. It takes an American folktale hero and strips away all the niceties to reveal the sorrow at its source. From my post in April:
The big reveal in his book is that John Henry was probably a prisoner, an inmate at the Virginia Penitentiary where convicts were rented out to the C&O Railroad in the late 1800s for 25 cents a day. Nelson found a convict named John William Henry who arrived at the prison in 1866 and later transferred at an unknown date to an unknown location. Nelson found though that when the penitentiary was torn down in 1992 a contractor discovered 300 skeletons - probably African Americans from the late 1800s. There were no gravestones to mark their bodies, or records revealing their names. It is known that hundreds of prisoners died working on the Lewis Tunnel - in 1872 one out of every ten. Records on the John Henry that Nelson discovered disappear after 1872; whether he is THE John Henry, Nelson can not say. But what happened to a lot of men like John Henry is clear - they died building a railroad and no one remembers them, no one remembers anything about them at all.
Except for a song about a man who had only his strength and his pride to call his own - that man they made sure we would all remember.
7. Do you know about Subterranean Press? Have you purchased any Sub Press titles (like Cherie Priest's excellent monster/Daniel Boone novella, Those Who Went Remain There Still. This is one of my favorite pubs, period. If you want to help the economy this season in a way that also helps a great small press and some talented authors - then order a book from Subterranean Press.
8. The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia. Sublime. From July:
I have finished Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow.
Oh my.
This book is wonderful, really really wonderful. On one hand it is seriously mythic - what propels the plot is the mystery surrounding people who appear to suddenly turn into birds (mostly jackdaws but also some owls). But the people who become embroiled in the mystery are not the slightest bit fantastic: a cop investigating the disappearances, a young translator with a history of mental illness who sees her sister transformed, and a street artist. The three of them come together because they know the bird transformation is true. Soon enough, in pursuit of clues, they see something that seems beyond belief and then, in a true leap of faith, they literally jump into Moscow Underground.
At that point Sedia could have gone full on fantasy, and she certainly does introduce a lot of characters from Russian folklore and myth. But she also includes entirely human characters in the Underground, people who fell in or found themselves there with no real knowledge of what they were getting into. And now they all live - just like most of us live, in an interesting community of good, bad and otherwise complicated relationships.
Locus also liked her new book, The Alchemy of Stone, which I have yet to read (but really really want to!)
9. Samantha Hunt. This year I discovered Hunt through her older mythic novel The Seas and her wondrous combination of science, family drama and Nikola Tesla in The Invention of Everything Else. (Ed recently had it on his Top 10 list and compared Hunt to Scarlet Thomas, another fearless writer I adore.)
What I wrote about The Seas last February:
At first I thought it was the sort of mythic fiction that plays around a bit with the myth (in this case mermaids) but settles into a story about a girl discovering who she really is and moving on from there.
Except it is not that kind of book at all.
This is a love story (partly) and a war story (slightly) and certainly a story about a mermaid (maybe). But definitely, more than anything, it is a story about grief and the grieving process.
"One night," I began and close my eyes, "my father, he was very handsome, he walked into the ocean. That was eleven years ago. He hasn't come back yet and even though the police found the place on the beach where my father's footprints disappeared into the water, they never found his body. So my mother and I have been waiting."
In the end, as much as it is about myth and mystery it is even more about deeply dark sorrow, and the struggle to see it through, to get to the other side, to get to the light.
What an amazing book.
And my thoughts on The Invention of Everything Else from March:
I am deep into Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else and I have to say that the way she writes is so damn different from most authors. I wonder how much the hunger readers have for a richness of plot and characters like this (nonlinear plot to boot) is what drives us to keep reading. In other words we are so sick and tired of the same old thing that when we luck into something different - into an author who takes a chance and follows through on the promise of that risk - that we fall and deeper and harder for the story than we expect. It's not like Hunt is the second coming of the great American novel but she is smart and thoughtful and creative and the books she writes go beyond the limits of traditional story. Basically, she is a writer who gives us a lot more bang for our buck which is so refreshing I'm still in some kind of literary stupor.
And beyond all of this wonderfulness, I can heartily recommend Fables to comics lovers, Eating Well and Clean Eating subscriptions to folks trying to eat better (fab recipes in each), Orion for those who enjoy good nature writing and the Trans Siberian Orchestra if you're trying to get in the holiday mood. (I know that's not literary but please - good holiday music is awesome!)
