Holiday Smörgåsbord

Fives, Sixes

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Greetings, all.

This is the last post until we emerge from the Holiday Vortex. In the meantime, I wish you and yours good health, respite from worries and demons, a wee drop o’ wassail, and a few quiet interludes in which to disappear with a book.

Until then, here’s a basketful of fives and sixes):

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Six Reads Born of Whimsy:

• The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern ( 2011)

• To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis (1997)¹

• Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan (1967) 

• Puckoon, Spike Milligan (1963)

• The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne (1760-66)

Five Bad Books by Good writers:

• I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe (2004)

• Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut (1997)

• The Breast, Philip Roth (1972)

• Across the River and Into the Trees, Ernest Hemingway (1950)²

• A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers [travel/essay], Henry David Thoreau (1849)³

Six Good Reads with Skimpy Titles:

• XO [essay/memoir], Sara Rauch (2022)⁴

• Pew, Catherine Lacey (2020)

• Ice, Anna Kavan (1967)

• V, Thomas Pynchon (1963)

• Go, John Clellon Holmes (1952)

• She, H. Rider Haggard (1887)

Five Numericals:

• 11/22/63, Stephen King (2011)

• 1776, David McCullough (2005)

• 2666, Roberto Bolaño (2004)

• 334, Thomas Disch (1972)

• 1984, George Orwell (1949)

Six Cafés:

• Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi [trans. by Geoffrey Trousselot] (2015, Japanese//2019, English)

• In the Café of Lost Youth, Patrick Modiano [trans. by Chris Clarke] (French, 2007//English, 2016)

• The Falling Boy, David Long (1997)

• Bailey’s Café, Gloria Naylor (1992)

• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, Fannie Flagg (1987)

• The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories [stories], Carson McCullers (1951)

Five 1950s Signet Pulps by Women That Are Actually Good Novels:

• Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor (original 1952//Signet 1953)

• Meg, Theodora Keogh (original 1950//Signet 1951)⁵

• The Street, Ann Petry (original 1946//Signet 1954)

• Lily Crackell, Caroline Slade (original 1943//Signet 1950)

• Night Shift, Maritta Wolff (original 1942//Signet 1954

  

Six Wintry Reads:

• How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu (2022)

• The Terror, Dan Simmons (2007)

• The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe [memoir], Paula Fox (2006)⁶

• Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Høeg (1992)

• Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak (1958)

• Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton (1911)⁷

Six Good Novels by Writers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of:

• August Heat, Beth Lordan (1989)

• In Shelley’s Leg, Sara Vogan (1981)⁸

• Mojo Hand, J. J. Phillips (1966)

• Daisy Kenyon, Elizabeth Janeway (1945)⁹

• Nobody Starves, Catherine Brody (1932)

• Adeline Mowbray, Amelia Opie (1804)¹⁰

Six More Good Novels by Writers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of:

• Wonderful Women By the Sea, Monika Fagerholm (1994)

• The Moonflower Vine, Jetta Carleton (1962)

• Odd Girl Out, Ann Bannon (1957)

• The Blank Wall, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1947)¹¹

• Black Cherries, Grace Stone Coates (1931)

• The Morgesons, Elizabeth Stoddard (1862)

What’re You On?

• On the Mystic Lake, Kristin Hannah (1999)

• On the Black Hill, Bruce Chatwin (1982)

• On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)

• On the Beach, Nevil Shute (1957)

• On the Shortness of Life, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (49 AD)

What’re You Under?

• Under the Harrow, Flynn Berry (2016)

• Under the Skin, Michael Faber (2000)

• Under the Frog, Tibor Fischer (1992)

• Under the Glacier, Halldór Laxness (1968)

• Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry (1947)

• Under the Sea Wind [natural history], Rachel Carson (1931)

What’re You After?

• After This, Alice McDermott (2006)

• After Dark, Haruki Murakami (2004)

• After the Quake [stories], Haruki Murakami (2000)

• After You’d Gone, Maggie O’Farrell (2000)

• After Rain [stories], William Trevor (1996)

• After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Aldous Huxley (1939)¹²

That Huxley book has a great old-school title—bit of purloined quote, from Tennyson, it turns out. A few more?

Two Sci-fi Titles Too Classic to Omit:

                      Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick (1968)

                     Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury (1962)

Two Booker/International Booker Winners:

                      At Night All Blood Is Black, David Diop [trans. by Anna Moschovakis]    
                                   (2018, French//2020, English)

                      How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman (1994)                   

Three from my Life List:

                    I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, Claire Vaye Watkins (2021) 

                   Let It Scream, Let It Burn [essays], Leslie Jamison (2019)   

                  Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart, Joyce Carol Oates (1990)

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Note: I’ve kept the footnotes to a bare minimum this week. But faithful readers of this Stack will recognize titles footnoted in earlier posts.

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***And finally . . .

I know what’s been troubling many of you: What to get David’s Lists 2.0 for Christmas. You’ve gotten as far as: How about a book?? Then thought: But David’s Lists 2.0 already has a ton of books. I feel your frustration. Yet the solution couldn’t be simpler: Each of you can procure David’s Lists 2.0 one brand new subscriber/follower.

1. Willis: Willis’s title is a good joke. Some of you will get it. Those who don’t should take a dive into Victober next year.

2. Across the River . . . BFN.

3. Thoreau: Henry David was close to brother John, who died a couple of years after the two took the canoe trip, so I assumed this book, written in solitude at Walden Pond, would be intensely personal, chock full of interesting brother stuff. Um, no. Chock full of tedious/ turgid philosophical maundering. Bigly disappointing.

4. Rauch: Sara was one of our students at the Pacific University low-res MFA program. We love it when former students publish books. Especially when the books themselves make us forget we’re reading an ex-student’s book(!).

5. Keogh: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/08/22/the-late-great-theodora-keogh/

                                                           Theodora Keogh

6. Paula Fox: Also a writer of children’s books. Her adult novels include Desperate Characters (1970), The Widow's Children (1976) and The God of Nightmares (1990).

7. Ethan Frome: I plug this one whenever I can. Falls under the “slim heartbreaker” banner. Wharton always seemed like the consummate New Yorker—the city, society, money . . . but this book is as New England as it gets. And wintry.

8. In Shelly’s Leg: Women’s softball in Missoula, Montana, and a bar named after a missing limb. Sara was a good friend in my way-back time. An early loss.

9. Janeway: The surname rings a bell because her husband, Eliot, was a journalist/economist who advised Lyndon Johnson. But Elizabeth was a well-respected writer in her day, and served on the committees for major literary awards. Why does it always surprise me when writers so quickly slip from the public mind?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Janeway

10. Opie: You don’t really need to know this but I feel like sharing: Opie was married to a portraitist, John Opie, who painted a number of well-known figures of the day. The often- reproduced picture of Mary Wollstonecraft [mother of Mary Shelley and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)] is by Opie. But it’s the portrait of his wife that truly seems to glow:

11. Here’s a link for this book, but it’s really to introduce you to Persephone Books; one of their missions is to republish a whole cadre of women writers like Holding. They’re a rich resource. https://persephonebooks.co.uk/products/the-blank-wall

12. Huxley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Many_a_Summer