Peg’s Book List Updated May 2003

Karin Hofmann, a friend from Madison, who grew up in veritable book heaven, Cambridge, Massachusetts, asked me to compile a list of my favorite books. Twenty three  years ago the newly wedded Karin was lured off to Red Oak, Iowa by her husband, who promised it would just be for a year. She has been there since, and since book stores do not abound in Red Oak, I thought I had better honor Karin’s request. Here is my list for Karin, and I thought I would send it to other reading friends as well. In recounting my favorites I seem to owe a particular reading debt to Daphne Webb, who once charmingly referred to her twenties as “her great reading decade”. I am sure she has read most all of the below.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Whimsical, and highly entertaining book about a 17 year old girl living in a castle in rural England with her eccentric family.

The Diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, starting with Bring me a Unicorn
I spent a whole winter reading through all of her published diaries. She wrote beautifully and this is a series of books to immerse yourself in. Hopefully at some point the rest of the diaries will be published.

All the Days and All the Nights by William Maxwell

The Folded Leaf

Time will Darken it

The Chateau

They came like Swallows

The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews

The first is a book of his short stories (complete I believe), the next four are novels with a strong autobiographical element, and the last a book of literary essays. He writes beautifully and is under appreciated. My friend Daphne recommended this author. I became completely enchanted by his writing. He died in August at the age of 92, eight days after his wife died. Fittingly I was at Daphne’s house for a visit when I saw his obituary in the New York Times. (Luckily Daphne has the same devotion to the NYTimes as I do.)

Kristin Lavransdatter, the trilogy, by Sigrid Undset,

Start with The Bridal Wreath

This author won the Nobel Prize, probably in no small part for her  story of one girl-woman’s life in 14^th century Norway. I read this book at a time in my life when I was in great physical pain, and the books helped me transcend that pain. An out of body experience.

The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin

Family Happiness; Happy all the Time; Shine on Bright and Dangerous Object

Passion and Affect; Goodbye without Leaving; A Big storm Knocked it Over;

Another Marvelous Thing; Home Cooking and More Home Cooking

One of my all time favorite authors. When I picked up the business section of the New York Times in late Oct. of 1992 and saw her picture in the obituary section of the New York Times I was realized I was mortal. Up until that point all my energy had been focused on procreating. Now I realized I would at some point die, and I realized no amount of obsessing was likely to solve that dilemma.  Laurie Colwin died at age 48 of a heart attack, leaving behind her nine year old daughter and a bereft husband.  Her writing is consistently upbeat, and for those who like food, she weaves in beautiful images of cooking and food. See especially the title story in the Lone Pilgrim. The last two listed titles are her essays about food, with recipes. Very witty. 

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina

War and Peace still stands as my all time favorite book. Tried it in high school but could not get past the war scenes. Picked it up again when Kurt and I were living in Boston in the early 80s. I read it while commuting to work on the T. Hated that mode of transportation but could not wait to get to the T so I could read this book. Kurt liked the war scenes, I liked the peace scenes. 

The Last Lion, Volumes I and II, by William Manchester

While on the subject of war, Kurt could not believe I sat mesmerized through this amazing biography of Winston Churchill, which went into great military detail on World Wars I and II. About 900 pages each, these two volumes, which end at 1940, are beyond a doubt the most amazing biographies I have ever read. Sad to say Manchester will never publish the third volume. Churchill was obviously an amazing subject for a biography.

August 14, 2001,
 Ailing Churchill Biographer Says He Can't Finish Trilogy

New York Times 

Several times a month the phone rings at the New York offices of Little, Brown, the publishing house, with each of the callers posing an insistent and nearly identical question. When, the queries go, will William Manchester finally finish the third and final volume of "The Last Lion," his hugely successful biography of Winston Churchill?

"The only question we get more often is, 'Will you publish my manuscript?' " said Ryan Harbage, an assistant editor at Little, Brown. Mr. Manchester, whose first two volumes rank among the most popular biographical works of recent years, receives similar calls and letters at his home in Middletown, a quiet university city about 90 miles north of Manhattan. And it stings, Mr. Manchester says, each time he delivers the answer.

"I have to tell them the book is not coming out," he said in an interview at his home. "I tell them I just can't do it." Felled by two strokes after the death of his wife in 1998, Mr. Manchester, who is 79, says he has tried several times to kick-start the writing of the final Churchill book, of which he has completed 237 pages. He is skeptical of his publisher's suggestion that he finish the book with a collaborator, and he says he has finally surrendered to the conclusion that his body is too feeble and his mind too diminished to carry on with the project.

… By the time he fell ill, Mr. Manchester had completed about 100,000 words of the third Churchill volume, "Defender of the Realm." It picks up where Volume II left off, with Churchill about to become prime minister of Britain in May 1940 as France was collapsing before the Nazi onslaught. It fades out with Churchill rallying his countrymen during the Blitz.
 … Once able to write and work for days on end without sleep, Mr. Manchester says he now needs a full day to compose a letter to a friend. The author of 18 books, including "The Death of a President" and "American Caesar," Mr. Manchester now struggles to follow the plots of the television dramas he has begun, for the first time in his life, to watch.

Most frustrating, he says, is the loss of his subject: the grand and tumultuous figure of Winston Churchill, whose life and times Mr. Manchester brought into dramatic focus, has slipped away without a proper finish. For the 20-plus years that the pairing lasted, Mr. Manchester and Churchill seemed a nearly perfect fit: the eminent, enthusiastic biographer chasing the brilliant and relentless wartime leader.

"I try not to think about it," Mr. Manchester said, his partly completed manuscript on the coffee table. "There is nothing I can do."

… "I used to write, be able to think, a dozen paragraphs ahead; I would jot down little symbols to remind me what was coming next," Mr. Manchester said. "I couldn't write fast enough."

Holed up in his office, Mr. Manchester says, he would often work for 50 hours at a stretch, pausing occasionally to have one of the small containers of yogurt he kept in a tiny refrigerator there.

"I would work all day, all night, all the next day, all the following night and into the third day," Mr. Manchester said. "I would look up at the clock, and it would be 3:30 in the afternoon, and I would say, 'Oh boy, I've got three more hours to write.' I just loved it."

The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

And This Real Night, and whatever the last volume of the Cousin Rosamund trilogy is called. Unfortunately out of print, this trilogy is great, especially the first two volumes. She had an amazing life (the paramour of H.G. Wells), her childhood is recounted in The Fountain Overflows.

Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

Middlemarch I read on the last week of my bedrest when pregnant with Natalie. Once again this was a recommendation from Daphne. Also liked Daniel Deronda, even though it may not be regarded as one of her best.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

She may be strange, but this was a pretty amazing book.

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier

This book was being read for a class by someone I was madly in love with at the time. I read the book on his recommendation. Unclear whether I was overly influenced by the circumstances of my discovery of this book, but it represents the height of romance for me. Set in France, it is a tale of adolescence and true love. The author was inspired to write the book by a glimpse of a girl he fancied. Sadly he was killed as a young man in WWI, and this is his only novel. Many to whom I have recommended this book cannot get in to it. It is worth persevering. For a long time I claimed this was my favorite book.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

Overall I do not think she was a great writer. This book is her best in my mind. Although she was not a great writer, she had an interesting life, and text on her is pretty interesting.  “Partisans” (don’t recall author) was pretty good, about the group of  writers who wrote for the Partisan Review. When the biography “Seeing Mary Plain” came out, Carolyn See wrote a wonderful review of the book in the Washington Post Book World. Avid New York Times reader that I am, I would have missed this Washington Post review if Irene had not saved it for me. Here is a short excerpt from the March 12, 2000 review by Carolyn See entitled “Quite Contrary”.

For those who haven't read Mary McCarthy's work, her early history -- told in those "Catholic Girlhood" memories -- was that she began as a lucky child, privileged and loved by beautiful parents. She carried a little fur muff. But when she was 6 her parents perished in the post-World War I influenza epidemic. She and her siblings were sent to live with an impoverished aunt and uncle from hell. (But here a younger brother chimes in that they weren't all that bad!) By the time Mary was rescued from this situation, she was enraged at the world, and never got over it. She worked off a seething sense of injustice that made her a ferocious, imperious, relentless dragon for the rest of her life.

The thing was, McCarthy looked so pretty. And when, after her Vassar education, she came to New York to hang out with the literati and perhaps do some writing herself, men couldn't get it through their heads that she was who she was.

Perhaps more than any other feminist in the country, she made men (one at a time, as they lived it, and by the thousands as they read her novels) begin to think twice about how they treated women -- not because they were "bad" when they did it: Who cared about "bad"? But because they looked like such retarded dunces, and women saw right through them. But women could be dunces too, in Mary McCarthy's eyes. Play dumb, act vapid, be a snob or a bore in front of her, and two or three years later you'd find yourself in her pages. Her women friends suffered from this greatly, but her husbands and lovers really suffered: Again and again, they couldn't seem to get it. Make a bumbling pass at McCarthy, and what -- in earlier days -- might have been gleefully reported to a single girlfriend, blow by bumbling blow, was now published (from the Latin publicare, to make public) for the world to read. For McCarthy, men were the natural laughingstock in a series of mean novelistic jokes.

Even Edmund Wilson, one of the great minds of his generation, was incautious enough to marry McCarthy, and then incautious enough to slug her in the chops a few times. What in the world was he thinking? All the lofty thoughts he ever wrote about have been tinted, irrevocably, by her comic, scathing portrait of him as a boozy bully who, in point of McCarthy fact, wasn't quite as bright as he thought he was.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

Night and Day

It was the late seventies, and I was laying on the beach at BBClarke Beach in Madison, Wisconsin when I read the first sentences, second paragraph of “To the Lighthouse”, to wit:

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch.

Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan, which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.

I was transfixed.  I knew I had found a new author.

My Antonia by Willa Cather

O Pioneers

When I read these two books I wondered how could I not have known about these books sooner.

Mating by Norman Rush

An intellectual romantic walks across the Kalahari Desert to reach her soulmate. This book was given to me by Daphne for my birthday. I loved it unconditionally. I have since recommended it to others, and many people simply could not read this book. No accounting for taste, but try it and you may love it.

Ladder of Years by Ann Tyler

I have read some but not all of her books. This was my very favorite.

Love in a Cold Climate/In Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

Written by a member of an eccentric upper class British family, these books were hilarious in parts. An incredible wit.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I remember not much about this book other than that I thought it was great.

Possession by A.S. Byatt 

A.S. Byatt is the sister of Margaret Drabble, another British writer whose every word I read. It’s a romance and a send up of academia at the same time.

The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley

Ordinary Love and Good Will

I read most of what she has written. These are my favorites.

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

Pigs in Heaven

The Poisonwood Bible

Prodigal Summer

The first was the first book to be read by newly formed  book group I was to be in with Daphne and two of her friends. The group never really got off the ground. I remember thinking who wants to read a book named “Animal Dreams”? I was so glad I got past the title. The Poisonwood Bible was read by my current book group last summer, and is probably the favorite of the group so far.

The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

This is my favorite of the novels we have read for Book Club. The first book we read, it is the kind of book you can sink into and know you will totally enjoy yourself for the next 900 pages. There are two more trilogies containing about 900 pages each, have not polished them off yet. Per Kurt’s Mom they are not as good as the first 100 pages.

The Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats

We should all read more poetry. In true Irish ethnocentric fashion, Yeats is my favorite. Natalie memorized “The Stolen Child” for her poem of the month this year.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

It took me several times, but on the second reading I got it and liked it quite a bit.

An Alphabet for Gourmets by MFK Fisher

The Gastronomical Me

Born under the sign Cancer, with the Moon in Virgo, she loved to write about food, and has a talent for it. Witty as well.

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

One Writer’s Beginnings

Charmed by her writing. One quote “To her, girls were as obvious as peony plants, and you could tell from birth if they were going to bloom or not.”

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

Lost my copy of this but had to buy another. The quintessential American childhood. I have a weakness for memoirs, and this is one of my favorites.

The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

True North and A Woman’s Education

Memoirs by Jill Ker Conway. Wonderful books.

Memoirs of an Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison

An amazing memoir of this renowned psychiatrist’s struggle with manic depression. Should be mandatory reading for all.

My Personal History by Katherine Graham

The autobiography of the publisher of the Washington Post. Also a great book.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

I read this book on my journey home from living in London for my second year of law school, and realized I had not been living in a great neighborhood for the second half of my year there, as I was living in the same neighborhood where the poor destitute creature in the novel hailed from.

Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Kitchen God’s Wife

The author has a delightful outlook on life. Also very witty. Great stories.

Hard Candy and other short stories by Tennessee Williams

I think this was the title of the collection I read. “The doll coffin and the violin” was very good. (may have been called the boy and the doll coffin. )

Roman Fever and other Stories by Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence

The House of Mirth

I love all of her writing. Roman Fever is a great short story.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

This is my favorite of hers, along with Pride and Prejudice, which I recently reread. There is a picture of me on a boat at the cottage with baby Will on my lap reading Persuasion. I never did understand those women who exclaimed that they no longer had time to read once they had children.

The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.

 I read all of the Chronicles of Narnia. The first is probably the best, but don’t let that dissuade you from reading the rest. I think I read just about all of his books, including the Perelandra Trilogy, and The Great Divorce. The latter is his version of Heaven and Hell. Quite entertaining. A Christian theologian with a great imagination.

Winds of War and The War and Remembrance Trilogy By Herman Wouk

Aunt Jane sent these over to me while I was on bed rest with Natalie.  The lives of a family involved in World War II. Wonderful.

Chrome Yellow and Island by Aldous Huxley

Island is Huxley’s view of utopia. More fun to read than Brave New World, his dystopia.

Will recently read Brave New World, written more than half a century ago. I was amazed by his prescience, as in that novel everyone in taking something called “soma”, little pills that keep them happy.

Women In Love

Sons and Lovers By D.H. Lawrence

I have to agree with Anna that these are classics.

EvenSong by Gail Godwin

I love all of her books. This was my favorite. I am going to hear her speak this week on her new book.

Living out Loud by Anna Quindlen

A collection of her best columns. These are her personal columns. Her political columns are also very humorous and are collected in another book. One of my favorite of those was on Clinton and  marijuana. Published in the New York Times on April 1, 1992 in her Public and Private column, it began like this:

Here's a suggested response for elected officials of a certain age when asked whether they smoked marijuana:

"Of course."

When political handlers are putting together position papers in the years to come, they should include an appendix they might as well call the Rolling Papers. Exhibit A might be the way in which Gov. Bill Clinton handled the dope issue when it came up this year. He backed, he filled, he clung to the letter of the question ("I have never broken the laws of my country"), and finally he said that, like so many other people of his generation, he did smoke marijuana when young, at Oxford when he was a Rhodes scholar. He then went on to explain.

Never explain.

Light Years by James Salter

I think he only had one good book in him, but this one was it. It demonstrates all too well how short our time here is. The book made an amazing impression on me as it imparted a visceral feeling to what it was to have time be fleeting, and I was only in my mid-twenties when I read it.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Set in Madison, Wisconsin, this is an elegant book.

Time and Again by Jack Finney

A time travel book set in old New York, with some great plot twists.

Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

Teddy Roosevelt’s childhood. Read this and he will be one of your favorite presidents.

No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Read this and Eleanor Roosevelt will be your favorite first lady. She really has not had that much competition.

Poet in New York and Other Poems by Federico Garcia Lorca

Have not read this in a while. Was enchanted with “Your childhood in Menton”

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

Read this sophomore year in college. One of the worst years of my life, this was a great book.

The Magus by John Fowles

It has been years since I read this book, I think I went on to read everything else he had written.  Just reread or read for the first time Daniel Martin. My retention is not that great for books I read twenty years ago. I got to page 345 of this book and thought to myself, maybe I have read this before. This paragraph sounds familiar.

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

The tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. What really happened, from the female point of view. Mystical and fascinating.

Alice Hoffman and Ann Beattie

Maybe they would not like being linked together, but I liked just about all of their books.

Hers: Through Women’s Eyes Nancy Newhouse, editor.  A collection of the best New York Times articles by the same name. Out of print.

Evening by Susan Minot

This is about a 65 year old woman dying of cancer, and looking back over the defining moment of her love, some 40 years before. Stream of consciousness. She also wrote Monkeys. An interesting writer.

Katerskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

The lives of Orthodox Jews set in upstate New York in their summer community, I think set during the seventies. Great book.

Waiting by Ha Jin

A romance frustrated by the Cultural Revolution in China. A mediation on what love may really be all about, and how what we think we want may not be what we do in fact really want.

East of Eden by John Steinback

Will had to read this for school this summer. I read on the plane back from Europe. My son was impressed I knocked it off in one day. It was that good, (and the plane ride was that long.)

In the Eye of the Sun and Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif

I am in the middle of the first book, apparently quasi-autobiographical, the coming of age on an Egyptian woman, born circa 1950. It is life seen from the Muslim perspective. What is was like to be sitting for your college entrance exams during the 5 day war with Israel in 1967, etc. Long, but fun to read. A family saga set in Egypt.

Map of Love is also good. Set in both Egypt and England, over the course of 100 years. Two intertwining love stories. Not as good as In the Eye of the Sun.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997)

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

by Anne Fadiman

The first book was commissioned as a magazine assignment for the New Yorker by Robert Gottlieb, but when Tina Brown took over, she declined to publish the article and Anne Fadiman turned it into a book. It tells the story of a little girl named Lia, who is Hmong and has epilepsy, and how the cultural disconnect between Western culture and the Hmong affects her health and her family. An amazing book. Good for all of us that Tina Brown was such a ditz. You will read the book and think about it for a long time.

Ex Libris is a charming collection of essays on reading. A good book to give to a friend who likes to read or be charmed by someone with great wit.

Her father was Clifton Fadiman, an editor and scholar, and her mother was also an author, co-authoring Thunder out of China with Theodore White. Anne Fadiman is the editor of The American Scholar. She teaches non-fiction writing at Smith College.

Excerpt from the author on writing the two books:

AF: I wrote EX LIBRIS during the last three years of writing THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN. I'd work on SPIRIT for six weeks, and then work on EX LIBRIS for two. It was a crazy schedule, but in some ways a lifesaving one. SPIRIT was long and sad; the essays on reading that were collected in EX LIBRIS were short and funny. I can't say which form I prefer, since both experiences were splendid in completely different ways, but I will say that writing EX LIBRIS saved me from the slough of despond I sometimes plunged into while writing SPIRIT, because the latter was just so damned tragic. Writing SPIRIT was like climbing a mountain, where you get to see strange and beautiful things from a terrific height but you also get altitude sickness and hypothermia. Writing EX LIBRIS was like getting back to your cozy home, shivering and with icicles dangling from your nose, and bundling up in your grandmother's afghan in a really comfortable easy chair with a cup of tea in one hand and a book in the other. The other major difference is that SPIRIT was about two foreign cultures (that of the Hmong and that of American medicine), whereas EX LIBRIS was about me, my family, and my friends --- about topics like book inscriptions, shopping in secondhand bookstores, reading aloud, and how my husband and I consolidated our libraries (a far more intimate act than mere marriage!). So the former had the advantages and disadvantages of newness, while the latter had the advantages and disadvantages of familiarity.

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife; the Amber Spyglass: Written by an atheist, this is a sci-fi version of parallel worlds, set in Oxford, England, written for kids, compelling reading for adults as well. The Church is the bad guy in these books. Third book not as good as first two. 

“It was, some said, the moment that literature for the young finally came of age. On January 22, Philip Pullman, a children's writer (although he objects to that label), was awarded Britain's prestigious Whitbread prize for the final installment of his best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy. In the opinion of the judges, The Amber Spyglass was Britain's book of the year. It was an unprecedented honor for a work aimed at younger readers, but Pullman is a man who must be getting used to praise, and not just in Britain. His writing has been described as "very grand indeed" in the New York Times, while reviews in the Washington Post have included adoring references to the "moral complexity" and "extravagant . . . wonders" to be found in Pullman's work. There can, indeed, be little doubt that the first book in the trilogy, The Golden Compass, is a masterpiece, a sparkling addition to the canon of great children's fiction that leaves poor Harry Potter helplessly stranded in the comparative banality of his Platform 9 . Within the time it takes to read his first few, skillfully drawn pages, Pullman takes us into a beguiling parallel universe. His spikily endearing heroine, 11-year-old Lyra, lives in an England that is a curious blend of the Edwardian and the modern. It is a place where the boundaries between what we would think of as the natural and the supernatural are blurred, no more distinct than the fraying edges of the alternate realities that Pullman describes so well. In Lyra's world every person has a demon: a companion in animal form, part soul, part familiar spirit. There are witches in Lapland, and the most feared warriors in the North are a rampaging race of armor-clad bears, ursine Klingons who have fallen into decadence under the rule of a corrupt and vicious usurper. “

From the National Review, March 25, 2002, in which the reviewer continues on to criticize the books, and the author, for the message. The reviewer concludes that the third volume is very disappointing. Natalie seemed to agree. She did not finish the third volume and declared it to be “cheesy.” Nevertheless, at least the first two are really fun to read.

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Larry Lessig This book will change the way you think about Cyberspace, and make you consider the layers underneath. Good book for lawyers to read as it shows how limited the law is;  really only a piece of the puzzle. 

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie A totally and utterly charming book. I was completely smitten. Started reading it on the way up to Thanksgiving dinner in Pennsylvania with the Baumans and finished reading it by end of eve.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. Whatever his failings may have been from a political angle (he was not a pacifist) you can’t help but like Teddy Roosevelt when you read about him. Interesting characters such as Henry Adams and others of the time wander in and out of the pages.

Reckless Youth by Nigel Hamilton: The first of a planned three volume biography of JFK. Family protests kept the author from writing the last two volumes. Although there were spots that should have been smoothed over by a good editor, you come away from the book a big fan of JFK, so it seems short-sighted of the family to protest. Allows a good glimpse of JFK’ s famous wit.

The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand

A history of ideas in the latter half of the 1800’s of the United States, as described through the activities and philosophies of John Dewey, Charles Pierce, William James and Oliver Wendall Holmes.

Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende

My favorite book by the author. Set in California and South America.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Winner of the National Book Circle Award for 2003 (see http://www.bookcritics.org/) and rightly so. I especially liked the description of the mother with migraine headaches who had learned to sense what was going on in the house.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Winner of the Pen Faulkner award

From Ann Patchett’s web page on the book:

What inspired you to write Bel Canto?

Usually it's hard to pin down the exact point at which you come up with an idea for a novel, but this one is easy: December 17, 1996, the night that the terrorist organization Tupac Amaru took over the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. I'm sure I didn't know that day that this story would turn into Bel Canto, but I was completely focused on it from the start. It had so many elements that were compelling to me: confinement, survival, the construction of family. For a long time I'd wanted to find a way to experience the things I read about in the paper, to grieve for disasters that had no immediate effect on my life. Turning a tragedy I knew nothing about into this novel was part of that process.

Were you an opera aficionado prior to writing Bel Canto?

I wasn't. I knew as much about opera as I did about baseball, which is to say nothing. But once I came up with the character of Roxane Coss I threw myself into learning about it whole-heartedly. The best thing I did was to buy a book called Opera 101 by Fred Plotkin. It tells you how to listen and what to listen to. It takes you through everything you need to know step by step. It was my bible. Then I listened to a 28-hour lecture series called "The History of Opera." I also started playing opera all the time and attending operas whenever possible. I absolutely fell in love with opera. It's been such a wonderful bonus of writing this book. I feel like I learned a second language.

Roxane Coss is a fascinating character. Is she modeled on an actual opera singer?

She's modeled on the only opera singer I know personally, a woman named Karol Bennett. Karol and I were both fellows at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College in 1990-91. Physically, Karol and Roxane are very similar, small women with huge personalities. Karol commanded any room she walked into. It was as if music surrounded her even when she wasn't singing. I admired her greatly. The funny thing is that now I know Roxane so much better than I ever knew Karol. For Roxane's singing I mostly listened to Rene Fleming. I didn't have any recordings of Karol singing so I gave my character Rene Fleming's voice.

Embers by Sándor Márai One of my favorites this past year.