A Year in Reading: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year in Reading
December 6, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 4

Related Books:

coverI most enjoyed Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings, which I only just discovered this year. Pym is funny and witty, brilliant at portraying the middle class English of the 1950s, and in particular she does the ‘psychology of femaleness’ very well.

It is a ‘slice of ordinary life’ sort of novel, that manages to be both prim and subversive, perhaps because of the matter of fact way that the contradictions of life are shown, for example the horror of the High Anglicans about the menace of Catholicism, and the laissez-faire attitude of a woman whose husband fancies her friend.

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's work has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope. She is the author of The Thing Around Your Neck and of three novels, Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist, and Americanah. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

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4 comments:

  1. I love the whole “prim but subversive” canon. Claire Messud’s character in “The Woman Upstairs” is a type of “crazy cousin locked up in the attic” to the more well-behaved Pym characters. Their spiritual godmother is Jane Austen.

    When I think of the writing of Mailer and Hemingway, I imagine a big noisy, farting guy wrestling, drinking, wenching, and bullfighting his way through the page, with an army of quiet Pym characters bringing up the rear, wiping up the piss, blood and sweat with a sturdy cloth and ammonia cleanser, a silent universe of observation seething in their brains. Their presence is at the periphery of the page and their quietness belies what my be waiting there in the wings.

    I have sensed that same peripheral lurking in the corners of paintings of 17th Century manor houses in western County Cork in Ireland, full of dappled sunlight and green meadows. Hunting parties gallop along through the woods, masters of their domain. You might spy a picturesque garden boy in the background, making hay. He might be my great, great great grandfather, who would happily throw a very large rock at any of them within reach if he could get away with it. His descendants would then ultimately successfully oust them all and form a republic.

    It’s all in the perspective!

  3. Interesting, the write up is full of perfect rhetorism that stimulates the reader’s ego to change the reading gear forward, keep it up its a nice piece!

  4. Hi Evelyn Walsh!

    Are you the same person who published “Birthday Girl’ in Narratives? Glad to see another “chord” being struck. :)

    Moe Murph
    (Rough Week At Work — Subversion Unfortunately Limited To Slamming Door To Stall In Ladies Room In Especially Energetic Manner)

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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Amanda Petrusich

Year in Reading
December 3, 2008 | 1 book mentioned

Amanda Petrusich is the author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music. She writes about pop music for Spin, the New York Times, Paste, Pitchfork, the Onion, and elsewhere.I’ve always found it remarkably difficult to read or write about a place without also reading or writing about its food: I used to think whole landscapes were ably reflected in guitar riffs and drum fills and pedal steel mews, but I’m growing more and more convinced that maybe fried chicken and crawfish and hamburgers and remoulade sauce and Buffalo wings are actually the true indicators of a region’s deep, gooey heart. In 2008, I read Calvin Trillin’s The Tummy Trilogy for the first time – it’s arguably three short books about food, but it’s also about American regionalism and, most of all, marriage (“Marriage, as I have often remarked, is not merely sharing one’s fettuccine, but sharing the burden of finding the fettuccine restaurant in the first place,” Trillin writes). I admire Trillin’s charm and gusto as much as I admire his prose; who wouldn’t adore a narrator who believes that “anyone who sacrifices stuffing power by using chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant must be demented”?I also loved Alone in the Kitchen With An Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone, Jenni Ferrari-Adler’s collection of personal essays about sitting on your couch in a pair of sweatpants, eating peanut butter out of the jar, and Bich Minh Nguyen’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, a stunning memoir about how American assimilation also means eating Rice-A-Roni and casseroles and Kool-Aid and sacks of Doritos.More from A Year in Reading 2008

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David Leavitt is the author of several novels and short stories, most recently, The Indian Clerk. He is a recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was recently named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. David Leavitt divides his time between Tuscany and Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches at the University of Florida.Don’t be deceived by the cover of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read. Despite appearances, this extraordinary book is, in fact, an eloquent meditation on the act and art of reading dressed up as a sort of etiquette guide to Parisian parties. (Apparently at Parisian parties, as opposed to American parties, people talk about books and take for granted in one another a more than basic knowledge of books.) As his starting point, Bayard considers novels by Balzac, Musil, Eco and Greene that he knows intimately, whether he’s read them or not, and explores the role that not reading plays in each of them.Also well worth pursuing: Bayard’s earlier Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? which proposes an alternative solution to Agatha Christie’s famous murder mystery.More from A Year in Reading 2007

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