The Muser’s favorite books read in 2020

Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks  17 stories, each featuring a different antique manual typewriter (Hanks is an avid collector)  “A bagel in Manhattan is the stuff of theologians.”  “It’s a typewriter, child.  Ribbon.  Oil.  Paper.  Happy fingers.” 

In the Pond by Ha Jin  dark comedy about life in China

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce  “It was as much a gift to receive as it was to give, requiring as it did both courage and humility.”  “I’ve begun to think we sit far more than we’re supposed to.”  He smiled.  “Why else would we have feet?”

Hits & Misses by Simon Rich  18 quirky tales  “Inspired by Rich's real life experience in Hollywood, Hits and Misses chronicles all the absurdity of fame and success alongside the heartbreaking humanity of failure.  From a bitter tell-all by the horse Paul Revere rode to greatness to a gushing magazine profile of everyone's favorite World War II dictator, these stories roam across time and space to skewer our obsession with making it big—from the days of ancient Babylon to the age of TMZ.”  https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/simon-rich/hits-and-misses/9780316468879/  TMZ is a tabloid news website. 

My Brilliant Friend, part one of the four-part series Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante.  The book follows the lives of Elana ("Lenù") and Raffaella ("Lila") from childhood to adolescence.

A Passion for Books  stories, essays, lore and lists.

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline  An imagined memoir of Christina Olson, the woman in Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens  An abandoned girl raises herself in the marshes of coastal North Carolina.

The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger  The rivalries and deceptions of four families are revealed as they scheme for admission to a planned school for gifted students.

Dawn by Octavia Butler, #1 in the Lilith’s Brood trilogy   The three volumes of this science fiction series (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago) were previously collected in the now out of print volume, Xenogenesis.  Nuclear war had left the Earth uninhabitable.  The few human survivors are plucked from the dying Earth by an alien race, the Oankali.  The story begins when Lilith wakes 250 years after the war.

 

Translators the Muser has enjoyed in 2020: 

Lucia Graves  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_Graves

H.T. Lowe-Porter  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Tracy_Lowe-Porter 

William Weaver  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/18/william-weaver 

Archibald Colquhoun  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Colquhoun_(translator)

Lisa Dillman  https://www.catranslation.org/person/lisa-dillman/

Sam Garrett  http://worldbookshelf.englishpen.org/Writers-in-Translation-translators-Sam-Garrett

Ann Goldstein  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Goldstein_(translator)

Fulfilling the Mission:  a Conversation with Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s translators by Jennifer Croft  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fulfilling-the-mission-a-conversation-with-olga-tokarczuks-translators/

The Neapolitan Novels are a 4-part series by the Italian author Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions (New York).  They include the following novels:  My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015).  The series has been characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story.  In an interview for the Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel", published serially for reasons of length and duration.  The series has sold over 10 million copies in 40 countries.  The series follows the lives of two perceptive and intelligent girls, Elena (sometimes called "Lenù") Greco and Raffaella ("Lila") Cerullo, from childhood to adulthood and old age, as they try to create lives for themselves amidst the violent and stultifying culture of their home--a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Italy.  The novels are narrated by Elena Greco.  The series was adapted into a two-part play by April De Angelis at the Rose Theatre, Kingston in March 2017.   The first two books in the series have been adapted into an HBO television series entitled My Brilliant Friend.  In 2019, The Guardian ranked My Brilliant Friend the 11th best book since 2000.  The overall series was also listed in Vulture as one of the 12 "New Classics" since 2000.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolitan_Novels 

A FAVORITE AUTHOR:  Barbara Kingsolver

Novels:  The Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2001), The Lacuna (2009), and Fight Behavior (2012)

Nonfiction:  Holding the Line:  Women in the Great Arizona, Mine Strike of 1983 (1989), High Tide in Tucson:  Essays from Now or Never (1995), Last Stand:  America's Virgin Lands (2002), Small Wonder:  Essays (2002), and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007)
Collections:  Another America (1992), Homeland and Other Stories (1999)  https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/barbara-kingsolver/bibliography

BARBARA KINGSOLVER REVEALED   I was born April 8, 1955, in Annapolis, Maryland, but barely remember it because my family moved to rural east-central Kentucky when I was two. I’m lucky to have grown up in the midst of pastures and woodlands, with parents who favored virtually any form of reading as educational.  This meant anything from classic comic books to the Encyclopedia Britannica and whatever we could pull down from bookshelves at home or at the library or, scariest of all, my Dad’s old medical textbooks in the basement.  At age eight I began keeping a journal, inspired by the gift of a small red diary with a tiny lock.  The lock was gratuitous, given the diary’s soporific content, but the ruled lines encouraged a habit of daily writing.  When my schoolteachers assigned a two-page theme, they would get ten pages from me, a surfeit of juvenile prose I am sure they came to dread.  I could hardly contain my adjectives.  I entered every school essay contest that presented itself, and my first published work, entitled “Why We Need a New Elementary School,” gave an exciting account of how our grade school’s ceiling plaster fell and injured my teacher.  My essay was printed in the local newspaper prior to a school-bond election, and the school bond passed.  I had no notion of ever becoming a writer then (evidence suggested that writers were old, from England, and uniformly dead), but I credit that school-bond incident for teaching me that the pencil is a mighty tool.  In 1973 I entered DePauw University, in Indiana, on a piano scholarship.  I soon changed my major to biology, in the practical hope of someday earning a living.  Beyond the expected math and science classes, my liberal-arts education included a manic cross-section of electives:  anthropology, history, French, music theory, a semester in Greece, a winter internship at the Eli Lilly Pharmaceutical Company, and one creative writing class, which I loved.  I enjoyed playing with the Rock Bottom Remainders, an all-author rock and roll band; getting the call from Oprah, when she chose The Poisonwood Bible for her book club; having the National Humanities Medal hung around my neck on a grand red ribbon, by President Clinton; and being invited to join the usage review panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, a responsibility I enjoy to this day.  One of my kids learned early that any playground shouting match over “my-parent-is-tougher-than-yours” could be ground to a halt with:  “My Mom writes the dictionary!”  In the late 1990’s I was able to put good fortune to use by establishing the Bellwether Prize (bellwetherprize.org), which is awarded biennially to first-time novelists.  Read much more and see pictures at  http://barbarakingsolver.com/biography/Kingsolver_Biography.pdfD    

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. - L.P. Hartley, writer (30 Dec 1895-1972)   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2306  December 30, 2020