All tagged Literary Fiction

Recommendation Tuesday: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Recommendation Tuesday: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Sarah Moon
Books

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here. 

It's not often I find a work on literary fiction that has a story as compelling as its prose--hence, I don't recommend it very often. Sparkling, thoughtful writing is wonderful, but it feels awfully vapid when the story falters. Or it's filled with dull Middle Aged Man Angst.

Discovering Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You was an unexpected surprise, as result. While imperfect (as all novels are), it hits so many notes that make worth checking out, even if you normally avoid literary fiction. It's a historical novel, though the 1970s time period is one of the book's less-developed aspects, but more than anything it's a story of family and marriage. 

Podcast Episode 23: Genre Fiction, Lit-Fic & Romance... Oh My!

Podcast Episode 23: Genre Fiction, Lit-Fic & Romance... Oh My!

Sarah Moon
Podcast: Season Two, Podcast

We really enjoyed digging into the subject of the way fiction and its various genres are being discussed and why certain genres are privileged over others by people on the inside of publishing. 

We're currently planning the rest of season two of the podcast and are super-excited to bring you more discussions and interviews. We love this format for exploring nuance in a way that's not possible via blog posts. If you have an idea for a guest or topic, get in touch via the podcast page.  

As always, you can listen to the podcast by streaming on this page, downloading the MP3 below or by subscribing in iTunes. If you're an iTuner, we very much appreciate your rating and reviewing the podcast, as it helps us to show up in iTunes searches and makes us feel special. ;-) We're also now on Stitcher Radio, so if you prefer that app, you can subscribe here. 

Recommendation Tuesday: The Storied Life of A.J. Firky by Gabrielle Zevin

Recommendation Tuesday: The Storied Life of A.J. Firky by Gabrielle Zevin

Sarah Moon
Books

Y'all, last week, I put on my crown and declared that Tuesdays are now "Recommendation Tuesday." I will be recommending things on Tuesdays, because Tuesday is pretty much worthless and we all need more awesome in our lives. You're welcome to join the fun too. Tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

“Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again. He selects one and holds it out to his friend. “Maybe this?”

— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Gabrielle Zevin snuck up on me (metaphorically) and managed to snatch a spot on my forever auto-buy favorite authors list. I'm not sure how it happened, but her writing has a quality to it that sticks with my long after I've closed the covers of her books.

Her gripping futuristic family saga, the Birthright series, is a remarkable character-driven trio of books that is one of my favorite series, full-stop.

Her newest, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is no less awesome, though much different. 

Review: Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith

Review: Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith

Sandra
Books

Laura Lee Smith’s beautifully crafted novel, Heart of Palm is long, 449 pages, and each page illuminates the Bravo family, their home and Florida’s landscape. It captivated me with lovely language and beautiful storytelling. It’s alive, vibrant with a sense of  the people and place.

With each new twist in the novel, my admiration for Heart of Palm grew.

Heart of Palm brought me into the lives of the Bravo family, a family that at its core is like many families: difficult to define or understand, sometimes dysfunctional, yet complex with layers of love and hurt melding together. Its charm comes from characters and setting.

This is the Bravo family. Their world. Their uniqueness.

The Bravos live outside of St. Augustine, Florida in the fictional village of Utina. Their rickety and once-grand home, Aberdeen, stands along an intracoastal waterway that ebbs and flows to a slow southern rhythm. Named for the chief of the Utina tribe, the land of oaks and Spanish moss is enchantingly beautiful. Now it slowly slides into the 21st century with a culture solidly entrenched in the past. 

Real estate developers have no interest in the town’s colorful history. Instead, they have cast a hungry eye on the land, especially the Bravo’s: a marina, restaurants, Starbucks—ah, the endless possibilities to make money. The natural land must bend to progress as the moneyed class sees it. 

The plot develops less from this pull of money and more unfurls from the Bravo family, of how each has a secret that slowly unwinds toward resolution.

"Challenging" Books, Reading Culture and Other Complications

Sarah Moon
In the News, Opinion

Why do we read?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. Actually, I’ve been thinking about this question since April, when the Pew Center released their study on the reading habits of Americans.

Unsurprisingly, the data revealed that people read… wait for it…

A lot of different reasons. 

Take a moment to recover from the shock of that astonishing information. 

Here’s a snippet from the results (it’s really worth reading through the study, if this sort of thing interests you):

  • 26% of those who had read a book in the past 12 months said that what they enjoyed most was learning, gaining knowledge, and discovering information.
  • 15% cited the pleasures of escaping reality, becoming immersed in another world, and the enjoyment they got from using their imaginations.
  • 12% said they liked the entertainment value of reading, the drama of good stories, the suspense of watching a good plot unfold.
  • 12% said they enjoyed relaxing while reading and having quiet time.
  • 6% liked the variety of topics they could access via reading and how they could find books that particularly interested them.
  • 4% said they enjoy finding spiritual enrichment through reading and expanding their worldview.
  • 3% said they like being mentally challenged by books.
  • 2% cited the physical properties of books – their feel and smell – as a primary pleasure.
    • Source Link

For me, all but the last item (books’ physicality) are true. Often when I read, I find that my world expands, that I learn something new, maybe about a place, perhaps about my own thinking. I love the drama of a good book, of a beautifully constructed plot, of carefully crafted words. Reading, as I’ve mentioned a time or twelve, is also my favorite way to unwind and decompress—it’s a lifelong habit of mine to read for an hour or two before bed or when I take a lunch break.

I’d also add to that list that I love the community of readers, which was even true before the internet became such an awesome book talk water cooler. Even as a kid, passing around good books and chatting about them, was a joy. Now, I love discussing about books here on CEFS, at my book club meetings (hi ladies!), on Twitter, on Goodreads and at Costco (this keeps happening to me for some reason).

But what I’m most interested from this data is the idea of reading being “challenging.”

Review: The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan

Sarah Moon
Books

Charlotte Rogan’s much-hyped debut, The Lifeboat, is one of my biggest reading disappointments of the year. 

And I feel like a complete jackass for saying that. Rogan has a wonderful story of writing for years and years before The Lifeboat was published and in a publishing climate where precocious twenty-somethings are getting all sorts of attention, it’s wonderful to see someone’s dream of being a published novelist become a reality after years of work on her craft.

However, with its singular focus on Big Questions About Morality, I was left wanting more of everything: plot, character development, tension. 

{Review} The Sharp Time by Mary O'Connell

{Review} The Sharp Time by Mary O'Connell

Sarah Moon
Books

And look at me: My mother gave me a punk-rock name, but my spirit is composed of elevator music: Tra-la-la-la./Don’t mind me./I’m a nice girl./I have good manners./I’ll not bother you./Tra-la-LA!

The Sharp Time by Mary O'Connell

Mary O’Connell’s The Sharp Time is a unique, quiet novel that sneaked up on me. 

I credit Trish Doller with my discovery of The Sharp Time, as she posted about it on her (fabulous, must-follow) Tumblr, and since I adored Trish’s book (my review will be published closer to the book’s release date), I figured that The Sharp Time was worth the read based on her recommendation. 

The Sharp Time begins shortly after ADD-afflicted 18-year-old Sandinista Jones—her free spirit mother named her after the Clash album—has left school following a bizarre conflict with a teacher. Sandinista’s mother has recently died in a fluke accident and the incident at school was the last straw. She’s lonely and angry and lost, wrestling with violent urges.

{Opinion} Stop telling me what to read, please!

Sarah Moon
In the News, Opinion

In a blatant (and successful) attempt at link-baiting, the New York Time published an opinion piece on their website last week about how adults shouldn’t be reading young adult fiction. 

Cue the eye rolls.

(No, I won’t link to the article, you can find it if you Google “Joel Stein is a Sexist Ass.”) I’m not going to add to the commentary about how this is an absurd assertion, because loads of people have already done that extremely well, but I am going to ask another question, 

Why the HELL do we even care what people do or do not read?

Seriously. Why is this important to so many people? It seems that at least once a month, there’s some new article (50 percent of which feature Jonathan Franzen bloviating about his supposed superiority) asserting that we should read X, that we should not read Y and that “serious readers*” would most definitely should not read Z. 

If you’ve been reading this blog, you have probably figured out that my reading tastes are all over the place. But, I have a particular enjoyment of the following: 

  1. Contemporary, realistic YA;
  2. Creative, entertaining urban fantasy;
  3. Urban crime fiction;
  4. Post-apocalyptic/dystopian (adult or YA)
  5. Books involving prank wars;
  6. Smart contemporary romance (a la Julie James and Shannon Stacey);
  7. Novels involving zombies;
  8. Novels involving werewolves;
  9. Middle Eastern women’s fiction;
  10. Graphic novel/fiction with visual elements;
  11. Funny memoirs;
  12. Sweet and fun contemporary YA (a la Stephanie Perkins); 
  13. Books involving heists and/or capers; and
  14. Books that don’t suck (to me).