Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books To Read Together

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I'm taking a slightly different tack on this week's topic. We're supposed to be writing about books we'd like to mash together to make an epic story, but honestly I had no idea what I'd do with that. I don't read a lot of fantasy, and I know you could do it with other kinds of books but I wasn't feeling creative so here's what I came up with instead: books that complement each other when read together. Each of them portrays a "side" of a story, so putting them together makes for a more well-rounded look at it.



Gone with the Wind and Beloved: Margaret Mitchell's classic of the antebellum South did bring us the incredible character of Scarlett O'Hara, but made no attempt to critically examine the machine on which that society was built: chattel slavery. Toni Morrison's Beloved, the story of a slave who escaped to the north at a great price, makes the horrors of it viscerally real. We often romanticize the plantation lifestyle, and we need to reckon with the terrible cost, too.

Little House on the Prairie and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: I used to get in trouble in school for reading books while I was in class, and when I was a kid, Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories about her family's journey across the country were ones I tucked inside my textbooks to read again and again. But the westward drive of white settlers had a devastating impact on the people who'd lived there for hundreds of years, so Dee Brown's nonfiction recounting of the desperate, doomed fight of the Native Americans to retain their land and traditions is necessary to understand what the Ingalls family was actually a part of.

To Kill A Mockingbird and Native Son: That poor Tom is innocent of the charges against him is, of course, a critical part of the injustice Harper Lee's novel asks us to understand. But while Lee wraps it in a soft, white-savior narrative, Richard Wright's searing book is much less comfortable in its story of a young black man who does assault a white woman. It examines the social conditions of the Jim Crow era that perpetuated criminality in a very up-front way, really forcing us to consider our own complicity in the system.

Lolita and Speak: Don't get me wrong, I consider Vladimir Nabakov's tale of Humbert Humbert's obsession with the vulnerable Delores one of my all-time favorites. It's an incredible book and not nearly as salacious as most people expect. But it's the story of the predator, and for a story about the impact of being the very young prey of a rapist, it's hard to beat Laurie Halse Anderson's incredible YA novel about a teenage girl ostracized after she calls the police when she's assaulted at a party. Anderson makes her nightmare real, and she's not even dependent on her rapist as Lolita is on hers.

The Great Gatsby and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: I actually didn't love it when I first read it in high school, but F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece has come to be The Great American Novel in my eyes. It's come to symbolize the grandeur and excess of early 20th century New York City so thoroughly that people don't talk about having Roaring 20s parties, they talk about Great Gatsby parties. But for all that excess and wealth, there was also poverty and want, and Betty Smith's beautifully rendered coming-of-age story shows the struggle beneath the glitter.

9 comments:

  1. What a unique and interesting take to have on this Top Ten Tuesday topic!! I truly love some of these pairings... especially Gone with the Wind and Beloved. I haven't read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn before, but I recently picked up a copy and am planning on reading it this September, so I'll keep Great Gatsby in mind when I do!

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    1. Thanks! A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was lovely, I really enjoyed it. It was interesting to me to realize that it takes place just slightly before the action in Gatsby and that the roaring 20s didn't necessarily roar for everyone

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  2. Great job, Gabby. I have read a lot of these books and agree with your analysis, however, I simply do not see the appeal of The Great Gatsby and have read it twice. Different strokes I guess. Also, as I get older and learn more about slavery, Gone With the Wind sort of horrifies me. I loved it in junior high school.

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    1. I read Gatsby in high school and hated it, but when I read it again after college I loved it, and have the few times I've revisited it since. We all have classics that fall flat for us though (Don Quixote's popularity continues to baffle me). I will always love the movie version of Gone with the Wind, for Vivien Leigh's performance if nothing else, but if it were a new thing coming out right now it would be hard to take

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  3. I like your take on this! You know I think of when I think of mashing two books together? A jumbled mess that is completely overdone!

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    1. Haha! I agree...I really just had nooooothing at all for the topic as presented so I had to do something else and enjoyed doing it this way!

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  4. I love your spin on the topic! Thanks for the thoughtful list!

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  5. This is such a good spin on the topic! Presenting the two sides of each story is a fantastic idea. I think English teachers could have a whole curriculum here!

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    1. Thanks! I actually came up with the idea when I realized I'd read both To Kill A Mockingbird and Native Son in school, but in different years and in such different contexts that it didn't occur to me until recently that they had anything at all in common and I wished I'd had more of a chance to think about the issues they raised in tandem. Who knows how fruitful that actually might have been at 16, but it was an interesting thought so I went with it!

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