Top Ten Tuesday: Questions I Would Ask My Favorite Authors

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about questions we'd ask our favorite authors. Not all of these authors are my absolute favorites (for one, I only chose authors who are alive), but here are ten questions I'd ask authors I respect and admire!

Roxane Gay: What was your favorite thing about living in the Upper Peninsula during your Ph.D. program?

Margaret Atwood: You've written so many brilliant modern classics. What modern classic means the most to you?

Alison Weir: What person in British Tudor history would you like to write a biography about, but there just isn't enough material there for a book?

Jeffrey Eugenides: What is your favorite place in Detroit?

Katherine Arden: What is your favorite Russian folk tale?

Donna Tartt: Your The Secret History is one of the most popular books not yet adapted for the the screen. Has there ever been an actor you thought would be perfect for one of the roles?

John U Bacon: Who is your favorite Michigan football player of all time?

George RR Martin: When are you going to finish The Winds of Winter?

Nick Hornby: Music was such an important part of High Fidelity. What is your favorite song?

Erik Larson: Is there a historical event or person that you find interesting, but you don't think you're the right person to write about?

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Top Ten Tuesday: Questions I Would Ask My Favorite Authors

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Bookish Twitter Follows

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, the topic is technically authors who have a fun social media presence. But I'm a bad book blogger, because I don't actually follow very many authors on social media. So there aren't quite ten here (only eight), and they aren't all necessarily authors. But they're all book-type people!

Roxane Gay: Not everyone loves Roxane's twitter feed...she posts quite a bit, and definitely doesn't let people get away with talking back to her. But I find her voice incredibly smart and often very funny (and sometimes not, but that's everyone, right?).

Celeste Ng: She posts quite a bit not just about her books/books in general but also about the news and our world and I really enjoy reading what she has to say.

Connor Goldsmith: He's a literary agent who does a lot of A+ pop culture tweeting alongside stuff about his work.

Anne Theriault: I think she has written a book, but she also writes longform articles (my favorites are about old-school royalty, Queens of Infamy) and tweets frequently about her life, her mental health, and her son, who sounds like a great kid!

Mignon Fogarty: She's Grammar Girl, so obviously a great resource, but I have to give an extra special shout-out to a fellow Northern Nevadan!

Maris Kreizman: She created the truly fantastic Slaughterhouse 90210 tumblr (and book!), was on staff of Book of the Month for a while there, and remains in the general literary realm. I don't always agree with her taste in books but she always has something interesting to say!

Alexandra Petri: Columnist, author, hilarious.

Rachel Hawkins: Her Sexy History twitter series was fantastic, both laugh-out-loud and informative. I also enjoy her tweets about the realities of being an author!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Bookish Twitter Follows

Book 202: An Untamed State

"I held my hand close to the heat. I knew what it meant to burn, how it felt, how the right amount of heat can make your skin rise and how the pain rises with your skin until it spreads through you and when the pain starts to spread, it becomes easier to endure."

Dates read: January 17-20, 2018

Rating: 8/10

The first stories we learn are usually fairy tales. Cinderella, the little mermaid, Hansel and Gretel. We learn the sanitized, Disney-fied versions: simple stories, with unquestionably evil villains that create danger for our heroes but are vanquished at the end, usually with a moral to wrap things up in a bow. The original versions are usually darker...less redemption, more death. But the tales themselves have endured, even as they've changed, over time. Storytelling is basic human nature.

The theme of fairy tales, and the subversion of that theme, runs throughout Roxane Gay's debut novel, An Untamed State. American-born Mireille is visiting Haiti, where her parents are from and where they've returned in their later years, with her husband and newborn son. They're just leaving the gated compound where her family lives when they're suddenly accosted by kidnappers and Mireille is taken. They demand $1 million for her return, and she's held for 13 days before ransom is paid. During those 13 days, she's brutally raped and tortured, and the woman she is when she's released is a world away from the woman she was before.

We learn about her life through the memories she experiences while she's captive. How she grew up, watching her talented father chafe against the ways in which he was treated as "lesser than" because of his status as an immigrant. Her relationship with her siblings, especially her sister. The way she and her husband Michael met and fell in love. Their privileged life together in Miami, where she's an immigration attorney and he's an engineer. And then when she gets back, how very unable she is to resume that life. The second half of the novel relates Mireille's flight to Michael's family farm in Nebraska to heal...or more accurately, recover enough to be able to deal. The wounds she's suffered aren't the kind that really heal, after all.

The motif of fairy tales is everywhere, from the beginning, where the book literally opens with "once upon a time", to the end, in which Mireille is given the chance to confront one of her captors. When I first read it, the ending bothered me. It seemed too convenient, to tie things up too neatly. Life doesn't work that way, and otherwise the book is deeply, unflinchingly realistic. When you think about it through the context of fairy tales, though, it has that kind of wish fulfillment that the modern versions of these stories often do. But the bulk of the story is filled with the things that get cut out of the tales for today's world: the violence inflicted on Mireille is completely unvarnished and it is very difficult to read.

And that difficulty of reading is the only reason I'm not more enthusiastic about this novel. Roxane Gay is a phenomenal writer and the book is compelling and hard to put down. She draws realistic, captivating characters who have shades of gray and consistent internal logic, and the way she subverts Mireille's "fairy tale" narrative of her life with Michael by showing us its sometimes-ugly underbelly is brilliant. I could go on forever about how incredibly-written it is. But with the subject matter being what it is, it's hard to recommend this book widely. There's a great deal of sexual, physical and emotional abuse. If that's something you're able to handle, I'd definitely recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: Prep 

 
Two years ago, I was reading: The Blind Assassin

Three years ago, I was reading: The Life of the World to Come

Four years ago, I was reading: Beloved

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Book 202: An Untamed State

Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Read In 2018

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a favorite annual topic of mine...authors whose work I've experienced for the first time in 2018! Even with how much I read, there are so many great writers who I haven't gotten to yet, so I like keeping track of which ones finally made it only my list each year. I like to reserve this list for established authors only, so I don't count ones who have only written one no matter how much I might have liked the debut!

Roxane Gay: I've loved her Twitter presence for years, but I'd never actually read any of her books until this year, when I read the searing An Untamed State. I'm definitely ready for more!

Iris Murdoch: I'd been curious about her ever since I watched her biopic years ago, but Henry and Cato didn't really do much for me. I do want to try The Sea, The Sea, but if that one also falls flat I'll probably call it quits with her.

Rainbow Rowell: One of the bookternet's favorite authors, I'd heard the for-adults Landline was one of her less successful outings, so I'm not going to let my underwhelm with it push me away from reading her well-loved YA.

Louise Erdrich: I found Love Medicine a little challenging to follow at times, but she's written a whole series of books based on the same fictional reservation and I'm curious to see how she develops these characters out!

J.M. Coetzee: One of only a few authors who've won the Booker Prize twice, I read one of those books (Disgrace) for my book club. It was very depressing but also really well-done, so I'm interested in continuing to explore his backlist.

Lawrence Wright: He's written a bunch of non-fiction, and reading his The Looming Tower (about al-Queda and 9/11) gave me faith that he presents solid research in a compelling way, so I'll for sure read more by him!

Elizabeth Strout: I'd heard great things about her writing, so I picked up her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Olive Kitteridge. It was good, and I'll absolutely grab more of her writing to read!

Jesmyn Ward: She's an incredible well-regarded young author, and while I have others from her that I'm still looking forward to reading, I thought Sing, Unburied, Sing was powerful but flawed.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Her short story collection got a lot of buzz this year, and reading her debut Prep definitely made me interested in reading it and the rest of her writing!

Michael Pollan: I've been aware of his books, especially those about food and eating, but reading In Defense of Food convinced me I don't need more.

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Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Read In 2018