Books I've Enjoyed This Summer

If you are in Mississippi and have any interest in arts and letters, you can't possibly escape the influence of Eudora Welty. The Optimist's Daughter, her Pulitzer Prize winning novella reads very quickly and reminds me why I love Southern literature (and Welty in particular) so much: the tangible and fraught connections with one's past, the overarching significance of place, the golden memories of childhood and the pain of leaving/returning home; Welty seems to bring it all in without overwriting, managing to weave a story that expands ever outward from the particularities of a small Mississippi town to capture a much larger feeling of life and loneliness. Also, Square Books has some wonderful recordings of Welty reading her own work; 'Why I Live at the P.O.' is another (short story) favorite.

I, like many others, read The Great Gatsby in ninth grade and didn't really get it. When I reread it a few years ago, I decided to give F. Scott Fitzgerald another chance, mostly because he was a fellow Tiger, but also because I was finally able to recognize the genius, and to borrow a choice phrase from a dear member of the book club, 'the sparse economy' of Gatsby. The Beautiful and Damned is much longer and more sensational a novel than the other Fitzgerald I've read: the themes of overindulgence and rampant hedonism dominate (sometimes hard to stomach when you have to get up at 5:30 a.m. and decide which teacher clothes to put on..) the characters are at times insufferable, but the plot's twists and turns make for exciting reading and a climactic ending. Crazy woman, alcoholic man, impending financial ruin: it seems like Fitzgerald may have used parts of his own life for this one.

This was the best book I've read in a long time. The complexity of the narrative that Stegner manages to develop in less than 500 pages is nothing short of astounding. Even after the reader learns that he used the letters of a real woman to create his main character (a sort of plagiarism for which he got in slight trouble), Stegner's invention and command of human emotion and motivation, his care and attention both to action and to intimate relationships- his skill in all these areas saturates the entire novel. I read the last half in approximately three hours, including one morning on the bus to Holly Springs. Yes, it was that good!


Flannery O'Connor is so weird, and that is precisely why I love her. Her stories are full of rejects, misfits, criminals, and, not to be overlooked, overeducated people with deformities. This collection of short stories made me laugh out loud many a time, so much so that I subjected the students of the June session to a reading of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" which, though probably a little misguided (okay, totally misguided) made me extremely happy. I had great fun giving them a little mini-lesson on O'Connor's numerous oddities- training chickens with the 4-H club, her family's history of lupus, her life in small-town Georgia. And who can forget Hulga, the philosophy graduate student with a wooden leg who is seduced by an erstwhile Bible salesman?


My next book, which I am now rereading with the hope that the perspective of a few years will make it better than the last time, a la my Fitzgerald attempt. Corrupt politicians, a love story, and the Southern humidity- it seems to have all the essential elements so far....