Book ideas anyone? I'm trying to come up with a few more lists for our book salon.
Here are the four themes I'm mulling over:
Turning Japanese (fiction about Japan and Japanese authors)
Go West, Young Man! (books about the frontier)
1 Picture = 1000 Words (books about art and artists)
American History X Libris (Am. history--this was a request from a salonista, fiction or non-fiction I guess)
Remember these are just suggestions to pimp the topic, so I'm mostly looking for a dozen books or authors people recognize on seeing the name on the list. Classics or modern classics.
For "Turning Japanese" I have the following, but I need to pare it down a bit so I'd love to hear from anyone that's read any of these (I've only read
Silence,
which is awesome):
The Woman in the Dunes
(Kōbō Abe)
Shogun
(James Clavell)
The Samurai
(Shusaku Endo)
Silence
(Shusaku Endo)
Memoirs of a Geisha
(Arthur Golden)
Beauty and Sadness
(Yasunari Kawabata)
The Sound of the Mountain
(Yasunari Kawabata)
Snow Country
(Yasunari Kawabata)
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea
(Yukio Mishima)
Spring Snow
(Sea of Fertility #1)(Yukio Mishima)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
(David Mitchell)
Norwegian Wood
(Haruki Murakami)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
(Haruki Murakami)
Kafka on the Shore
(Haruki Murakami)
The Housekeeper and the Professor
(Yoko Ogawa)
The Book of Tea
(Kakuzō Okakura)
Kokoro
(Natsume Sōseki)
I Am a Cat
(Natsume Sōseki)
Battle Royale
(Koushun Takami)
The Makioka Sisters
(Junichiro Tanizaki)
Kitchen
(Banana Yoshimoto)
Shipwrecks
(Akira Yoshimura)
The Samurai's Garden
(Gail Tsukiyama)
Thanks in advance!
Memoirs of a Geisha is an easy, good read and I imagine would be popular with a lot of people. I'm sort of opposed on principle to a novel in the voice of a Japanese woman written by a white man, but it's well done.
I've also read Norwegian Wood. It's very Murakami. I find him difficult, vague and moody. Not my style.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell)
Is one of my favorite books ever. You could also do his Dream Number9, which is also pretty great, but Thousand Autumns is a better book.
Go West, Young Man!
Westering Man
is a biography of Joseph Rutherford Walker, and I thought a good read.
Go West, Young Man! (books about the frontier)
As Dana says, definitely Willa Cather.
Little House books
Conrad Richter's Awakening Land trilogy and
The Light in the Forest
Last of the Mohicans
(Much better than Mark Twain says)
Mark Twain's
Life on the Mississippi
Hamlin Garland's short stories in
Main-Travelled Roads
The Virginian,
Owen Wister
Shane,
Jack Schaefer
Riders of the Purple Sage
Zane Grey
The Octopus,
Frank Norris (depressing, but not as depressing as his
McTeague,
one of the most depressing novels of all time)
Bret Harte's short stories
The Call of the Wild, White Fang
Jack London
The seminal essay on the role of the frontier is Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier In American History," which is the first chapter of his book i The Frontier in American History, which is widely available online. Henry Nash Smith's
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
is very readable.
True Grit for the frontier books.
How many books are there supposed to be?
I thought 7, but I keep hearing 9, which makes me wonder how he can keep it going without dragging things out.
Better than True Grit: Douglas C. Jones's
Winding Stair
and
The Search for Temperance Moon.
