Thirteen of My Favorite Books from 1997
When it gets toward the end of the year, I can hardly wait for all the lists...best movies, worst performances, best dressed, etc. So I've gone back in time to the journal I started keepin in 1997. I was a very stingy book-rater at the time, giving not a single one of the 76 books I read that year more than an 8 on my 1-10 scale. So, these are the thirteen most memorable of the books that I gave my highest rating (in no particular order).
***If you feel inclined to buy any of these books, please click on the book jacket to do so or on my BookSense Logo. This not only supports local, independent bookstores, but part of my affiliation includes a donation of proceeds to Books for Kids***
1.
Fran
k McCourt was an elderly phenom with the spash of Angela's Ashes onto the literary scene. He wrote of the abject poverty making the reader's skin crawl thinking of the dirt and the vermin and the rancid food that kept them alive.
"Worse than
the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and
worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
So if I now told you that this book is a book that made me laugh out loud, you would think I was crazy right? But somehow McCourt makes the seemingly unbearable, not just tolerable, but humorous!
2.
Crooked Little Heart was my first Anne Lamott fiction, read on the recommendation of the mostly-reliable Amy (we have mostly forgiven her for The Stolen Child) who has probably been my most consistent recommender of the last ten years.
I personally don't think Anne Lamott is capable of writing anything that is not intensely personal, and Crooked Little Heart is no exception. It draws from her own experience living in a competitive family, excelling at tennis and seeking the family she dreams of by living vicariously through the families of her friends.
3.
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb...read it before Oprah picked it. I'm sorry, I just can't help myself. I love what Oprah has done for books and reading, but I just feel compelled to let you know that I read it BEFORE it received the Oprah stamp of approval. The most interesting aspect of this book to me is that it is written by a man and told so believably from the perspective of a woman.
This is a long and somewhat convoluted book, but I remember I shared my love of this book with my sister who doesn't have the time I have to read the long, long books, but loved this one and recently inspired me to read The Pillars of the Earth...which is REALLY long! Oh...and ALSO an Oprah selection...several days AFTER I placed my order for it with Quail Ridge Books! Why is this so important to me???
4.
If presidential candidates had enough faith in the voters that they might have an attention span beyond a 3 minute and 14 second song (I'm thinking "Don't Stop" by Fleetwood Mac in the 1992 Clinton campaign), The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle could be the literature of John Edwards and his "Two Americas".
The two extremes of our society are no more apparent than in California...where illegal Mexican immigrants clean the homes and do the landscaping for people with such extreme wealth that neither can fathom the lives the others lead. The clash of the two ends of the spectrum in the realm of real people rather than statistics makes this novel bring to life the expansion of these two unreal worlds and the diminishing of the middle class.
5.
Joyce Carol Oates...undeniably one of the most prolific and diverse authors of modern times examines the dysfunctional family, probably before it was so cliche to do so, in this beautifully written novel. We Were the Mulvaneys is difficult, sometimes painful, to read.
What does a family do when faced with an unspeakable crisis? When one of its members is threatened? Oates explores and digs and finds the sometimes unpalatable reality of that situation.
And YES, Oprah selected it LONG after I read it!!!
6.
My first Elizabeth Berg...another Amy recommendation...Ms. Berg apparently lives somewhere in New England and was a local favorite before she gained her more national recognition.
Talk Before Sleep is about friendship. It will make you cry. It will make you think about your most treasured friendships. If you aren't Berged out by her subsequent novels, it will make you appreciate the early work of a gifted author.
7. 
Kathryn Harrison's ultra-controversial The Kiss details her sexual relationship...not even as abuse...but as a love affair of sorts. Sometimes I cannot think of words to describe a book that does it better than quoting the book itself:
"We meet at airports. We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us...With his hand under my chin, my father draws my face toward his own. He touches his lips to mine. I stiffen."
Haunting.
8.
In Drinking: A Love Story, the now tragically deceased Caroline Knapp describes her many, many years as a functioning alcoholic. You can't be an alcoholic if you drink only the finest wines, right? You can't be an alcoholic if you still make it to work every day? Knapp will make you question your thoughts about your own drinking habits and the habits of those around you.
She forces us to think that only the dirt-covered homeless man with a bottle of MD 20-20 in a paper bag has a problem with drinking.
9.
I had no interest in mountain climbing. Didn't understand what was involved in climbing Everest. I had only a passing, front page, understanding of the disaster on the face of Mount Everest in May, 1996. My friend Nancy, who lives in Oregon, who has been on Oprah as a reader of The Book of Ruth and whose book recommendations I have been listening to for probably almost 20 years, recommended Into Thin Air. Jon Krakauer was a survivor of the Everest disaster who writes at times with the dispassionate descriptive air of the journalist that he is, but intertwines it with his clearly emotional and surreal memories of the events involved.
I literally could not put it down without causing myself severe distress. I don't disclose this to many people...but I carried it into the bathroom with me because I could not find a stopping point to turn it over and continue on after peeing!
10.
Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World was another Amy recommendation that rocked my world as a typical suburban Mom.
How many times to we blithely agree to watch our friends' children? How much do we love having friends with whom we can excange thoughts, feelings and kids? It's an integral part of the fabric of the life of most moms that I know.
Jane Hamilton turns that world upside-down in an instant and carries the reader into a house of mirrors where nothing is as it looks and you feel all dizzy and unreal until you reach the last page. Mesmerizing!
11.
For some reason, I am the only person I know who is a die-hard Larry Watson fan. White Crosses had me held in its thrall from the first page to the last. I still remember the disbelief I felt when I read a certain paragraph that completely upended my take on the novel.
I wrote my first author fan letter to Larry Watson in 1997. I didn't get a response. I don't care. I just wanted him to keep writing. It's been 10 years...maybe he'll come across my letter and respond. But I don't care...White Crosses was a gift enough.
Larry Watson's website...not that I'm stalking him or anything...says that White Crosses has been optioned as a film, but it doesn't appear in IMDB as of yet.
12. 
Ubiquitous in 1997? Yes! But Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is a fun book that gave a more national presence to the Southern, drunken, dysfunctional mother genre...a genre I love, by the way!
Despite some of the questionable choices these moms, led by the colorful Vivi, made...we began to call ourselves "Ya-Ya's" if we had a group of close friends who drew our families together because of our friendships.
13.
Amy and I thought we discovered the newest voice with Jenn Crowell's Necessary Madness. But with her 2002 follow-up of Letting the Body Lead, proved disappointing at best.
Crowell's debut, however, is the beautifully written story of a young woman whose husband dies of leukemia and how she starts older. It's brilliant!
Anyone remember what they were reading in 1997? I know I'm late posting this, so I'm not going to fuss with the formatting...I hope you'll forgive me!
Di
I have a list of everything I read in 1997. None of your 13 are on there. Happy TT.
Posted by: pussreboots | December 14, 2007 at 02:42 AM