A quick heads up: Just heard that the guests to UAlbany in the next few months are likely to include Richard Ford and Norman Mailer, among many, many others.
Author: Michael Janairo
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Small world
So this past weekend, I was picking my wife up from the Millay Colony (in Austerlitz, NY), and after we loaded up the van with her supplies, I nosed around a bit and checked out the library of books published by former residents of the artists colony and came upon Janet Desnaulniers’ “What You’ve Been Missing,” the Iowa Short Fiction Award winner from 2004. As you may know from an earlier post, it was something Desnaulnier had said when I was an undergrad in the 1980s that gave me the idea to call this blog “a conspiracy of smart people.”
Small world? Maybe it is a conspiracy…
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What was your favorite book of 2006?
Poet and publisher Erik Sweet weighs in with his top read of the past year: Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero“No book I read this year made more of an impact on me than Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero, an Egyptian novel first published in 1975. This slim volume tells the story of an Egyptian woman, who due to the oppression of the individuals around her is never given a taste of true freedom. The author, Nawal El Saadawi, a writer, feminist, and physician, based the main character Firdaus on a woman she encountered at a woman’s prison in Egypt. Though brief in length, Saadawi’s novel pulls readers deep into the evolution of Firdaus, a woman penned within the confines of a world that does not value independent women.
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The New York Times best of 2006 list
A lot of publications have been running best of lists, and when it is done by one person, it seems they should include a disclaimer that lists all the books that one person read over the year.
The NYTimes, though, attributes the list to “editors” and it is listed below. Of all ten books, I read one this past year — Richard Ford’s Lay of the Land. My review of it is here. What I don’t get is that one reviewer for the Times panned the book, and the other wrote more about Ford’s place in American letters than the book itself. Yet there it is on the list, which is below: -
What were your favorite books of 2006?
In a twist on the question above, I thought I’d write about the books that I’ve talked about the most with people who have asked me for reading recommendations. In a way, these two books are the ones that have stayed in my mind longest after reading and have seemed appropriate to the people I was speaking with. Both books are challenging and have distinct , fully realized aesthetics, and they share a kind of spirit that questions commonly accepted realities.
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What were your favorite books of 2006?
Check out this North Haven, Conn., bloggers best of for 2006 by going to:
http://dhamel.typepad.com/book_blog/2006/12/bookblogs_best_.html
Of interest to me is that I’ve only read one of the books on her list, Scott Smith’s “Ruins,” and I wouldn’t rate that as one of the best of 2006. -
“Indispensable” books about Albany
Fred LeBrun’s review today about the new edition of Jack McEneny’s “Albany: Capital City” begins with an intriguing premise, the notion of “indispensable” books about Albany:
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What was your favorite book of 2006?
Hollis Seamon, novelist and College of Saint Rose professor , weighs in with oen of her top picks:“One of my favorite books of 2006 was recommended by my former student (more…)
