nomadreader

This spring has been a hectic one, and it's pulled me away from the blogosphere at times. Here are some of the things I've been up to: Elle  magazine Reader's Prize Each month, Elle  selects fifteen readers, sends them three books, and has each reader rank them and comment on each one. I participated years ago in the non-fiction category, but it was so much fun to participate in fiction this spring. Fiction and non-fiction alternate months, and then at the end of the year, all of the fiction judges will read the monthly winners and crown a grand champion. It's a book tournament all its own. Our picks appear in the May 2012 issue ( it's also online ), but I read them all back in February. The titles were: The New Republic  by Lionel Shriver ( my review ), The Red Book  by Deborah Copaken Kogan ( my review ), and The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler ( my review .) I didn't know how the votes turned out until I received my issue on my Kindle Fire last week....

2010 was a wonderful year of reading. I wanted to be a deliberate reader, and looking back on the books I read this year, I'm quite pleased with the quality of them. I stuck to literary fiction for the most part. I tried to read from the award lists, and I discovered many of these books on the award lists. Without further ado, here are my favorite books of 2010 (when I made my list, there happened to be ten!)  All the books I read in 2010 were eligible regardless of when the books were published. (Clicking on the links will take you to my full, original review. Clicking on the book cover will take you to it's page on Amazon.) 10. Trespass  by Rose Tremain (longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize) I will remember 2010 as the year I finally read Rose Tremain. This hauntingly beautiful novel has stayed with me. Favorite passage: "Even here, where life went along more slowly than in England, she could sense the restless agitation people felt to make real and tangible to the...

Last Thursday, I reviewed If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous. I loved the book, and I've read quite a few interviews with her on blogs, in old media and the one included in the back of the book itself. With most of my questions having already been asked and answered, I asked Malena if she would be willing to write a guest post for this blog instead of doing another interview. I mentioned I was interested in the process of how she turned a short story into a novel, and she quickly and graciously agreed to tell that part of the story here. One of the questions that I have been asked since my novel came out is what I learned from the process of writing it, and what I would do differently the next time around.    The short answer is that I wouldn’t want to turn a short story into a novel ever again.   I wrote “Gomi” (garbage), the story that became  If You Follow Me ,   when I was a student in Marilynne Robinson’s workshop at the University of Iowa. ...

I've been eager to read If You Follow Me , the first novel by Malena Watrous since I read an interview with Curtis Sittenfeld , author of my favorite book, American Wife , in Paper Cuts, the New York Times book blog. Needless to say, I had high expectations. If you read this blog, you know my favorite books are about so much more than their plot. Great literature transcends its characters and plot and brings greater understanding and critical thought, and If You Follow Me is that kind of great literature. It's mostly the story of Marina, who is spending her first year out of college teaching college in rural Japan. She's still dealing with her father's suicide, and her girlfriend, Carolyn, is also teaching in Japan. They're the only foreigners in a small, rural town with a nuclear power plant. They live in the only apartment available for two people. Watrous did an amazing job of translating the experience of teaching in rural Japan to the reader. She set...