Stuff I Recommend

This past month, I've been consumed with finishing this draft of my novel, but I have found time for a few other diversions. Like...

LADY ORACLE by Margaret Atwood. I've read two other books by Atwood, The Blind Assassin, which I loved, and Surfacing, which I couldn't get through. This book is like neither of those. It's the story of a Canadian poet/romantic novelist who while trying to erase herself tells her life story. What makes this novel such a hoot, however, isn't so much the story, which is a lot of fun, but the vibrance of Atwood's narrative voice. This is one novel in which every sentence, even every word counts, and tickles the reader with pleasure.

SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT by Leslea Newman. One of the things I like about Newman, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while teaching with her for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Maine, is the way she claims the lesbian experience as a universal experience. When she write about a crush on a fellow passenger in "Flight of Fancy," she's not just letting you know what it is for a woman to desire another woman, but also for a person to desire another person in general. When she writes about a breast cancer scare in "Keeping a Breast," she uses a second person point of view that implicates the reader, whether male, female, straight, gay, or anything else, in the story of a woman confronting mortality. Reading these stories, you wonder why it's been assumed for so long that the straight white male experience is any more "universal" than any other.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD, film. I don't usually publicize movies on my blog since they get enough play in our culture already, but this one is special. The film's main character, Daniel Plainview, is as rich as any character I've come across in many works of contemporary fiction. It helps that Daniel Day-Lewis gives a rich performance that captures all of Plainview's profound virtues and flaws. At the end of this absorbing movie, I wasn't sure whether his character was more victim or villain, but I was so fascinated by his story that I didn't mind thinking it over for a good long while.