People who write books are a diverse lot. It's hard to come up with a common trait that applies to all writers, but one comes close: Most writers also read a lot.
Winter is here, the perfect time to curl up in an armchair by the fireplace with a good book. So we asked some Sonoma County authors to tell us about the books they've been reading this season.
Nationally known poet and teacher Dana Gioia of Santa Rosa, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, figures he owns 10,000 books, but four current titles get his recommendation for cold-weather reading.
"This is actually the only time in years that I'm reading four brand-new books. I'm usually reading books that are so obscure that nobody's ever heard of them, and people think I'm just being perverse by saying I'm reading a 73-year-old Romanian novel or something."
Not this time. He just finished "The Marriage Plot," by Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize winner in 2002 for "Middlesex."
"This is a new novel about a group of students at Brown University in the '80s, who graduate and go on to have various romantic troubles. It's a book that's being much talked about right now," Gioia said.
"Just before that, I finished a new novel by Ron Hansen called &‘A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion,' which lives up to its title, I must say. It's based on an actual, wildly scandalous murder that happened in the '20s."
Right now, Gioia is about a third of the way through "Civilization" by Niall Ferguson.
"He's one of the great living historians. This is a book about the rise and imminent decline of the West in world economics and world politics. He thinks China is the emerging civilization, and Europe and America are the declining ones," Gioia said.
Next up: a change of pace with "The Graveyard Book" by Neil Gaiman.
"This is a supernatural retelling of Rudyard Kipling's &‘Jungle Book.' And I love Kipling. I think he's really underrated," Gioia said.
Writers don't always grab for best-sellers. Frequently they reach back into the past to revisit or simply recommend old favorites.
For Jenner writer Carol Sklenicka, whose biography "Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life," was one of the New York Times' Top 10 books of 2009, one of those unforgettable novels is "Rumors of Peace" by San Francisco writer Ella Leffland. First published in 1985, the World War II coming-of-age novel was reissued in 2011 by Harper Perennial.
"It's great it's getting another life," said Sklenicka, who frequently assigned the book when she was teaching. "I just find it a riveting story of a young girl growing up during times of anxiety. And maybe that applies again - to now."
Sklenicka, who is now researching the life of San Francisco short-story writer Alice Adams, said she found Charles Shields' new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, "And So It Goes," a page turner. "What is really interesting is what fame did to him. Becoming famous did not exactly make his life easier. He was trying to live up to the fame of &‘Slaughterhouse Five.' "
Sklenicka's spouse, the poet R.M. Ryan, whose latest collection "Vaudeville in the Dark," was published by LSU Press in 2011, was "stunned" by the brilliance of Paul Hendrickson's "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, And Lost."
"Not only am I a cynic, I'm a tightwad. I actually got this book for people insisting they read it," he said.
The book is a singular meditation on Hemingway, following the storms of his life around one constant in a tumultuous life - his boat, Pilar.
"It's just one of the most moving books I've read in years," Ryan said. "Hemingway, by a kind of miracle, was on top of this deep well of writing. He changed the way people thought. He changed the way people wrote. And this well, I think, finally dried up."
Fiction writer Joan Frank, author of the award-winning short-story collection "In Envy Country," has been honing her wit and brevity this winter on a varied diet of novellas and short stories, memoirs and personal essays.
Recent gems include Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams," praised by the New Yorker for its "hard, declarative sentences" that "suddenly flare into lyricism."
"It's a small, memorable jewel of a novella, set in the nation's early 20th century," she said.
Frank also enjoyed following the footsteps of Sven Birkerts, an essayist who unveils the internal world of the writer in "The Other Walk" (Graywolf). "Brief, fresh, quirky personal essays by our foremost American belle-lettrist," she said.
"Scenes from Village Life," by Amos Oz, also graced her bedside table. The linked story collection revolves around the residents of a cozy Israeli village. The New York Times compared it to a symphony, "its movements more impressive together than in isolation." Frank found it to be "quiet, beautiful, moving."
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