100 Books in 100 Days
Life is nothing without a challenge and so I set out to review 100 books in 100 days to share my favorite literature. You will find a sampling of this below and the full list of books can be found here, which will be updated as I add more.
Before you get to scrolling, you can read my interview with Anne Kniggendorf for KCUR about my new short novel, Tania the Revolutionary. Thank you, Anne, and thank you to anyone reading along.
As the economic downturn churns on, one of the great books about the Depression comes to mind. Davis Grubb's The Night of the Hunter. It's a book about being forced to do battle with evil at a time in life when we have only a child's resources, a child's powers and a child's ability to persuade the adult world to listen.
With travel curtailed for now, maybe the next best thing is a crime novel set in Brighton, England, by the sea. Graham Greene always said he wished he'd started this novel after the murder that happens in the opening chapters, that he really wrote the book to show what happens when a sociopath named Pinkie meets a shop girl named Rose.
A reason to read this book is one that isn't often mentioned – its importance as a work of Minimalism. We didn't have Minimalism until the early 20th century when it was essentially invented by writer, Gertrude Stein. This ushered in the American writing style with its use of the fewest, simplest words and an insistence on stating nothing which can be implied another way.
Back when I was a young short fiction writer in grad school, everyone said I needed to be reading Chekhov, Alice Munro and Katherine Anne Porter. Porter wrote a trio of classic short novels in the 30s and collected them in this volume. Included here is "Noon Wine," one of the best books, long or short, ever written about the unnecessary killing of one stranger by another.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.