What is the what

JG and CS over at the Hotchpot Cafe have a reading challenge up.  They love these.  This one sounds like fun.  It is a birth year challenge.  The books you read should all have been published in the year you were born.  

I was initially dismayed, but things are looking up.  One of my comments to them was this after moaning and whinging about what a crappy year my birth year seems to have been.  Then I came up with these two: 

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud won both the National book award and the pulitzer.....a list may be forming...., something by this guy Miguel Angel Asturias...still, gonna think about this a bit. Such an unpromising year.

Then they so very kindly came in with some help:
CS said:  
Don't despair, Oreneta. Here are a few others:
The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron)
The Chosen (Potok)
A Garden of Earthly Delights (Oates)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez), which was first published in Spanish in 1967.
Hope that helps.


Then JG said:
I looked for some for you, too, Oreneta. How about:
Tom Stoppard's "Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (it's a play, but it comes in book form)
V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men
Wilder's The Eighth Day
I did a little research on these and they sound possible.


Another commenter came up with the site, The books of the Century, from which I chopped out this section:

Fiction Bestsellers 1. Elia Kazan, The Arrangement 2. William Styron (tie), The Confessions of Nat Turner 2. Chaim Potok (tie), The Chosen 4. Leon Uris, Topaz 5. Catherine Marshall, Christy 6. Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day 7. Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby 8. Irving Wallace, The Plot 9. Mary Stewart, The Gabriel Hounds 10. Henry Sutton, The Exhibitionist

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude Peter B. Medawar, The Art of the Soluble Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Nonfiction Bestsellers 1. William Manchester, Death of a President 2. Johnny Carson, Misery Is a Blind Date 3. Eric Berne, Games People Play 4. Rod McKuen, Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows 5. Father James Kavanaugh, A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church 6. Sam Levenson, Everything but Money 7. Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd 8. Jess Stearn (tie), Edgar Cayce—The Sleeping Prophet 8. Better Homes and Gardens Favorite Ways with Chicken (tie) 8. Phyllis Diller (tie), Phyllis Diller’s Marriage Manual .

Book-of-the-Month Club Selections Jan de Hartog, The Captain Cornelia Otis Skinner, Madame Sarah Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory John Gunther, Inside South America Thornton Wilder, The Eight Day William Manchester, The Death of a President W. S. Kuniczak, The Thousand Hour Day Harold Nicholson, The War Years, 1939–1945 Dennis Bloodworth, The Chinese Looking Glass Gwyn Griffen, An Operational Necessity Sarah Gainham, Night Falls on the City Will and Ariel Durant, Rus and Revolution William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend George Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950

Here's where you come in. I'm hoping that you may have some background on some of these books.  Nabokov, I will confess to a prejudice against him, though maybe that is a good reason to try it.  Phyllis Diller's Marriage Manual is just to ridiculous, I may have to read that......I think I would like to try and read both the Marquez book and the Nobel prize writer's book in the original Spanish.  Now there is a truly psychotic goal, but one must dream big.  Naipul, again, haven't read enough of his.....


Any words on that?  Who the heck was Nat Turner anyway.  Feel like I should know....he makes it on three times.


On another note, Dave Eggar's What is the What came in the mail today.  I have never walked home so slowly from the post office, and it is only with the greatest difficulty that I have done anything else today.  Eggars is an amazing guy.  If you haven't seen his Ted Talks lecture, you should....wish it weren't so late, I'd like to see it again.  He is writing the auto-biography of another man.  A Sudanese man who managed to escape the horrors of what has happened there.  It is an utterly compelling bit of stunningly beautiful writing.  Cannot recommend it highly enough, and I am only at page 36.


All of the author's proceeds from the book belong to the man who tells the story, Valentino Achak Deng and are to benefit the Sudanese, both in Sudan and elsewhere.


Amazing in every single little way.