Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

It’s official: The New York Times has decreed my Christmas list again.

Except: gasp! I actually already read one and own another one of the Top 10 Books of 2008! That never happens!

In fact, I thought I was still slogging my way through last year’s list. Out of ten selections, in the entire year since it came out, I have read Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris and Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. I do own Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson and The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, who made this year’s list as well. Either I got them both for Christmas or I bought them with a gift card to Barnes & Noble, I can’t remember.

I only recently finished the 2007 selection for the Booker, The Gathering by Anne Enright.

But I’m digressing into my tendency to be a prize whore. Admit it though: how fun is it to be able to act like a member of the literati sand say “oh yes, I disagree with the Booker selection, I thought Salman Rushdie was much more deserving,” even though my friends would laugh for several reasons, including that I’ve never read Rushdie. Oh yeah, and also because I’m not usually that obvious with what a literary snob I am.

Anyway, back to the Times’ selections and the most important part, the book I’ve read: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. The book is a return to her Pulitzer Prize-winning roots, with a short story collection. I don’t exactly agree with the Times’ claim “there is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans,” since her stories often depicting much of the typical Indian-American experience.

But I loved this collection of stories. It’s easy to get lost in Lahiri’s sentences, since her descriptions are so vivid. Nothing major happens in any of her stories, but they are real people’s emotions, and you don’t have to be Indian to understand what she is saying.

Here is an example from the first and title story, Unaccustomed Earth: “Her first impulse was to shred it, but she stopped herself, staring at the Bengali letters her mother had once tried and failed to teach Ruma when she was a girl. They were sentences her mother would have absorbed in an instant, sentences that proved, with more force than the funeral, more force than all the days since then, that her mother no longer existed. Where had her mother gone, when life persisted, when Ruma still needed her to explain so many things?”

I’m not sure I’m doing anything to convince anyone to read it, but I just love that paragraph. What better way is there to describe a woman who just misses her mom?

Anyway, if this is an indication of the rest of the books on the Times’ Best Books list, I’m excited to read the rest of them. I own A Mercy by Toni Morrison, so I’m going to make an effort to read it after the semester’s over.

Hmm, and my own list of the Top 10 books I read this year? I guess Unaccustomed Earth, What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn, Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, Run by Ann Patchett, What is the What by Dave Eggers, Imperial Life in the Emerald City and Not Quite What I was Planning. That’s only seven. Honorable mention goes to All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones, but the entire collection of short stories were too uneven. But I’ve been a little slow this year, because of school and the election messed me up because all I read were magazines.

Has anyone read any of the other books? Have any suggestions which one I should pick up after A Mercy?