#28: The Easter Parade Richard Yates

Jacket Copy: Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the distance between the two women grows, until a tragic event throws their relationship into focus one last time. Richard Yates's masterful novel follows the two sisters from their childhood in the 1920s through the challenges of their adult choices, and depicts the different ways they seek to escape from their tarnished family past.
Similar to: Virginia Woolf's "The Years"; Richard Ford; Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire
Why I am Getting Tired of Richard Yates: I would like to see just one women character in a Richard Yates novel who is not an alcoholic. Just one. Also, a dude who is not completely against the idea of monogamy. They exist. Also, how am I supposed to like any of the male characters in the novels when they all beat their wives? One of my biggest turn-offs for books is when they don't have a single character that I can admire. I would also like to see Yates treat abortion with more sensitivity and attention to the psychological issues that accompany it (the way Didion does). He shouldn't even mention it at all if he's just going to mention it for a second, just state that it happened, and then act like it had no impact on her mental state or her later life whatsoever. Also, his novels tell wonderful stories and include extraordinary depths of character development. Narrative ability and description are  definitely his greatest strengths. What the novels lack however, is a point, or a conclusion that the reader is supposed to come to at the end of the novel. What universal message about life and the world are we supposed to take away from Yates' novels? I have only the very vaguest idea. 

#27: Run River Joan Didion

Jacket Copy: Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.

Similar to: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men; Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca

Why I Love It: Joan Didion is the master of subtlety and understatement. There is more to be found in what she does not say, than in what words are actually on the page. I love the way this combined so many different themes and genres of writing (as you can see from the "similar to" section). I feel like it has something for everyone. It almost has the feel of an old 1940s black and white movie. When reading a book can make you feel like you're watching a movie, I usually consider that a pretty damn good writing job :)

My Top 40 REM Songs

Now that REM is (sadly) come to the end of its career as band, here are my favorite REM songs:

Top 10:
Sweetness follows: live your life filled with joy and thunder
The ascent of man: my book is called the Ascent of Man, i marked your chapter with a catamaran, the accents off, but i am what I am
Final Straw: love, love will be my strongest weapon
Maps and legends: he's not to be reached, he's to be reached. he's not to be reached. maybe he's caught in the legend, maybe hes caught in the myth. maybe these maps and legends, have been misunderstood
All the Right Friends: you've been hanging with the wrong crowd, you've got all the right friends

At My Most Beautiful: you always say your name, like i wouldnt know its you. at your most beautiful

I’ve been high: What i want, what i really want is, just to live my life on high. and i know, i know you want the same, i can see it in your eyes.

Me in honey: if you got to do what you're doing, do it with me.

She Just wants to be

Walk unafraid: I will walk unafraid, i'll be clumsy instead. hold my love me or leave me high. 

I realize this is not a typical list by any means...its way more heavily weighted towards their more recent stuff than most people's lists. I just feel its under-rated and that as Stipe matured is words became more poetic and beautiful.


The other 30:
Accelerate

Catapult

Country feedback

Driver 8

Electron blue

Find the river

Harborcoat: a handshake is worthy, if it's all that you've got

Horse to water

I believe

I don’t sleep, I dream: I'll settle for a cup of coffee, but you know what I really need

I wanted to be wrong: mythology's seductive and it turned a trick on me, that i have just begun to understand

I’ll take the rain

Ignoreland

Imitation of life: like a friday fashion show teenager, cruising in the corner, trying to look like you don't try

Kohoutek

 Moral kiosk: its so much more attractive, inside the moral kiosk

Mr. Richards

Near Wild Heaven: near wild heaven, not near enough

New Test Leper: I can't say that I love Jesus, that would be a hollow claim. But he did make some observations, and i'm quoting them today. Just lest not ye be judged, what a beautiful refrain. 

Nightswimming

Pretty Persuasion

Romance

Second guessing

Sitting still: I'm the sign and you can read; i'm the sign and you're not deaf 

Strange currencies: I dont know why you're mean to me, when you call on the telephone. and i dont know what you mean to me

Supernatural superserious

The lifting: you have watched on repeat, the story of your life across the ceiling

The outsiders

Welcome to the Occupation

What’s the frequency, Kenneth?: you said that irony was the shackles of youth