Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

This book portrays the extreme poverty of the Lester family in a story that might be compared to a train wreck: you know you shouldn't be looking (and in this case laughing), but you can't look away either. The book relies neither on sentimentality nor on a proletarian call to action, but rather by turning the readers' reactions back on them: instead of a moral or a plan, Caldwell interrogates why we respond to this family with humor, contempt, and perhaps pity. The failure of the land to produce crops is equated with the family's inability to reproduce within social norms (the Lesters have had seventeen children, but only two still live at home, for example, and the ones who have left want nothing to do with the family). While Jeeter Lester (the head of the family) instinctively knows that his fate is tied to the land and that he wants no part of industrialization (symbolized by the possibility of a mill job in Augusta), the family is completely unable to cope with modernity: they treat their new car as if it were almost human--and in so doing manage to almost destroy it in a few short days. Finally, this book is about rural poverty in the South in the same way that Moby Dick is about whales--certainly it's a relevant topic, but Tobacco Road raises bigger and more pressing questions: What does it mean to be human? and What are the costs of living in a society that allows some of its members to become so abject?

Narrative and Freedom: the Shadows of Time by Gary Saul Morson

This book investigates the question of whether time is closed (and our fates are fixed) or whether it is open. Instead of looking at the question simply philosophically, Morson uses literature (and particularly the realist fiction of nineteenth century Russia, as practiced by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky). Even though fiction seems to imply closed time (both through devices such as a foreshadowing and backshadowing and through its ability to place the reader outside of the time of the narrative, which is always already fixed), Morson suggests that there are ways to read the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that work against this fated view of history--namely sideshadowing. Sideshadowing is a technique by which a work of fiction opens up parallel histories so that the reader cannot determine which of these histories is actually "true." I found this book very convincing and provocative.

The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

This collection of poetry gives you everything Bishop ever published and more. My main complaint about the edition itself (not the poetry) is that it doesn't provide line numbers. That quibble aside, this collection is fantastic. I particularly enjoyed "Insomnia," "One Art," "Sestina," and "In the Waiting Room" this time around. The beauty of this poetry rests as much in what it doesn't say, and in the task of digging out the pieces. I'm also interested in the way this poetry blurs the line between the surreal and the real and the way in which it portrays nature. Several of these poems definitely make my essential list.

The Red Notebooks: True Stories by Paul Auster

In this collection of vignettes, grouped under four headings, Paul Auster uses what he claims are true stories to illustrate life's shocking coincidences. I think they are meant to show the point of writing--some are gathered under the heading "Why Write?" and one explains why Auster always carries a pencil around. While Auster writes with a beautiful touch, and while some of the stories have gorgeous moments, at other times, the collection veers into the false, the unacceptably improbable, and the cliché.