Number 98.
Hierarchy of Book Publishing
The Top 100
(circa 2012)1). Brand-name authors (still)
- Stephen King (since 1974)
- John Grisham (1989)
- Patricia Cornwell (1990)
- Jodi Picoult (1992)
- Nicholas Sparks (1996)
- Jennifer Weiner (2001)
- Etc.
2). Self-published authors with proven track…
Supposedly These Are the Best Fiction Works of 2011
via the New York Times, the New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, and NPR.
The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
11/22/63 - Stephen King
The Tiger’s Wife - Tea Obreht
Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson
SWAMPLANDIA! - Karen Russell
Until the Dawn’s Light - Aharon Appelfeld
The Good Muslim - Tahmima Anam
There but for the - Ali Smith
Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson
Lost Memory of Skin - Russell Banks
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
Open City - Teju Cole
Daughters of the Revolution - Carolyn Cooke
The Angel Esmeralda - Don DeLillo
Solo - Rana Dasgupta
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman - Margaret Drabble
The Forgotten Waltz - Anne Enright
The Stranger’s Child - Alan Hollinghurst
The Marriage Plot - Jeffery Eugenedis
The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
The Wandering Falcon - Jamil Ahmad
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine - Alina Bronsky
The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt
Say Her Name - Francisco Goldman
Volt - Alan Heathcock
The Stranger’s Child - Alan Hollinghurst
Once Upon A River - Bonnie Jo Campbell
Iq84 - Haruki Murakami
The Night Eternal - Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
When You Move to a New Place
When you move to a new place it won’t feel real. You might have a job, or three. You might have a cozy bedroom with Christmas lights, hundreds of books, and postcards from all the museums you’ve visited. You might eat all your meals in this new place. You might use local banks, local post offices, local pizza places, and local bars. You will curl up in your bed at night, reading a book, drinking tea or wine or water but probably wine, and think “this this so nice and this is temporary.”
You will feel lonely but it is temporary so it will be okay. You will feel elated at times, when you have job interviews or you get a free coffee or you look out your window and it’s snowy, but that elation is subdued because it is temporary. Your emotions are minimized and brought towards the horizontal axis because of this nature of “this is not for ever, this is not for real.”
There will be people in your life, of course. People at work who offer you recommendations and pastries and files to organize, but these people exist solely within an office building in this new place, and not in the real world. You are grateful for their praise and advice, you learn from them and admire them and wish for their jobs, but you are temporary here. You focus on what you will take away rather than how you will stay. People who you may live with, who are similarly new to this place, similarly transient, are therefore not truly part of this new place. People you knew from before this place, who reappear on weekends at bars, who existed before you came to this place, will continue to exist after you leave.
Although there are people you meet here. People you really meet here. These are people who have never existed for you in any other context besides this place. They do not exist in your office, in your hometown, on your college campus. These people are real in this place. It is not until you encounter such people, who undergo the full beautiful colorful range of emotions in this place, whose experiences are not tempered by transience, that you are suddenly made aware that this is real for you as well. For these other people, you are real in this place. This place is part of your real life. Whether you physically depart from this place, in five months or fifteen years, this place will have been real for you. Your framing of this place’s reality must change. You must feel the air on your skin here as you felt the air on your skin before as you will feel the air on your skin after.
Say what you will about Stephanie Meyers - I know I do - but, goddamn if the soundtracks to the Twilight movies aren’t beautiful every time.
My Workday: A Play-by-Play
8:30am - leave apartment with instant coffee in hand, no makeup, feel sort of like you’re going to throw up because you’re malnourished and overtired, be way too aggressive about getting a seat on the subway
9:30am - see Breaking Dawn with coworkers because it’s somebody’s birthday, eat popcorn for breakfast because it smells so good, wonder longingly about Robert Pattinson’s morning breath
12:30pm - to the office! “Catch up on emails,” “make some calls,” mostly format some excel spreadsheets and wait for direct orders
2:00pm - go to lunch at a pub again for the birthday girl, have two glasses of wine on your boss’s dime because she’s wonderful and it’s a working lunch, talk about everything from marriage to work, pretend you have a definitive taste in footwear besides moccasins
4:00pm - back to the office! Actually catch up on emails and make some calls, open another bottle of wine and feel invincible, go to the bathroom 6 times in one hour
7:00pm - leave the office with your boss to go babysit her child while she goes to some networking event. proceed to do the work you should have been doing all day until about 1am when she gets home and sends you back to Brooklyn.
A Brief Thought on Caretaking
Not saying I need a housekeeper or somebody to follow me around, deposit the check that’s been shoved down at the bottom of my pursue for eight days while I had $3 (total) to my name, or buy fresh produce for me at the farmer’s market. I don’t want someone to do my dishes, get me quarters for the laundromat, or assemble tupperware containers of nutritious meals in the fridge for the coming workweek.
What I really need is someone to take a once-over of my life and tell me that things are disgusting.
“Eliza, it’s not okay that there’s an empty peanut m+ms bag sitting on your desk from six weeks ago, because you have a trash can. It’s not okay that all your desk and dresser drawers are open, because it makes your room give that ‘just-ransacked’ look of 24 episodes. You need to wear a raincoat when it’s raining, and take advantage of work-appropriate footwear, which you do own, instead of trudging around in moccasins all the time. Do some laundry and stop wearing the same dress three days in a row. Consider dry cleaning. Consider taking the trash out and DOING YOUR DISHES for Christ’s sake because you have mice, and stop leaving dirty tissues scattered about the apartment like you’re leaving a trail for a rescue squad.
“REAL PEOPLE DON’T LIVE LIKE THIS.”
Instead, I have wonderful roommates who, although they are definitely more together than I am, tolerate my lifestyle because their own are somewhat comparable. I have three friends who I meet once a week, one at a time, in a rotating cycle, at a bar in the city. No one ever comes in my bedroom, ever. I try to avoid the place myself because it’s depressing and, quite frankly, getting a little smelly.
What I really need is a pair of judgmental eyes to communicate, without words, that this is not okay.
Learning to Love Diversity
I love diversity. My upper-middle-class, Caucasian-Irish-and-Italian-fourth-generation, “a pride flag in the middle school will make our heterosexual gender-role-minding children gay not that we mind but for reals let’s take that flag down” suburban hometown was a little stifling at times. We had the benefits of a small, closed community (top ten school district in the state, everybody’s parents knew who you dated and had an opinion on the relationship, a terrible football team, lots of weed). But we also really lacked any semblance of the real world. I’m not saying that a couple black families would have opened our worlds - we did, after all, have the METCO program, which bussed a few lucky inner-city kids to our tiny high school.
But all the stores carried the same products. All the families drove the same cars, owned the same untouched collection of classic literature, allowed their purebred dogs to frolic (with electric collars) in their equally-sized backyards. My family was a little more original, what with the divorce and the mutts we adopted from local animal shelters. But even so: in a town that small, people get off on fitting in.
Going to college in Boston was a good transition. The university I attended was overwhelmingly kids from similar suburbs, but we were in the heart of a major city (okay, a minor city) that drew immigrant populations, attracted cultural events, and even saw a few muggings every once in a while. Once, I even got to speak in Spanish to a guy outside of Fenway Park. I was drunk, with a hamburger in one hand (I’m a vegetarian) and an ongoing phone call in the other hand, but that cultural exchange took momentary priority over food and friends.
Brooklyn’s different. I’m not talking about Williamsburg or Park Slope, where (as my neighbor and new friend Tanyia told me) “white people live.” I’m talking about Sunset Park, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in all of NYC. Tanyia went so far as to accuse me, upon our introduction, of not living in the neighborhood. “You visiting?” she asked me abruptly after borrowing a quarter for the laundromat. “No, I live here,” I responded, gesturing vaguely above the overly-Halloweened storefront behind me. Tanyia eyed me up and down, sat next to me on the stoop, and started telling me how mean her dog and her ex-husband are.
And I love it. I love that there are Spanish restaurants and $2 taco carts and the ATMs are in Chinese and, sometimes, no one understands me. I love that none of the shopkeepers know what I mean when I say “can I have a box of tampons.” (Side note: who keeps tampons behind the counter so you have to ask for them? The ordeal is embarrassing enough without broadcasting, to every person just hanging out in the store, that, yes! It’s my time of the month and I’m woefully underprepared!)
I love that people sell churros in the subway and I’m learning to love being a minority. It’s weird, having people recognize me. I’m tall. I’m young. I have short hair and I’m a girl. As if those things weren’t enough to draw attention to yourself in a city, I’m white in a very non-white neighborhood. My new friend Sam, who operates the 24-hour convenience store/deli by the subway stop, told me that I’m the only white girl who comes into his store. He also gives me 25 cents off Pop Tarts. We have a good relationship.
The only thing I don’t like is when the Chinese women who operate the laundromat next door laugh at my underwear.
But, you gotta take the bad with the good. And things here are mostly good. I guess I’m in favor of immigration, or something. Mostly I’m in favor of speaking Spanish on a regular basis.
“So to note the fiftieth birthday of the closest thing that American literature has to an “Alice in Wonderland” of its own, Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth”—with illustrations, by Jules Feiffer, that are as perfectly matched to Juster’s text as Tenniel’s were to Carroll’s—is to mark an anniversary that matters.”
This is the book that my tattoo is from. This is the book that made me a nerd when I was little and nerdy-hipster when I was older. This is the book that will make my children love books, and maybe make them nerdy and, later, nerdy-cool. This is the book that will make me very strange and nostalgic when I get old.
