Book Recommendations

50 States of Literature: Heading On Down to Colorado | Columbia Spectator The Columbia Spectator cruises into Colorado with Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong: Here, patches of snow sit among blue mounds of sandhill and dead sunflowers drop their loaded heads onto the black-top roads. In this atmosphere we find a land at once modernized and […]

50 States of Literature: Georgia On Our Minds | Columbia Spectator Tayari Jones’ debut, Leaving Atlanta, is set during the 1979 Atlanta Child Murders, at which time a total of 29 black children were killed. Three kids tell their stories: Tasha, struggling daily to stay in favor with her friends, Rodney, branded as too soft

50 States of Literature: Exploring in Maryland | Columbia Spectator Columbia Spectator‘s 50 States of Literature series continues with Anne Tyler’s novel A Patchwork Planet, where the main character, Barnaby Gaitlin, lives just outside of Baltimore: The quiet neighborhood outside of Baltimore serves to nestle Barnaby with its “big, tall spruce trees” and “damp, chilly

50 States of Literature: Meandering Through West Virginia | Columbia Spectator From the hills of West Virginia comes Ann Pancake’s debut Strange as This Weather Has Been, based on real events and interviews from an Appalachian mining town. Lace See and Jimmy Make fall in love in the era of the Buffalo Creek Disaster. Twenty

50 States of Literature: Heads in Hawaii | Columbia Spectator The Columbia Spectator heads to Hawaii with the novel Heads by Harry: Lois-ann Yamanaka is exceptionally gifted at making the unusual and unsavory seem exotic and entrancing—taxidermy is “true art, not a painting or poem, inaccurate and prone to interpretation, but breathing life into flesh

50 States of Literatue: A Trip to Wild Alaska | Columbia Spectator The Columbia Spectator is back, with its entry for Alaska,  The Man Who Swam With Beavers, a collection of short stories by Nancy Lord. “At the heart of the conservation debate, and with a population divided between Native Americans, recent locals, and businessmen,

50 States of Literature: Wide Open North Dakota | Columbia Spectator Here’s the entry for North Dakota, Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, which describes “a land where the wilderness inspires not only awed romance, but also a cosmic sense of fear and danger.”

50 States of Literatue: Next Stop, Michigan | Columbia Spectator The Columbia Spectator offers up the second in its series of the 50 states in literature with its entry for Michigan: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. I’ve not read this one, although Eugenides’s Middlesex was very popular with my book group. Spectator praises Virgin