Book Your Stocking with Barbara Williamson

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 19

You're back, Stocking Reader. Good. You know where you are, but if you are not you, but new, you've reached Book Your Stocking, the annual holiday series in which avid readers share the books they'd love to discover in their stockings, or leg warmers, or sock drawers.

Please welcome today's guest, film and literature professor, Barbara Williamson. 

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Educated:  A Memoir by Tara Westover

Educated by Tara Westover

I haven’t read this book yet, but it seems to ping many of my buttons:  cultism, survivalism, local area issues, childhood trauma, the meaning and power of education, and the ability to overcome against the odds.  Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, Educated:  A Memoir, recounts Westover’s experience growing up isolated in an abusive, rural Idaho home with a father who believed public school was indoctrination.  Eventually, she earns her Ph.D. from Cambridge, and this book is her journey.  I am attracted to such books, I think, because I wasn’t supposed to make something of myself, so watching that process of transformation in others is both heartening and inspiring, and I think we need inspiring at this point in history. 

• Find Educated at your local bookstore.
• Discover Educated at your library.
• Learn more about Tara Westover at her website.

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Barbara Williamson

About today's reader:

Barbara Williamson is both a high-school dropout and a proud community-college graduate. She eventually moved on to earn other degrees, including a Ph.D. with a triple emphasis:  Popular Culture with an emphasis in film, Women’s Literature, and 20th Century American and Canadian Literature. She loves teaching film, cultural studies, literature and writing, particularly at a community college, and particularly at Spokane Falls, because she believes teaching at a community college is an act of revolution.

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with Sarah Bartusch

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 18

You've found yourself at Book Your Stocking, the annual reading series in which writers and readers wish for the book they most want to discover in their stocking or sock drawer this year.

Please welcome Sarah Bartusch to today's edition. 

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Calypso by David Sedaris, cover

So, I really struggle to make time for myself to read. However, I really, really enjoy David Sedaris's books, essays, diaries, and so on. I love his dry, dark humor. I almost need a diaper when reading his stuff. He says what I think--only funnier.

I read that Calypso is Sedaris' "top read," and if I love all of the other books that I've read so far, then this must be an amusing riot!

• Find Calypso at your bookstore.
• Discover Calypso at your library.
• Learn more about Calypso and David Sedaris at his website.

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About today's reader:

Sarah Bartusch

Sarah Bartusch lives in Terre Haute, Indiana where she works as a psychotherapist, writes poetry, and lives with her daughter and husband. She also runs 'th Poetry Asylum, a monthly poetry-reading series in its tenth year of existence. Learn more about the series at its Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thpoetryasylum/

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with John Kenny

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 17

For those celebrating the pagan, religious, or some mix of Christmas, we've now entered the last full week before that big day. So few days to write that book you want to give everyone, but enough time to order a book someone else wrote and hide it in your favorite person's stocking or under their pillow or wherever book-surprises happen where you live.

Here to recommend such a book is John Kenny, all the way from Dublin.

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Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

I’d like to pop Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector into other people’s stockings. It’s the story of Macabea, a young woman living in the slums of Rio who may or may not be real according to the author, Rodrigo, who may or may not be the author Clarice Lispector. It’s a short novel that is as much about the author, fictitious or real, as it is about Macabea; it’s about the act of writing, and of trying to avoid (or not) imposing a writer’s preconceived notions onto a life; it’s about fiction and the truth of fiction as opposed to reality, or so-called reality. It is at times a maddeningly frustrating read and yet, despite the digressions and the author’s hand very deliberately showing, the story of Macabea’s life shines through in all its splendid constraint; even as we witness the author’s intrusion and artifice, the reader feels for the person of the young woman and her lack of self-awareness and aspiration.

• Find Hour of the Star at your local bookstore.
• Discover Hour of the Star at your library.
• Learn more about the author here.

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About today's reader:

John Kenny

John Kenny is a writer, editor and creative writing tutor in Dublin, Ireland. His short stories have appeared in Revival Literary Journal, The Galway Review, Woman's Way, Emerald Eye (an anthology of the Best of Irish Imaginative Fiction), Transtories, Fear the Reaper, Uncertainties Vol 1 and many other venues. John was co-editor of Albedo One from its inception in 1993 until 2013. He is editor of original horror anthology Box of Delights for Aeon Press, Writing4All: The Best of 2009, and Decade 1: The Best of Albedo One. Learn more at https://johnrichardkenny.com/

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with Tatiana Ryckman

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 16

Welcome back to Book Your Stocking, the annual reading series in which readers and writers share the book they most want to discover in their stocking this year, whether that's a book they've read, want to read, or wish existed. 

Today's reader joins us from Austin, TX by way of a childhood in Cleveland, OH. Please welcome Tatiana Ryckman.

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So Sad Today + Melissa Broder

So Sad Today: Personal Essays
Melissa Broder

I often just think the name of this book as if it's an explanation for something, or an independent thought (similar to Heti's How Should a Person Be?--a question I ask myself often). I've seen the book in shops, I've heard it mentioned by friends, it just seems so ubiquitous and yet I haven't taken the plunge and bought the thing. It's starting to feel absurd that I haven't read it yet. I'd like to put my eyes where my brain is, I guess.

• Find So Sad Today at your local bookstore.
• Discover So Sad Today at your library.
• Learn more about Melissa Broder at her website.

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About today's reader:

Tatiana as a child in Cleveland, OH

TATIANA RYCKMAN is the author of the novella, I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) and two chapbooks of prose. She is the editor of Awst Press and has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, Arthub, and 100W. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Lithub, Paper Darts, Barrelhouse, and other publications. Tatiana can be found on airplanes or at tatianaryckman.com.

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with Melissa Stephenson

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 15

All December long, avid readers show up on Book Your Stocking to share the book they most want to discover in their stocking this year (or, I think, the book they most want you to discover in your stocking because readers are like that, always wanting to talk to other readers through book selections). 

And today's book-wisher is writer Melissa Stephenson, all the way from the Midwest, Southwest, and now Northwest.

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Asymmetery by Lisa Halliday

Asymmetry, a novel by Lisa Halliday, came to me on recommendation from someone whose taste I trust, and she was right: I've never read a book like this before. I mean that in a good way. I mean it in the way that I now understand why my friend said, I can't wait to talk about it when you finish. 

Because this book will whisk you away quickly, with sharp, bright prose and dialogue, and then it becomes something else. And something else again. And again. It's a narrative full of left turns, turns that add gravity and depth to the narrative. If you get it in your stocking, I'd love to talk about it when you finish.

• Find Asymmetry at your local bookstore.
• Discover Asymmetry at your library.
• Learn more about Lisa Halliday at her publisher's website.

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About today's reader:

Melissa Stephenson

Melissa Stephenson's writing has appeared in publications such as  Blackbird, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, ZYZZYVA, and Fourth Genre. Her memoir, Driven, a memoir of cars, childhood, and loss, was released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July of 2018. She lives in Missoula, Montana with her two kids. Learn more at https://melissa-stephenson.squarespace.com

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with Rajia Hassib

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 14

Welcome to Book Your Stocking, an annual reading recommendation series in which writers and readers share the books they'd most love to discover in their stockings, or sock drawers, or doormats this year--whether that's a book they've read, want to read, or wish would exist. 

Please welcome novelist Rajia Hassib for sharing today's bok-wish.  

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Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat has always been one of my favorite authors. She writes with a tender authority, with compassion and yet with the severity of a truth well drawn, and she masterfully manages to present characters living in a different country and representing a different culture as ones as familiar to us as family—and isn’t that the dream of every minority writer? But I only recently stumbled upon her collection of essays, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, and I found that it was one of those rare books that I read and felt as if I was the ideal audience for it: a book about writing as an immigrant, about being an immigrant and an artist, about the ties that bind readers and writers of totally different backgrounds. 

In the book’s titular first chapter, Danticat writes: “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” It’s a reminder of the freedom we take for granted, of the people all around the world who are still persecuted and murdered for attempting to speak their minds, of how writing and reading are often acts of challenging authority, of exhibiting “disobedience to a directive,” and of how, all around the world, peoples still do it all the same. Recent reality is a reminder that such risks are still present, often closer to home than we like to admit. Jamal Khashoggi would agree, I think. 

Those essays remind me of how important writing is, challenge me to reconsider my identity and how I’m presenting it, and that assure me that we should all be passionate about reading and writing while also challenging me to do better. I love all of Danticat’s work, but these essays have a special place in my heart. 

• Find Create Dangerously at your local bookstore.
• Discover Create Dangerously at your library.
• Learn more about Edwidge Danticat at her website.

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About today's reader:

Rajia Hassib, photo by The Oberports

Rajia Hassib was born and raised in Egypt and moved to the United States when she was twenty-three. Her first novel, In the Language of Miracles, was a New York Times Editor's Choice and received an honorable mention from the Arab American Book Award. Her second novel, A Pure Heart, is forthcoming from Viking (Penguin) in August of 2019. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Marshall University, and she has written for The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker online. She lives in West Virginia with her husband and two children. Learn more at https://www.rajiahassib.com/

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with Eva Silverstone

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 13

Welcome back to Book Your Stocking, the annual series in which avid readers share the ONE book they'd love to discover in their stocking this winter. Today's reader is The Most Certified of Book Suggesters, which as you know, is a librarian's official title. 

Thanks to Eva Silverstone for creating today's installment of Book Your Stocking.

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The Book of Dust

I would love to receive The Book of Dust (Volume 2) by Philip Pullman, but it hasn’t been released yet. His Dark Materials is a three-book series by Philip Pullman that is one of my most favorite ever. La Belle Sauvage is the first book in the follow-up series to His Dark Materials (actually a prequel), and I tore through that book with incredible gusto. I can’t wait for the next installment. Philip Pullman creates a world where magic, religion and life all mix and it’s fascinating and smart and challenges readers to think. I love this!

How to learn more about this book:

• Visit Philip Pullman's website for updates about release dates
• Begin reading the trilogy at your local library.
• Locate his works at your local bookstore.

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About today's reader:

Eva Silverstone

Eva Silverstone works at the Downtown Public Library in Spokane, WA where she’s in charge of all the art exhibits at that location. She also works the reference desk, manages the meeting rooms, and does “other duties as assigned.” One of her favorite things is recommending books to people. When not at work, Eva makes her own art which has recently been textile based.

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with Michael Noll

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 12

It's the twelfth day of Christmas, and one of my truest book-loving friends is here to share the book he'd be most pleased to pull from his stocking this winter. 

Please welcome today's reader, Michael Noll. 

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Heavy: An American Memoir

Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon (2017)

I can't remember the last book that I've finished and immediately thought, "I need to read this again," but that's the case with Kiese Laymon's memoir Heavy. 

He writes about weight, food, and his childhood growing up the brilliant black son of a brilliant black mother who was a university professor but often scraping by (and sometimes not). 

The book intentionally cuts across the usual narratives of bootstrap self-improvement found in such stories and is written in one of the most captivating voices in current American prose (which is why the audiobook was named the best of the year by Audible).

• Find Heavy at your local bookstore.
• Locate Heavy at your library
• Learn more about Heavy at the publisher website (Simon and Schuster 2018)
• Discover the writer Kiese Laymon at his author website.

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Michael Noll

About today's reader:

Michael Noll is the author of The Writer's Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction and short stories that have appeared, most recently, in Crazyhorse. He edits the craft-of-writing blog Read to Write Stories and works as the Program Director for the Writers' League of Texas. 

Learn what books Michael recommended on last year's Book Your Stocking.

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with Michael J. Wolfe

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 11

Thank you for returning to today's Book Your Stocking. Every December day of 2018, avid readers are sharing the one book they'd be glad to find in their winter stocking this year. Please welcome Michael J. Wolfe back to this year's edition. Read his last year's book recommendations, here.

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Half-Light: Collected Poems
by Frank Bidart

It would delight and no doubt astound me to find in my stocking Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart, because 

1. throughout the years his poems have always been around but not close enough; I’ve never owned one of his books; 
2. What could be better than waking up on Christmas morning to a giant book of gay poems with a beheading gracing the cover?
3. My stocking is so tiny and barely fit for a gift-card that for this 700+ page book to be in my stocking would mean something impossible would have occurred overnight, and I’d very much like to believe in that possibility as well as in the magic in Bidart’s poetry. 

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Michael J. Wolfe

About today's reader: 

Michael J. Wolfe lives in L.A. where he is currently developing a documentary series based on queer history. He can be found online at WolfeWrites.com.

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html

Book Your Stocking with Jack Kaulfus

Book Your Stocking: December 10

We've officially entered week two of the holiday season. This is the second year of Book Your Stocking, a series in which avid readers recommend the books they've most loved in the past year and would be delighted to find in their own stockings, socks, or slippers. 

Today's contributor is Jack Kaulfus, whose book-list I meant to feature last year, but I lost the list through the crevices of email and discovered it too late. Luckily, Jack agreed to share the list this year. Please welcome author Jack Kaulfus!

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Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett
One of my favorite books by Everett is Wounded, which is about all my favorite subjects: queer cowboys, horses, and the intersection of cultural violence, racism, and environmental disasters. I was thrilled to see Everett return to this territory, and am happily making my way through these wry, emotionally hefty stories.

Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
This book has really stuck with me. For all its humor and character-driven drama, it's also a fast-paced mystery that tackles mental illness, cultural oppression, and gender identity. I listened to it, and it was a terrific recording with a excellent voice actor at the helm.

His Bloody Project by Graeme McRae Burnet
If you're like me and you secretly want to move to Wales and never return, this book will do until you can get your hands on some more Welsh fiction.  Even though it does take place in Scotland in 1869, it's got murder, peat bogs, and a schoolmaster named Gillie. It's a fictionalized dossier detailing the stories of a few people involved in a terrible family murder. The varying points of view deftly examine issues of class, education, and gender, making it a fantastic, layered mystery.

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Reading this book was like watching a movie. It took a little longer, but not much, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about this particular multiverse since. This may be because I'm sci-fi soft and need my quantum physics to be couched in a dysfunctional family, but this one is two thumbs up for that day you can't afford Netflix anymore but you feel like some Black Mirror.

Her Body and Other Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
Kind of horrific, kind of funny, kind of inappropriate, complicated, multi-layered, super-feminist. Like every good book should be.

Marlena by Julie Buntin
I'm so happy this book exists. It's a meditative, page-turning, satisfying story about a beautiful mess of characters in a lot of snow. I barreled through it in the way that you can when you're actually enjoying each sentence.

Large Animals by Jess Arndt
Unabashedly queer and grounded in the visceral, Large Animals is a treasure of original writing, images, and ideas. Carefully crafted around characters who are struggling with some of the most basic questions of being, these stories always seem inches from going off the rails. That element of uncertainty under the control of Arndt is exhilarating and ultimately completely satisfying.

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Jack Kaulfus

Jack Kaulfus is the author of  the story collection Tomorrow or Forever (Transgress Press 2018). Jack lives in Austin, Texas with their spouse, Bianca. Learn more about Jack, their writing, and upcoming appearances at jackaulfus.com. Follow Jack on Facebook.

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

http://www.erinpringle.com/p/book-your-stocking.html