Grant recommends the book All This Could Be Yours, the latest novel by Jami Attenberg. An imperious father in a coma, and the family who comes to terms with his life and effect on them. If you’re familiar with her earlier book The Middlesteins, you’ll recognize the same sharp, well-observed writing. Other recommendations for the book lovers on your holiday gift list: A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, the lavishly illustrated anthology of letters edited by Maria Popova of Brainpickings and Claudia Bedrick, and Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, a smart, engaging, introduction to language and linguistics by linguist Gretchen McCulloch. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “2019 End-of-the-Year Book Recommendations”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Earlier in the show, I recommended the book Greek to Me by Mary Norris.
And I’m wondering what you have in your pocket there, Grant.
I have a book that I’ve been really enjoying. This is Jamie Attenberg’s latest novel, All This Could Be Yours. It is a dark glimpse at a family who is in trouble. The imperious, powerful father is in a coma, and while this is happening, the mother and the grown children are coming to terms with who he is, what he’s done, and what he’s done to them and the world around them. And they’re trying to sort themselves out over a very long day.
So from each of them, we kind of get a point of view. We get dark wit, digressions, dysfunction, a lot of self-justification. And we kind of get all these problems that they’ve created for themselves but a lot of it is through the lens of their relationship with this terrible man. But again, there’s some wit here. I don’t want to make this too terrible and too dark. What I look for in novels, just so you know, is a sense of place and characters who seem to be headed to becoming something else. And I like writers who seem to want to take them there without hesitation. What I don’t like is writers who seem to dither on their way to a point and dither on their way to an arc. And Jamie Attenberg doesn’t do that here. This book is everything that I want in a novel. And if you know Jamie Attenberg’s earlier books like The Middlesteins, then you’ll see here a lot of her same sharp writing. She has a good writer’s ear, and you’ll see a lot more of that. She seems to have grown quite a bit since that novel. And I appreciate that. I like seeing the arc of a writer as well across their career.
This is a great book, and I want to recommend it to you, Martha, and to everyone else. This is All This Could Be Yours by Jamie Ettenberg.
It’s interesting. My father always said it’s great to pick a writer and just kind of live with them for a while.
That’s right. And I love the idea of following the arc of a writer like that.
Well, we can’t talk about book recommendations without recommending a couple of others that we’ve mentioned before. The book that I am going to be giving as a gift to people this year is A Velocity of Being. That’s edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick. And it’s a collection of letters from famous people to young readers about the joy of reading. And it also contains some amazing art with every single letter.
And I think the language book of the year, besides the Mary Norris one that you mentioned earlier in the show, that you and I both agree is the language book of the year, is Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet. This is a fun, fast read that will bring you up to speed with how language works on the internet. It’s about why English is as healthy as ever and why everything between the most formal and the most informal language has found a welcome home on the internet, the most democratic of all media.
So that’s Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. And we’d love to hear what you’re reading. Give us your recommendations. Send them to words@waywordradio.org or find us on Twitter at Wayword.
