30 before 30!

A week or so ago, I turned the big 2-9, and given that I only have just under 360 days left in my 20s, I'm putting together a literary bucket list of sorts:  My 30 before 30.  This is comprised of books I've either been dying to read, should have read by this point, or want to revisit with the perspective of age.


Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck
Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading


Of course I'll supplement with my typical diet of new releases and review all along the way.  Looking forward to getting started!!!

Review: Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

title: Stone Arabia [purchase here]

author: Dana Spiotta

pages: 239

genre: literary fiction

originally published: 2011

source:  New York Public Library

Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta's third novel, follows Denise as she tries to gently hold together the pieces of a family as it drifts slowly in different directions.  Her mother suffers from a dementia she is adamant she doesn't have and Denise must come to terms with something more scary than becoming her mother:  becoming her mother's parent.  Her brother Nik, a *fascinatingly* complex character, lives by the mantra "self-curate or disappear," and has amassed an enormous collection of documents, recordings, etc, referred to as "the Chronicles," all fictitious, chronicling life how he sees it?  how he wishes it was?  And how does Denise deal with the pressure?  Displacement.  She begins to have excessively empathetic reactions to items in the 24 hour news cycle.

Spiotta's novel is riveting, refreshingly of the moment but at the same time, timeless in terms of the lives of the characters and the challenges they face.

One scene that I thought worked incredibly well was a scene in which Denise learns her mother has tried to shoplift and then refers to the cop as a "mick," behavior completely opposite of her character.

"Where in her brain was this coming from?  The doctor wasn't sure of the nature of her dementia, or how fast it would progress.  He just called it likely Alzheimer's.  He couldn't tell me what I could expect.  Anything was typical.  Anything was possible.  At first I didn't think it really mattered--they were all equally untreatable.  What difference did it make if it was this or that part of the frontal lobe?  But I wasn't quite prepared for this latest sign of deterioration.  It wasn't just forgetting the past or repeating the same thing over and over.  It was actually remixing and changing the wiring.  It was creating new things, it was changing her in real ways.  She wasn't just losing her social inhibitions, nothing as benign as that.  She was starting to get paranoid, and it made her someone else, someone a little mean.  It just didn't seem fair." (Spiotta, pgs 139-140)

Rubric rating:  8.  I can't wait to read Eat the Document and Lightning Field.