PenguinReaders' Group
 

Author Book Choices

Julie & Julia

We asked our Featured Author, Julie Powell, author of Julie & Julia, to recommend three books to our readers.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child

This is a gimme, of course, but I feel that Mastering is probably on my top three list for good, and not only because it was the book that quite literally turned my life around. The book is truly a masterpiece - Ms. Child, with her combination of scientific rigor, innate good humor, and sharp, clear, witty writing, created a book that changed and enlarged the American culinary landscape forever.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

Actually, it's hard to pick one DFW book I love more than the others. But I just re-read this one recently, after having despised it when I first read it years ago, and I find myself stunned by its harsh, disturbing beauty. Wallace was, of course, a brilliantly intelligent man and extraordinarily original writer, with a mind that constantly struggled for new, authentic ways to express itself on the page; but he was also kind - to his readers, his characters and his non-fiction subjects. As an examination of male rage in the face of the feminine, Brief Interviews is, for a woman, an extremely tough read. But once you get past the furious howls of his characters, you see the vulnerability beneath, and it's heartbreaking - a masochistically sharp examination of Wallace's own impulses and fears. I only wish he could have found a way to be as generous to himself as he always was to his audience.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro

Again, it's impossible for me to pick just one book or story by Ms. Munro. She's everything I want to be and am not (yet - knock wood) as a writer - wise, considered, concise. Her landscapes and situations can be bleak, but she never takes the possibility of hope, or acceptance, away from her characters. Prose that crystalline, simple and beautiful is what inspires me to try to write.