A reading list for Rory Gilmore

by Zeljka Marosevic

The rumours had been raging all summer but it was only a couple of weeks ago that Netflix confirmed it would be reuniting the cast of Gilmore Girls for four new 90 minute episodes. Fifteen years after the drama first aired, and eight years since it ended, Gilmore Girls is still fiercely loved by its fans. And if those fans can be characterised in one word, that word is bookish.

Not many hit dramas are about characters who are big readers, and Gilmore Girls filled this void. As a teenager Rory Gilmore always carried a bag large enough to fit in a book, and during her time at Yale she preferred staying in and studying to throwing parties. She began her high school valedictorian speech with the words: “I live in two worlds, one is a world of books.” That world extended to the fast-paced conversations with her mother Lorelai, which were stuffed with literary references, and many of the episodes have titles that are puns on the names of books or authors.

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The Impersonal Is Political

On her new album, Joanna Newsom—like writer Elena Ferrante and country singer Iris DeMent—performs a vanishing act, in order to make her audience see her more clearly.

The Guardian view on the Baileys women’s prize for fiction – still needed, 20 years on

Irish writer Eimear McBride won the 2014 Baileys women’s prize for fiction with her ‘gleefully’ experimental first novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. Photograph: Teri Pengilley

“If female experience, stories and art are undervalued, everyone misses out. One only has to look at the sheer ravenousness with which Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels about female friendship have been devoured over the past few years to see that art that passes the Bechdel test is hungered for. (To pass this test, devised by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, a story must involve two women having a conversation that is not about men.)”

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Local bestsellers

PAPERBACK

FICTION

1. My Brilliant Friend By Elena Ferrante Europa Editions

2. The Martian By Andy Weir Broadway

3. Euphoria By Lily King Grove Press

4. Station Eleven By Emily St. John Mandel Vintage

5. Lila By Marilynne Robinson Picador USA

6. Everything I Never Told You By Celeste NgPenguin

7. The Boston Girl By Anita Diamant Scribner

8. A Brief History of Seven Killings By Marlon James Riverhead

9. The Best American Short Stories 2015 By T.C. Boyle & Heidi Pitlor (Eds.) Mariner

10. The Paying Guests By Sarah Waters Riverhead

The Year We Obsessed Over Identity

Ferrante included in a New York Times Magazine slideshow about 2015’s obsession with identity.

2015’s headlines and cultural events have confronted us with the malleability of racial, gender, sexual and reputational lines. Who do we think we are?

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Francesca Mari of ‘Texas Monthly’ Has Article Recs for Ya | MEDIA DIET

The editor and writer on European cinema, Elena Ferrante, and noisy waiters at the Alamo Drafthouse.

Colin St. John

October 28, 2015

Yarn Registry BLOG – book round-up, part 1

By Dylan Taylor-Lehman

Published: October 28, 2015

Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is book one of a subtle, jarring, beautiful, and difficult series that chronicles the friendship of Elena and Lena as they grow up together in a working-class neighborhood in 1950s Naples. The events of the novel play out as straightforward as do the events of life – their progression can be charted linearly, no matter the emotional and spiritual complications behind them, because life is unstoppable. The book’s complexity lies in its simultaneously delicate and unflinching exploration of their reactions to outwardly simple events. A person is just as easily held hostage to the petty jealousies of adolescence as she is to her seemingly inescapable station in life. The tragic beauty of the novel is in the way it which it explores how Lila and Elena use each other to grow up. Their relationship is tumultuous because the person you’re closest to can also seem like the person you’re furthest from. (The fact that Ferrante is a pen name and that the author’s real identity is essentially unknown makes the lessons in the book seem all the more universal but also much more personal, and haunting in both respects.)

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Radio Hour: Clarice Lispector, Harry G. Frankfurt, and “Maybe Connect” by LARB AV

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND has been selected as the November book for The Diane Rehm Show’s on-air book club “Readers’ Review” (NPR). The show will air Wednesday, November 25 from 11am to noon EST.

The secrets behind the practice of good writing: 37

by Jo-Anne Richards

How to bring sincerity to your work

The Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has been much praised by critics for the “sincerity” of her voice. But her comments on how a writer achieves this sincerity surprised and delighted me.

She called sincerity the “torment and, at the same time, the engine of every literary project”.

I expected her to talk about experience and caring, or heart and empathy. Instead, she said the most urgent question for a writer was not: what experience can I bring to bear? What is my material?

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Northern California best-sellers, week ending Oct. 18.