Some of the best writers in the world have spoken at The Santa Barbara Writers Conference (SBWC) since its inception in 1972—William Styron, Ray Bradbury, Joan Didion, Eudora Welty, Clive Cussler, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton, Jane Smiley and many more. This year with cities on lockdown because of Covid-19 and many of us sheltering in place, we’ve had to postpone this year’s conference. We know how disappointing this news is. Still, books can help us put things into perspective, expand our horizons or simply wow us with the sheer force of language and story. So, as a treat for our faithful SBWC attendees, we asked some of the authors who have spoken at SBWC or were scheduled to speak this year—Armando Lucas Correa, Alexandra Fuller and Shannon Pufahl—to tell us about their favorite books and why they mean so much to them. Think of it as a reading list to get you through self-isolation for however long it lasts or to get you through the year until we meet again.
ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA, editor of People en Español and the author of The German Girl and The Daughter’s Tale, came up with a list of ten remarkably diverse books.
1. I read Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert when I was 10 and was fascinated by that woman who drank spoonfuls of vinegar so she would look emaciated to her husband. It's the perfect novel. When I left Cuba and arrived in the United States, I asked my mother to send me my books. One day, she told me that someone could bring me one book, only one. Picking it among hundreds was a challenge. I asked her to send me my worn-out copy of Madame Bovary. This served as inspiration for the bookstore owner in The Daughter's Talewhen she has to save her most precious book from Nazi Germany’s book burning pyres.
2. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar is another youthful reading that made me fall in love with La Maga and Paris. Hopscotch is one of my favorite novels because of its use of language and structure.
3. Memoir of Hadrian and Fires by Marguerite Yourcenar have been constant companions since college. They were a true discovery for me. Classic characters and mythological Greeks mingle with an astonishing everydayness in the hands of Yourcenar.
4. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima is my favorite novel by this Japanese author: the master and the disciple and the weight of guilt in a caste society.
5. On Writing is Stephen King’s masterpiece. Everyone who intends to write should read and re-read this unique work by the master of horror novels. I've acquired the habit, which has become almost a superstition, of reading On Writing every time I start writing a new book.
6. Our House in the Last World by Oscar Hijuelos is a debut novel, but of all his books, it's my favorite, and I recently re-read it. It's the most Cuban of all his novels, the most traumatic and the one that best reflects the questions of identity of an entire generation of children of immigrants or exiles in a language that is very close to the Latin American boom.
7. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. One of my favorite American writers, she reconstructs loss from a scientific and emotional level. Her mix of medical terms with what she’s dealing with as she loses a husband is masterful.
8. 2666 by Roberto Bolaños is a real masterpiece. I know that The Savage Detectiveswas the work that earned him his place in world literature, but his posthumous work is my favorite. Bolaños mixes several novels in one, their stories hermetically sealed capsules. His sense of humor, the use of irony in his language, the way he manipulates the reader, all make his writing exciting. His paragraphs defy gravity and logic. When Bolaños writes, he plays with his readers, setting them up for a fall.
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez was also childhood reading for me, but it’s a book I have revisited during my adolescence and adulthood. You can always discover something new and be charmed into the magical world of the inhabitants of Macondo.
10. The Occupation Trilogy by Patrik Modiano is a novel that at the same time is a book of quotes from characters who come and go during the Nazi occupation. It's a book that helped me understand the French during the German occupation so I could write The Daughter's Tale.
SIMON VAN BOOY has the soul of a poet. He is also the award-winning author of thirteen books. His short story collection, Love Begins in Winter, won the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
1. Buddy by Nigel Hinton: First time I connected to a character. I read it in 1986. This is one of the best books I've ever read, and after re-reading it, it's still magnificent. And by some miracle, I'm now friends with the author.
2. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels: First time a novel made me want to write. More because of the language than the story. I'm still much more interested in language than story.
3. Plainsong by Kent Haruf: This book is a fantastic example of pure storytelling where there's little trace of the author.
4. The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin: This book reminds me to find beauty and wonder in the everyday.
5. The Complete Poems of Dylan Thomas: While I understand little, reading his work breaks down walls into new territories of language.
ALEXANDRA FULLER (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood and Travel Light, Move Fast) is a British-Zimbabwean author who lives in Wyoming. The bestselling memoirist and journalist has managed to find an upside to self-isolation. “It’s been a while since I have been able to spend uninterrupted time with my library,” she says. “Like everything else, it’s thinned over the years (all those disruptive relationships and sudden moves and the upending griefs of an eventful middle age, both expected and unexpected), but the works of the poets and mystics and prophets have stayed with me throughout—some new, some old—some half read and waiting for a more patient understanding, one read and re-read until the pages are shredded. So, it’s to them I have turned with fresh humility.” Hers is less a list than a deep dive into the books that have resonated strongly with her over the years.
“Two years ago, I stumbled across a copy of Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky in a little church in Kilauea on the island of Kauai,” says Fuller, whose son had recently died. She and her daughters had gone to Hawaii to get out of the “geography of our grief.” When she came home to Wyoming, she bought a copy of the book, which has not since left her bedside table. “Rumi—the fire hose of sacred verse—is featured in Ladinsky’s collection, of course, and also Hafiz,” she says, “but so too are Mira, Saint Teresa and Meister Eckhart, whose Love Does That is a poem to be read aloud to one another in times of adversity.”
Fuller also suggests Charles Wright’s 2007 book-length poem, Littlefoot. “Wright wrote the poem as a diary in his 70th year as a meditation on nature, death, all of it,” she says. “The poets are always the practical ones, pointing us in the direction of ourselves, which brings me to the sublime music and rich art and ecstatic words of Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth century German Benedictine abbess, writer, environmentalist, feminist, gardener, prophet, composer, artist, visionary, outspoken firebrand and occasional hysteric. I like this about her: She could pitch an impressive fit, and she had the spiritual chops to back it up. At fourteen, Hildegard was enclosed for some years—it’s uncertain how many—with her 20-year-old teacher, Jutta, in an anchor hold attached to the Benedictine monastery in Disibodenberg. Hildegard had an extraordinarily vivid relationship with the sacred. From the age of three or five, she reported receiving Divine instructions. She also made elaborate gold-leaf-adorned sacred art of her visions.” Fuller recommends Hildegard von Bingen: A Journey into the Images by Sara Salvadori as a good place to start. “I am currently in the midst of a very slow read of her Scivias—Know the Ways. ‘But a person has within him three paths,’ she writes. ‘What are they? The soul, the body and the senses; and all human life is led there.’ And so, as in all times, body and soul insist on being kept together, and the senses quicken to this demand. There will be spring in the mountains soon. Snow will recede from the meadow, soil will emerge black and wet, and elk calves will drop in the cottonwood forests. And I will be giving fresh attention to my garden; I already am.” Every gardener knows the addiction of seed catalogs, and Fuller has quite a few. At the moment she is perusing them in careful consideration with Diana Maranhao’s Rocky Mountains Fruit & Vegetable Gardening. “She writes that the important thing, as if for this exact moment,” says Fuller, “is that you grow (garden) and continue growing (gardening)!”
JANET FITCH is the author of the national bestseller White Oleander as well as her epic novels of the Russian Revolution: The Revolution of Marina M and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral. “It’s so particular to ones’ own taste and changes over time,” she said when we asked her to name five of her favorite books, but she narrowed it down to these:
1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Doestoevsky. The intensity, the extremes, the psychological acuity, the compelling crime—Doestoevsky made me the writer I am, and this is his magnum opus. He was influenced by Poe and Dickens, and so was I!
2. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. The most astonishing work of art, the death of the English consul in Cuernavaca, Mexico on the day of the dead 1939. It’s all about resonances, echoes, repeating images.
3. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (or the first one, Justine, if I can’t have the whole Quartet). People don’t read Durrell enough. I’d like to revive him—nobody writes more beautifully, more sensually, with an artist’s eye. The world of high society and the demimonde in Alexandria, Egypt between the wars.
4. The Lover by Marguerite Duras. A slender book of sexuality, rebellion, colonialism and individuation as a woman looks back to her poverty-stricken girlhood in French Indochina and her wealthy Chinese lover. What Duras can get into 125 pages is a marvel.
5. The Perfect Spy by John Le Carre. One of our great writers, often neglected because he writes genre (spy novels), this is a book as psychologically acute as Doestoevsky’s. Young Magnus Pym struggles to find a distance and a moral framework as he’s co-opted by his con-man father. It’s his most autobiographical work.
She also graciously offered a list of books for quarantine. “They’re a bit lighter than my favorites (though you can’t go wrong with John Le Carre),” she says. “Either mesmerizing and not too dreary, or actually hilarious.”
1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrente—first novel in the Neapolitan quartet, the friendship of two girls from the slums of Naples. Bringing seriousness and close observation to the lives of women. Nobody is better at tracking the small movement of emotion and loyalties than Ferrente.
2. Lolly Willowes by Silvia Townsend Warner. Witchiness in a Victorian home as the oppressed maiden aunt rebels against her role as unpaid servant.
3. Bleak House by Charles Dickens. The lawsuit that wouldn’t die. Dickens’ funniest book.
4. Drop City by TC Boyle. Hapless hippies decide to move to Alaska to live off the land. Who said nobody remembers the ‘60s?
5. The Sword in the Stone by TH White. This is a beautiful book, far more exciting than Harry Potter, and if you have only read the Disney version, you need to remedy this failing.
6. The Group by Mary McCarthy. Follows a group of Vassar girls through their lives. Trash from the pen of a major writer is always FABULOUS, and The Group is just delicious.
SHANNON PUFAHL can craft a metaphor with the best of them. Set in the American West in 1956, her debut novel, On Swift Horses, brims with beautiful language and creates its own kind of mythology. She recommends The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje; All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy; Houskeeping by Marilynne Robinson; So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell; and The Known World by Edward P. Jones. For the record, Michael Ondaatje called So Long, See You Tomorrow, which was published in 1996, “one of the great books of our age.” Pufahl suggests that The English Patient is a “great book for being brought together in a time of crisis, since the characters are camped out in an Italian villa at the end of World War II.” The author is also reading Silence by Jane Brox, a social history of one of the least understood elements of our lives. “I’d say it’s a good time to think about and practice silence,” she says. “It’s important to be together and find ways to connect right now, but it’s also a great opportunity to be quiet.” Still looking for another book about silence and why it’s more important now than ever? Pufahl recommends Silence: In the Age of Noise by Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge.
STEPH POST (Miraculum and Holding Smoke) grew up in the backwoods outside of St. Augustine, Florida, with a deep connection to the land and a keen appreciation of the outsider. She lives about an hour north of Tampa, Florida, where she raises a brood of chickens with very specific personalities.
1. I read Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient for the first (of many) times when I was sixteen, and it still remains my favorite novel. Ever. For the language and for the love story, for all the tiny heartbreaks along the way. It's also one of the books that made me desperately want to be a writer one day.
2. Maybe there's something about the current craziness of our world that makes us return to the past, but I've also been thinking a lot about The Rapture of Cannan by Sherri Reynolds. I was 17 when I first read this novel about a girl living and fighting within a poor, Southern, fundamentalist community, and I knew not only that I wanted to be a writer, but that I “could” be a writer, that beautiful stories could be written about the ugliest of people and places and that there was room for my voice, too, in the literary world.
3. Apart from these two gems, I've been thinking about the books that can get us through isolation, distancing and, you know, daily panic attacks about the future. Last year I discovered Sharon Kay Penman and her absolutely compelling medieval historical series and stand-alones. I'm currently reading her latest novel, The Land Beyond the Sea, but for one anyone new to her work, I'd suggest starting with Here Be Dragons, the first of her Welsh trilogy. Penman writes with such immersive detail that it’s easy to get lost in the trials and tribulations of a thousand years ago and forget about our own for a while.
4. If historical fiction doesn't cut it for you, but you'd still like to escape into a few thousand pages, I'd say now is the perfect time to dive into an epic fantasy series like Katherine Derr’s Deverry series. Start with Daggerspell and continue on for another 15 books. If you started now, the world might be back to normal before you reach the epic conclusion.
5. And finally, check out The Goshawk by T. H. White. It's a slim volume, but one that cuts like a knife. The memoir of a man struggling to tame, but ultimately understand, a hawk in isolation is striking and resonating. As our horizons necessarily close in, this is a book to turn to find patience and the appreciation of life outside of our own.
