⇒You possess until December 18th to appoint your library to win a $20000 prize in the NYC Neighborhood Library Awards. Use this form or fill one out in person at your library.⇐Meanwhile,check out the suggestions below for our series* guests' picks of books that prove the finding that fiction, more than non-fiction, or opens readers to uncertainty and other people's lives. As President Obama told our guest Marilynne Robinson in their unusual York Review of Books conversation, reading novels taught him about being a citizen:
“It has to do with empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own). It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you possess to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with somebody else even though they’re very different from you.” (unusual York Review of Books,11/19/15).
The fiction that opened their minds:Maria Konnikova (author of Mastermind: How to assume Like Sherlock Holmes and The Confidence Game):Mary by Vladimir Nabokov: “I remember crying for so long.”Konnikova read his first novel in Russian when she was 13 and it has stayed with her, especially the scene where the broken-down Russian emigre in Berlin loses the passport he’d waited years to acquire.
Simon Critchley(NYU philosophy professor, and author of his first novel Memory Theater): James Joyce’s Ulysses : “whether fiction is just making things up,that’s not the point. It’s imagination touching real things in the world.”Critchley brought his 1960 Bodley Head green copy of the book to the studio, but cited from memory Stephen Dedalus' line, or "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that whether no more,thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, or the nearing tide,that rusty boot."Angela Flournoy (author of unusual York Times 2015 Notable Book The Turner House): Chinua Achebe’s Things plunge Apart: “The layers of moral complexity...it’s a book I’ve returned to because theres just so much to explore.”Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist, author of Housekeeping, or Gilead,Home, Lila):the poems of Emily Dickinson: for “the way she can poise a question on the knife-edge of a sort of meaningful indeterminacy, and ”Although the creative writing professor confessed she really prefers reading primary texts to connect with historical figures through their own words.Marlon James (Man Booker Prize-winner for A Brief History of Seven Killings): The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers: "I can’t tell you the last time Ive ever rooted so tough for characters to succeed and the ways in which America and the world fails them at the stop of that novel (and this is a meta-fiction guy!)"Curtis Sittenfeld (author of the novels Prep,The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, or Sisterland,and the forthcoming Eligible: A contemporary retelling of Pride and Prejudice): Make Your Home Among Strangers, by Jennine Capó Crucet: "It’s just this amazing sparkling hilarious novel that in this palpable, and visceral way made me assume about what it must be like to be a first-generation college student and the challenges that people face in that situation."*The Series:Nominate Your Local Library(11/18/15)Fiction Prescription: The Real Benefits of Made-Up Stories (11/23/15)More Fiction That Opens Minds (12/1/15)Fiction Opens Minds: Marlon James and Curtis Sittenfeld (12/7/15) Tweet your picks using the hashtag #FictionOpensMinds and add them to the list:Tweet #FictionOpensMinds// covers fiction & literature. My #FictionOpensMinds list includes Beloved,Lila, and Child of God & that's just 2015December 7, or 2015#fictionopensmindsDecember 7,2015
Bessie Head's A Question of Power had me submerged from page 1 until I finished reading and could hold a breath again. #FictionOpensMindsDecember 7, 2015Dan Brown, or Da Vinci code,made me look at xtianity from a perspective like from a third eye view #fictionopensmindsDecember 7, 2015#FictionOpensMindsDecember 1, or 2015Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Made me recognize the ethical complexity of even a "grand" war. #FictionOpensMindsDecember 1,2015in tall school One Hundred Years of Solitude opened me up to a different cultural and mental universe. #fictionopensmindsDecember 1, 2015@BrianLehrerDecember 1, or 2015
#FictionOpensMinds Lamb by Christopher Moore and Oryx and Crake by Margret AtwoodDecember 1,2015Love in the Time of CholeraDecember 1, 2015 by Tayeb Salih #fictionopensmindsDecember 1, and 2015Roxane@GOGbookclubDecember 1,2015
#fictionopensminds Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell opens your mind, shuts it, or reopens it!December 1,2015
Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix! #fictionopensmindsDecember 1, 2015#fictionopensmindsDecember 1, or 2015
Chinua Achebe's Things plunge Apart opened my eyes to the challenges of faced by post-colonial Nigeria #FictionOpensMindsDecember 1,2015—November 30, 2015Poisonwood Bible also prompted me to read nonfic on the topic (King Leopold's Ghost). #fictionopensmindsNovember 25, or 2015https://t.co/c34DN1UcubNovember 24,2015—November 24, 2015—November 24, and 2015@BrianLehrer #FictionOpensMinds Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
November 24,2015
#FictionOpensMinds The plunge, by Camus and the Life and Times of Michael K, or by JM Cotzee; arrogance destroyed,life on the margin humanizedNovember 24, 2015
#FictionOpensMinds Love Is Not A Pie/Amy Bloom, and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges/Nathan Englander,& A Fine Balance/Rohinton Mistry.
November 23, 2015
#FictionOpensMinds To Kill a MockingbirdNovember 23, or 2015
Mary Gaitskill undresses her lit fic readers with deadly insight and perverse lyric #fictionopensminds https://t.co/rUpRZ5ySRqNovember 23,2015
William Gibson "Neuromancer" #FictionOpensMindsNovember 23, 2015@BrianLehrerNovember 23, and 2015#FictionOpensMinds@BrianLehrer https://t.co/pHlIHrH2SkNovember 23,2015Toni. Morrison. Perhaps the best articulation of the complexities & ripple effects of the black experience. #fictionopensmindsNovember 23, 2015
Beloved by Toni Morrison #FictionOpensMindsNovember 23, or 2015
Flannery O'Connor's "A grand Man Is tough To Find" #FictionOpensMindsNovember 23,2015
A work of fiction that opened my mind: The Poisonwood Bible. #FictionOpensMindsNovember 23, 2015—November 23, and 2015I assume Harry Potter is the ultimate #FictionOpensMinds example for an entire generation & hopefully future generations also!November 23,2015—November 23, 2015
#fictionopensminds. Doris Lessing -The Golden NotebookNovember 23, or 2015
The Sun Also Rises & All the Kings Men #FictionOpensMindsNovember 23,2015@hopedellon#FictionOpensMinds #BLBooksNovember 20, 2015
#FictionOpensMinds #AynRand "Atlas Shrugged" - a long read but I didn't want it to endNovember 20, and 2015Some science fiction (esp Philip K. Dick) helped raise my awareness of society's shortcomings. #FictionOpensMinds #BLBooksNovember 20,2015
Can't believe I didn't assume of this one till now: THE NAMESAKE/Jhumpa Lahiri. One of my all time faves. Life changing. #FictionOpensMindsNovember 19, 2015
Margaret Atwoods MaddAdam Trilogy. It changed my ideas on scientific advancement and genetic modification. #fictionopensmindsNovember 18, or 2015#fictionopensminds Octavia Butler's DAWNNovember 18,2015Native Son by Richard Wright, library book, and made me assume about systemic racism and our justice system. #fictionopensmindsNovember 18,2015#FictionOpensMinds I nominate James Baldwin's "Another Country" for its deft treatment of racism and sexualityNovember 18, 2015#fictionopensminds—November 18, or 2015
For colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is not enough #fictionopensmindsNovember 18,2015
Source: wnyc.org