Italics are mine

My Bennington Year 1 Reading List

Studying in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program has been an amazing experience, because of the workshops during residency, the one-on-one exchanges with my term instructor outside the residencies, and the near-constant reading of and learning from books. One of the program's objectives is to make each student read and analyze a total of one hundred books of their choice, preferably relevant to their project, so my goal was to read at least fifty books for the program during my first year. (I actually achieved that goal early but I put the extra books I read on my reading list for Term 3. I don't count books unrelated to my creative writing, for instance biographies, but we are allowed to read outside our genre, so I do have some poetry and nonfiction books on my Bennington reading list.)

Because I started the program in January, Term 1 for me was the shorter winter term that runs from January to May, so my goal there was to read twenty books, and Term 2 was the longer summer/fall term that runs from June to December with a break in July, so my goal was to read thirty books during Term 2. 

Here are my fifty books of Terms 1 and 2 in pictures: 

Term 1 (twenty books)

 

Term 2

First Half (fifteen books)

Second Half (fifteen books)

It is hard to pick favorites, but some books that stood out include: A Thousand Acres, Horse, The English Patient, Nobody's Fool, Bluets, Preston Falls, A Summons to Memphis, The Handmaid's Tale, Revolutionary Road, House of Sand and Fog, The Magician, Giovanni's Room, Red Rover, Housekeeping, Jernigan, Biography of X, Bel Canto, Transit of Venus, Ordinary People, My Brilliant Friend and Lost in the City. 

 

 

Bennington Term One in One Pic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can't say enough how much I love this MFA program. To the left are the twenty books I read for Term 1. There were many excellent reads, especially A Thousand Acres, Horse, The English Patient, Nobody's Fool, Preston Falls, A Summons to Memphis, The Handmaid's Tale and Revolutionary Road. Looking forward to Term 2!     

Best Books I Read In 2022

Here are my favorite books of 2022! (They may not have been published in 2022. My only criterion for inclusion is that I finished reading them in 2022 and loved them, aka 5/5 on Goodreads.)

Fiction:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis. Loved loved loved. Great example of a strong female character struggling with her own demons. I haven't seen the TV adaptation, so can't compare.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. I attended the Arts & Letters Live event at SMU sometime ago and didn't get around to read the book for a while. It is great. Also shows how to do close 3rd person POV effectively.

Mohawk by Richard Russo. I love Richard Russo for his close 3rd person POV and his description of academia in a previous book. This book was also great. 

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. I watched part of the TV adaptation on a transatlantic trip and didn't care for it, but then I read the book and wow! what a page turner. 

Nonfiction:

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years (1933-1943) by John Richardson. Hardcover book with high-quality reproductions of the art and great scholarship on the subject. It makes me sad to think Richardson died before completing his multi-volume biography of Picasso. I am not a big Picasso fan because of how he treated his women, but Richardson does great justice to the man's genius. 

Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years (1898-1940) by Jed Perl. That is another book along the lines of "Hardcover book with high-quality reproductions of the art and great scholarship on the subject." I liked that Calder was initially an engineering student, and maybe it shows in his art later. I also liked how he had many artistic talents. 

The Unquiet Ghost by Adam Hochschild. The Soviet Union... Stalin... Possibly a future project of mine.

Frida, by Hayden Ferraro. My late aunt loved Frida Kahlo before it was fashionable. I loved reading more about her and feeling closer to my aunt in better understanding her tastes. I also have that book in Spanish. That's on my to-read list for 2023.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lessons from the Edge by Marie Yovanovitch I read that book when I was in Portland, Oregon for a weekend. It was a page-turner, well-written and truly inspirational. I recommend it for anyone who seeks a memoir by a strong female character who lives her life on her own terms and dedicated herself to public service. 

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. Russia! Short stories! A phenomenal teacher! It was like getting a master class by an expert in his field.

Passion by Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka, by Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall. I wish I could have gone to San Diego to see the Lempicka musical at the La Jolla playhouse this summer but my schedule didn't allow me to. Next best thing: I read this book. A fascinating woman. 

Patti LuPone: A Memoir, by Patti LuPone. I took a trip to New York City, saw a play or a musical just about every night, and stumbled upon this biography in a local bookstore. Spellbinding, accessible for a lay audience while being insightful for musical professionals too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Secret Life of the American Musical, by Jack Viertel. I am more of a straight-play rather than musical-play person, but after reading the LuPone biography and seeing "Into the Woods" on Broadway, I decided to learn more about the medium (I may use it for a future project of mine). This book by Jack Viertel was exceptional in dissecting what makes a (successful) musical compelling for the audience. This was also interesting for me because I like to read cross-genre craft books in case I can glean lessons for my novels. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about musical theatre.  

The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. The "Best American..." collection can be hit or miss for me, depending on the year, but this was a bull's eye hit.

Screenwriting is Rewriting, by Jack Epps, Jr. Another example of a craft book in a different genre that provided good transferrable advice to novel-writing.

The Best American Travel Writing 2020, edited by Jason Wilson. I think I bought it when I was in Colorado. Perfect to satisfy my wanderlust vicariously. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow by Laurie Wilson. A very good biography of an atypical woman artist who lived her life on her own terms. Quite obvious why I liked this book. 

Sam Shepard: A Life, by John Winters. I thought I had finished reading this book in 2021 but I forgot to enter it on Goodreads and now I don't remember if I finished it in late 2021 or early 2022. So, here it is! Very well written. Gives genuine insights into Shepard the person while describing his plays. Every biography should aim at achieving a similar mix. 

Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh. It is a bit too long (900 pages) but it is still a good read.

The Director's Voice: Twenty-One Interviews by Arthur Bartow. Read my previous post about that one. Loved every page of it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide by Joe Deer. For a potential future project of mine. A really good book with excellent advice, worth its paperback price. 

Acting the Song: Performance Skills for the Musical Theatre by Tracey Moore. For that same potential future project of mine. A great recommendation for musical theater performers. 

How Musicals Work, and How to Write Your Own, by Julian Woolford. For that same potential future project of mine. Outstanding. 

Plays:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Collaboration by Anthony McCarten. That Warhol-Basquiat play that everyone is talking about in New York right now.

Vanities: The Musical, by Jack Hefner. Spot-on Dallas play from a few years back.

Total: twenty-five books! I read a lot more than that in 2022 but it is nice to see I averaged over two great books a month. I pick my books well, and I have some more fantastic books to read in 2023! 

 

 

 

 

 

The Director's Voice

 I love this book so much. Years ago (maybe nine years ago?) when I still lived in Pennsylvania, there was a time period where I got tired of taking the Bieber bus to New York City and I would drive down to Washington DC quite frequently and I saw Henry IV Part 1 twice at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC because it was that good. And I went to college in Paris, France, so I like to think I know what good theater is like. That Henri IV Part 1 was really, really good. (And I loved the Tom Hiddleston TV series but that was not live theater.) Anyway, in the Shakespeare DC bookshop when I was in town to watch Henry IV Part 1, I bought The Director's Voice volume 2, about more recent interviews (at the time) of directors, and I remember seeing The Director's Voice later in the bookshop (maybe the second time I drove down to catch Henry IV Part 1 again) and at the time I decided I didn't know enough about the times where those directors had made theater to connect with what they had to say in interviews. Frankly, I don't think any of the names resonated with me. (!) 

But I am where I am now and I bought this book on a recent trip to New York City (Drama Book Shop, I love you), and once I started reading it I could not put it down. It was fascinating to hear theater landmark names like JoAnne Akalaitis or Zelda Fichandler or Harold S. Prince express themselves when time has made them become stultified. This is an important book for anyone who cares about theater directing.

Finally, a funny aside is that my current employer is mentioned in two interviews (out of twenty-one) in the book, and in the second of them it is mentioned more than once. Theater is not a discipline that my employer currently seems to include in its strategy for greater academic preeminence, but I have also read about my employer in another theater-related book, and they are ranked in the top 25 drama programs in the world in Hollywood Reporter, so I think they are good, even if they don't play a leading role in the current strategic plan, for whatever reason.

The two directors with ties to SMU mentioned in the book are John Hirsch and Garland Wright. The other university that gets mentioned a lot in the book is Yale, so it is all to SMU's credit that it was mentioned in the book too more than once. SMU alum Garland Wright tragically died at 52 of cancer and we are left to imagine the impact he could have had on American theater if he had lived longer.  

This was a phenomenal book I could not put down and I recommend it to anyone interested in theater, especially directing.

Review of "Great Circle" by Maggie Shipstead

It is time to revive this blog and a lot has happened since my last post, which seems a lifetime ago, but let's continue with some book reviews. A few days ago I finished Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead and I absolutely loved it. The first few chapters were hard to get into and I wasn't sure about the double POV, the female aviator Marian Graves's as close 3rd person (and occasionally others') in the 1930s and 1940s and actress Hadley Baxter's 1st person in the current day. But then the story really drew me in - a woman who has a passion for something usually only done by men, a man who tries to control her with his money, the need to escape, a love story with a childhood friend that will extend through decades, death of loved ones, a comfort in being alone and self-sufficient, the determination to live one's life one's way. And also, for the much smaller part of the novel that is about Hadley: a very talented artistic woman who keeps adding to her troubles and running from her problems. Shipstead's language is also vivid and evocative. A pleasure to read. The book also comes full circle in the way the story begins, with Marian cutting off her hair and dressing like a boy when she makes deliveries, and how it ends (I won't be more specific to avoid spoilers).

This book obviously will most appeal to a certain segment of the female population, but that segment is made of my soul sisters, and there is probably no better way for me to find them than figuring out who adored Great Circle as much as I did. Six stars out of five.

Review of "Terms of Endearment" by Larry McMurtry

I picked up this book when McMurtry died and I didn't have the heart to read Moving On beyond the first ten pages (it is something like one thousand pages long) and after I read All my friends are going to be strangers I still didn't have the heart to tackle Moving On so I went for Terms of Endearment and OMG, if you except the last 50 pages (Book 2), it was so exceptionally good I remember laughing out loud when I was reading it at night in Marfa and I don't normally laugh out loud when I read books, except Blind Side and Straight Man. McMurtry is a keen observer of the human behavior and he can really put himself in the head of his protagonists. Then, the last 50 pages are so summarized that they don't read like a novel but rather a treatment of a novel that McMurtry had once hoped to write and then lost interest in. I know this part became a movie, and the movie may itself be excellent (the storyline will certainly be more developed), but you can't really tackle one of the lead characters' illness and death in 50 pages at the very end of your book and expect to be taken seriously for it. So I will watch the movie and hope for the best. The first 350 pages of the book were truly original and hilarious, showing a unique take on the world and standing out for their depiction of Houston and a world now gone by. Book 1 is so good, I can't wrap my head around the fact that an editor allowed Book 2 to be tacked on to this masterpiece - perhaps because McMurtry had lost interest in it, and the idea was sufficiently developed to be turned into a book. Anyway, this is an excellent book. Five stars out of five, because I am determined to ignore the tiny and flawed Book 2.

Review of "The Dutch House" by Ann Patchett

I bought this novel when Ann Patchett came to Dallas on her book tour before the pandemic shut everything down, but I misplaced the book and ended up buying it again as an audiobook to prep for my trip to Marfa. The first two CDs out of 8 were quite boring, as I found the character of Andrea the stepmother rather stilted and predictable. This was what I put up with while I was driving toward Marfa, and frankly I was glad to arrive, and I also listened to other CDs on the way, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. But after the b!tch (Andrea) kicks her husband's young children out, and got out of the story, I found the novel to be spellbinding. (That was on the return trip.) I was driving through West Texas and couldn't stop listening.

It may have helped that Tom Hanks was doing the narrating, but the story was also rock solid and truly moved me. Ann Patchett knows exactly when to summarize events and when to focus on feelings, and the feelings are what kept me engaged, so in her way she taught me a thing or two about writing novels in the process. I felt gut-punched so many times in this book - when the kids are forced out of the house, when Danny learns about his mother, when the mother shows up, and more (can't tell you what in order not to spoil the story). The story is one of a beautiful sister-brother friendship that stretches over decades and many hardships. Patchett's insights are mind-blowingly spot on. So although the book has a slow start (in its first 25%), it really ends up glowing. And making the reader feel some things that are not often felt.

And the young girl on the cover is of course supposed to be Maeve, Danny's older sister, whom Andrea kicks out of the Dutch House along with Danny. And given Maeve's fate at the end, this was the perfect cover, so absolutely moving, and perfectly chosen. It took me a while to decide what to rate this book but I started at two stars out of five and then increased it to three, then four, and by the end I had decided this book was truly a five stars out of five.

Review of "Prophetic City: Houston on the cusp of a changing America" by Stephen Klineberg

I've recently become interested in learning more about Houston, TX and this is one of the books I bought on the topic. The author, a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rice University with degrees from Haverford College, the University of Paris and Harvard University, ran a survey for about 35 years about the attitudes of Houstonians and residents of the Houston metropolitan region on various topics as the founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. A central theme in his book is that what is happening in Houston right now foreshadows what will happen in the United States in a few years because Houston is much more diverse than other big cities. 

I have to say, the parts where he enumerates statistics were the least interesting for me, and the parts where he shares actual stories and quotes from Houstonians were page-turners. Having gone through quite a few volumes of turgid prose written by academics who thought they could write for the general public, this book is better than average, and it turns out from the title (not cover) page and the acknowledgements that this is due to one Amy Hertz, who helped write the book. (When I found out about her, I thought it was wrong not to include her name on the cover page via a simple "with Amy Hertz", as for the title page. That does not shed Stephen Klineberg in a good light to have relegated her to the insides of the book. Having read the pages where he spouts off the statistics, I am very convinced that she played a critical role in making the book interesting for the general public.)

So what do I like about this book? First, I like Texas, and I like books that focus on parts of the United States that aren't on either coast. Also, I like cities with top universities: Rice University in Houston, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Northwestern University outside Chicago. The elites of the nation are no longer educated solely in Massachusetts and California, and Texas is fascinating because of the large number of Democrats and Republicans thrown together for better or for worse. Houston also has a thriving economy that isn't limited to oil and gas but also included health care and more. After going through Hurricane Harvey, it also has more stories of resilience than many. And then simply I always love learning more about my adopted state of Texas. 

So this is why I picked up the book, but here are a couple of passages that caught my attention and made me like the book even more, once I started reading it. I really got into the book at Chapter 6, "The moral core of a paradoxical city," because of its emphasis on Hurricane Harvey. Then Chapter 7 "The black/white divide" was another home run, especially the story where an African American police sergeant shared the story of his son (in his early twenties) moving to a new neighborhood and getting pulled over for no obvious violation. "His hands were shaking so badly he couldn't get out his license and registration" (p.145) and because he had some obvious PTSD symptoms from the encounter, his dad "brought him to the local precinct of his son's new neighborhood and introduced him around." The young man knew all the cops in his dad's neighborhood but none of them in the area he had just moved in. "He was so scared that he asked his dad to go with him to his new local precinct and introduce him around." 

I also loved the story of Derrick Ngo, who was admitted to Harvard after being homeless thanks to his stint at the Energy Institute High School, and the insights of developer Stan Marek and BakerRipley then-CEO Angela Blanchard.   

Some quotes from the book:

• "Houston is one of the most vibrant, rapidly growing metropolitan areas in America, with a vigorous entrepreneurial economy, thriving primarily because of the tremendous energy, vitality and commitment to hard work on the part of immigrants who have been pouring into this city from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean." (p.192)
• "We found out that teachers were going too easy on the kids, giving them lower than grade-level textbooks." (p.266) The pressure of going too easy on students is something I can relate to. 
• A May 2015 article in the Houston Chronicle "described the "Texas myth" as a place that "relished the death penalty, that's obsessed with guns, that's anti-education, anti-science, anti-immigrant, and anti-environment." But the author's surveys "show clearly that the general public has been expressing more progressive views over the years, and as in the state's other major cities (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso), area residents are now more firmly affiliated with the Democratic Party." (p.268)
• "[Houston] is low, flat, and full of bayous; it rains a lot, and we will always flood. Solving for flooding is the window, because it will take us into the densification we need, building upward instead of out over the floodplains and in the flood zones." (p.278)
• "Cities need to form partnerships with their "city accelerators", organizations with the cutting-edge knowledge and critical resources that come out of the nation's most prestigious universities, think tanks, and philanthropic organizations." (p.280)
• "Still, I worry about the city's mounting problems, especially the burgeoning gap in access to quality education; the growing pockets of concentrated poverty, homelessness, and despair; the persistence of environmental racism; the region's increasing vulnerability to flooding; its position as a hub for human trafficking." (p.282)
• "In The New Localism, Brookings Institution fellows Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak posit that the best opportunities for shaping the future of America will come from its major cities." (p.283)
• "Houston's economic future will depend on its ability to harness the new energy technologies, to become the third coast (along with Boston and San Francisco) for the life sciences, supported by the world's largest conglomeration of medical institutions, and to develop a full-fledged entrepreneurial ecosystem, stimulating new ideas and new wealth in the high-tech sectors of today's economy." (p.284)

Rating: four stars out of five.

Review of "Hold Still" by Sally Mann

I picked up this book, in its hardcover version, after my latest visit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. I had actually never heard of Sally Mann before, but I loved the large number of color and black-and-white photographs in the book (at least in the hardcover version, the reproductions were of high quality although they were integrated to the text instead of being on separate pages.) The book was very well written and it provided good insights into her life up to 2015 - her son committed suicide about a year later so that is not in the book - but, in spite of her friendship with fellow Lexington, Va. local Cy Twombly, the fact remains that she doesn't quite have the sort of life and career that would lend itself to a full-length memoir so she has to spend a lot of the book on her parents, photos included, and the black woman who raised her as a child. I actually liked a lot the part about her interactions, as a young white girl, with black folks, which was written with great sensitivity, and the part about her elderly father committing suicide. Regarding the controversy of the pictures of her naked young children, I felt she was a bit naive not to expect what happened, but if you live on a farm in a place like Lexington, Va, it is probably easy to forget there are weirdos out there. So, the book is well-done and the stunning pictures will certainly inspire many photographers, but I did skip some pages about her parents, especially before she was born. Hence, the rating of four starts out of five. Definitely worth a look/read.   

Recent read: "You don't belong here" by Elizabeth Becker

This was a good read. I picked it up on a whim at Interabang and am so glad I did. Elizabeth Becker, who arrived in Vietnam in 1973, writes about three women photographers who covered the war before she did: Frances FitzGerald, Catherine Leroy and Kate Webb. Of course they had to deal with a lot of questionable behavior and prejudice, but still managed to leave their mark through their pictures. They were very much loners, although FitzGerald married later in life and Webb was briefly engaged (to a soldier who turned out to be married and decided against leaving his wife - she even left her job as reporter and returned to the United States to live on a military base with him, except that he hid her away in a hotel instead). 

I liked the book but I always felt some sort of distance or invisible glass barrier between the reader and the reporters covered. Yet their stories were fascinating, and I read the book as fast as I could. The chapter that took my breath away is toward the end, about the atrocities in Cambodia and the many journalists killed covering that part of the conflict. Such a waste of life - talented journalists and photographers murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Kate Webb luckily survived her own abduction, but seemed to have struggled with PTSD for years afterward. 

I only wish the book had shown more of their pictures, but I got so impressed by Elizabeth Becker while I read that I bought her account of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge revolution after I finished this. 

If you'd like to know more about these women, besides reading the book, here are some resources:

Catherine Leroy

• Wikipedia
• ICP
• NYT
• The Guardian

Kate Webb

• Wikipedia
• NYT

Frances FitzGerald

• Wikipedia