A Year in Reading: Hannah Pittard

December 5, 2011 | 1 book mentioned

I’m lucky that I get to choose the curriculum I teach, and so why wouldn’t I choose the books that have, year after year, continued to blow my mind?

Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams is a heartbreaking and hilarious look at what it means to be a woman – to be a human being, really – trying to survive this world. Without fail, each quarter, when I read the last chapter aloud to my students (it’s only two pages), I end up either laughing or crying hysterically, which, in some ways, is the point of the book: At the end of the day, what’s the difference?

coverThis year I introduced a book to my students that I hadn’t read in over a decade. I took it on a prayer that it would live up to the novel I remembered it being. But I was wrong. It was better. Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods is a book that forces its readers to stare directly into the eyes of a tormented man (and possible killer) and wonder, Are we really any different? It’s a book that plays with narrative (so is Moore’s book, by the way), and it’s a book that suggests that just being born – just being alive – is the problem with life.

 

 

 

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is the author of three novels, Reunion, The Fates Will Find Their Way, and the forthcoming Listen to Me (2016). She is winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a consulting editor for Narrative Magazine. She divides her time between Chicago and Lexington, Kentucky, where she lives with her husband, W. Andrew Ewell. Follow her on Twitter @hannahpittard.