Indie Fixx Book Club: literary fiction reviews from Tiffany

A lovely book review post from Tiffany for the Indie Fixx Book Club. Get in touch if you want to contribute to the Book Club in some way. xoxo –  jen!

Hello fellow Indie Fixxers! My name is Tiffany Keenan from In Love With Saturday. In addition to being an artisan, I am also a full-time librarian and lover of words, so books and reading tend to be a big part of my life both on the job and off. Reader’s Advisory is one of my favorite librarian duties, so I was ecstatic when Jen decided to introduce the Indie Fixx Book Club! I set a personal goal to read at least 24 books a year, and along the way I find among the pages stories that caress my inner self and leave me wishing for more after the last page. The following literary fiction books spoke to me on multiple levels and have found their way onto my list of favorites:

The Infinite Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender is the story of a girl who can taste the history and emotions behind anything she eats and the consequences this extraordinary gift poses. The prose in this book is so beautifully written I found myself reading sentences two or three times on many occasions. The author constructs beautiful similes and metaphors, and I love the way she has her characters use them frequently in conversation. The plot is quite strange, but one I found totally unique and enjoyable.

Anything by Chuck Palahniuk is guaranteed to be good and make you stop and think without being to heavy and labor intensive. I especially recommend Lullaby, Choke and Survivor. It’s like Stephen King met Jerry Springer and the two fell in love with the United States Poet Laureate and they somehow managed to have a cynical and sexy son named Chuck.

Women as Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek follows the love lives of two women living in Austria during the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the women’s place in their culture and their individual struggles to achieve their dreams and meet their expectations through the act of love or the approximation thereof. Translated from German, this story looks at the feminist struggle from another angle and is both interesting and well written.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy took my breath away with nearly every page. It follows a son and his child through post-apocalyptic America and deftly describes the physical, moral and spiritual struggles of survival, faith and hope in a dead world. The books is at the same time both glorious and horrifying. It was also the deserving recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Fiction by an American Author.

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho is an enchanting, quick read about a suicidal girl named Veronika who, upon admittance to an infirmary, becomes the subject of a morally questionable experiment that ends up transforming the lives of a number of patients in the ward. In this book, Paulo Coelho, who wrote the classic spiritual tale The Alchemist, demonstrates the transformative powers of death.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein is perhaps one of the books I recommend most to library patrons. It is narrated by a family dog named Enzo who is on a quest to improve his karma and be born as a human in his next life. Full of laughter and tears, this book has something for everyone, and the author nails Enzo’s voice so perfectly that I’m convinced he must have been a dog himself in another life.

I hope you take the time to explore the above titles and perhaps find a new favorite of your own. Happy Reading!

Bookworm photograph from Lola’s Room