Tag Archives for Susan Orlean

Booking Through Thursday: A Shout Out to the Great Unknown

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading–but that nobody seems to have heard of. You know, not JK Rowling, not Jane Austen, not Hemingway–everybody’s heard of them. The author that you think should be that famous and can’t understand why they’re not…

This is a tough question to answer. I haven’t read any new or emerging authors this year (Yes, Yes, I know! We’re only 21 days into this fresh new year, but still . . .). I suppose I could promote my own work , but that seems a little narcissistic, doesn’t it? Besides, I have yet to complete that novel I’ve supposedly been working on for the past five years so there is no book to brag about. I haven’t published a short story since 2004. And I haven’t published any freelance work since late 2008.So self promotion doesn’t seem to be in order.

On the other hand, I did read some new fiction early last year, emerging writers Joe O’Connell and Karen Harrington, and they are certainly worth championing. New writers need all the promotion they can get these days. And I’ve read a lot of nonfiction that I’ve enjoyed by William Bradley.

Another writer traversing the nonfiction map whose work is worth looking into is Dinty W. Moore . Start with his witty Google Maps essay , though you’ve probably read it already. (If you haven’t, do.)

Plenty of writers out there deserve more attention. One of my favorites is New Yorker writer Susan Orlean. Her features, besides being great magazine profiles, delve into the quirkier side of life, like her recent Smithsonian magazine piece on donkeys in Morocco. And The Orchid Thief is a masterwork of literary journalism. Who knew orchids could be so intriguing?

Stephen Harrigan, essayist and novelist, deserves some love, too. Harrigan’s Gates of the Alamo does what a historical novel should: it takes you to a different time and place — revolutionary Texas — and gives you a feel for that time and place, and at the same time, gives you a cast of characters caught up in that time without being stick figures presliced for TV movies.

An Unusual Read and Happiness

Again I was blog trolling and found something interesting posed at Scobberlotch:

“What was the most unusual (for you) book you ever read? Either because the book itself was completely from out in left field somewhere, or was a genre you never read, or was the only book available on a long flight… whatever? What (not counting school textbooks, though literature read for classes counts) was furthest outside your usual comfort zone/familiar territory?”

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. That’s my answer. In this case, it’s because of the subject matter — orchid poaching, orchid poachers, and orchid collecting. It has to be one of the most unusual subjects anyone might write about, but Orlean pulls it off so well. Her reportage is excellent, detailed, suspenseful. It’s the writing, the reporting that makes such an usual subject become worth reading about.

Orlean comments in the Reader’s Guide in the back of my edition that the subject matter of orchids and orchid collecting was unfamiliar territory for her and she started out detached from the subject, but became much more invested in the subject matter as she wrote. “[T]he process of writing is the journey to understanding,” she says, and that’s how I approached this book. Orchids, orchid collecting were completely unfamiliar territory for me as a reader, but once I became involved with Orlean’s writing, I wanted to keep journeying through the book to understanding.

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Writer, editor, and teacher Shelly Lowenkopf posted a wonderful essay on happiness that is definitely worth reading. Here is the link: Shelly Lowenkopf’s Blog

What is an Essay (Part 2)

Susan Orlean wrangles with the nature of the essay in her introduction to Best American Essays 2005:

Anytime I read an essay, write an essay, or, as is the case here, sort through and select the very best of a year’s essays, I find myself wondering what an essay is —what makes up the essential parts and structures of the form. . . .Is an essay a written inquiry? A meditation? A memoir? Does it concern the outside world or just  probe the writer’s interior world? Can it be funny? Does it have answers or does it just raise questions? Does it argue a point or is it a cool, impartial view of the world? Does it have a prescribed tone or is it absolutely individual — a conversation between the writer and reader, as idiosyncratic as any conversation might ever be?

The essays selected for the collection seem slotted in to answer the questions Orlean has about the essay. Some like Michael Martone’s “Contributor’s Note” and David Sedaris’ “Old Faithful” are funny. (Humor, especially if it’s classified as nonfiction, gets spanked because of exaggeration to the point people claim it and perhaps its writers should be lashed for the lack of truthfulness; Sedaris has recently been washboarded by the press. These interrogators seem justified because many recent memoirists and journalists have exaggerated or just plain damn lied. Exaggeration or even fictionalization, though, make the humor work; it’s intentional to that form of writing, and not outright lying, except for the effect of laughing. The whole of one of my favorite essays, or series of essays, Mark Twain’s “Letters From the Earth, Satan’s Letter,” is fiction, or written in the voice of Satan; and yet it’s not a short story — it’s Satan making an argument from evil: why is there evil in the world if God is wholly good? Such an essay leads to this question, I suppose: do essays have to be nonfiction?)

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