Eva Ibbotson has recently popped up on my radar. She is a writer of children's books and charming easy-to-read novels for adults. I've been duly charmed with Madensky Square, a story about a dressmaker in Vienna in 1911 who chats with the reader about her shop, her assistant, the neighbors, and the threat of an urban renewal scheme which would destroy the little world of Madensky Square.
This is not great literature. But the book is well-written, does not condescend, and pleased me greatly.
I had already started back in 2006 on a project to read all of Philip Roth's novels, which has now become an official New Year's Resolution for 2007. I didn't expect to enjoy his work as much as I'm doing.
I've used the categories the Wickipedia uses. I'm not sure what "Roth books" means, but I suppose I'll find out when I get there. The Facts and Patrimony are non-fiction memoirs cum lit crit.
A list of the novels:
Kepesh novels:
Zuckerman novels:
Roth books:
Inspired by Fay over at Historical / Present, I'm going to try this year to read a book by each of the women authors who were mentioned in a comment by Jane Smiley about the New York Times' quest for the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years.
There are 37 authors on Smiley's list. I've started with Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury, which is about the genius cluster in Concord, Massachusetts, in the middle of the 19th century when Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller rubbed mental elbows and produced the flowering of New England Trancendentalism.
These are the authors:
There's no one to touch Jane [Austen] when you're in a tight place. -- Rudyard Kipling
Today is the birthday of Jane Austen, born in 1775.