Daniel M. Lavery’s Recommended Reading List
Daniel M. Lavery, the author of the newly released Women’s Hotel and the New York Times-bestselling author of Texts from Jane Eyre, The Merry Spinster, and Something That May Shock and Discredit You shares his recommended reading list.
Daniel is a former “Dear Prudence” advice columnist at Slate, the cofounder of The Toast, and writes the popular newsletter The Chatner. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
“I learned of this book last year after the Furrowed Middlebrow issued a reprint. It's a lighthearted but deeply-felt examination of a woman's lifelong love affair with her suburban childhood home, and I find it almost unbearably moving.”
“The New York Review of Books reissued this in 2019. I love Warner – her story collection Kingdoms of Elfin is also excellent – and was instantly won over by the description of a novel "that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history." It tells the story of the residents of a Benedictine convent over the course of 100 years, and it feels like wading in and out of a bright, cold stream.”
“This is a sequel to 1926's The Proper Place, but you don't need to have read the latter to enjoy it. It's a conservative novel about Scottish aristocrats viewed through the rosiest of glasses. They are unfailingly gracious, considerate, self-effacing, and so determined to behave well it's rather like reading a book about polite train engines.”
“Meigs appeared in the 1990 Canadian "docufiction" movie The Company of Strangers, and wrote a book about her experience the following year. In the movie, a tour bus carrying a group of elderly women breaks down in the countryside, and they wait for rescue in an abandoned summer cottage. In the meantime they discuss their lives with each other in a "leisurely evolution as friends." I feel so buoyed, so gently spun by this delicate book. I wish everyone could read it.”
“If you've heard of Edna Ferber it's probably as the author of Giant or Show Boat. She was a shockingly prolific bestseller (one of her short stories was adapted into a movie no less than three times in fifteen years) and Pulitzer Prize winner who's become significantly less widely-read since her death in 1968. If you manage to find an original copy, the Art Deco illustrations alone are worth the price of the book, but so are lines like this from her introduction:
‘He is vanishing—that exquisite craftsman who, in white cap and apron, used to ply his trade for all to see and admire through the plate-glass window of the chain restaurant. With what grace he poured the creamy batter, with what dexterity he jerked back the wide-lipped pitcher; what a sense of timing in the flip of the wrist that turned the bubbled surface to reveal the golden-brown underside of the hot pancake…
The American short story of a passing generation was the hot pancake of literature. The same deft pouring of the batter, the same expert jerk, the same neat flip of the wrist at the end.’”
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