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Of course I teach, write, and write about memoir. Of course I write, and write about, young adult literature. Of course I take my stab at poems.

But don't think I'm not also in love with, perhaps most deeply admiring of, novels written for adults. Because I have not found a way to do this work myself. Because I don't know how.

Yesterday I raved about Swimming Home. This past weekend, in the Chicago Tribune, Reply to a Letter from Helga. A few weeks ago, The Colour of Milk, and before that You Remind Me of Me, The Orchardist, Boleto, Book of Clouds, Out Stealing Horses, The Disappeared, American Music, The Sense of an Ending, the Alice McDermott novels, the books featured in this yellowing snapshot above (and others). These slender books that devastate with their shimmering, dangerous sentence, structure, form. These books that have left me staggered on the couch.

I don't know what I would do without them, truly. I don't know that I'd have the same faith in humankind if these books were not now in my blood, if they were not (fractionally) mine.

There is still room to do what no one has ever done before. There are still stories untold. I may be getting older, but: there are more stories to be found. Genius abounds.

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I encountered Antoine Wilson at the BEA, where I had gone to find out which adult titles had all the buzz, and why, on behalf of Publishing Perspectives.  Quick on his feet, witty, Antoine was, nonetheless, the author of a book about a "slow absorber"�a 28 year old named Oppen Porter who is recording every millimeter of minutiae about his life and thoughts for the benefit of his unborn son, whom Oppen doesn't expect to meet, stuck as Oppen is, in a hospital, and perhaps dying.  I would need to add a few more commas to that last sentence, a smattering of additional half-steps, not to mention some unexpected profundities, they would have to be funny profundities, but also true, in the way that funny is also true, except that I am personally incapable of conjuring either the profound or the funny, in order to foreshadow the nature of the novel itself, which I have just finished reading, in order to give you a sense for the whole. Or one small sentence of the whole.

I would have to be Antoine Wilson, but I am not.  I would have to be a literary ventriloquist with an obsession with the question, What is a man of the world?, but this is Wilson's terrain.  His Oppen is a Forrest Gump of sorts (minus the super-hero powers and the awesome historic coincidences)—optimistic, well-meaning, highly observant but also stuck in his observing, capable of seeing a lot of the picture, but perhaps not the same picture that so many of us see (because we are rushing, because we have conformed, because we have ceded something of the raw and unschooled in ourselves).  The novel is a monologue, a man talking into a tape recorder while his baby sits coiled within his gold- and white-toothed mom.  It is a circle, and while riding the circle, one meets fast-food workers, big thinkers, exasperated aunts (all right, just one single exasperated aunt), religious zealots, and a talking-cure shrink who cures nothing. 

I'm going to share here three sentences of Oppen's world.  Oppen is tall, you see, and his sleeping arrangements are unfortunate.  He's finding himself slightly fatigued:

I'm not a complainer, I wouldn't have said anything, except that I was concerned I wasn't going to be getting enough rest, that over the course of several nights the lack of rest would add up to a general fatigue, it had happened to me before, it had happened to me in Madera, when I had broken my arm, or rather my arm had gotten broken while playing Smear the Queer with the Alvarez brothers, I had fallen in an awkward way, and because of the cast and the way it was situated I could not roll over freely in my sleep, and as a result I suffered from what your grandfather called general fatigue, which he said was quite noticeable with me, what happened was that in addition to having less energy I was less interested in everything and less friendly, too, I wasn't myself.  At the time I did not know the root cause of the general fatigue but I have since come to realize that without sleep the head gets clogged with other people's words.  The head needs sleep to make everyone else's words into our own words again, it is a conversion process.

One final thing.  Panorama City is a Lauren Wein (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) book.  Lauren, whom I am proud to say is a friend, continues to produce some of the most interesting books around.  Read Shards, if

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The fabulous Holly Cupala of Brimstone Soup tagged me on this meme, and since I was musing just yesterday about bookshelves and friendships, it seems an appropriate Sunday launch. The question is, What's on your bookshelf?, and the specifics are these:

Tell me about the book that has been on your shelf the longest...

A beaten, brown thesaurus (the pages unbound now and out of order) and the bible my mother gave me. In fact, however, most all of my books have been acquired during the last 20 years. I was not a bookish kid (I was a writerly one, not a bookish one, which is truly not the right order of things) and did not come from a bookish family, which is not to say that I did not come from an educated one. It's simply that the home that I grew up in was not furnitured with books.

Tell me about a book that reminds you of something specific in your life ...

Natalie Kusz's Road Song was the first memoir I ever bought—the first I ever read. I was pregnant with my son. I was in a Princeton bookstore. The book was revelatory (you can write about your life? like this?) and I wrote to Ms. Kusz, never expecting a response. A few weeks later, one came. "As I am sure you know (because, judging from the elegance and insightfulness of your letter, you must be a writer yourself), writers are in the business of attempting to expose the human condition in such a way that our description resonates in the souls of other humans ... " A writer myself? Not then. Just someone who loved the sound of words, their puzzling together. By announcing to me a new genre—memoir—and by suggesting to me a possibility—an actual writer—Ms. Kusz and Road Song changed my life.

Tell me about a book you acquired in some interesting way ...

This past Friday six books arrived in a brown box, chosen by an editor with whom I've lately had the privilege of corresponding. I had mentioned that I sought, in my life, books that "put faith in the reader." She responded with generosity and with a telling eye and ear. Every one of these six books appears to be my kind of book. You'll be hearing about them here, over time.

Tell me about the most recent addition to your shelves...

Since the books in that box aren't yet on my shelves (but on the coffee table, where I will leave them until they are read), the newest books were three: Book of Clouds, The Frozen Thames, and The Cradle. I've written of them all here. Book of Clouds also, in its way, changed my life, my way of seeing what is possible in story.

Tell me about a book that has been with you to the most places...

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I've read it several times, in several places—in El Salvador while visiting my husband's family, in Orlando while helping to oversee a corporate launch conference, on the train to New York City.

Tell me about a bonus book that doesn't fit any of the above questions...

Two books that I felt strongly should win the Pulitzer Prize did, and they sit eloquently on my shelves: March by Geraldine Brooks and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. There were shouts of joy here when both were announced. Both winners aren't just enormously talented writers. They are gracious people, which counts just as much.

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Wearied by an overwhelm of work and the static panic of good-news hoping, I had again let reading go, until yesterday, when I brought home Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis), The Frozen Thames (Helen Humphreys), and The Cradle (Patrick Somerville). This morning through just now I read the first, a book about which Wendy Lesser, in the New York Times Book Review, recently wrote: "First novels by young writers who see the world with a fresh, original vision and write about it with clarity and restraint are rare enough to begin with. When you add in the fact that Chloe Aridjis’ 'Book of Clouds' is also a stunningly accurate portrait of Berlin, as well as a thoughtful portrayal of a young Mexican Jew drifting through her life abroad, this novel becomes required reading of the most pleasurable sort."

I love fresh and original. I love a writer who will take risks. I adore publishers who will take those risks, right along with the writer—who will agree to put out a novella-length book as a classy paperback original in a format that fits so perfectly into one's hand that nothing—even that overwhelm of work—can budge the reader once she has turned the first page.

What a perfectly odd, summation-defying book this is. What a lonesome character is Tatiana, who believes she sees Hitler on the subway dressed as an old woman, who hears phantoms in the unrented room above her, who meets a meterologist and learns the language and salvation of clouds, and whose job involves transcribing the dictations of an historian who may or may not be a transvestite, and who may or may not be relevant. Do books about lonely people have sustainable plots? It's an old debate; let the debaters read this book. Let them fall into the quick thick of clouds and fog and watch this author lasso weather.

A thick smell hung in the air, a smell that spoke of dungeon, as if one thousand Victorian chimneys had been tipped over and the lethal combination of coal fires and urban vapor had been decanted into the vast cavities of Berlin, crawling up walls and skimming the surface of the Spree, coating the shell of the S-Bahn and halting trains midjourney.

If that isn't enough for some in a book, it is more than enough for me. We can't ever know, just as this character never knows, if all she sees and hears actually exists. But what does actually matter in a book of fiction? Only the imagination does.

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