Tease

I want to read three books that are not yet published, and are teasing me with their “almost here but not yet and by the time we are you will probably have forgotten we exist!”  Here they are, so if one day in summer I do recall that they exist, I can link people back here to buy them for my birthday.  😉

#1. Ruthless by Carolyn Lee Adams.  This is a YA debut novel by a writer I know.  I’ve read some of her other work but I never did read this one, and I have been looking forward to it coming out for over a year.  Carolyn has a knack for evocative descriptive writing, for taking her reader and placing him/her in the sleepy Southern town/creepy back woods/wherever.  She is also skilled in pacing tense and exciting novels.  She has created a strong young female heroine here – she writes from the point of view of strong young men as well, and I love that her heroes kind of explode on the page and stride ever onward, regardless of the huge power structures that threaten to take them down.  I’m a sucker for mystery/horror novels, so this is kind of my jam, and I can’t wait to read this horror novel about a young girl trying to escape from a serial killer out in the woods.  (Book trailer here, a short clip that gives you an idea of what the book is about).

#2. The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander.  This is a memoir by a poet whose husband died suddenly at the age of 50.  First of all, I really love prose written by poets.  They are so good at being spare, at careful word choice.  I like reading poems by poets, too, of course, but there’s something really special about applying the rigor and discipline of poetry to the looser art form of prose.  Secondly, she write about her happy marriage, its sudden and painful end, and her subsequent closer relationship with her two teenaged sons.  I loved reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and Blue Nights – both of which touched on similar themes, of living with loss.  Hurts so good.

#3. Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs.  Among her other works, photographer Sally Mann has taken beautiful, and controversial, pictures of her children at their idyllic woodland home in Virginia (controversial because in some of them the children were nude).  They suffered at the hands of a deranged stalker for years – serving as kind of a analog pre-cursor to the “here’s what could happen if you post pics of your kids online” warnings.  I actually went to law school with one of Sally’s daughters, and never knew she was part of this family until after law school was over.  Once I learned who my classmate was, I googled her mom out of curiosity, and became entranced (as many have before me) with the world that Mrs. Mann captured in her photographs.  My classmate posted on facebook a link to this memoir, which is coming out later this spring.  I can’t wait to read it.

What are you all reading lately?