Books like Words Upon the Word

Denning is a master. He mixes literary analysis, historical sleuthing, and some smart ideological excavation to see how dime novels—treated like trash by most scholars—were used by working men and women in 19th century America. They were creating a culture and their reading did all the things that culture does: helped them make sense of the world, gave them a place to pay with ideas, and invent myths and narratives for orientation. All while middle-class scolds told them they were reading “wrong.”

If you’ve ever loved a book that wasn’t good for you, or wanted to seriously think about something that wasn’t “serious,” this book is for you.

A man I was working with recommended this book to me, when he heard about my novel, while it was in the making. I got hold of this book and already after the first chapter I understood why. Janice Radway investigates how Harlequin novels have such a large audience. In essence it is because romance novels always end well, as opposed to life, that keeps being complicated. It taught me that I’m a very romantic person. This was something I had never regarded as a positive trait so of course I failed to see just how important romance was and is to me. By identifying with millions of women who read these romance novels, I gained a respect that I still feel is lacking in our culture: A respect for our emotions and the big role they play in our sense of satisfaction with life.  

Wolfgang Iser isn’t for the faint of heart. You don’t read him as much as wrestle. But in this work, the German theorist teaches you to watch for the ghost of the reader who haunts fiction, the one who isn’t quite there, but always right next to you, implied by the text as the intended audience, the ideal reader (who isn’t quite you).

He’s German and this is literary theory, so put away your phone, but if you can wrestle with Iser it will change forever how you read anything.

I’m cheating a little here, but I made the rules and there’s a little clause in the rules I made that says I can break them as long as I announce that I am breaking them. Herewith, I announce. 

This isn’t a book about readers. It’s a book about watchers—specifically the Dutch audience for the soap opera Dallas. But this book is so good and so wild, it changed forever the way I think about “reception,” including reading. I recommend this book all the time and if you want to understand the freedom and creativity of readers, you have to read it.

This is a real battle of wills, between Dr. Viveca Lancaster, newly licensed physician, and Nate Grayson, manager of a newly-founded Michigan town in desperate need of a doctor. He hires her, sight unseen, and when she shows up, he tries to fire her, because he doesn’t want a female doctor, but Viveca is not having that. She’s going to prove herself, as one of the first Black women doctors in 1870s America, and Nate falls for her as a brilliant doctor as much as he does for her as a woman. It’s impossible to go wrong with a Beverly Jenkins book, but this one is extra delicious.

I can’t help but think a woman wrote this, and the viewpoints are slightly different. Her focus is more on the people than the events, but she writes so well a reader is drawn into the story from the start. Again, this is out of the general books like this—and better for it.

Want to spend 10 glorious hours with Meryl Streep?

I loved her audiobook performance of Tom Lake. Her intonation mirrors the exact qualities that the main characters, who are actors, strive for: neither underacted nor overacted. Just genuine. 

Ann Patchett is a treasure, and in Tom Lake, she effortlessly navigates two timelines: one in which Lara tells her daughters about meeting famous actor Peter Duke in a long-ago play. These scenes are just as compelling as the flashbacks in which we learn about her time with Duke before he became a famous movie star.

It's a talent, the ability to tell a mostly ordinary life in a page-turning way. Her imagery is magnificent. Every scene is wondrous. Touching. So real.

“Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Thus begins Marlena, Julie Buntin’s debut novel about Marlena and Cat, who meet as fifteen-year-olds in rural Michigan. Their friendship is intense and complicated, and right from the start, we know that Cat is the only one who makes it out alive.

Buntin’s writing perfectly captures the voice and texture of adolescence, and her book is a model for how to maintain tension in a story when you find out early on (page 6 to be exact) that one of the main characters is dead.

The sections featuring Cat as an adult show that while she may have left her small town behind, she can’t escape her past. 

The conventional wisdom is that middle-grade girls read books a lot more than boys do. Maybe so... but if there’s any book that could encourage more boys to read, you couldn’t do much better than this goofball adventure story. In 1895, Stan, a clueless but earnest eleven-year-old, is sent to a mining camp in northern Michigan with his “sweet Mama,” his snarky cousin Geri, and his no-nonsense grandma. Between the unfamiliar milieu and his wildly overactive imagination, Stan undergoes an endless string of indignities that convince him he’s the victim of every evil under the sun, even as he searches for his long-lost father and struggles to become the man he aspires to be. Hilarious, engaging, and full of heart, this is one for everybody (including girls!). And don’t miss the sequel, I Almost Died. Again.

There’s a driving intensity to this book's narrative and atmosphere, which remains as compelling and fresh today as when I first read it years ago. Part of its power derives from Eugenides’ use of first-person plural narration through the collective voice of a group of neighborhood boys still haunted, years later in adulthood, by the untimely deaths of five adolescent sisters in 1970s suburban Michigan.

Part-detectives, part-elegists, they piece together their memories of not only the girls but of a particular place and time now vanished. I’m always struck by the book’s deft melding of pathos and humor and by the way that what is essentially a personal suburban tragedy gradually begins to speak to a wider malaise that calls into question the American dream itself.