Good morning my little cozy cocoons,
On the heels of announcing my Top 10 books of 2020, now is the perfect time to announce the oeuvre I’ll be trying to read in 2021! Last year, I decided that one way to increase my understanding of an author and to be more critical of a reader was to try and read every book a writer published. I posed it to all of you as a challenge, and many of you emailed to say you tried the same thing! Last week, I heard from a lot of you that you really enjoyed reading a whole oeuvre and are thinking about doing it again.
I also really enjoyed it. Not only was reading Colwin an absolute joy, I came out of her oeuvre with a new appreciation for character description and an envy of her ability to lay out (even a side character’s) an entire life in a few phrases. In college I read the whole oeuvre’s of Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich. As a child I read the whole oeuvre of Alice Hoffman and most of Agatha Christie’s. Formalizing this process makes it more fun, and gives my reading for the year a shape. It’s nice to know that whatever else you read, you are planning to read a bunch of books by a writer you know is good and don’t have to worry about hype having overblown.
My oeuvre for 2021 is Gloria Naylor!
There are a lot of holes in my reading education but Gloria Naylor is a huge one. I have only read one of her books Mama Day. This is a shame because I’ve devoured the books of her contemporaries like Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, and because I haven’t read her most famous work, Women of Brewster Place.
Naylor was a child of the Great Migration. Her parents were sharecroppers in Mississippi who migrated to Harlem. She was a member of the Jehovah’s Witness religion for a while, which I cannot wait to find out more about. She’s one of America’s great novelists, and yet, I haven’t read her. This is my own fault, and I’m going to fix it.
Here’s my list of Naylor reading:
The Women of Brewster Place (1982)
Linden Hills (1985)
The Meanings of a Word (1986)
Mama Day (1988)
Bailey’s Cafe (1992)
The Men of Brewster Place (1999)
1996 (2005)
I will also try to incorporate a few of her short stories, which I have not collected yet. If you know of any good supplemental reading for Naylor, please send it on over!
If you’re reading an oeuvre this year or if you plan to join me, please let me know!
If you’re not reading at all right now because of the ongoing violence by white supremacists destabilizing the country, well, same. This is a list made in the optimism that at some point during this year my focus will return, and I will have somewhere good to place it.
This newsletter will continue to come inconsistently/whenever I please in 2021. We will still have guest contributors and I will still read old books to tell you all about. For paying subscribers, I’ll write more Friday for you about this/what this means for you!