Kaster
What a lovely thread. Thanks for starting it.
I have just read Julia Reed's collection of essays 'But Mamma Always Puts Vodka In Her Sangria'- a New Orleans resident journalist. Littered with anecdotes of being entertained by some iconic names, full of recipes, I have read all of Reed's books and love them all. She can be a tad 'Marie Antoinette' but this is part of her Southern persona.
Bumgrapes I read 'The Sisters Brothers' last year. It is wonderful. Can I recommend 'The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart'- a book I think you might enjoy?
I am a big fan of Pat Conroy, another quintessentially Southern author. He has written semi autobiographical novels such as 'THe Great Santini' alongside other Low Country set works such as 'South Of Broad' and 'The Prince Of Tides'. All evocative and saturated in a sense of place and time.
Ben Hatch's 'The P45 Diaries' is excellent- funny and a true heir to Adrian Mole.I see this book as a good Christmas holiday choice as it made me feel nostalgic. Is often on offer on Kindle too.
If you enjoyed 'Strayed' then you might enjoy 'A Blistered Kind Of Love' another book in the travel writing genre. The authors walk the Pacific Crest Trail (several years before Cheryl Strayed did). Great depiction of the travails of the long distance walker burdened by the pessimistic predictions of more experienced trail walkers who did not have faith in their ability to complete it.
I am halfway through 'The Goldfinch' and enjoying it hugely.
For cracking good stories, Barbara Kingsolver is hard to beat. Her earlier lesser pubicised novels 'The Bean Trees'. 'Pigs In Heaven' are beautiful.
T C Boyle's 'Tortilla Curtain' is amazing- poetic, full of descriptive beauty and a gentle ephemeral story at the heart of it.
Paul La Farge's 'Luminous Airplanes' - a young programmer arrives home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died in upstate NYC precipitating a road trip back with tandem journey back in time and place.
If you like memoirs, Susan Hill's 'Family' about her struggle to complete her family (and death of her premature daughter) is way more than one of those awful 'misery memoirs'. Stuffed full of her sparky opinions about everything and accounts of her interesting early life (Her Mother worked in a maternity nursing home and Hill's reminiscences are almost 'Call The Midwife' in their homeliness), her non fiction is as wonderful as her fiction.
I am an absolute hero worshipper of Janis Owen and Karen Russell, two Floridian based authors. Russell's 'Swamplandia' has a vein of magical realism streaking through it in her story of a Floridian swamp dwelling 'Cracker' family struggling to maintain their Gator theme park after the death of their Mother. 'American Ghost' by Janis Owen is loaded with the history and culture of Florida life, especially the Cracker lifestyle. Full of characters and the ghosts of their past, flaws and lives gone skewed. A reviewer says it better than me - "Janis tells a research-driven little told story of rural, poor, white families struggling with the haunting legacy of the old South. Easy to condemn because of the evil of slavery and the ongoing bigotry still in 2012. Discomforting to contemplate the white families who have never been able to outgrow their deeply Southern history"