Monday, July 22, 2013

Summer Reads: Yoonmi Nam Picks

We continue our series of what books Lawrence artists are currently reading. This week, Yoonmi Nam shares with us her list of books.   She had some great picks!  Here they are: 


Photo of artist Yoomni Nam


1. Birds of America by Lorrie Moore


New York Times Book of the Year 
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Winner of the Salon Book Award
Village Voice Book of the Year

 Birds of America is the celebrated collection of twelve stories from Lorrie Moore, one of the finest authors at work today.





2. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made

Landscape by James Howeard Kunstler

The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots. 
In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness.






2. Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris


A guy walks into a bar car and...

From here the story could take many turns. When this guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you deeply moved. 





3. Collections of Nothing by William Davies King



Nearly everyone collects something, even those who don’t think of themselves as collectors. William Davies King, on the other hand, has devoted decades to collecting nothing—and a lot of it. With Collections of Nothing, he takes a hard look at this habitual hoarding to see what truths it can reveal about the impulse to accumulate.




4. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens


On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.



5. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes


This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. 




Yoomni also adds some books that she plans to read. They are: 
It Chooses You by Miranda July
You Are Not a Stranger here by Adam Haslett
Moo by Jane Smiley
A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect
Piano by Katie Hafner

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