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The frenetic pace and minimalist lifestyle that being a college student seems to engender has forced me to redefine what I see as my relationship to those fictive worlds – how I fit books into both my schedule and my identity. These days, it’s mostly fantasy and chick lit that I read – desperate to escape the mental challenges of the academic life, I turn to books less to reaffirm my love of literature, or to submit myself to an author in order to learn something about life or love or writing, than to simply escape, as wholly as I can, into someone else’s vision. When that urge arises it’s not the complex machinations of Tolstoy’s novels that I want to be faced with but rather the frenzy of finding a proper husband for a marriageable young woman, or the clearly sketched wars between good and evil in fantasy worlds in which magic is a living force. Summers, I engulf myself in Tolstoy and poetry and Jhumpa Lahiri while I can, knowing that my time to spend with them is all too short. Once back, I let impulse dictate what it is I choose to read in the few cornered hours that remain free. Genre is unimportant – all that I need is that sense of fictional worlds seeping over into mine, with all their vivid wonder.

It took college to teach me that as much as I enjoy picking and choosing, rifling through book lists and favorite author bibliographies and Booker-prize winners to find the books which fit my kinks, it is ultimately the mere act of reading that keeps me going. Books are not necessary to sustain human life, or even the human spirit – I’ve never believed that. But there is an intimacy, an ownership to the act of reading that I’ve found almost nowhere else. Opening a book is like sipping a mug of hot tea – there’s a sense of power in the choice to drink, and a sense of submission in the willingness to take in, but above and beyond there’s a profoundly personal nature to it – the feel of the mug in your hands, its warmth on your fingers, the knowledge that no one else will ever drink this particular cup of tea in the same way you do. Books are like this – eloquent, interacting directly with you. Unlike a football game or even a film, books are profoundly individual experiences, rather than audience experiences (both their greatest strength and greatest weakness), which means that no matter how far I stray they’ll be waiting for me when I turn around. Waiting to be opened, tasted, submitted to, engulfed. Books will always be a part of my world – an intrinsic part, which I will return to again and again, and an elusive, necessary warmth at the borders of my life.”

Robin McKinley is one of the more successful fantasy authors alive today, but she’s sometimes dismissed as a children’s writer. To me, the point is rather moot since her books are deliciously complex and satisfying, less in language than in emotional richness and world-building. If I were to describe her, I’d say she has the dense mythology of Patricia A. McKillip’s books and the intense, riveting romance of Cecilia Dart Thornton. Unlike both of these writers however, her plots don’t meander and her characters leap off the page. Don’t get me wrong, I love both McKillip and Thornton and would recommend them to fantasy readers – but Robin McKinley, at her best, is in a league of her own.

Some of her books are geared more for younger readers – The Blue Sword, The Hero and the Crown, to some extent Rose Daughter, Spindle’s End and Beauty - but she’s also written a couple adult novels. Sunshine is one of these. I finally got a chance to read this earlier today and it stopped me in my tracks. Full disclosure: Beauty is one of my favorite novels of all time, but I have mixed feelings about some of her other novels, and I haven’t read McKinley in a long time, mostly because I was under the impression that I’d read all her good books.

Sunshine is wonderful. The best book I’ve read all year, bar none. It reminded me why I read, not just fantasy, but books in general. Rae is a funny, immensely sympathetic heroine, the world-building is stellar, and all the minor characters shine. It’s the plot, however, which caught me – this is that rarest of books which combines a fantastic protagonist with a writing skill and plot that grab you in the first five pages and push you forward with a driving force like a hammer through the rest of the book. I marathoned Sunshine in one glorious, too-short sitting, looking up only once to refuse a lake trip, and stopping only to grab ice cream. Vampires are much-maligned these days, but this novel made me realize they shouldn’t be entirely dismissed as subject material just because one mediocre writer turned them into a mediocre, and world-wide bestselling, series. Also, for the record, this was published in 2003, before the Twilight series, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to discover that Stephanie Meyer got some of her inspiration for the Edward-Bella relationship from it.

Regardless, McKinley charts her own powerful, winsome way through magic, baking, a loyal but misguided family, and most of all the steady coming-into-power of an extraordinary young woman. It’s funny, riveting, absurdly well-written for the topic material, and at least a little romantic. Read it. As soon as possible.

The shortlist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award has been announced.

“The Best Translated Book Awards launched in 2007 as a way of bringing attention to great works of international literature. Original translations (no reprints or retranslations) published between December 2009 and November 2010 are eligible for this year’s award. Quality of the original book and the artistry of the English translation are the criteria used in determining the winning titles.”

The list:

The Literary Conference by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland
A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin
The Jokers by Albert Cossery, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis
Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar), translated from the French by David Bellos
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal
On Elegance While Sleeping by Emilio Lascano Tegui, translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey
Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns
Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg

Of these, I would say that Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation has the highest profile; I’ve read mixed reviews however so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

The Longlist for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction was recently announced. The Orange Prize is for a novel written by a woman and is one of Britain’s biggest book awards. Below is the list.

London, 16 March 2011: The Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, today announces the 2011 longlist. Celebrating its sixteenth anniversary this year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing throughout the world.

• Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) – Sudanese; 3rd Novel
• Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate) – British; 10th Novel
• Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador) – Irish; 7th Novel
• The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi (Bloomsbury) – Indian; 1st Novel
• Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty (Faber and Faber) – British; 6th Novel
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair) – American; 4th Novel
• The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury) – British/Sierra Leonean; 2nd Novel
• The London Train by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape) – British; 4th Novel
• Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson (Sceptre) – British; 1st Novel
• The Seas by Samantha Hunt (Corsair) – American; 1st Novel
• The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna (Faber and Faber) – British; 2nd Novel
• Great House by Nicole Krauss (Viking) – American; 3rd Novel
• The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone (Chatto & Windus) – American; 3rd Novel
• The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) – Serbian/American; 1st Novel
• The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (Viking) – American; 1st Novel
• Repeat it Today with Tears by Anne Peile (Serpent’s Tail) – British; 1st Novel
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Chatto & Windus) – American; 1st Novel
• The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Serpent’s Tail) – British/Nigerian; 1st Novel
• The Swimmer by Roma Tearne (Harper Press) – British; 4th Novel
• Annabel by Kathleen Winter (Jonathan Cape) – Canadian; 1st Novel

Check out the Alexandrian round-up also for plot synopses and observations.

China Miéville won a record-breaking three times, most recently last year. Check out his acceptance speech below (er – am I the only one who’s thinking he’s not at all bad-looking?)

Around the World:

Algeria
Albert Camus

Argentina

Jorge Luis Borges

Australia
Melina Marchetta
Markus Zusak

Bosnia-Herzigovina
Zlata Filipovic?

Brazil
Paulo Coelho
Clarice Lispector

Canada

Margaret Atwood

Czech Republic:

Milan Kundera

China
Ha Jin

France

Hungary

Embers, Sandor Marai

India
Salman Rushdie

Ireland
Tana French
Celine Kiernan
Ceclia Ahern
Marian Keyes

Italy
Andrea Camilleri

Mexico
Luis Alberto Urrea

New Zealand
Nalini Singh
Juliet Marillier

Russia

Sweden
Stieg Larsson

United Kingdom (Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and England)

Zimbabwe
Tsitsi Dangarembga

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Around the World in 80 Countries (books by setting, example)

-All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

To categorize Cormac MCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses as primarily a “literary” novel seems to me to be doing it a disservice, because what it really is, and what it functions best as, is a Western with a literary bite.  All the trademarks of the traditional Western novel are here (and beautifully so) – the hard-bitten characters forced to grow up too early, the deep-running friendships evinced by nothing more than casual surface talk, the necessary, ever-present nature of food, guns, and horses, the transitory sense of life as constant travel while the characters search for permanence or at least the illusion of it…McCarthy has finely captured and in fact rejuvenated a genre that seems to be dying out. Don’t get me wrong – All the Pretty Horses is not a straight Western. Most Westerns set up one particular conflict early and then circle around it for the rest of the novel (usually a conflict with a particular antagonist) and as soon as this is resolved the novel is over (often with a gun battle). Simple, contained, and straightforward. All the Pretty Horses is much longer, more sprawling, more inclusive of potentially epic themes. But it possesses the same sensibility of dust and travel and survival mechanisms as most Westerns, and has the same stripped, linear storytelling style. I think I am going to enjoy it.