Sometimes the hardest part about reading, is deciding what to read next. But don’t worry, we have books for that too.

Thomas Foster’s Twenty-Five Books that Shaped America is a great starting place if you are trying to reread (or read for the first time) the American Classics your high school English teacher raved about. Each of the twenty-five books has its own chapter, arranged in chronological order, beginning with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and continuing through My Antonia and To Kill a Mockingbird. Each chapter gives a summary of the book, as well as insight into the author. If you want to read yourself through American history, this book is a great guidebook.

Book Lust To Go  is a great way to find books for any and all traveling you may do. Compiled alphabetically by place name, as well as the type of trip, Nancy Pearl makes suggestions on what to read where. So if you don’t know what to read on that Caribbean cruise your mother-in-law booked for the whole family, there’s a chapter for that (See: Cavorting through the Caribbean). My favorite part? The suggestions are both fiction and nonfiction.

If you want a long list of good books that you probably haven’t heard of, but wish you had, Read this Next is perfect. Read this Next  is intended as a go-to guide for book clubs–included under each book suggestion is a question guide. The books are arranged by subject, so it is easy to browse. Sandra Newman and Hoard Mittlemark are not book snobs; their suggestions span all genres, from science-fiction to mystery to biography.

Happy Reading!

As an English major and later English teacher at Belhaven, I had the usual memories–looking up at her busy concentration at that manual typewriter as we waited for the #4 bus. But when I encountered her in Jitney #14, our discussion was focused on a mutual friend, garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence. pictured right with her nephew

Years later, on a trip to Washington, my family shared first a cab and then a Greyhound bus to Meridian with Miss Welty, to catch the “Southern Crescent.” As we were going to a Daffodil Convention, we talked about the “square daffodil” which is mentioned in Losing Battles, and I was able to identify it as Narcissus moschatus.

Later, as the train clicked along, our 4-year-old son said, “Mother, I know she’s a famous writer, but doesn’t she know all daffodils are round?”

-Written by Loyce Cain McKenzie

above: Eudora Welty with her mother Chestina from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History

The summer of 1973 after I graduated from Forest Hill, five friends came down from Senatobia and Memphis for a long weekend visit.  Among the things on their to-do list was a visit to Miss Eudora Welty.  She wouldn’t be hard to find — we might run into her at the Jitney Jungle 14, but that didn’t seem sure enough to count on.  Besides, she had lived in the same house forever and was listed in the phone book just like everyone else in Jackson.  So it wasn’t long before the six of us were on her front porch, knocking on the door.

Miss Welty opened the door herself and looked out at the mob on her porch and asked “May I help you?”

I explained that my high school-age friends had come all the way to Jackson and really wanted to meet her.

She said, “Well, I am working, but why don’t you all come in.”

She welcomed us into her rather plain parlor and began to ask questions about the six of us: “Where do you go to school? What is your favorite subject? What sort of books do you read?”

Here we were excited to meet a world-famous author, and Miss Welty was more interested in what us six teenagers were doing.  We tried to ask her a few erudite questions about “The Ponder Heart” and “Why I Live at the P.O.”, which she dutifully answered.

After a few minutes, she asked us if we wanted something to drink and some cookies, but we had been raised better and told her “thank you, no.”  She noticed that we each had a book or two so she asked if she might sign them for us, carefully personalizing each one.  Knowing that she was busy, we excused ourselves, and she saw us to the door, waving to us as we drove down Pinehurst.  For a few minutes, Miss Welty had made us feel as if we were the most important people in the world.

Years later, when I was the new Operations Supervisor of the Jackson Social Security office, I checked the reception area and saw Miss Welty sitting there waiting along with everyone else.  I went out and offered to get someone to help her right away, and she told me no, that she would wait her turn.  I wondered if she might be observing the other people waiting and their interactions with each other and the staff.  After one of the Service Representatives had helped her with her Medicare issue, she gathered up her papers and quietly left the office.  I said something to the employee, and she said, “Oh, we see her every now and then, but she just wants us to treat her like everyone else.”  What a gracious lady!

Written by Rod Clark

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa[at]lemuriabooks[dot]com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

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I have two stories to share about Miss Welty’s Delta Wedding. Marion Barnwell, a Delta native, shares her experience of reading Delta Wedding as a teenager. The other story is from Karl Marlantes who many of you might have met when he came to the bookstore on two separate occasions for Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War. Both of these stories are unique testaments to the power of Miss Welty’s writing. -Lisa

It was a hot summer day in Indianola, deep in the Mississippi Delta. I was fourteen. Some plan or other had fallen through to get together with a friend, and I was bored. Bored! Only one thing to do—pester my mother. More effectively than Chinese water torture, I repeated “I’m bored” a few hundred times to get her to stop what she was doing to entertain me. Instead, she went over to a shelf, selected a book, and handed it to me. “Read this,” she said. “It’s about the Delta.”

“Our Delta?” I asked in disbelief. “This boring place?”

“Our Delta,” she repeated. “Our very Delta.”

The book she handed me was Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding. By making that particular choice, she handed me so much more. No other book on earth could better have expanded my sense of self. I was—we were important. We must be. Someone had written a book about us.

That gift was the spark for a continuing passion for reading, which led to my pursuing a career as an English teacher and as a writer. I still marvel at my mother’s choice. For who better than Welty could use all the senses to make a particular place come alive? Who better to teach me that if I was bored, then I just wasn’t looking?

–Marion Barnwell

 The following is from Publisher’s Weekly – The title is “Why I Write” but it could  just as well be titled “Why I read” – a truly great piece. You might have read this story before on our blog but I love it so much and feel it is worth sharing again. -Lisa

by Karl Marlantes — Publishers Weekly, 1/25/2010

Having read a galley of my novel, Matterhorn, about Marines in Vietnam, a somewhat embarrassed woman came up to me and said, “I didn’t even know you guys slept outside.” She was college educated and had been an active protester against the war. I felt that my novel had built a small bridge.

The chasm that small bridge crossed is still wide and deep in this country. I remember being in uniform in early 1970, delivering a document to the White House, when I was accosted by a group of students waving Vietcong and North Vietnamese flags. They shouted obscenities and jeered at me. I could only stand there stunned, thinking of my dead and maimed friends, wanting desperately to tell these students that my friends and I were just like them: their age, even younger, with the same feelings, yearnings, and passions. Later, I quite fell for a girl who was doing her master’s thesis on D. H. Lawrence. Late one night we were sitting on the stairs to her apartment and I told her that I’d been a Marine in Vietnam. “They’re the worst,” she cried, and ran up the stairs, leaving me standing there in bewilderment.

After the war, I worked as a business consultant to international energy companies to support a family, eventually being blessed with five children. I began writing Matterhorn in 1975 and for more than 30 years, I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript. Certainly, writing the novel was a way of dealing with the wounds of combat, but why would I subject myself to the further wounds all writers receive trying to get published? I think it’s because I’ve wanted to reach out to those people on the other side of the chasm who delivered the wound of misunderstanding. I wanted to be understood.

Ultimately, the only way we’re ever going to bridge the chasms that divide us is by transcending our limited viewpoints. My realization of this came many years ago reading Eudora Welty’s great novel Delta Wedding. I experienced what it would be like to be a married woman on a Mississippi Delta plantation who was responsible for orchestrating one of the great symbols of community and love. I entered her world and expanded beyond my own skin and became a bigger person.

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa[at]lemuriabooks[dot]com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

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Last week I sat by my friend Mary Alice White, Miss Welty’s niece, who has written a beautiful Lemuria blog on her famous aunt. I told Mary Alice that I was going to write a blog for Lisa at Lemuria if only I could remember the recipe! I went on to tell Mary Alice about the delightful conversation that I had with Miss Welty (that is what I called her face to face, as a Southern girl would) in the “Jitney 14” probably in the early to mid 1980s. I was in the vegetable and fruit section looking around when Miss Welty walked up. We had the most delightful conversation about a recipe. But was it banana bread, or what? I can’t remember! We laughed and talked for some time, and I recall thinking at that point that besides being one of the most talented writers of the 20th century, she was a true Southern lady who was friendly to all who walked by and who seemed absolutely delighted to see me and all her other friends who were in the store that day.

It was not too much longer after that when I went with my friends Charlotte Capers, Patti Carr Black, and Miss Welty to a meeting one night. We drove up in her driveway, and she walked out. Moments later, I remember thinking, “I am in a car with one of the most famous writers in the world, and I am never going to forget this.” Afterwards, however, I recalled the laughter among these dear Jackson friends and their delight at being in each other’s company. This is what struck me that night as very, very special.

Years later, I would tell my students at Millsaps, or Belhaven, or Hinds, or Holmes or Tulane as we were reading and laughing about “Why I Live at the P.O.” or examining the complexities of “A Worn Path” that I personally knew Miss Welty, the person. They would look at me with amazement. I would tell them how friendly and genuine she was. I would also tell them that she holds a high place of honor not only in Jackson, not only in the South, not only in the United States, but in the world. I would tell them how much the French absolutely adore her and her writing.

I went to Miss Welty’s funeral in the spring of 2001. It was hard for me to go because my own dear mother had died only a few weeks earlier; yet, I wanted to be there to honor Miss Wetly at Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church.I keep the service bulletin in a file and run across it from time to time and look at the names all of the national dignitaries who came from afar. I wanted to be there and reflect with thanksgiving on the joy that she brought to others, whether it was through her writing or her personal friendships. I am grateful to say that I knew Miss Welty, the person. Her legacy, not only as a beloved Southern writer, but as a beloved Southerner will live on in my mind always.

-Nan Graves Goodman

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa[at]lemuriabooks[dot]com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

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While working as a graduate intern at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History last year, I began a particular assignment centered on Eudora Welty. The goal of my project was to find a way to mesh social media with Miss Welty’s connection to MDAH, possibly through the use of Twitter or Facebook. The catch? I knew very little about Eudora Welty’s life.

As a Millsaps English major, I’d dabbled in Welty’s fiction. Dr. Suzanne Marrs impressed upon the English 3350 Welty Short Fiction class the poignancy of Welty’s fiction writing, taking us on a tour of the Welty house as a “bonus.” I’d been warned that a student should not over-connect the work of an author with the life of an author, because fiction is fiction and thus stands alone. However, years later as an intern at MDAH, I found myself finally reading my former professor’s biography Eudora Welty, and looking back I notice that I’ve highlighted the following passage, taken from one of Miss Welty’s essays:

“Southerners do write – probably they must write. It is that way they are: born readers and reciters, great document holders, diary keepers, letter exchangers and savers, history tracers – and, outstaying the rest, great talkers. Emphasis in talk is on the narrative form and the verbatim conversation, for which time is needed.”

It is a quote from an essay published in the Times Literary Supplement. I’ve scribbled the word “critical” in the margin next to the passage, decorating the paragraph with stars for added emphasis. This concept – that Southerners are perhaps inherently destined to document our conversations in written form – made perfect sense. Think of all the correspondence Miss Welty wrote, all the notes she must have jotted while eavesdropping, and all the recipes and gardening tips she recorded in writing. She was nothing if not prolific, so it must be interesting to write a book about Miss Welty, because really, it seems that she was always writing a book about everybody else.

As Miss Welty said, Southerners are talkers, driven to communicate, retell, relive, and relate. We have new ways of communicating, it’s true: our culture has come to depend on social media as a way to document our lives and stay in touch. We are E-mailers, bloggers, Tweeters, Facebook-status updaters. But while we have modified our methods of communicating, we are still communicating the same things. We still storytellers, narrators and gossipers, readers and letter-writers. More than ever, we value our conversations, and we want others to share in our chatter.

As I studied Miss Welty last year, I began to wonder what she would think about the way we experience her legacy. I can’t imagine what Miss Welty would say if she knew that her old house now has a Facebook page, or that Lemuria was running blogs about her. Would she have liked Facebook, blogs, and Twitter? She seems too regal for social media, but then again…perhaps she would have loved it. After all, what is social media if not a way to retell stories, share ideas and communicate with others?

I think Miss Welty would approve.

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa[at]lemuriabooks[dot]com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

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