Top Ten Tuesday: Gateway Books/Authors

This week's Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) is about those Gateway Books or Authors in Our Reading Journey who got you into reading, or into reading a genre you never thought you'd read, or brought you BACK into reading.

Definitely this was a fun Top Ten list to consider--I focused on authors because when I find an author who works for, I tend to try to read everything they come out with.  I also had a blast coming up with the right illustrations for my authors.

Donna Leon - Leon's series of books featuring Guido Brunetti sparked an interest in Venice that has taken hold of me and just won't let go.  Now I seek out books--histories, novels, memoirs--about Venice.  Hoping to make it there this fall.

Nevada Barr - I've always liked mysteries, but Barr's Anna Pigeon series which features a lot of National Parks and a lot of hiking got me interested in both.  Now I walk daily and hike weekly, and make a point of planning vacations around visiting National Parks...truly one of America's best ideas! 

Mary Stewart - I'm not much of a Romance reader but my mom used to get British women's magazines from our town's newspaper/tobacco shop in the 1960's and I learned to read by reading the serialized Mary Stewart stories, complete with stirring illustrations!

Bill Bryson - My love of travel and travel memoirs can be traced to reading Bryson's oh-so-snarky travel books.

Jane Austen - Classics don't have to be big, scary, or filled with political ramblings that are incomprehensible to the modern reader.

Daphne du Maurier - I love psychological thrillers and DDM is the mistress of the genre.

James Michener - I love historical fiction and Michener hooked me early.

Margaret Forster - I didn't really start reading literary bios until my dad gave me Forster's bio of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and I fell in love with the genre.

Erik Larson - I love his histories that read like novels; Larsen's books made me go back and read In Cold Blood, the prototype of the genre in which Larsen shines.

Tracy Chevalier - Artifact-based fictionalized backstory. Love it!

Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller

Often, the subtitle of a book almost seems like an afterthought, a way of cataloging the book but not really significant.

In Daphne Du Maurier, by Margaret Forster, the subtitle is everything. This bio definitely focuses on the bisexual aspect of du Maurier that Forster uncovered during her research and the full scope of which, according to the Afterword, her children didn't know.

While I was reading this bio, I kept wondering whether Daphne would have been the success she was had even one of the conflicting elements that went into her story been different. She was the golden girl of a notorious family--her grandfather was a renowned Victorian illustrator and novelist and her father a successful and flamboyant actor--and living up to her family name clearly was extremely important to her. From her earliest memories, she portrays herself as sexually confused--seeing herself as a boy, wishing she was a boy, and feeling that she had to put her boy in a box. She found artistic as well as psychological and sexual relief in her writing to the point where she came to see the writer within her as a separate self, a "demanding other self" that was "placated only by writing," which drew her away from attending to her other demanding roles of wife and mother.

Thinking about Daphne's story, and having read Justine Picardie's novel Daphne: A Novel recently, I can't help but think about my adolescent logic (derived mostly from healthy doses of the Brontes, Fitgzerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Daphne herself) that went something like this:
1) All writers are tortured souls who must be miserable in order to write.
2) I don't want to be miserable.
3) I cannot be a writer.

I'm not a teenager anymore and writing has brought me great joy, but like I said, I can't help wondering whether she could have written Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel or The Scapegoat or The House on the Strand if she hadn't felt miserable, trapped, scared, driven, insecure, or, at times, a bit psychotic.

This was a fascinating bio, well-written, well-footnoted, and best of all, Forster is a pro at clearly marking where she is speculating. She also does a superb job at reading between the lines of Daphne's letters and highlighting inconsistencies, which usually are quite telling. She provided a nice mix of analysis of the stories and novels, interesting anecdotes about their publication, and, like Daphne herself, provided a wonderful sense of place as she followed Daphne from London to Cornwall to Egypt to Italy, etc.

The Duchess - Double Standard

I finally got an opportunity to watch The Duchess
last week, and I liked it much more than I expected to. I guess I had read too many negative comments about it that lowered my expectations. But, I thought it was really pretty good--not a feel-good movie, or even an atta-girl movie--and it certainly didn't portray a complete picture of the Georgiana from Amanda Foreman's bio, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (Modern Library Paperbacks), but that would take a 6-part mini-series and not a 2-hour film.

I think Keira Knightley did a good job of convincing me that she was Duchess material (naive, flirtatious, intelligent, ambitious, pragmatic, maternal, resigned), and I felt so sorry for her and so glad that, much as I love history, I am alive in the 21st century and not the 18th. Ralph Fiennes played the Duke perfectly--just the way I imagined him when reading the book a year or so ago. The script and Hayley Atwell were much kinder to Bess Foster than I would have preferred, but you can't have everything, I suppose. Charlotte Rampling was fantastic as Gee's mother--cold, ambitious, I shudder just thinking of her. I wish Fox had been more in the movie, but I liked the brief glimpses we had of him.

The double-standard comes into play in that I am much more forgiving when a filmmaker takes liberties with history to tell a compelling story than I am when a filmmaker takes liberties with certain literary texts (e.g., Austens!) and rewrites them to tell a completing different story. I know I should be outraged when historical facts are fudged in the name of storytelling, but I'm finding that I'm okay with it...to some degree. As long as the facts aren't twisted so badly that the lessons that history can teach us are corrupted. I don't think that happened with The Duchess--Georgiana may have been to the manor born, but it wasn't an easy life, and that comes through in spades.