{"id":349,"date":"2025-05-22T17:10:53","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T17:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/?p=349"},"modified":"2025-05-22T17:10:54","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T17:10:54","slug":"two-books-best-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/two-books-best-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Books, Best of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Ask me if I can recommend a good book. Yes, I can. I can recommend a couple of them, if you can take them. The best book I have read this year, if not the best of the decade, is <em>Erasure <\/em>by Percival Everett,&nbsp; the guy who won this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for <em>James<\/em>, a retelling of&nbsp; Huckleberry Finn\u2019s adventures with Jim the runaway slave, told from Jim\u2019s point of view. (I\u2019m sure that <em>James<\/em> is a great book too, but I haven\u2019t yet read it.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Erasure<\/em> is not an easy book to take. It may surely shock a lot of readers. Written by a black man, it viciously satirizes a certain class of black men\u2014those who adopt and lionize the gangsta lifestyle and affectations, and especially black writers who win fame and fortune by grandizing the life to (mostly) white audiences. The sex, the violence, the crudity, the racism may be far too rough for gentle readers, but oh my god can Percival Everett tell a tale in a most entertaining way. It is telling that his latest book is a retelling of a Mark Twain book, because he may well be the new Twain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If <em>Erasure <\/em>is my favorite book of the year, following close behind is an unassuming book by an unknown writer named Diane Chiddister, who not too long ago moved to my hometown of Olympia, Washington. Diane emailed me her resum\u00e9 and asked if she could write for <em>Oly Arts. <\/em>I was impressed with her resum\u00e9 and offered to give her a shot at freelancing. And she gave me a copy of her debut novel, <em>One More Day<\/em>, a novel about residents and workers in an assisted living home. This novel is cleverly constructed around a series of chapters, each of which focuses on a different character and each of which is a self-contained short story with different characters in different situations, each related by their connections to the same assisted living facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whether through imagination or experience or some combination of both, Chiddister found her way into the minds and hearts of these people as no one else possibly can, and through her words, we the readers come to know them. Their lives are sweet, heartbreaking, and in many instances surprisingly. This is a major talent at work. I recommend getting copies of <em>Erasure<\/em> and <em>One More Day.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ask me if I can recommend a good book. Yes, I can. I can recommend a couple of them, if you can take them. The best book I have read this year, if not the best of the decade, is Erasure by Percival Everett,&nbsp; the guy who won this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"Two Books, Best of the Year\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/two-books-best-of-the-year\/#more-349\" aria-label=\"Read more about Two Books, Best of the Year\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Two Books, Best of the Year - Alec Clayton - Writing etc.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/two-books-best-of-the-year\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Two Books, Best of the Year - Alec Clayton - Writing etc.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ask me if I can recommend a good book. Yes, I can. I can recommend a couple of them, if you can take them. The best book I have read this year, if not the best of the decade, is Erasure by Percival Everett,&nbsp; the guy who won this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for ... 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I write for OLY ARTS (Olympia). My novels, published with Mud Flat Press, are: \\\"Teacher; This is Me, Debbi, David;\\\" \\\"Tupelo;\\\" The Freedom Trilogy (a three-book series consisting of \\\"The Backside of Nowhere,\\\" \\\"Return to Freedom\\\" and \\\"Visual Liberties\\\"); \\\"Reunion at the Wetside;\\\" \\\"The Wives of Marty Winters;\\\" \\\"Imprudent Zeal;\\\" and \\\"Until the Dawn.\\\" I've also published two books on art, \\\"As If Art Matters\\\" and \\\"What is What the Heck is a Frame-Pedestal Aesthetic? 1960s Revolution in American Art Revisited.\\\" All are available on amazon.com or can be ordered from your local bookstore. I grew up in Tupelo and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 1988.\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\/\/www.alecclayton.com\/\"],\"url\":\"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/author\/alecclayton\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Two Books, Best of the Year - Alec Clayton - Writing etc.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/two-books-best-of-the-year\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Two Books, Best of the Year - Alec Clayton - Writing etc.","og_description":"Ask me if I can recommend a good book. Yes, I can. I can recommend a couple of them, if you can take them. 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I write for OLY ARTS (Olympia). My novels, published with Mud Flat Press, are: \"Teacher; This is Me, Debbi, David;\" \"Tupelo;\" The Freedom Trilogy (a three-book series consisting of \"The Backside of Nowhere,\" \"Return to Freedom\" and \"Visual Liberties\"); \"Reunion at the Wetside;\" \"The Wives of Marty Winters;\" \"Imprudent Zeal;\" and \"Until the Dawn.\" I've also published two books on art, \"As If Art Matters\" and \"What is What the Heck is a Frame-Pedestal Aesthetic? 1960s Revolution in American Art Revisited.\" All are available on amazon.com or can be ordered from your local bookstore. I grew up in Tupelo and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 1988.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.alecclayton.com\/"],"url":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/author\/alecclayton\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350,"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}