silashouse.net/blog

Silas House's blog can now be found at www.silashouse.net/blog .  It will be updated regularly.  Thanks for visiting.  

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What I Read This Year

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The vast majority of books I read this year were not published this year, but I did read several 2017 releases.  You'll notice that hardly any of the books I absolutely loved received major awards attention or adulation this year.  The hype surrounding most of the books at the tops of the critics lists were largely lost on me.  I tried reading a few of them--and I won't say which ones, as it would be bad manners to publicly put down other novelists (now if we were in private conversation that'd be another thing altogether...)--but I found them mostly unreadable, pretentious, dull, overhyped, or, most often, a combination of all four factors. So, I am only mentioning here the books I read in 2017 that I loved.   My reading list this year was largely shaped by the fact that I taught in Edinburgh for two weeks this summer, so I immersed myself in Scottish literature as much as I was able.  And it is an incredibly rich literature. The other twenty-two books I read this year cam
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Favorite Books (Today)

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A friend recently challenged me to post my ten favorite books on Facebook, one a day, for the next ten days.  I've decided to post them all in one fell swoop here so I can try to articulate my thinking a bit.  Choosing ten favorite books is just about impossible for me.  It's akin to choosing a favorite child.  So instead, I tried to think about the ten books that are really speaking to me today as ones that changed me as a person and a writer. My list of favorites is constantly changing.  So, this is my list of ten favorites today.  It might be different tomorrow. As you'll see if you keep reading, sometimes I've chosen one book by a favorite author simply as a placeholder for many books. I'm listing these in no real particular order but my two favorite writers are Willa Cather and Thomas Hardy, so I'll talk about them first. I absolutely love Cather's My Antonia , O Pioneers! , My Mortal Enemy , and Death Comes For the Archbishop . They are al
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The Matter Is You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About

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There are two places in Southeastern Kentucky I think of as my true homes:   the small community of Lily , in the foothills of Laurel County, and, fifty miles east, Rockhouse Creek , in the lush mountains of Leslie County.   I will focus on Rockhouse here, mainly because it is the dark, lovely topography of my collective memory, but also because it is the epitome of Central Appalachia, the kind of place that journalists-who-don’t-know-what-they’re-talking-about always zoom in on with their statistics and opinions. In fact, Rockhouse is located just a few miles from the communities that were recently the focus of a piece called “ What’s The Matter With Eastern Kentucky? ” by Annie Lowrey in The New York Times that referred to Appalachia and the Deep South as “the smudge of the country.”             Well, I am that smudge.   My people are that smudge.   My homeland is that smudge. And we are much, much more than that.   In fact, we would fight for that smudge.   Many of us
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