Books (and a movie) to recommend

I just finished Allison Benis White’s Self-Portrait with Crayon, a wonderful book (my mini-review of it will appear in the next Crab Creek Review) of crystalline prose poems that present a puzzle and a glimpse of how loss and art work together. The thing I’ll say here that I didn’t get to say in my review: this is a great book for people who are looking at 1. how to build and organize a manuscript, because her organization is meticulous and very clever and 2. how to write about personal tragedies through the lens of art (kind of ekphrasis of the soul.)

The other book I’m recommending is a Young Adult book called When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. It’s a book the author said was inspired by L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which was all I needed to hear to read it, and it involves a young girl coming of age in 1970’s New York City and time travel. It’s not as good as A Wrinkle in Time, but it’s the kind of smart, emotionally engaging book I wish had been around when I was a kid. Issues of class and race are addressed, as well as the confusing transition between childhood and adulthood. The best time travel book L’Engle wrote, in my opinion, was not A Wrinkle in Time, but A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third in her trilogy.

The movie I saw was an independent film called Haiku Tunnel, about an aspiring, depressed novelist working as a temp in a law firm. The writer/actor/director is charming and funny, and a lot of the scenes reminded me of the Kafka-esque cheer of showing up to work as a temp and how work can actually help writers stay connected to the world. At least, that’s what I think it was about. It was a fun movie of the genre “movies about writers.” I wish more of these movies were about women writers, but there you go. Maybe I’ll become a famous screenwriter writing the exciting life of a poet. Probably not.