Here are the opening lines from The Poisonwood Bible:
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Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.
I am breathless with wonder at how someone can write so beautifully.
Posts: 66 | Location: Ireland | Registered: 28 July 2005
I think her books are great. Poisonwood Bible was really good, it's one of those books that you want to talk about with other people once you put it down. Prodigal Summer was good too as was Animal Dreams. For some reason I haven't read Bean Trees. Her books make you think about things in a new way, not by being in your face, but through layered characters who have interesting things happen to them. And watching the choices they make is fun. Does she have anything else coming out soon? Any "undiscovered" authors like her to recommend?
Posts: 35 | Location: California | Registered: 30 November 2004
Originally posted by B41066: For some reason I haven't read Bean Trees.
Bean Trees was her first book and a little less polished than the rest, but good all the same. You should definitely read it, and its sequel Pigs in Heaven.
She also has some collections of short stories and articles, but I haven't read any of these.
quote:
Originally posted by B41066: Any "undiscovered" authors like her to recommend?
You might enjoy Plainsong by Kent Haruf. A bit like Prodigal Summer in that it has well-drawn characters in a number of intertwined stories and a real sense of place (the plains of Colorado). Although with a very different writing style, sort of a stark beauty about it.
Posts: 66 | Location: Ireland | Registered: 28 July 2005
