17 for 2017: Jamie Lauren Keiles recommends The Group

9. The Group by Mary McCarthy recommended by Jamie Lauren Keiles

Throughout my tenure as the December Writer-In-Residence, I will be assembling a list of 17 must-read-books for 2017. To accomplish this numerically satisfying task, I have asked 17 people whose work I adore to suggest one title for the list. Consult the end of each post for the growing list of recommendations! 

I met Jamie Keiles at the University of Chicago, right before she graduated and moved to Brooklyn. Since then, her writing has been featured in New York Times Magazine, Gawker, and Vice. Prior to publishing You Only Live Twice, I sent Jamie a PDF of the penultimate draft with the secret hope that she might be able to intuit – and therefore solve – all of its methodological and existential problems. Instead, she sat in my living room and said “Dude, I CAN’T BELIEVE WE CHOOSE TO WRITE ABOUT THESE THINGS.” While unexpected, it was in fact the reaction I needed: a moment of shared anxiety about both public space and unpredictable affective interconnectivity. Interested in learning more? Perhaps you are in need of an online LOL? Follow Jamie on Twitter.

From Jamie:

I pulled The Group by Mary McCarthy out of a dollar bin and it sat in a stack for several years, as usually happens. I didn't realize it was a "famous" book until I finally read it this year and started recommending it to friends, all of whom had already read it. The novel follows a group of women in the years after their 1933 graduation from Vassar. It's one of those sprawling novels that demands a hundred pages of reading just to remember which character belongs with which plot, which was a nice counterbalance to all of the fleeting online reading I necessarily got sucked into this year. McCarthy has a good eye for the idiosyncratic details of post-liberal arts life. The book is a half-century old, but it has all the lesbianism and drama and high-society shit talking you'd want. Reading a big good novel is nice because the time goes fast and when you're done you feel like you really accomplished something. 

Stay tuned as we build the ultimate 2017 reading list! A new suggestion from an inspired thinker emerges every-other-day for the month of December on open-book.ca.

17 for 2017:

1. Mariko Tamaki recommends The Land of Forgotten Girls

2. Sheila Heti recommends The Normal Personality: A New Way of Thinking about People

3. Vivek Shraya recommends The Mothers

4. Kate Bornstein recommends Siddhartha

5. Casey Mecija recommends Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America

6. Morgan M. Page recommends Small Beauty

7. Lauren Berlant recommends Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

8. Chase Strangio recommends Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation

December Writer-In-Residence

Chase Joynt is a filmmaker and writer. His latest two films Genderize and Between You and Me are now streaming live online with CBC Digital Docs. His first book, You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) was published by Coach House Books and just named one of the Best Books of 2016 by The Globe and Mail and CBC. His second book The Case of Agnes (co-authored with Kristen Schilt) is forthcoming from Duke University Press.