Cushla's virtual road trip through the states

Here's where I've been so far...


visited 10 states (20%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or Amsterdam travel guide for Android

Edited to say that I'm going to update this list as I go:

Alabama - Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (read in 2008) by Fannie Flagg
To Kill a Mocking Bird (read years ago) by Harper Lee

California - East of Eden (read years ago) by John Steinbeck

Florida - Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King (non-fiction) - December 2014 - 5 stars

Georgia - Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (read in 2008) by John Berendt

Louisiana - Property by Valerie Martin - 2009

Massachusetts - Running the Books: the Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg - December 2010, 4 1/2 stars

Nebraska - O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - June 2011 - 5 stars
My Antonia by Willa Cather - January 2014 - 4 stars

New Mexico - The Wives of Los Alamos - TaraShea Nesbit - 3 stars - March 2014

New York - The Emperor's Children (read in 2008) by Claire Messud
Julie and Julia (2009) by Julie Powell (my least favourite this year)
Motherless Brooklyn (years ago) by Jonathan Lethem
The Chosen(years ago) by Chaim Potok
Tolstoy Lied by Rachel Kadish (2012)

Washington D.C. - Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu - published in the US as The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears - read in May 2011 - 4 stars

Wisconsin - American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm sure there are more! I'll add some more when I've checked my bookshelves.

When I read new books, I'll post comments here as well as in my 75 book challenge thread.

Louisiana - Property by Valerie Martin. I read this earlier this year and really enjoyed it.

YOWSER, it's been 16 months since I read a book that fits this challenge. It's not that I haven't been reading books set in the US, it's just that they have all been about the financial crisis.

I've just finished a good book set in Boston, Massachusetts - Running the Books: the Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg. There was quite a lot of Boston flavour to it, especially about Deer Island and the development of the prison system, so I'm giong to count it here.

It's interesting isn't it. I thought this challenge would be a piece of cake, but I am finding that lots of books I read, although set in the US just don't seem to represent the state very well.

>3 cushlareads: I have read reviews of that book and wondered what others think of it.

#4 Deltaqueen, the other thing that happens to me is that as soon as I start a challenge I seem to read no more books from there - same thing happened with Canada and the presidential biogs one!

#5 Thornton37814, I've seen several other people in the 75 book challenge group who also really liked it.

OK, at last I read a couple of US books with a strong sense of place. The first is one I finished yesterday, the second one i finished in May and forgot fitted into this challenge!

Nebraska: O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - 5 stars

The only Willa Cather I'd read before this one was Alexander's Bridge and that had been oooookay. This had a good plot, a great main character and some of the most beautiful writing about the American midwest that must exist. If it's sitting on your bookshelf, move it up your TBR mountain!!!

John Bergson and his wife emigrated from Sweden to Nebraska, where they became farmers. Right at the start of the book, after 5 years on the farm, John dies and leaves his daughter Alexandra in charge of all decisions concerning the farm and effectively the family - her 2 older brothers, Oscar and Lou, and Emil, who is much younger. Alexandra is smart, brave, calm, takes calculated risks, and looks after the family well. The book follows the Bergsons, their family dramas and their Bohemian and French immigrant neighbours over the next 20 years. This is definitely a book I want my daughter to read when she's old enough.

*spoilers* I thought about dinging this half a star because I found Alexandra's reaction to what happened unbelievable. What, what her friend and brother were doing was WORSE than what Frank did? Um, hellooo. But I think it probably fitted in with attitudes to infidelity and morality at the time Cather was writing, and it felt plausible, so I left it at 5 stars .

Washington D.C. - Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu - 4 stars

Read in May 2011.



(Copied and pasted from my 75BC thread, sorry!)

This is published as The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears in the US, and I much prefer that name because it's from a line from Dante's Inferno that really fits the book.

Sepha Stephanos is an Ethiopian immigrant who's been living in DC for 17 years. He runs a corner store at Logan Circle and has 2 good friends, Kenneth, who left the Congo and is now an engineer, and Jospeh, who's originally from Kenya and now works as a waiter at one of the poshest restaurants in the city. One of the big themes in the novel is immigrants' life in the US and how they feel about their home countries and why they left. The other one is gentrification and race (less successful I think - it felt like he was trying to cram a bit much into one short novel.)

It's one of those onion books - Mengestu skips backwards and forwards over the last 17 years. It's not giving too much away to say that life in the US has been difficult for three 3 men and hasn't worked out how they expected. Sepha in particular doesn't have many friends and is very lonely and unsettled, underneath his every day routines. He's also very likable (and he reads lots, which of course makes me like someone more!), which is what kept me turning the pages in what turns out to be a really sad book, first for what happened to make him leave Ethiopia.

The neighbourhood Sepha lives in is changing and Judith moves in with her 11 year old daughter Naomi. Judith's the only white person in the neighbourhood. Naomi's father is black, but not there. The 3 of them become friends, and he and Naomi read The Brothers Karamazov together in the shop. Sepha can see the life he always wanted dangling in front of him... (I really liked Naomi but didn't warm to Judith.)

Mengestu's writing is beautiful and I will look for How to Read the Air, his second book, in the Wellington library next year.

This book gave me a good look at a part of DC that I haven't seen in fiction often.

I haven't posted a book in this challenge for over 3 years! I've read US fiction since 2011 but nothing has focused on one state, till this month.

Florida - Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King - 5 stars



This was an outstanding book about the alleged rape of Norma Padgett, a white woman, in Lake County, Florida in 1949 by 4 black men. It's grim reading but extremely well written grim reading, and the details of what happened to the Groveland Boys, in and out of the Florida courts, are interspersed with a biography of Thurgood Marshall's early life (up until he left the NAACP to be a judge). Highly recommended if you are interested in civil rights or US history.