This Book Will Change Your Life - Domestic Apparitions by Meg Tuite.

 

Travel. Read. Fast. Amanda Knox. And apparitions. In the air. Cars. On living rooms floors.  We are movement and read and  Domestic Apparitions by the Meg Tuite. It is story as sketch. Family as fragment. Life as a series of disturbances that bounce into one another and congeal. It is also the female experience as filtered through violence and oppression and we recognize that women's experiences are far more wide-ranging than what we're reacting to, that there is love, friendship and family as a nurturing and safe place, but in a world where men endlessly project their sexual and aberrant fantasies onto women, where women's voices have been suppressed historically, and ignored, and continue to be suppressed in ignored in various forms in the literary world and beyond, these stories need to be told, highlighted and given a place to be broadcast. And in that way Domestic Apparitions is reminiscent of other work we've had the chance to read recently, books like Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello, Sweet Charlotte's Seventh Mistake by Cori Crooks and The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginnetta Correli, books that eschew metaphor and magical realism and try to capture something in real time in all its ugliness. Which makes them important and necessary, but aren't reduced by this necessaryness as something merely important, not when these books are this creative, thoughtful and bursting with storytelling talent.    

The TBWCYL, Inc. 2008 Top Ten Lists are coming and today you get our Top Ten Books. No for real, you do. Just look below.

It is Top Ten time here are TBWCYL, Inc. and our plan is to roll out lists on books, movies and music as we did last year and maybe add one on television this year as well. As we have also done in the past, we are not limiting our books list to books released in 2008, though we will do so with our other lists. On the other hand, we are quite pleased to say that we have done some kind of review on everyone of these books during the last year here at This Blog Will Change Your Life, and while we may be terribly biased in our reviews and choices, something that bothers us not in the least, we are happy to say that we have also had the opportunity to connect with everyone of these authors in some capacity, which frankly is quite cool, for us anyway, the experience for them may have been something else entirely. That said, here we go (including the hyperlink to our previous reviews):

(1) Breaking it Down - Rusty Barnes
(2) The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli - Ginnetta Correli
(3) Black Flies - Shannon Burke
(4) Half-Empty - Tim Hall
(5) The Heebie-Jeebies and CBGB's - Steven Lee Beeber
(6) Songs of Insurgency - Spencer Dew
(7) Sunbeams and Cigarettes - Nick Ostdick
(8) The Love Book - Ken Wohlrob
(9) Unmarketable - Anne Elizabeth Moore
(10) When the Leaves are Falling - Kelly Moran

Honorable mention: I Call This Flirting - Sherrie Flick, Unlucky Lucky Days - Daniel Grandbois and My Inflatable Friend - The Confessions of Rollo Hemphill - Gerald Jones.

Please note, that all of these books are self-published or released by independent presses, something that pleases us to no end. Also, we honestly believe that all of these books will change your life, though to be honest, even if they don't, your patronage and support will certainly help change the lives of the authors and their publishers.

The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli.

We want to give a big shout-out to The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginnetta Correli, a crazy good book that is both terribly upsetting and terribly engaging. Ginnetta Correli would seem to be cracked in a really good way and so we hope you will take a look. We also hope that you are prepared to experience some trauma so please consider yourselves forewarned.