I'd rather be reading...

Sometimes you'll get a book suggestion and the person will say, "Full disclosure, I know yadda yadda yadda."

Right now, I'd rather be reading Adria Bernardi's Openwork and, full disclosure, she is a teacher who I worked with at Warren Wilson. She's also a fine, fine writer with whom I was very lucky to work.

(And she can no longer send my homework back to me and ask me to redo it. So, really, I have no ulterior motive here. I just really like her books.)

Am I not good enough for you, recommendation-wise? Well, then:

"In prose as radiant and emotionally precise as Virginia Woolf's, Bernardi illuminates the working lives and longings of coal miners and wet-nurses, seamstresses, stonemasons, and housewives, brilliantly rendering a century in the life of an Italian American family. Like Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, this is a novel in which the sentences themselves capture the feel of human beings at work."

—Andrea Barrett

And one more for good measure:

"Openwork is glorious! The fine poetic intelligence that guides it, the humor, the sadness, and Bernardi's overarching knowledge of of so many times and places and peoples. A remarkable book. A beautiful book."

—Jane Hamilton