From NPR:
It’s June, which means that summer plans are starting to kick into high gear. And for some of us, those plans might include travel — like a classic cross-country road trip, a jaunt to another state to see loved ones, or sightseeing at historic locales. With that in mind, the NPR Books team put together the ultimate reading list to learn more about your destinations: 50+ books for 50 states (and beyond).
We asked book-lovers — librarians, bookstore owners, poets laureate — from across the country to tell us the book that best represents their state or territory. And boy, did they deliver: the final list includes over 100 recommendations, ranging from poetry, to memoirs, to short story collections.
But, of course, no list is perfect. So NPR’s Books team wants to know which book you would pick to represent your state (or Washington, DC. or Puerto Rico), and why. It can be any genre: fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, novel or short story collection. Tell us: Why would you recommend this book to folks who want to learn more about your state?
Link to the rest at NPR
The OP has a form you can use to nominate the best book to represent your state.
Yikes!
Once again a title has pulled me in for the wrong reasons.
I thought it meant my “state”; where I am in life, all of the Liminal Events, etc…, not the “State” where I physically live[1].
Duma Key is King’s Lost Carcosa novel, with the King in Yellow(who has left the page before the novel started) and the Queen in Red(who is all too present on every page).
Every writer that writes in Lovecraft’s world ends up writing a Lost Carcosa novel, and I need to do the same to finish what I see that King started. There is so much on the page, that ties into the King Vector, that I will be unpacking everything across dozens? of stories, and if I do my job right, no one will ever know they came from King, unless I mention it in the foreword(s).
[1] Fire in the Mind by George Johnson
The idea that you can pick one book to represent a state – or a country – seems a bit delusional to me. Are there any states in the USA that are so limited/uniform that this is a viable idea?
NYC can stand in for the entire country. The world, even.
In the eyes of the tradpub establishment, anyway.
Of course, their business have been stagnant all century so their views “may” not actually reflect reality. 😉
But can one book encompass the full glory of NYC? I doubt it, but don’t know New York well enough to really argue the case. I do damn well know that it’s beyond the wit of man (or women) to do so for London.
Ah, but the only part of NYC that matters is Manhattan. And the downtown area around the publisher towers in particular. Self-importance cuts deep.
Yeah, I’m skeptical of representing-a-state-with-a-book idea. A city, maybe. A few years back, there as a horror movie set in Detroit. The guy at Cinema Sins (a YouTube channel) was scoffing at one scene in the movie, convinced it wasn’t plausible. However, the clip he showed instantly confirmed for me that the movie was filmed in Detroit.
The scene involved a man living on a street full of abandoned houses, with tall grasses everywhere. If I haven’t driven on that exact street, I’ve driven down others similar to it. It’s horror movie territory; a TV news reporter once got the city to take action simply by showing herself hiding amongst the grasses of one lawn. She was standing in the grass, and she was over six feet tall, but you could only see her eyes and the top of her head if you looked close enough. She was concerned that school children could be ambushed in the mornings, when it’s still dark outside. The city cut the grass after that segment.
But that scene was not representative of Michigan in general, only to the post-apocalyptic areas of Detroit at that time. I don’t see how a book could represent that part of Detroit, and the small town / countryside where I grew up, and say, Mackinac Island.