Number 2

    Have heard from a good friend of mine that the Rain Dance was a little over the top, so we are back to a pleasant drum roll please.

   The book that makes it into my Number 2 spot of this Top Ten List is this book:

      I know. I know. I know. This is once again a group of novels, stories, essays, and letters, but very few items that I have read beat any thing Miss O'Connor ever wrote. The cover that I am showing comes from somewhere I love very much: The Library of America. It is a wonderful organization. They compile large amounts of an author's works, compare them with the author's notebooks, correct any mistakes that made it through the printing process, update the works to include what censor's may have taken out or excluded, and then they publish them in nice, cloth hardback editions. They also only cost $30-$35. Which isn't bad considering you are getting a book that contains over 1000+ pages. Some of them have like 4-6 books or several collections of short stories. This exact book includes all of Flannery O'Connor's works except some book reviews and some personal letters. It has two novels, two short story collections, essays, and some personal letters. I think it is $30 well-spent.

  The reason why Flannery O'Connor makes it into the coveted Number 2 spot in my Top Ten List is for a multitude of reasons and here are a few:

  5. The comic genius portaryed in these stories is rarely rivaled.
  4. The dialogue in the novels and stories is excellent.
  3. Her essays about writing make me strive for better writing/to be a better writer.
  2. Enoch Emory and Hazel Moates
  1d. The way she ends her stories like, A Good Man is Hard to Find, "She'd a been a good woman if someone would have shot her every minute of her life."
  1c. The way she shows that religion in the South in truly the poetry of the people.
  1b. Her belief in a truly violent Grace and odd apiritions of Redemption that drives someone to the Savior and her ability to write wonderful fiction that is a deep down picture of the Gospel, but on the surface is so well-written that few rival her.
  1a. Her belief that the writing life is truly hard work when you are doing it correctly. She only wrote two novels and 30+ stories in over 20 years of writing.

  Looking to have a little fun with Enoch Emory and his gorilla costume,
    David