Staff Picks: Ingrid's Ten Favorite Books
 Each month, we ask one employee to tell us about their ten favorite books. This list is no holds barred -- any genre, any size -- whatever they really want to talk about. The only restriction is that the books still be in print so that we can help you find them if they sound good.This month's presenter is Stacey's Marketing and Events Manager, Ingrid. "How to narrow a lifetime of reading to just ten favorite books? I managed to put together a reasonable list of twenty books that are especially important to me and somehow capture the breadth of my interests, if not the depth. But only ten…" |
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 The Bone Peopleby Keri Hulme  "Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning book is a powerful meditation on the many meanings of love, family, and native culture. The story centers on an emotionally damaged Maori artist whose life is completely changed when a young boy wanders into her secluded studio. The sometimes-uneasy relationship that develops between the artist, the boy, and the boy’s Maori foster father highlights the violence and emotional alienation of native people who’ve been separated from native spiritual practice and the sometimes difficult job of finding beauty and light and truth and love in a world that isn’t black and white, but shades of gray. I read The Bone People for the first time in the mid-80s, and have since re-read it a couple of times. It is a piercing look at how we relate to each other, and even now, it moves me." |
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 Angle of Reposeby Wallace Stegner "I picked up Angle of Repose almost twenty years ago after a writer friend of mine said it was one of the best books she ever read. Stegner succeeds in being a master wordsmith as well as an accomplished characterist. Angle of Repose is a story within a story. The main narrator is a middle-aged man writing about his grandparent’s life in the early West. It’s a wonderful interweaving of grand history and personal trials, as well as an unsparing examination of the writer’s own life. How do we become who we become? How do we come to rest at the angle of repose? " |
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 The Things They Carriedby Tim O'Brien "The title of The Things They Carried refers to the little things and memories and expectations we carry with us that frame our experiences. This and O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato are the best books about Vietnam war experience—or the rigors of war in general—I’ve ever read. O’Brien is a master wordsmith." |
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 My Antoniaby Willa Cather "If my experience is telling, Willa Cather has to be one of the most overlooked of American writers. I read her work for the first time not as an assigned book in high school English, not as part of my expensive liberal arts education, but as a thirty-year-old in a book group devoted to reading only women writers. Not all of her books are great, but many are. Her simple prose and everyman/everyday situations perfectly distill a moment in the grand American experience. I think My Antonia, the story of a Bohemian immigrant in Nebraska, is absolutely one of her best." |
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 Winnie the Poohby A.A. Milne "No day is ever so bad or ever so good that reading Winnie the Pooh won’t make it better. It is a kind and accepting world with true and loyal friends." |
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 A River Runs Through Itby Norman Maclean "In an interview, Norman Maclean said that there is such a thing as a best sentence, a sentence crafted in such a way that it cannot be improved upon. After reading this book I would have to agree. It looks deep into the heart of a family—particularly the dynamic of a righteous father and his somewhat wayward son—and at the spiritual redemption possible in nature. Maclean captures and celebrates the epic size and spirit of the West." |
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 Let Us Now Praise Famous Menphotography by Walker Evans text by James Agee "For my parents, the Great Depression was the most defining experience of their lives. It dramatically influenced who they became and how they lived day-to-day. David Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom from Fear is definitely the best history I’ve read of the time, but Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the best "snapshot"—in photographs, lists, prose, and poetry—I’ve found. It is a profoundly moving story of want and dignity and the failure of government, chronicled with great empathy by two men of wealth and privilege. " |
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 The World Atlas of Wineby Hugh Johnson "Johnson offers a basic introduction to wine history, grapes, the winemaking process, and the major players in any particular region. He provides topographical maps, weather information, and grape production for every wine-growing region in the world. If you want to understand why and how grape growing and wine making varies region to region, this is a must have. This is not a guide to specific wines, nor does it include ratings or tasting notes. " |
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 Photography at the Dockby Abigail Solomon-Godeau "When I first became seriously interested in the history and nature of photography, I ran out and bought Beaumont Newhall’s history of photography. It’s a wonderful overview of basic movements, techniques, innovations, and artists. But Solomon-Godeau’s book is the best collection of general criticism I’ve found. She is a sophisticated and self-aware critic, but she also displays a knack for putting the object back into the context of its original inception and balancing the object itself with its high-art status. Read a few of these essays and then check out the Photography Exhibit at SFMOMA…your mind and eyes will thank you for it." |
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