As the Crowe Flies (and Reads!)

Book Review: Same Sun Here by Silas House and Neela Vaswani

2012-02-13T00:40:00.002-05:00

Upon first hearing of this book, I thought I would love it. Turns out, I wasn't quite that enamored of it, but it's still a solid 3-star book. It's a mostly sweet penpal correspondence between River, a boy in small town eastern Kentucky, and Meena, an immigrant Indian girl living in NYC.

I think this book would work equally well for boys or girls and its quiet lessons in multiculturalism would make this a good book for the classroom. There are also some good moments in environmentalism and activism that don't come across as particularly preachy. I think the two authors did a pretty good job sounding like the characters in their letters, something fairly difficult to sustain in an epistolary book without the prose coming across as too grown-up.

It's more difficult for me to connect with middle grade novels than with YA ones, and this one just didn't have a spark for me, but I can see this book's becoming a required summer read and gain semi-classic status. One of things I had a minor issue with was River's name. I grew up in the South, and River (and almost as frequently, Rivers) was always a girl's name, River Phoenix notwithstanding, so it was a bit hard adjusting to that. It would be like reading a book where Jeremy was the female protagonist. But I also heard from my colleague Marika that the two authors wrote the book as a series of letters back and forth to each other, which really appeals to me.

Same Sun Here is published by Candlewick this month and I received a free ARC at Winter Institute that I was lucky enough to get signed. It also qualifies as entries #7-8 in my New Authors challenge, hosted by Literary Escapism (I think that counts as two since I'd read neither of these authors before).It also qualifies for my South Asia challenge hosted every year by S. Krishna.

Book P(Review): The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

2012-02-11T00:22:00.001-05:00

This is the story of how we begin to remember. Well, no, not really. But that particular Paul Simon lyric has been swirling in my head this morning and I was just itching to use it. This is actually the story of the day the earth ~~stood still~~ slowed down. And the days after that, and the days after that. Nobody knows why the earth's rotation has slowed, but Julia is eleven the day this discovery is announced on the news, with varying degrees of panic.

At first the effect is subtle, resulting in a few extra minutes each day, but before long there is a worldwide dilemma on how to handle the growing length of days--and there is much debate whether to follow the 24-hour clock time of old, or to establish "real time" that coincides with each new solar day. "Clock timers" declare dominion over the "real timers" and marginalize them in society in much the same way all minority groups have been marginalized through the ages.

The first indication that the world might be headed for end times is the birds. The new gravity from the slowed rotation has crippled their ability to fly and navigate. Next, the magnetic field changes and weather becomes unpredictable. Crops wither under 24 straight hours of sun followed by an equal period of darkness. Newly erected greenhouses powered by sunlamps deplete the energy grids. Clearly it's only a matter of time before all food sources will disappear.

In the meantime, Julia is just trying to make sense of what is happening in her personal life amidst these larger world turmoils. Her best friend's family moves away to join a desert Mormon collective in Utah. Her unrequited crush finally approaches her. Her mother succombs to gravitational sickness. Her father may or may not be having an affair with a "real timer." In other words, a typical adolescence.

In other, other words, this is a coming-of-age, pre-apocalyptic novel.

I think I just coined the word "pre-apocalyptic." If I didn't, please don't disabuse me of the notion just yet.

The book is, overall...pretty good. I liked it. I didn't rock my world; there were no profound insights into the human experience; and at no point was the prose so spectacular that I wanted to read something a second time in order to savor it. It's simply a quick and easy read with a moderately interesting premise, but I'm a little perplexed about the pre-publicity buzz surrounding this book. The manuscript created a bidding war in the publishing world and word on the street is that the author walked away with a cool million from her US publisher and another $500k each from her Canadian and UK ones. Since this is a debut novel and not a particularly brilliant one I that, I just have to wonder if the publishing world's head is up its collective arse. You can't read a major newspaper these days without coming across an article touting the demise of the book world as we know it. And it's moves likes this, which are questionable at best and asinine at worse, that makes me doubt both publishing's business acumen and sense of value.

Which of course means that this book will probably be a raging bestseller and a major motion picture and I am just the lone voice in the wilderness who ~~isn't in on the joke~~ questions it all.

I received a bound manuscript of this book from my lovely sales rep Michael Kindness. It will be published this summer by Random House, and it happens to qualify for entry #6 for the New Authors Challenge, hosted by Literary Escapism.

Audio Book Review: Juliet by Anne Fortier

2012-02-10T08:26:00.002-05:00

I actually borrowed this audio book from my mother, for whom I had bought it about a year ago when I saw it on the bargain table at my bookstore. When I was visiting her over the Christmas hols I noticed that she hadn't listened to it yet, so I helped myself to it. Much as I love David Sedaris and Bill Bryson, I was growing a mite weary of re-listening to their audios on my daily commute, week in and week out.

The story turned out to be surprisingly satisfying, not least because Cassandra Campbell is a very good reader for this story. I did think that it was a touch over-long, and if I had been reading the physical book I definitely would have skimmed over a good bit of it, but despite that, I give it a solid recommendation.

There are two storylines that eventually come together; one is a modern day young woman named Julie Jacobs, an American who travels to Siena to track down a mysterious inheritance that her mother may have died trying to protect, and the other is the story of Giulietta Tolomei, whose doomed love for Romeo Mariscotti haunted 14th-century Siena and was the inspiration for Shakespeare's famous play. I far more enjoyed the earlier storyline, with its intrigues and betrayals, than the modern one, where Julie seems a little whiny and ineffective.

Medieval curses, hidden statues, lying scoundrels, mystical rites, horse races, precious heirlooms, family feuds, the Mafia, and yes, two pairs of star-cross'd lovers, all have their roles to play, and while most readers (or listeners) won't have much trouble guessing the various plot twists, there's no denying that this is a frolicsome book.

Now, of course, I have to plan a trip to Siena to visit all of the fabulous places described in such loving detail and I've got an unanswerable hankering to delve into more books with an Italian setting. It's been years since my one and only visit to that country and this book makes me yearn to return.

This book serves as entry #5 in the New Authors Challenge, hosted by Literary Escapism.

Book P(Review): Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

2012-02-08T07:50:00.003-05:00

Summary from my ARC: Told over the course of a single day*--specifically Thanksgiving Day at Texas Stadium, as the Dallas Cowboys take the field--Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is the story of Bravo Squad, eight survivors of a ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents, whose bravery and and valor have made them national heroes. In the final hours of their Pentagon-sponsored "Victory Tour," Bravo's Silver Star-winning hero, nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn, will confront hard truths about love and death, family and friendship, war and politics, duty and honor.

I'd say that the first 3/4 of so of this book held me spellbound, but once I made it past that point, it bogged down a bit for me. Maybe because the book feels as if it reads in real time. Although there is one significant flashback section, the bulk of the book takes place during the course of one football game (* the summary says one day, but the book opens when the limo delivers them to the stadium for the game and it closes when the same limo picks them up to take them to Fort Hood, so it's really an afternoon).

That being said, I feel that in addition to being a fresh and edgy book, this may be an important book. So far it's the only one I've read coming out of the Iraq War that subsumes itself in neither action sequences nor in an overwrought family or romantic drama. This one seems to be just as much about the concept of war itself as the politics behind it and how America feels about it. (Though given the book takes place mostly in Texas, especially Dallas, we're not really given a look at the dissenters' side of things.)

Billy Lynn is a fascinating character, a boy thrust into the army (in lieu of doing hard time) after taking a crowbar to his sister's ex-fiance's car for gallant but misguided reasons. He's a thoughtful young man, fully aware that the labels of "hero" mean nothing when one's actions are guided neither by bravery nor fear, but simply reactionary to any given situation, including Bravo's famous firefight with the Iraqi insurgents: one day you're the hero and the next day you're cowering under your humvee and refusing to come out. His thoughts are never far away from his imminent return to Iraq, nor from his buddy, Shroom, who died the day Billy was labeled a hero.

Ben Fountain's novel is the first book coming out of the Iraq War (that I've read, at least) that seems willing to say that war is, more than anything else, a commercial enterprise. It's difficult not to draw these parallels about the US's involvement in Iraq with, say, the Dallas Cowboys franchise and the oil-steeped politics of the state in which the book is largely set, or the larger-than-life characters we meet, such as the Dallas Cowboys' owner or the man who spends the book negotiating a movie deal for Bravo. War as commercially motivated enterprise, not a political one, isn't a new concept per se, but it goes a long way in increasing this particular reader's distaste for it, because if it's really not about oil, really not about protecting our interests, and really not about freeing a people from their dictator's rule, then it's really not something I can ever understand, or wish to, for that matter.

Karl Marlantes blurbs this book, and he's not a writer whose opinion I take lightly, especially when it comes to the topic of war. He calls it "the Catch-22 of the Iraq war," and with a comment like that, I'm not sure that there's anything more to add. I'll just conclude with some passages that resonated with me as I read it:

"So they lost Shroom and Lake, only two a numbers man might say, but given that each Bravo has missed death by a margin of inches, the casualty rate could just as easily be 100 percent. The freaking randomness is what wears on you, the difference between life, death, and the horrible injury sometimes as slight as stooping to tie your bootlace on the way to chow, choosing the third shitter in line instead of the fourth, turning your head to the left instead of the right. Random. How that shit does work on your mind (26-27)."

"Those people [movie studios, producers, etc], the kind of bubble they live in? It's a major tragedy in their lives if their Asian manicurist takes the day off. For those people to be passing judgment on the validity of your experience is just wrong, it goes beyond wrong, it's ethics porn. They aren't capable of fathoming what you guys did (57)."

I love this moment between Billy and his sister Kathryn, re: their father:

" 'He's an asshole,' Kathryn said.

To which Billy: 'You just now figured that out?'

'Shut up. What I mean is he likes being an asshole, he enjoys it. Some people you get the feeling that can't help it? But he works at it. He's what you'd call a proactive asshole' (75)."

Billy with his nephew on leave:

"Based on his highly limited experience with small children, Billy had always regarded the pre-K set as creatures on the level of not-very-interesting pets, thus he was unprepared for the phenomenal variety of his little nephew's play. Whatever came to hand, the kid devised some form of interaction with it. Flowers, pet and sniff. Dirt, dig. Cyclone fence, rattle and climb. Squirrels, harass with feebly launched sticks. 'Why?' he kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why? Why? Why? And Bill answeing every question to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward universal knowledge...So is this what they mean by the sanctity of life? A soft groan escaped Billy when he thought about that, the war revealed in this fresh and grusome light. Oh. Ugh. Divine spark, image of God, suffer the little children and all that--there's real power when words attach to actual things. Made him want to sit right down and weep, as powerful as that. He got it, yes he did, and when he came home for good he'd have to meditate on this, but for now it was best to compartmentalize, as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all (82-83)."

The reader never gets the full picture of exactly what happens to earn the Bravo Squad their Victory Tour back home, but here is one of Billy's ruminations on it: "All your soldier life you dream of such a moment and every Joe with a weapon got a piece of it, a perfect storm of massing fire and how those beebs blew apart, hair, teeth, eyes, hands, tender melon heads, exploding soup-stews of shattered chests, sights not to be believed and never forgotten and your mind simply will not leave it alone. Oh my people. Mercy was not a selection, period. Only later did the concept of mercy even occur to Billy, and then only in the context of its absence in that place, a foreclosing of options that reached so far back in history that quite possibly mercy had not been an option there since before all those on the battlefield were born (125)."

Read this book. Seriously, just read it.

NB: This book will be published by Ecco in May 2012 and I received an ARE from my fabulous sales rep, Anne DeCourcey. This book also qualifies as book # 4 for the New Author Challenge, hosted by Literary Escapism (it's not for debut authors, but for new-to-you authors).

Laughter Through Tears is my Favorite Emotion, or Book Review: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

2012-02-06T07:36:00.002-05:00

I met John Green a couple of weeks ago when he was participating on a panel for Winter Institute and was one of the big draws at the author receptions. Up until then, I had only read Will Grayson, Will Grayson, a book that he cowrote with David Levithan, and while I knew he was a beloved author, I really had no clear idea why until that time in New Orleans. On his panel he kept talking about his horrifically tragic books, but he himself was so damn funny (and WG, WG tipped decidedly toward the funny end of the scale, not the tragic one) that it was difficult for me to feature.

I left work on Thursday with a signed copy of The Fault in Our Stars tucked under my arm, winging a comment back to my colleague Marika as I left that I was looking forward to the emotional ride. Little did I know! I was barely into Chapter One before the bed was shaking with laughter and my husband sniffed at me from over the top of his own, decidedly-less-funny book, The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. My cats didn't seem to mind, though my sweet Murray did start licking my face when the laughter abruptly shifted to tears. I'm telling you, this book chewed up my heart and spit it back out again, but I had an absolutely Grand Time for the duration.

You know the movie Steel Magnolias? I love that movie, not least for its eminent quotability, and one of the first lines I committed to memory was one of Dolly Parton's: "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion." Well, this book is the pure-dee embodiment of that sentiment. There were times my shoulders were a-shakin' and I'd be very hard-pressed to determine if it were more from the tears or more from the laughter, for I could suppress neither for very long.

Probably most of you who are reading this review know exactly what this book is about, but for my mom and my husband, and those of you who don't, perhaps, have your fingers on the pulse of YA publishing, here's a short summary: two teenagers meet and fall in love. So far, so good. But it's where they meet that shapes this book's content--at a support group for teens with cancer. The reader absolutely knows from the beginning that the book cannot end well, but that doesn't keep the reader from hanging herself with the hope rope. (Or maybe that's just me.) Augustus and Hazel wouldn't be your typical teens even without their missing or weakened body parts. They're smart, curious, snarky, and introspective. Their cancer has taken them beyond politeness to that realm where fools are not suffered gladly and where the concept of pussyfooting around topics other (read: normal) people find uncomfortable is unfathomable.

The dialogue is exactly what dialogue should be in real life, if only we got to rehearse and make it perfect yet authentic. The pathos in the book is a fitting tribute to the title's source: nothing less venerably tragic than Shakespeare's Julius Caesar ("The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves").

There's book talk, video games, a friend who goes blind, some mild vandalism, a trip to Amsterdam, Two Very Important Venn diagrams, and an asshole of an author, and throughout it all the book boils down to narrative perfection. My two main critiques of the book have nothing to do with the content and everything to do with design: 1) the cover design is not very good, and in fact it's hard to read the text underneath the white cloud, and (2) The lovely-to-look-at typeface which is also, in fact, easy to read, is never identified.

This book was published by Penguin/Dutton in January 2012 and I purchased my own copy of it. If it had been published by Random House, it would have contained a note on the type and would have identified the book designer, etc. Shame on you, Dutton!

Book (P)Review: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

2012-02-03T20:12:00.005-05:00

Jonathan Gottschall has written an extremely interesting and captivating book in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. I was surprised upon picking up this book how little that is not story in our lives: there are the expected books of course, but also tv, movies, jokes, commercials, lies, gathering 'round the water cooler, advertisements, songs, conspiracy theories and even sports events; really, the list goes on. Gottschall delves into the fascinating evolutionary, cultural, biological, and even neurological reasons why our species is defined by our storytelling, both communal and individual.

Did you know, for example, that according to one study "heavy fiction readers had better social skills--as measured by tests of social and empathic ability--than those who mainly read nonfiction"? (I'm curious to know if readers overall have the same relative abilities compared to non-readers...)

This is by far the most compelling non-narrative nonfiction I've read in simply ages, and what's more, it should be required reading for every single reader and writer out there.

NB: This book will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April 2012 and I received a copy at Winter Institute. It also happens to qualify for my third book of the year for the New Authors Reading Challenge for 2012, hosted by Literary Escapism.

Last Month in Review: January 2012

2012-02-01T02:54:00.002-05:00

Well, I started a helluva lot more books in January than I ended up finishing, that's for sure! According to Goodreads at one point during the month I had 9 books going simultaneously, but overall it's not too poor a showing, despite the lack of reviews:

1. Gold by Chris Cleave. Really, really liked this book, and the writing is several notches above Little Bee, in my opinion. This one's coming out in July.

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Unbelievably, I'd never read this classic before. I liked it better than I expected to. Thanks, Mom, for keeping at me and giving me your own copy to read!

3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Yes, I'd read this book many times before this, but this was my first eBook to read on my iPhone, and I started it it about a year prior to completing it.

4. Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin. This YA book was a lot of fun to read.

5. New Orleans Day by Day by Frommer's. This might seem like it's cheating, but I really do think I read the book cover to cover prior to my trip to Winter Institute because I wanted to revel both in my own memories of New Orleans and in the planning of any free time I might have.

6. The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus. Okay, admittedly I didn't quite finish this one, but I put in some hard time on it and I read most of it, so I'm counting it. Mostly I just kept reading 'cause I thought it would get better, but I was bored to tears despite the excellent writing and the intriguing premise. I have no idea how this book turned out bad, but it did.

7. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. I read this for Reading Rambo's readalong, and I don't think I was the only participant left feel underwhelmed by the experience. (I have a few musings on it; if you do a search for "Norwegian Wood" you should find them all if you wish to read them.)

8. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall. The only non-fiction I was able to finish this month. It was good and mini-review coming soon.

9. The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman. Really excellent storytelling. The writing was occasionally uneven but more often than not, I was truly moved by the pathos in the story.

10. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain. Review forthcoming.

Norwegian Wood Readalong: Part-the-Last

2012-01-31T09:21:00.001-05:00

Well, sometimes you just get what you ask for. I thought I wanted more Midori, then it was all Midori, all the time, and then she turns into this sulking shell of a girl. But then, I guess, she turns out okay, despite her falling in love with Toru. At least she's direct, and a little directness goes a long way with this crowd.

Let's see...Naoko is still dreary and fucked-up, and whoops--she commits suicide, too, to nobody's surprise. Too bad, so sad. Moving on.

Reiko. Alas, she fell under Toru's spell, too. I mean, I can totally see now why chicks dig him--he likes to iron clothing and get rid of wrinkles and everything, and who wouldn't swoon over that? I reckon she's off to off herself.

Toru. Mr "I've just declared my love for Midori, so I guess the first thing I better do after getting back to civilization is indulge in a pity fuck right now." Helluva guy, that Toru.

So, I suppose it should come as no surprise that I didn't care much for this book. Murakami's men are either boors or bores, and the women are all either dull and suicidal, or far too bright & incandescent to be with Murakami men. Still, by the time I came to the end of this book there was a certain satisfaction in it, apart from the relief of finally getting to the end. I'm completely puzzled why this is the book that rocketed Murakami to both national and international stardom, though--how this book can be a cultural touchstone is way beyond me.

I bought 1Q84 as soon as it released in the US, but I don't think I'm going to be picking it up any time soon. I'm going to need a Murakami palate cleanser before starting in on that doorstop of a book. But still, y'all, how much fun was it to do a read-a-long with a modern classic that most of us didn't really like so much? Totes fun, that's how much! Yay, Alice, for hosting.

Book P(Review): The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

2012-01-29T08:53:00.001-05:00

When I was at Winter Institute a couple of weeks back, Wendy Sheanin from Simon & Schuster surreptitiously slipped me a copy of a manuscript called The Light Between Oceans by M. L Stedman. Since the last manuscript she sent was for Carol Anshaw's Carry the One, I moved it to the top of my TBR pile and I just finished it last night.

I'll start by saying one thing. M. L. Stedman is a helluva fine storyteller -- I was smitten with the novel by the end of the 6-page prologue. The book opens right after World War I in Australia and Tom is just self-aware enough to know he needs some time and space away from civilization after returning home from the front, so he applies for a job as a lighthouse keeper for the Commonwealth. He takes one remote post after another, finally settling on one that is 100 miles off the shore of southwestern Australia, at the point where the Indian and the Southern oceans meet. It's practically hardship duty, for he only gets one month's vacation after a three-year contract of isolation.

So when he meets and falls in love with Isabel, he knows it's not fair to ask her to join him on Janus Rock, but she will not be deterred. Their love is almost enough to sustain each other, but after suffering miscarriages on that lonely outpost, Isabel's sanity reaches a breaking point. Shortly after burying her stillborn child, a small dinghy gets swept by the oceans' currents to their rocky shore, bearing a man dead from exposure but protecting an infant who by some miracle still breathes. Instead of recording the incident in the official logbook, Isabel convinces Tom not to mention it and to keep the baby girl as their own child since the outside world is not yet aware of their immediate loss. With deep and grave misgivings, Tom acquiesces out of love and loyalty for his beloved wife, but it creates such a deep conflict in this man of honor and duty that he is never the same again.

The reader by now knows there is no possible way that this decision can end well for Tom, Isabel, or the baby they name Lucy, but that's all I can say for now without giving too many spoilers. I'll conclude with saying that the adults in Lucy's life give lip service to the question, "what would be best for Lucy?" but they all have their own selfish and morally-justified agendas in answering it. The problem here is that any compass of moral relativism lacks one True North, but even (or, perhaps, especially) non-parents like me will understand the choices the adults made in this riptide of a novel that sweeps characters and readers alike into cross-currents of sympathy and sorrow.

The book is slated for an August 2012 publication from Scribner and this novel of love, loss, selfishness, and sacrifice will find itself a wide and devoted readership, or else I miss my guess. Here are some of the passages that spoke to me for various reasons while I was reading:

"At the kitchen table, the flame of the oil lamp wavered occasionally. The wind continued its ancient vendetta against the windows, accompanied by the liquid thunder of waves. Tom tingled at the knowledge that he was the only one to hear any of it: the only living man for the better part of a hundred miles in any direction (37)."

"He begins to shape his routine. Regulations require that each Sunday he hoist the ensign and he does, first thing....He knows keepers who swear under their breath at the obligation, but Tom takes comfort from the orderliness of it. It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilisation (38)."

"Just to be beside her had made him feel cleaner somehow, refreshed. Yet the sensation leads him back into the darkness, back into the galleries of wounded flesh and twisted limbs. To make sense of it -- that's the challenge. To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it. There's no reason he should still be alive, un-maimed. Suddenly Tom realizes he is crying. He weeps for the men snatched away to his left and right, when death had no appetite for him. He weeps for the men he killed (57)."

"The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember...History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That's how life goes on -- protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame (172)."

" 'Oh, but my treasure, it [forgiveness] is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.' He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow. 'I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a very proper job of hating, too....No,' his voice became sober, 'we always have a choice. All of us.' (364)."

Nawlins Day Three: Vive le Small Press!

2012-01-27T20:37:00.000-05:00

So, back to Winter Institute. Working on approximately 3.5 hours of sleep, I valiantly hie myself downstairs to the ballroom where the Small Press Breakfast was held. I was not only on time, but early, and it was only my fervent devotion to the importance of small presses and the responsible publishing they do in our world that kept me from skiving off. Showing up as an act of love is what it was. Chelsea Green, Europa, and Small Press Distribution were just three of the presenters that morning. I was a little saddened to see that so many of my colleagues came late, but at least they bothered to come at all. There were a lot of empty chairs out there, which is too bad since we're independent booksellers and it seemed to send the message that we just like to give lip service about supporting small, independent publishers and do not actually want to make the effort to show up on time (or at all) to hear about their cool new books and programs. I was a little ashamed at us overall, but pleased that the three Odyssey booksellers were all there, if a bit bleary-eyed (speaking only for myself, of course).

Now, I did skive off for two other portions that day. Like the frequent flyer saying goes, I like to vote with my feet. Instead of ~~wasting~~ spending time with a randomly assigned cohort to discuss how a theoretical store might better itself, Joan and I headed out into the heart of New Orleans to visit a real bookstore and how it survived Katrina and what its best practices were for continued survival. There were several to choose from, but we ended up selecting Octavia Books in the Garden District, not least because we wanted to see more of Magazine Street (which is, without a doubt, one of the coolest streets I've ever driven down).

Joan outside of Octavia

It's a lovely shop and we had a great time talking with their booksellers, but we had to rush to get back to the hotel in time for Joan to check out and for me to catch Round 2 of the publisher's rep picks. More soggy sandwiches, but lots of exciting new books to hear about, so it was pretty good. The afternoon sessions were of varying use to me, so I poked into them randomly and was super happy that I ended up at the one where John Green was on the panel. He's great!

After a last poke through the galley room (this is heaven: it's a room filled with tables piled high with books and we could just walk through and help ourselves to whatever books looked good. I kid you not) and spending time in line to pack up and freight out said free books from the galley room, it was time for the small press author reception. Yay!

What was quite possibly the best "official" part of the trip for me, though, was the author dinner for Simon & Schuster. Simon had never invited me for anything before, but as I said earlier, I read and reviewed more books in 2011 than ever before, and one of them just happened to be for one of the two authors S&S invited to Winter Institute: Carol Anshaw's Carry the One. Color me tickled (and starstruck 'cause I got to sit next to Carol at dinner)! Not only was this one of the best parts of Winter Institute, it was one of the best author dinners I've ever had the pleasure to attend. It was held at The Red Fish Grill, which was excellent (duh--it's a Brennan family restaurant). We had a private room with two tables of 8 people, and a good mix of publishers, old guard booksellers, and newer ones like me. The food was *amazing* because Wendy had planned the menu with perfect attention to local flavors and specialties, and it turns out that our waiter, Ike, was a character who plays himself on the tv show Treme.

Our prix-fixe dinner menu

The wine flowed as freely as the conversations did, and for the first time ever at one of these dinners, I didn't feel like the little girl invited to eat at the grown-ups' table. I was seated between Wendy and Carol, who were both amazing, and across from a young bookseller named Liz Sher from Politics & Prose who is my new best book friend. Halfway through the meal, Carol traded places with Chris Cleave, author of Gold (but whom readers would recognize as the author of Little Bee/The Other Hand), so I got to be starstruck once more with an author whose work I greatly admired. They also both wrote really, really sweet inscriptions in my galleys, which made me swoon.

I think many of us were reluctant to call it a night after dinner was over, so a few of us gathered for one last drink and a salute to the Big Easy. (Or rather, it was one last drink for me but the other stayed out 'cause they were wearing their dancing shoes). I, however, had a breakfast date with the lovely and venerable Emoke B'racz from Malaprop's in Asheville the next morning, so I hied myself back to the hotel around 2:00 am to get some rest.

The day dawned hot & hazy--just the way I like it, actually, as memories of that morning will keep the cold New England winter at bay--as Emoke and I made our way down to Cafe Du Monde one last time. We talked story, as the Hawaiians say, for a good long time over beignets and cafe au lait, at one of the last tables available. By the time we rose to leave, there was a line snaking down the block. We rejoiced in our good fortune, but perhaps that was just tempting fate, because on our walk back to the hotel, I stepped off a curb only to simultaneously catch my toe on a raised flagstone and see a car approaching out of the corner of my eye. In an effort to keep from being run over (in my head I kept saying to myself, I cannot die in New Orleans, I cannot freakin' die here in New Orleans!), I must have been quite the comical sight to see as I flew horizontally across the street, losing both of my shoes, my sunglasses, my scarf and my handbag, only to crash mightily to the earth a few inches shy of the opposite curb. I attracted quite a bit of attention, and luckily Emoke was there to gather my accoutrements while a kindly restaurateur helped me to my feet and insisted that I sit at one of his tables to shake off the near-accident. The car, happily, braked at quite a distance from me and nothing much was hurt beyond my ego, though later I did develop some pretty nasty bruises on each knee and one forearm. Unfortunately my new cashmere sweater was ruined from skidding and sliding into ~~home~~ the curb, but I, at least, lived to read another day.

That's about it in a nutshell. Travel home was complicated but not interesting enough to write about, and I had to hit the ground running the next day for textbook rush at work. I miss New Orleans and the opportunities that Winter Institute provides for meeting other book people and networking in a way that doesn't feel like networking. I hate networking, but I love Winter Institute. And that's all I have to say about that. Thanks for reading along with my bookish adventures, and here are some parting photographs:

Bourbon Street on a Tuesday night

A typical wrought iron balcony in the Quarter

Nawlins Day Two: Or, Did I Really Just Do That?

2012-01-25T08:31:00.002-05:00

Day two of Winter Institute: our morning started off with a bang since Carl Lennertz was on hand to talk about World Book Night US. Holy cow--anybody who is reading this blog and living in the US who has NOT already signed up for it should do it now! I signed up the moment I first heard about it. Basically, it's a great big way to give books to people who aren't big readers. And these are FREE books 'cause publishers, authors, wholesalers, and printers are all donating their resources to pay for these books. I won't know until mid-February or so, but I signed up to give away 20 copies of Laurie Anderson's Wintergirls (selected from a list of 30 titles) to an after-school group the next city over from my bookstore. The idea behind this is to put books in the hands of people who don't have great access to books for various reasons: lots of people are choosing women's shelters, prisons, military bases, non-profits. Some folks have said they want to give out books on their local street corner, or their local mass transit. Doesn't this sound great?

Unfortunately, I thought the educational sessions for Thursday and Friday were lacking compared with previous years. And due to my own stupidity (alas), the one session that would have been best for me to attend was switched to a different time slot and I missed it. That's okay, though, with Rep Pick lunch to swoop in and save the day. That's when booksellers get to sit on their bums and eat a boxed lunch (alas, soggy) while various sales reps come to them and have 15 minutes to pitch their company's best books coming up this spring & summer. It's a lot of fun and it's very high energy, and I'm not sure how the reps keep themselves from going hoarse by the end of their 6th presentation. Word on the street is that shots of Maker's Mark *might* have been involved. There are a lot of titles to take in, so it's best when the reps limit themselves to saying more about fewer titles as opposed to saying less about more titles, but it didn't always work that way (alas, I wanted to say "alas" one more time in this paragraph).

Just a random shot of the cabildo that I made by light of day

The main star of Winter Institute, though, is the author reception that evening. Dozens of authors sit at tables around the room and booksellers stand in line to get free books signed by those authors--as many as they want. It's just crazy. And just in case it wasn't jealousy-inducing enough, they also lay by significant drinks and hors d'ooeuvres for those people not fortunate to be invited out for a dinner. So yeah, free books, free wine, free food, lotsa mingling with rock star authors (some of the headliners were John Green, Jeannette Winterson, Nathan Englander, Julianna Baggott). How can that possibly be bad? Well, it can't. I mean, my shoulders went a little numb from the weight of all of those books in my tote bags, and after a while I couldn't balance two bags AND a class of wine, but life should always be so hard.

Anyway, I thought that I'd be one of those booksellers on my own for the evening after the reception, but one of my reps, Eileen from Ingram, saw me in the ballroom and asked me if I'd met Marsha, her colleague from the southern territories, yet. When I said no, Eileen told me I should introduce myself to her because she wanted to ask me to dinner for that night. Assuming me that there was no way that I'd run into Marsha in that crowd of 600 people or so, I just thanked Eileen and moved on. But in one of those instances that you wouldn't believe if it were in a movie, I climbed into the elevator after the reception and there was Marsha from Ingram. She squealed a little when I introduced myself to her and what do you know? She invited me out for dinner, and not just any dinner. Dinner at Galatoire's. Reservations were in 15 minutes. Would that be problem? Um, that would be a big, fat NO!

Not my image

I'd never been to Galatoire's before, though I'd been steeped in its mystique. It's from the old guard of New Orleans restaurants, or as they say on their website, it's the Grand Dame. The atmosphere is very Old World and the menu is exquisitely heavy. Marsha ordered appetizer samplers for the table, and the soup (turtle) and salad (avocado and crab meat) were very good, but the piece de resistance came with the entree. I had the decadent crabmeat sardou, served up with spinach creamed in a bearnaise and the most wonderfully tender artichoke hearts. It wasn't beautiful, but it disappeared in double time. Wyn, the bookseller from Lexington, KY, across the table from me, ordered the same thing and between us there was an orgy of yummy-noises. But what was *really* photo worthy of the evening was what Rob, my neighbor from Ingram, ordered: puppy drum fish, fried and served up whole. Hand to God, it looked like a prehistoric piranha:

Creepy, no? It actually tasted pretty mild, but I was happy when Rob let the staff clear the carcass away so that we could proceed with desserts to share. I love that a large table of relative strangers all shared the sweet potato cheesecake, black bottom pecan pie, Key lime tart, and bread pudding, sticking in one fork right after the other and passing them 'round the table.

This is a book jacket

We ended up shutting the place down, which is a point of pride for me, but I had plans yet to come, so after thanking Marsha profusely for including me for a dinner that I'd never be able to afford on my own, I walked back to the hotel to meet up with Steven Wallace from Unbridled Books, one of the best small publishers of literary books out there. He's an old book buddy of mine and we'd agreed months earlier to ~~drink each other under the table~~ meet for a civilized beverage of the adult variety, but when I walked into the lobby I ran into Emily (my bookselling compatriot from Lemuria) and quickly surmised that Wallace would probably be more enchanted to be in the company of two Emilys instead of just one. He was. He's that kind of charming Southern gentleman. So he took us 'round to the Napoleon House to introduce us to its signature sazerac. Unbelievably, the bar had last call at our second round and we actually shut the place down. That made me two for two that night. Yeah, I rock like that.

Our were the only chairs still on the floor!

Wallace and the Emilys

The night was still young. Or at least the morning was. So we texted Emily's roommate, Kelly, and she met up with us for another round. Unfortunately, only the Carousel Bar seemed open, which is cool enough, but it was super loud there and very difficult to chat, so we moved on after only one round to the one place we *knew* would still be open. That's right: Cafe Du Monde, open 24/7. Beignets, here we come! There weren't many tables in use when we arrived, but we sat back to tell all kinds of stories about the authors we've worked with (if you're a badly behaved writer who toured in the South or New England in the last two decades, your ears were probably burning) and Wallace regaled us with tales from the heyday of 1980s publishing and the gluttony and greed that marked that decade. I guess it was a little after 3:00 am when we looked up and saw that we were the *only* table in use outside at CDM, with all of the other chairs stacked up on the tables. So while it's technically true that they're always open, I think this counts as three for three places that I shut down in one night. Did I really just do that? Believe me when I say that is *not* my usual style, but I had the Emily reputation to maintain. So what if we all had to be up for the 8:00 small press breakfast later that day?

See what I mean? Craziness!

Okay, I *loved* this shadow that the Jesus statue threw on the back of St. Louis Cathedral. It was all eerie until Emily (or perhaps Kelly) quipped something about Touchdown Jesus.

Norwegian Wood Readalong: Part Trois: I suck

2012-01-24T08:37:00.000-05:00

So...when we left off at the exciting point last week, we were most of us kinda bored and wanting more Midori. It's as if Murakami heard our silent pleas and it was like all Midori, all the time. In fact, I was enjoying the book so much more that I read it straight through on my trip to New Orleans last week. The catch (and there's always a catch) is that I thoughtlessly packed up my copy with notes and dog-ears and marginalia with the fifty or so books that I picked up in Nawlins, so I'm waiting for it to arrive tomorrow in my big box o' books.

And since I drank my weight in beer and sazeracs last week and am still, in fact, feeling sleep deprived, I can't really recall any of my thoughts about this week's assignment, other than these very broad and not-very-helpful ones:

1. Midori rocks, but she is also troubled and a little wacky: "let's go get drunk, let's go watch porn together, let's talk all about blow jobs." But I loved the hospital scenes with her father, particularly (and oddly enough) the one with the cucumber & Toru.

2. Why do all of these incredibly damaged women like Toru when he's not very interesting, not a good conversationalist, and actually says he might not be able to keep himself from raping a woman if he were to spend the night with her and she didn't want to have sex (though in reality he was able to manage just fine)?

3. Why is ho-hum and conventional Toru attracted to these incredibly damaged women?

Next week it is my intention to review the book in its entirety once my copy arrives in the mail. I can say that I ended up liking the book more at the end than I had at the end of last week's excruciating reading, but I guess that's not saying much.

What say you, Norwegian Wood Read-a-long-er?

Nawlins Day One: As the Crowe Flies and Read and Eats and Drinks

2012-01-23T20:33:00.001-05:00

Our first full day at Winter Institute (and thus New Orleans) could start off in only one way: a visit to Cafe Du Monde. Touristy? To be sure. But you'll also find plenty of locals here, and the staff are kind to the homeless of New Orleans, so consider that the next time you're looking for a reason to go. But despite the the fact that it's touristy, Cafe Du Monde's prices are decidedly not. Breakfast for three, including three plates of beignets, two cafe au laits, and once hot chocolate came to just under $20. My roommate, Marika McCoola, and I met up with Ann Kingman, one of our terrific Random House sales reps (and whom some of my readers might know for her Books on the Nightstand podcast with Michael Kindness), at 8:00 Wednesday morning to walk to CDM from our hotel, the Crowne Plaza on Canal & Bourbon.

Each order of three beignets comes absolutely drenched in powdered sugar, but you have to do that in order to balance out the fat from the fried dough. Add in coffee for a completely nutritional breakfast. You have to trust me on that.

It was a beautiful morning, sunny & bright, made all the more welcome by the wintry weather all three of us had left behind. All three of us were in high spirits as we walked back to the hotel, just in time to be addressed by Ann Patchett, America's favorite new bookseller. That's right--for those of you who haven't heard, Patchett was dismayed when all of the bookstores in her hometown of Nashville closed; when nobody else stepped forward to open one, she did it herself. She's an amazing speaker who can talk engagingly off the cuff quite at length and she held us all spellbound telling us of her early book tour and the challenges it presented (her publisher gave her $3000 to cover a 30-city book tour). Inspirational is not a word I use lightly, but she really was. And if I admit that I was on the verge of tears more than once during her talk, it's because she's tapped into that collective feeling we had of the urgency of our situation as indie booksellers, on the edge of big changes, opportunities, and challenges. I clearly wasn't the only one who felt that way because she is the only speaker from Winter Institute that I recall receiving a standing ovation from all of us. Here's a photo from the New York Times showing Ms Patchett and Karen Hayes, her business partner (and incidentally my old sales rep for Bantam Doubleday Dell when I used to work at Lemuria).

Not my image: it's from the NYTimes

Later that day we got to sit back and listen while USA Today writer Bob Minzenheimer interviewed eminent historian and writer Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge, his book about the experience of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. He and his family actually were stranded in the city during the ordeal, so unlike the subject of most of his books, he has firsthand knowledge of just exactly how terrible those days and weeks were. Like with Patchett's talk, my eyes watered a bit listening to Brinkley describe in detail the everyday acts of heroism he witnessed at the hands of the disenfranchised, those with nothing to lose who acted with strength and grace while those the city should have been able to count on, including former Mayor Nagin and former President George W. Bush, sequestered themselves away in cowardly fashion.

That night Algonquin (one of my favorite publishers) partnered with local New Orleans bookseller Britton Trice to host a gathering of booksellers, and Joan and I were extremely fortunate to have been included. Britton owns the Garden District Bookshop and his home is in the same district; I'm not sure what the publisher folks had to do to convince him and his wife to host us, but it had to have been a pretty sweet deal because his place is amazing. Check out the size of these bookshelves, which line the entire room that Karen is standing in (I asked her to stay there to give the photo some scale):

We basically could have just enjoyed ourselves by reading his bookshelves, but no! Algonquin provided authors from their 2012 list for our entertainment AND some amazing truck food to feed us all. Brandon Jones, Kris D'Agostino, and John T. Edge, authors of All Woman and Springtime and The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac, and Truck Food, respectively, signed books for the thirty or so of us and between times we noshed on the amazing food provided by Que Crawl (pulled pork and shrimp po-boys, boudin balls, Krispy Kreme bread pudding--need I say more?). Here's bookseller extraordinaire, Stan Hynds, who hails from Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT, in front of the food truck, followed by a photo of Brandon Jones as he was about to sign my book:

The night ended relatively early for Winter Institute dinners, so I did what any self-respecting bookseller would do: I texted Emily from Lemuria to see if she and her roommate, Kelly, wanted to meet up for a drink. 45 minutes later, we were walking through the Quarter looking for a good place to go. They in turn texted their local host, who recommended a few places in Maurigny or on the far end of the Quarter, and we ended up at a place called Molly's for a round of beers and dishing about the bidness. I'm pretty sure we solved most of our bookstores' problems. If only we remembered the solutions by light of day! I thought it was a late night, almost shutting down Molly's and getting in around 2:00 am, but apparently that was just child's play compared to the following evening, but that will have to wait for another telling...

Nawlins: As the Crowe Flies and Read and Eats and Drinks and...

2012-01-22T20:02:00.004-05:00

Jackson Square, New Orleans. image mine

So...I just got back from New Orleans, and by that I mean early this morning after a god-awful day of travel, but I've since had to go to work and catch up on things before coming home to give woogies to my animules who were missing me. But now I'm here to talk wildly about Winter Institute and how generally awesome the city of New Orleans is.

Firstly, Winter Institute: this is the place where 500 independent booksellers gather to share stories about being indies and how to survive and put best practices into place, whether you're a national rock star bookstore like Politics & Prose in DC, or more of a regional indie folk star like the Odyssey Bookshop, which is my store. The only thing we have to pay is our hotel room and our flight and incidental expenses because publishers and wholesalers (thank you, Ingram Content Group!) sponsor the whole damn event for us. We represent a small portion of book sales nationally (figures include online sources such as Amazon and big box stores such as Target or Wal-Mart), but apparently we're tastemakers in the industry and because of that, publishers like to sponsor Winter Institute and invite us out to author dinners and such. Who knew?

What I do know is that Winter Institute is what I most look forward to all year long. I enjoy attending BEA and my regional trade show of NEIBA, but Winter Institute rocks it in a way far beyond the other two. For one thing, it's a fairly small attendance as far as national trade shows go: it's capped at 500 attendees to maintain a sense of intimacy and so that we can break down into manageable groups for further discussion. And while there still is, regrettably, a sense of cliquishness at events like this, the more I attend, the more booksellers I come to know and thus the less I feel like an outsider.

For example, publishers still tend to favor the old guard (or at least their biggest) accounts when it comes to dinner invitations, which makes it difficult for new booksellers to get invited, particularly if they're not the buyer or the events coordinator for their store. In the past I've "inherited" invitations from my colleague Joan (who is definitely a member of the old guard) when she couldn't attend, but this was the first year that I was invited to multiple dinners on what I presume to be my own merit; a situation that I exclusively chalk up to the fact that I was my most active in 2011 for reading & reviewing books for publishers and they finally seemed to notice, despite the fact that I'm neither the events coordinator nor the primary adult book buyer in my store.

Over the next few days, I'll be posting about the Winter Institute and how I took to heart the New Orleans unofficial catchphrase, "laissez les bon temps roulez." In other words, I behaved as if I were a good 20 years younger than I am, but I regret nothing. In the meantime, here are a few shots from our welcome reception at the Louisiana State Museum at the Cabildo in Jackson Square:

Marika & Joan at the Cabildo

One of the displays at the Cabildo

Another Cabildo display. It was cool. And HUGE


The children's buyer from Books & Books in Florida. All of her tattoos were hand drawn on her by the actual illustrators when visiting her store, which she immediately had inked. I love Otis!

Wordless Wednesday: the homeless apostrophe

2012-01-18T11:34:00.002-05:00

I think Wordless Wednesday is a meme hosted somewhere, but I'm honestly not sure. And as I'm having to post this via my telephone while I'm away in New Orleans (about which, more anon), I don't really have the time or the thumb technique to look up where, etc.

But I saw this photograph in a Shelf Awareness recently and it made me laugh, as apostrophes (and their proper uses) are causes dear to my heart.

Norwegian Wood Readalong: Part Deux

2012-01-17T00:31:00.002-05:00

So, is it just me, or have the rest of y'all had "Norwegian Wood" stuck in your heads all week, too? I've been whistling and humming it at every turn. And am I the last one to know about the film adaptation to be released in the US later this year? I found it quite by accident today when looking for the Hunger Games trailer to watch.

All of this is to delay my discussion of the book, which I confess I find little pleasure in reading. Though I did finish the reading this week, I found the two assigned chapters tedious, indeed, which makes me fear that perhaps I'm too pedestrian to appreciate Murakami's subtleties. What I cannot determine is whether it's a lack of understanding the cultural differences or my lack of sophistication getting in the way.

What's up with this passage in chapter 6: "I'm saying you shouldn't use yourself up in some unnatural form. Do you see what I'm getting at? It would be such a waste. The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older. It's true."

And I noticed on the back cover of my edition that the LA Times Book Review said that this was "easily the most erotic of [his] novels." I wonder at that when there are passages like this in the book (and last week somebody else already pointed out Murakami's use of her "opening" in a sex scene): "If he wanted to play with my breasts or vagina, I didn't mind at all, or if he had semen he wanted to get rid of, I didn't helping with that, either." Erotic? I don't think so.

Still, the ~~loony bin~~ Ami Hotel was a pretty interesting place, though it's hard to imagine such a place here in the US. And Reiko's piano student was a real piece of work (though the writing was on the wall for that one).

Basically I have three words for Murakami at this point: More Midori, please.

Sorry for being so down on the book this week; I hold out hope that by the time I come to the end that my opinion may change. What about y'all? What did you take away from this week's reading?

Hey HEY Hey, New Orleans!

2012-01-13T19:11:00.002-05:00

Okay, who can tell me the source of today's blogpost title? I'll give you a hint: it's from an eminently quotable show from the late 1980s and early 1990s.

That's right--I head down to New Orleans, Nawlins, the Big Easy, the Crescent City next week, and what's more, I'm traveling there for work, which means very little out of pocket expense for me. New Orleans is my favorite city in the US to visit, and it's one of my favorite places in the world. Having grown up in MS, I was a frequent visitor there until I moved north. I had friends in college who were from there and whose parents opened their home to all of us whenever we wanted to visit, including during the Mardi Gras season. I'm pretty sure that there isn't any number of hostess gifts and thank you notes that could adequately express our gratitude for taking us in, so Betty and Jerry Cooper, this blog's for you!

You know what Betty and Jerry would do for us at Mardi Gras time? Not only did they make large, nourishing breakfasts to fortify us during the day or welcome us back home at night with hot & hearty dishes like jambalaya, or allow us to play Mardi Gras music very loudly on the speakers at all hours of the day or night...each morning after breakfast they would drive two separate cars down to the parade routes and leave one there, then drive back to their house together while we were getting ready for the day. Then one of them would round up all of us kids and drive us back to the parade route to drop us off--all so we could have a vehicle on hand after the parades and could drive home whenever we were ready. These are the kind of parents who have always enjoyed the company of their children and by extension their children's friends, and I've rarely met a family who were so universally generous or gracious. While I certainly appreciated at the time everything that Betty and Jerry did for us, I was also wrapped up in that bubble of self-involvement that marks adolescence and young adulthood; it is now when I look back on those long-gone years that I marvel at their largess toward a rag-tag bunch of teens and college kids. Which is why it was all the more devastating when Hurricane Katrina destroyed that home I remember so fondly.

It's been a couple of years since I was last in New Orleans, incidentally for standing up in the wedding for Betty and Jerry's daughter, Elizabeth, which was one of the loveliest weddings I've ever had the pleasure of attending. (Sidebar: we had our hair done at 7:30 that morning and the stylist offered us our choice of daiquiris, strawberry or eggnog. Would that all hairdresers had multiple daiquiri machines in their back rooms to offer their clientele)

Next week will be completely different, for I'm heading down for Winter Institute, an industry trade show for independent booksellers, capped at a 500-person attendance to maintain a sense of intimacy. We attend educational sessions and panels, listen to speakers on the state of the industry, attend wine receptions with various authors, generally mingle with other folks in the bidness, and GET FREE BOOKS. It's the coolest gig around, and this year on top of everything else I've been invited to a couple of publisher's soirees, so color me stoked. Wednesday night is a large dinner party hosted by Algonquin, one of my favorite independent publishers, at the home of a famed New Orleans bookseller known for his swanky Garden District Bookshop. We'll ride the streetcar (do not call it a trolley, please) from our hotel in the Quarter to his home and enjoy some Abita beer and boudin balls and other traditional comestibles.

Friday night I get to attend the Simon & Schuster dinner where I'll meet authors Carol Anshaw, who wrote Carry the One, and Chris Cleave, whom most readers will know from Little Bee, but who will be promoting his forthcoming novel Gold. (I liked both books very much and the links will take you to my reviews.) Dinner will be held at the Red Fish Grill, which I believe opened since I left the South, but it's a Brennan establishment so let's just say I feel pretty good about it!

My husband would disown me if I forsook the Acme Oyster Bar while down there, and for me, no visit to that august city is complete without a visit (or several) to Cafe du Monde. One of my favorite visits there was a spur-of-the-moment roadtrip in my freshman year of college, three hours away by car. I reckon it was around 8:00 that night when we decided we were craving beignets and that nothing else would do. So we piled into my boyfriend's roommate's car and headed down. We started and ended at Cafe du Monde and in between times we walked the Quarter, stopped in at Pat O's (yup, touristy, but who can possibly resist the alluring combination of fire fountains and Hurricanes-a-gogo?), and sang some karaoke at The Cat's Meow (Love Shack. That's right. We rocked that tin roof.). I seem to recall we made it back to Jackson in time to go to church the next morning. 'Cause we were bad-ass renegades like that.

So, umm, yeah. New Orleans. Gonna be there soon. Which makes this post travel related and thus totes legitimate.

NB: Only the photos of people belong to me. The others were found on an obliging tourist promotional website. I used to have very similar photos of my own, but I lost them when my hard drive fried last year.

Norwegian Wood Readalong

2012-01-10T09:02:00.001-05:00

I've never participated in a readalong before, but I rather obnoxiously commented on the posts for everybody who participated in the Help! I Haven't Read The Help Readalong, sponsored by Reading Rambo. This month she's sponsoring a new one for Haruki Murakmi's Norwegian Wood, which nobody doubts will be a more elevated selection. However, my book just arrived at the bookshop yesterday and the first posting deadline is today, so I am a little behind. Woe is I. But I will buck up, suck it up, and give it the ol' college try (and any other cliche you can think of that is suitable). I've already missed out on the introductory post, in which we are to elaborate on our feelings of reading Murakami: to sum up, a little bit intimidated because I've read two of his books before and one of them kicked my ass & I didn't finish it, and the other was slim and dreamlike and carried me along on its gentle current. Which one will Norwegian Wood resemble, or will it be something entirely its own?

Okey-dokey. Here are my almighty thoughts about chapters one through ~~four~~ two. In a readalong, I'm not sure which is more important: finishing the reading and posting late, or posting on time what you've had the chance to read. I'm erring on the side of the latter for this week until informed otherwise.

I'm not sure if it's a cultural difference or what, but the conversation between Toru and Naoko seems completely stilted. The relationship itself and the way they interact feel natural, but any verbal exchange leaves me feeling dissatisfied. On the other hand, the same dream-like quality that I liked about After Dark seems to be developing here, and I'm all for that.

I love the meditation on memory and clarity at the end of chapter one: it's almost like a prose version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the closer in time he is to Naoko, the less clear she seems, and conversely, "the more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to understand her." Maybe it's just the old physics nerd in me resurfacing, but I was completely drawn to the last two paragraphs in the chapter.

Cicadas--who knew that they were in Japan? Of the four places I've lived in the US (MA, NC, MS, and WI), I have only ever known them in MS. I wouldn't have expected them to show up in Japan, what with the wildly divergent climates.

Boys' dormitories--I guess that's a cross-culture disgusting thing. I was an RA in college and had to make several, ahem, official visits to the boys' dorms after hours and they were always appaling. I love Murakami's description of mattresses here: "sweat-impregnated pads would give off odors beyond redemption." So true, so true.

National anthem--"until pebbles turn to boulders" seemed like the phrase should be reversed to me until I looked up the rest of the lyrics online. Now I suppose I just find it creepy, because if it were "boulders turn to pebbles," then it's just a really long time on a geologic time scale. But waiting for pebbles to turn to boulders is not going to happen, ever. And then I had the irreverent thought that it would be a better national anthem for North Korea. And then I realized that I don't really want to inspect too closely the words of my own national anthem and I left it alone.

And how 'bout that suicide, eh? Can't wait to move on 'cause in retrospect it makes the convo in chapter one a little less stilted.

Shoot, this makes me feel stoopid. Can't wait to read everybody else's response so that I can learn better how to do this. 'Til next time, y'all.

As the Crowe Flies and EATS

2012-01-09T09:04:00.000-05:00

Last weekend my husband and I left on a jet plane to visit my family in Wisconsin over New Year's. Traveling in New England is always a little dicey in the winter, and traveling to Wisconsin at that time of year isn't exactly for the faint of heart. I find it almost impossible to believe that I was born there, such is the thinness of my blood today. My brother, in contrast, thinks there's nothing at all wrong with wearing cutoffs and a t-shirt to shovel snow; his heavy winter coat is very similar to the light jacket I wear in the summer when it rains.

Our driveway in snow (& deer tracks)

But I digress. When traveling in winter, my husband and I always allow plenty of time for layovers in case our departing flights are delayed, and if the forecast predicts even a dusting of snow the night before or the morning of a departure, we hie ourselves to an airport motel to avoid what happened one time on our way to MS in February: the forecast promised less than an inch of snow accumulation overnight, but when we tried to navigate our hilly, curvy driveway, our 4-wheel drive car slid downhill on the black ice. At one point the car did a 180-degree turn and thus we slid the last bit backwards. How we ended up not hitting a boulder on the way down or avoiding other cars when we slid into the street below is a matter left to speculation, but we were so shaken that we barely made the drive to the airport on time. We are now thusly over-cautious when it comes to winter travel.

On the bright side, our layovers in winter are also long enough to accommodate meals more leisurely than grabbing takeout from the various fast food chains that define the airport landscape. In Minneapolis (MSP) we have a favorite place to nosh when the timing works: Surdyk's Flights, which is a full wine shop (thus the punny name for an airport eatery) with a small bistro attached. If you're in a hurry, you can grab a sandwich or homemade pastry to go, but I recommend grabbing one of the booths to settle in for a meal when it's feasible.

The bar/counter at Surdyk's

Books & cappuccino: so very civilized in an airport

We settled into a cozy booth for two, where our first order of bidness was to turn off the small screen tv, but close on the heels of that, we ordered a couple of cappuccinos (cappuccini?). I opted for breakfast and chose the egg & swiss panino with a side of fruit while DH selected the prosciutto and pecorino sandwich accompanied by a tarragon potato salad. Both were excellent, ample, and at $7 and $12, respectively, not out of line in terms of price. Although we didn't partake on this particular visit, Surdyk's also has a full bar with nothing but top shelf liquor. It's one of the rare places outside the Caribbean or a specialty bar where you can find a really good rum (my friends, Bacardi is rotgut as far as I'm concerned). They happen to pour Matusalem, or at least did the last time we were there.

My breakfast panino

DH's sandwich

Close up of their made-daily muffins, brioches, and other pastries.

Feeling refreshed and oh-so-very-civilized after lingering over coffee and our books, we soon settled in for our flight to Central Wisconsin Airport (CWA), nestled in the heart of the state. I've never seen so little snow on the ground in December or January as I did on this trip. Wisconsin is not at its best in the winter, especially when there's no coat of snow to gently mask the drably harsh features of the landscape, but there is still a kind of stark beauty there. These are some photos of farmland between the airport and the small, dying mill town where I spent my earliest years:

This photo reminds me quite viscerally of Mississippi

The stories this abandoned house could tell

What else would you name your welding company?

Our visit to Wisconsin was splendid but entirely too short. It's never enough time to visit with family, whom I only see once or twice a year, but it's a difficult time for me to get away. There's a fairly short window between the end of the holiday retail season/end of year returns and the gearing up for Winter Institute and textbook rush. Still, you might be amazed at the sheer amounts of baked goods and liquor that my family and I were able to put away in those brief days. For once I held my own against my DH, brother, and sister-in-law, but suffice it to say that it will be a long while before I want to get friendly with another bottle of Zacapa.

Before we knew it, it was time to head for the airport again, this time on our way to Detroit (DTW), which is one of my favorite airports. There's a good Japanese restaurant on the main concourse, and after you've filled up on sushi or noodles, you can entertain AND refresh yourself at the water fountain display. The water itself can be mesmerizing, but as it shoots and leaps in patterns, it's also ionizing the air around it, so I suggest that you pause to take a few deep breaths. I also love what I call the Rainbow Connection (someday we'll find it!), the underground tunnel that connects the main concourse with the two smaller ones. Here are a few more photos in parting:

Sometimes there's music playing, too.

Imagine what it'd be like if you were tripping...


The pause that refreshes

Frost on my mom's window

Literary Blog Hop: Supplementary Reading & Secondary Sources

2012-01-07T16:52:00.000-05:00

It's the first Literary Blog Hop of the year! This weekend, the good folks at The Blue Bookcase have asked us whether we supplement our reading with outside sources.

My first reaction to this question was a resounding "no" because I was thinking mostly along scholarly lines. But upon reflection it becomes a qualified yes. I don't seek secondary sources very often because I'm mostly driven just to go on to the next book, but it does happen occasionally--usually when I'm reading a work of historical fiction and I want to know where the history leaves off and the fiction begins. Not dissimilarly, when I'm reading works of non-fiction and I want to know more about a particular item/concept/theory/place, I'll go to secondary sources to learn more. One of the last times I did this was after reading Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, the excellent memoir by Alexandra Fuller. I spent a little time reading more about Rhodesia online after being appalled by the little bit of Rhodesian history that Fuller provides. I didn't spend a lot of time on it, admittedly, but I was curious enough to want to know more.

What about y'all? How often, if at all, do you turn to secondary sources for your reading?

Book Preview: Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin

2012-01-06T09:37:00.001-05:00

Bethany Griffin's first installment of her proposed trilogy will find many fans. At this point, I think I'm one of them. Here's the Good Reads summary: Everything is in ruins. A devastating plague has decimated [sic: it's actually much higher than that, but most people use this word, which means one in ten, carelessly, including this summary] the population and those who are left are in fear of catching it as the city crumbles to pieces around them. So what does Araby Worth have to live for? Nights in the Debauchery Club, beautiful dresses, glittery make-up . . . and tantalizing ways to forget it all. But in the depths of the club—in the depths of her own despair—Araby will find more than oblivion. She will find Will, the terribly handsome proprietor of the club. And Elliott, the wickedly smart aristocrat. Neither boy is what he seems. Both have secrets. Everyone does. And Araby may find something not just to live for, but to fight for—no matter what it costs her.

Finally, a steampunk post-apocalyptic, dystopian love triangle trilogy I can get behind! I'm sort of kidding. I've actually grown weary of the trilogy/love triangle/dystopian ideas. Why can't we have one great, big book instead of three pretty good-but-incomplete books these days? Why can't our heroines be faced with impossible life choices instead of impossible love choices?

But beyond those generic criticisms (which I seem to have with almost *every* YA book/franchise these days) I really liked the atmosphere of this book, though I wouldn't call it New Orleans-meets-fin de seicle-Paris as the author's note suggests. I enjoy both the limitations and the limitless imagination that go hand in hand with steampunk. Araby is an interesting character, as are her friend April, and the two boys in her life.

This book isn't out for another several months (July '12), but it's got the kind of cover and conceit that marketers love and I feel that we'll be seeing a LOT about this book in the lead up to its publication. I received an ARC of this book from our Harper sales rep, Anne DeCourcey, because she is beyond diligent when it comes to keeping me in books. Masque of the Red Death qualifies for the New Authors Challenge hosted by Literary Escapism. Two down, thirty-eight more to go!

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2012-01-04T00:57:00.001-05:00

I have a confession to make. Up until now, I have never read The Great Gatsby, but the reasons I just read it are fairly roundabout. My husband read it a couple of months ago for the first time, and last month I commented on a Top Ten Tuesday post that it would be a book that I'd like to receive for Christmas. In that same TTT post, I lamented the fact that nobody gives me books any longer, now that I work as an independent bookseller. My mom in turn read that post and determined to make me eat my words, so she gifted me with her personal copy of Gatsby this past weekend when I was visiting her in Wisconsin over the New Year.

I remember watching the Robert-Redford-as-Gatsby film adaptation more than 20 years ago with my mom, who is positively gaga for Redford, but I'm afraid that my mind retained only a couple of images: the car accident scene and the final scene in the swimming pool. I came to the book with a similar tabula rasa in terms of the story, but I'm not sure whether it's to my family or the literary culture of the places I've worked that I owe the fact that all of the names and places were already familiar to me by the time I picked up the book.

Now I'm sitting in the Detroit airport, moments after turning the last page of Fitzgerald's book. I'm not sure what to say about this book, other than I know I have absolutely nothing new to bring to the conversation. There are some really, really lovely turns of phrase throughout, and I suppose I see why it has become an American classic, but for me it falls mostly under the heading of Pretty Good rather than Great. I like the book for its tightness (I can think of a few writers who should take that lesson to heart), and I especially admire the way Fitzgerald allows the reader to make those mental mini-leaps during the lapses in narration instead of filling in every single blank the way modern writers need to do. But I can't help feeling that I'm missing out on a lot of subtext in this book, both cultural and historical, and it makes me wish I had read this book in an academic setting so that I might have a fuller appreciation of it.

What about you? Have you read Gatsby? What is the one thing you feel I should take away from this book? If you're an avid Fitzgerald fan, what should come next for me?

Believe it or not, this book qualifies for the New Authors challenge hosted by Literary Escapism. I have never read F. Scott Fitzgerald before. One down, 39 more to go for the year.

Book Teaser: Gold by Chris Cleave

2012-01-02T22:53:00.006-05:00

While I thought the plot of Gold was overall a slightly less interesting read than Chris Cleave's previous Little Bee (whose central questions still haunt me: how far would you go to save the life of a stranger? how would that bind you to that stranger for the rest of your lives?), the character development and plotting are stronger here with Gold. Cleave is certainly bold in his approach to characters--he doesn't seem to care if the reader likes his characters or not, which frees him from quite a few constructs and constraints. I didn't especially like the characters in Little Bee, and I didn't especially like the characters in Gold, but unusually that didn't make a difference in my devouring this book, which was a really fast read.

In this book, however, the writing itself is a few notches above his other books. I've got so many dog-eared pages and I shared so many passages out loud with my husband and my extended family that my ARC is starting to look a little ragged. I look forward to meeting Chris Cleave at Winter Institute in a few weeks! This book pubs in July 2012 and I received an ARC of it from Wendy Sheanin at Simon & Schuster--I'll be attending dinner in New Orleans with Chris Cleave and with Carol Anshaw, author of Carry the One. Can't wait!

Here are some of the passages I marked:

On watching her competitor on television: "Kate hated the way her body still readied itself to race like this, the way a widow's exhausted heart must still leap at a photo of her dead lover."

On a sick child's trying to read the mood of her mother in Star Wars costume: "This was the thing with Stormtroopers: they only showed the multipurpose expression molded into the face plates of their helmets--a hard-wearing, wipe-clean semimournful expression equally appropriate for learning that one's souffle, or one's empire, had fallen."

On describing a falling out between friends: "In the weeks that followed, Zoe had been incandescent with remorse. That was how it had seemed to Kate--that her friend had actually flickered with a pale and anxious light that sought to expel the shadows cast by her behavior."

On the nature of time in a modern world: "Time had been restructured like bad debt. The long languid hour had been atomized. Manifestos were shrunk to memes and speeches were pressed into sound bites [sic]..."

Last Month in Review: December 2011

2012-01-01T13:21:00.000-05:00

December was a slower reading month for me. Between the extra hours at work and the demands of the holiday season, and somehow just not being that interested in reading, I couldn't seem to break into the double digits.

1. Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver. I really, really liked this sequel to Delirium, which I could barely make myself finish. Review here.

2. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander. Didn't love it, didn't hate it. Writing is good, wish it was less self-conscious. Review here.

3. Quarantine by Rahul Mehta. Another story collection. Review here.

4. White Truffles in Winter by N. M. Kelby. Review here.

5. Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James. Didn't review this one, but suffice it to say that it's a pretty decent Austen "sequel," as far as they go. Come on, it's P. D. James!

6. Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. This was a gift from my Secret Santa at Broke & Bookish. Loved it! Hope to get a review written when I return home from visiting my family in Wisconsin over New Year's.

7. Home Front by Kristin Hannah (audio). I didn't like this one much because I think it fell way short of what it could have been. Review here.

I came really, really close to completing my first e-book of the year, but I didn't want to push it and so it will be in my 2012 roster. I've been reading Pride & Prejudice on my phone a few pages at a time. Started it last January and took a full year 'cause I read it mostly when I'm in waiting situations: stopped for a train in traffic, waiting for my husband to meet me at a restaurant, etc.

Book Review: Kristin Hannah's Home Front (audio)

2011-12-29T08:42:00.001-05:00

I should be clear up front that a book like Kristin Hannah's Home Front would never be one that I would pick up to read, but I'm less particular about what books I listen to on my daily commute. There was a complimentary CD version of Home Front (read by Maggi-Meg Reed) available to booksellers and I made good use of it. It is definitely not my cup of tea, but I do understand what many readers find appealing about her.

Home Front is a story about a family, more specifically about a couple, Michael and Jolene. Michael is a high powered criminal attorney with little time to devote to his family. Jolene is the perfect wife and mother of two girls Betsy and Lucy Lu (not to be confused with Lucy Liu, as I first heard her name), but she is also a Blackhawk pilot in the National Guard. When her unit is called to serve in Iraq, everybody's life changes. Before she leaves, Michael tells Jolene he doesn't love her any more and naturally she hardens her heart against him as a means of survival. At this point, spoilers lie ahead, so be forewarned. I just cannot be arsed to do the whole hide-by-highlighting-the-text bit: Meanwhile back at the ranch, parents have flip-flopped their roles and Michael becomes a full-care parent with the aid of his own mother, while Jolene becomes more and more distant, both literally and figuratively. Jolene's helicopter gets shot down, leaving one crew member to do on site and both Jolene and her best friend gravely injured. Jolene loses her leg and (eventually) her best friend, launching her into full-on depression, but apparently nobody notices or cares enough for her to get counseling. I mean, who are these people? Why doesn't someone take note of her mental state? And oh, yeah, she's got PTSD, which her husband conveniently recognizes because his big case is defending a young Marine who shot his wife. Michael & Jolene: will they or won't they reconcile? Will they become a family unit again? Will bratty Betsy buck up? Possibly. Will obnoxious Lucy Lu ever stop being obnoxious? Possibly not.

If I sound flippant, it's because I have two major gripes with this story: it's both overwrought and repetitive. If I read (well, heard) a version of "her old way of life was lost along with her leg" once, I heard it a couple dozen times. Hannah is, unfortunately, a master of tell, don't show, and apparently telling things once isn't enough for her. The story is patently formulaic and utterly predictable, which I don't always object to, but it is pretty emotionally manipulative, which I think is a greater sin. What could have been a truly interesting book exploring modern gender roles, taking hard look at how PTSD can affect soldiers & their families, and moreover about the way our country has abandoned those soldiers to their own devices without proper mental and psychological care has turned out to be very trivial, indeed. There is a line near the end of the book that I'm paraphrasing, something like, "How can it be more difficult to return home than it is to go off to war?" I wish Hannah had crafted a more substantive answer to that very compelling question.

(I also wish the book had been better edited. For example, at one point in the third person narration it says "Michael was literally at the end of his rope." Why, no he wasn't. He wasn't literally at the end of any rope--not hanging from one, not being pulled by one. It bugs me when people use "literally" incorrectly and any editor should know better than that, even if the writer doesn't. So in this case, not only is the language trite, the usage is incorrect. Gah.)

This was clearly not the book for me, but I would still listen to more of Kristin Hannah's books if I could get them for free, so I suppose there's that. After all, I listened to the entire book, and I found myself crying in traffic on more than one occasion. Several, actually--I was drawn emotionally into the story in a way that I wasn't expecting, but that might have as much to do with the good reader as the story itself; it's so hard to say. The author clearly has a strong readership, and I suspect that people who are drawn to Nicholas Sparks' stories (which I also find overwrought, but plenty of people like 'em for what they are) or to Jodi Picoult's style of storytelling would really enjoy Kristin Hannah's novels.

Have *you* read Kristin Hannah? Are you a fan? Tell me what I'm missing!