Monthly Archives: October 2006

Random Assortment of Information

  • This is pretty cool. It’s the translator’s notes on translating The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier.
  • Is Hollywood going to ruin one of the books I loved this year?
  • This list of dos and don’ts from the Events coordinator of Powells is both hilarious and true. Seriously people. Listen to the advice.
  • I’m not sure what to say about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I finished earlier this week. It’s as good as the reviews say. I hate to use the word haunting because that seems so obvious, but it is haunting. I’m still thinking about how McCarthy takes this really horrible landscape and makes it almost beautiful at times:

    He thought of his life. So long ago. A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned. On the table books and papers. It had begun to rain and a cat at the corner turned and crossed the sidewalk and sat beneath the cafe awning. There was a woman at the table there with her head in her hands. Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the gray cold light.

Around the Water Cooler

  • Pinky’s Paperhaus has a nice-looking new home.
  • And Beatrice has some new roommates. Ron’s asked Scott of Slushpile, Dibs, Dj from Bookburger, and Rod Lott from Bookgasm to post on his site.
  • Alex Beam shares his secrets of un-reading with Globe readers. “Books are expensive, and most of them are not very well written anyway. I have not read dozens of books in just the past few months. I am prepared to share my secrets of un-reading with you.” Don’t bother reading the new Bob Woodward he says. The contents have been all over the news for the past few months and Woodward has been everywhere in the media for the past few weeks. Woodward’s “scoop” is that the Bush administration has mishandled the war in Iraq. Wow. Really? The best line of the article has to be: “I read a book about Fiorina a few years ago, in which she was trying to convince Hewlett-Packard to pay for shipping her yacht from the East Coast to the West Coast. Tough choices indeed.”
  • The Globe also ran an interesting article this Sunday on “new wave literary fabulists”, including one of my favorite writers Kelly Link.
  • It’s book week at Slate.
  • The Rake is full of rage again. This time, he directs his anger toward Nick Hornby. Deserving target? Quite possibly. I personally find Hornby irritating, but I know lots of people love him.
  • Bud Parr has posted a nice Q&A with Laird Hunt, author of The Exquisite

Color Me Surprised!

The National Book Award Finalists have been announced.

Fiction

  • Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (Pantheon)
  • Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins)
  • Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  • Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
  • Jess Walter, The Zero (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins)

Non-Fiction

  • Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)
  • Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)
  • Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)
  • Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (HarperCollins)
  • Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry

  • Louise Glück, Averno (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  • H.L. Hix, Chromatic (Etruscan Press)
  • Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press)
  • Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (New Directions)
  • James McMichael, Capacity (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Young People’s Literature

  • M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)
  • Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death (Front Street Books/Boyds Mills Press)
  • Patricia McCormick, Sold (Hyperion Books for Children)
  • Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial/Penguin)
  • Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (First Second/Roaring Brook Press/Holtzbrinck)

Land Ho!

In celebration of Columbus’s sighting of land supposedly on this day in 1492, I don’t have to work today. Perhaps I should be celeb rating it old school style, contracting the black plauge or performing some obscure religious rite. Instead, I will be spending it finishing up Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel The Road, which so far has been one of the most depressing books I’ve read this year.

Kakutani and Then Some

Marish Pessl’s debut novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics received a lot of press when it arrived on the shelves this August. Many of the reviews seemed favorable. Some have called the book overly clever and nothing but a literary trick. This week, my favorite local paper The Weekly Dig posted their own review. The subtitle of the piece says it all: “Deadly chick lit virus claims another victim”. Lest you think I’m trying to bring up the chick lit yay or nay discussion again, I’m merely pointing out the negativity of the review, not talking up the chick lit reference. I find this review so very interesting as it flies into the face of the anti-snarkiness that the Believer gang proselytize.

This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader by Joan Dye Gussow

After reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma this past summer, I wanted to do a bit more reading about sustainable living. Luckily, Pollan has posted a reading list on his website, which included Gussow’s This Organic Life, written in 2001.

Joan Gussow does not beat around the bush. She manages to live almost entirely off the vegetables and fruit she and her husband grow in their suburban backyard and spends most of the book telling you how she does it. It’s not an easy task, but she maintains that people don’t think hard enough anymore about where their food comes from. Gussow wants to be an example that raising your own vegetables and fruit year round can be done, even in New England. Eating locally grown food makes the most sense environmentally, ecologically, and economically. She demonstrates that with her careful research into food transportation. Transporting asparagus from South America in the winter (out of season) costs more in energy calories in shipping than you’d get eating it. Plus that asparagus will probably lack flavor having been refrigerated for at least a few days. Not to mention the impact on the farmers growing the produce in South America.

I only wish that Gussow’s book had a little more focus. She covers many subjects: buying her first and then second home, moving into her second home, planting the gardens at each home, the problems within the food system of the US, and the death of her husband. It goes back and forth in time, even within a chapter, and it can be confusing at times. Plus she can come across a little holier than thou and she seems behind the times, even taking into account this was written in 2001. Nevertheless, her overall message is clear and a good one and the passion that came through when she talks about her garden makes this book worth reading.

Another Award I Neglected to Mention

The shortlist for the Giller Award (the National Book Award of Canada if you will) has been announced:

  • Rawi Hage De Niro’s Game
  • Vincent Lam Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
  • Pascale Quiviger The Perfect Circle
  • Gaétan Soucy The Immaculate Collection
  • Carol Windley Home Schooling

The winner will be announced on November 7th.

I have to admit that I am not familiar with any of these authors. Even Canadian George of Bookninja had no comment. It sounds like a repeat of the National Book Award shortlist from 2004 when five fairly unheard of women were nominated.

On a side note, I noticed a difference of word usage that I’ve never seen before in this sentence: “Moreover, a survey released Tuesday by BookNet Canada, a not-for-profit agency that tracks national book sales, among its other activities, suggests that a win can significantly goose sales.” I like the idea of “goosing” sales. Typically I think of pinching someone’s posterior as the main definition of goosing. I now have a mental image of one of those Monty Python hands pinching an animated book’s butt.

A Match Made in Heaven

Lawrence Ferlinghetti will announce the twenty National Book Award Finalists this year on October 11th at his historic store City Lights. “The Foundation is excited to announce our Finalists from one of the country’s great bookstores in the heart of a city long associated with a passion for literature,” said Augenbraum, who will co-host the announcement at City Lights.

The award season crush is upon us already. The Man Booker prize is announced next Tuesday October 10th. The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced sometime in the next two weeks (they’re being coy). And now National Book Award finalists next Wednesday, with the finalist in each category announced on November 15th.