Author Archives: bookdwarf

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Leave a reply

Plenty of grownups like to read youth-oriented fantasy and sci-fi. Plenty of grownups like to read, ahem, <i>adult</i> fantasy and sci-fi. But The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, is a different sort of beast. It’s a novel about a young man who’s a fan of a children’s fantasy book. He’s always suspected there’s something special and different about him.

And of course, there is, and magic is real, etc. etc.

So, the first thing he does is throw over all his old non-magical-world friends, go off to special magic college, hang out with a really pretentious clique, and try to impress chicks with magic.

Grossman brings a metafictional flair and a wry humor to the treatment of how actual people would handle magic if it were real, and how the worlds we imagine to be fictional would behave if they weren’t novels, but actual worlds. Oh, you think you’re a hero? Everyone wants to be the hero in their own story. You might not be. Oh, you’ve found your one true love? You’re still an idiot twentysomething and you’re going to wreck that relationship by hooking up with a girl who’s just toying with you out of boredom.

There’s a reason George R. R. Martin blurbs this book – like Game of Thrones, it subverts the conventions of the genre, and creates something entirely different. It’s not as violent or explicit as Martin’s work, but it’s very much a novel for adults who were raised on children’s fantasies and want a grownup, more nuanced tale with deeper themes than “heroism = awesome.”

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

2 Replies
Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City is a classic of true crime, covering the remarkable transformations of Chicago and the world with the 1893 World’s Fair … and also the appearance and capture of America’s first modern serial killer.
 The fair witnessed wide deployment of the floating-slab foundation that allowed skyscrapers to exist, a critical demonstration of the benefits of lighting with AC power, the invention of the Ferris Wheel, the novelty of the zipper, the prize-winning Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, development of a police force dedicated to prevention of crime… and also identity theft, fraud, and murder made easy by the increasing anonymity of the huge city. Without the close supervision of family and village, psychopaths could manipulate merchants and vendors, borrow without credit checks, buy without paying, and of course practice seduction, bigamy, and murder on an immense scale.
So, the book really covers both the wonders and horrors of the close of the 19th century. It’s incredibly engaging and clearly has an immense following for a reason.
With Boston’s Olympic bid in the spotlight, it is also interesting to note how the city of Chicago was almost unanimous in its desire for the fair, and how much of the argument was over which part of the city would be allowed to host more of it. In Boston, we’re fighting to keep it out, or at least keep parts of it away from our neighborhoods. A big event like this was a point of pride for Chicagoans in the 1890s. 2015 Boston seems to have a totally different attitude in mind.

Report from the Road (or Not)

Leave a reply

As I mentioned in my last post some weeks ago, I’m now a sales rep for Penguin books selling to independent bookstores in New England. I’ve got a car, a laptop, a shitload of galleys, and I drive around visiting my accounts talking about the next season’s books. Or at least that’s the idea. Except I live in New England, more specifically in Cambridge, MA, across the river from Boston. We’ve gotten over 70 inches of snow in the last and are expecting more this coming week. We’ve run out of places to put that flaky menace and after a while, it just gets tiring (or maybe that’s just February). Suffice it to say, I’ve had to reschedule a lot of appointments and juggle my schedule. No big deal. (A photo of my street for perspective.)

20150209_133319

So far when I am able to do sales calls, I have a great time. I love nothing more than talking about books with other book lovers. And Penguin publishes some great stuff. I’m reading more variety than I normally would so I can confidently talk about the titles to buyers. All in all I’m digging this new job, no pun intended.

The Most Expensive Book I’ve Ever Read

4 Replies

I just finished reading Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson, a book about his work with the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to overturn wrongful convictions. And it is both the most important book I have read in ages. It made me cry more than anything I’ve read in months. And it was the most expensive, in that it made me immediately pull out my wallet and make a substantial donation to EJI.

Well, not quite immediately. First I checked Charity Navigator, which gives it perfect scores on accountability and transparency.

Then I gave them some money.

You should too.

Bourbon Empire by Reid Mitenbuler

1 Reply

When I mentioned to a friend Reid Mitenbuler’s  Bourbon Empire is my favorite history of bourbon, I got a raised eyebrow in response. You’ve read more than one?

Well, there’s King’s County Distillery Guide to Moonshining, which is a nice guide to production processes and the contemporary landscape of the American spirits business, but doesn’t have the narrative flow that I wanted it to. Max Watman’s Chasing the White Dog is thrilling and does a great job with illegal alcohol from the Whiskey Rebellion on through the present day, but doesn’t talk all that much about the stuff that we actually drink. And of course there are David Wondrich’s books Imbibe and Punch,  which are excellent general histories of drinking culture.

Last year brought us a candidate in the form of Dane Hucklebridge’s Bourbon: A History of the American Spirit. It’s informative enough, but the writing style is somewhat annoying and the perspective too boosterish to really provide objective value.

If you want to know your American whiskey history, Mitenbuler’s book is the one to read. Anyone else would have begin the story with the Whiskey Rebellion, but he goes to the 20th century. Yes, he starts with the 1964 lobbying triumph in which Congress was persuaded to pass a law defining bourbon as distinctly American. Why does this matter? Well, it kept foreign manufacturers from elbowing their way into the category, undercutting prices. (Then he goes back to the Whiskey Rebellion. You can’t skip it entirely).

Later on, he explains that the wide availability of 12-year-old bourbon resulted from a combination of poor demand forecasting, excellent lobbying, and tax-deferment policies which allowed distillers to age their stocks longer before having to pay taxes on them. It is a testament to Mitenbuler’s talent that he can explain industrial tax policy in a way that makes it seem like a fascinating tale of liquor-soaked intrigue.

What Mitenbuler does that’s particularly good here is root his history in the conflict between Thomas Jefferson’s and Alexander Hamilton’s conceptions of the American economy – should it be centered on yeoman farmers and small producers, or an industrial powerhouse with capital and leverage? In other words, he has written a history of bourbon which gives the reader a window into the overall development of American industry and society. It’s as good an explanation as I’ve ever seen for the fact that liquor and many other American industries are dominated by a handful of large producers, all marketing themselves as small-time humble craftsmen with homespun wisdom.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

1 Reply

Rachel has seen something from her window on the commuter train that she thinks might be related to a crime that may have been committed one night when… well, she can’t quite remember, but she’s pretty sure something awful happened. And now a girl is missing, and if only she hadn’t been blackout drunk that night she might be able to help. But the police don’t believe her, and she barely believes herself.

The Girl on the Train is a thriller you could read all at once, late at night. But it’s also a trip inside the emotional cores of people in varying kinds of crisis, and a beautiful illustration of the fallibility of human memory.

I suggest that you not read it while drunk on the commuter rail, though. That might hit a little too close to home.

End of the Year Post

2 Replies

Sorry for the silence around here. I started a new job in November—I’m now a Field Sales Manger for Penguin Random House, selling Penguin books to the independents here in New England. I’ve been busy setting up a home office, getting to know my accounts, and reading Summer 2015 books.

While adding a few books to my Reading List, I noticed that I’m almost at 100 books for 2014. I’m not pressuring myself to hit 100, but sere’s hoping I do it. I’m about to get on a 6 hours flight to San Francisco, so I’m sure I can get at least 1-2 read. It was interesting going my reading list. There were definitely a lot of books that I forgot that I had read and clearly didn’t stick with me. But then there were the ones that did. Here, in no particular order, are my favorite books of 2014.

  • Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
  • The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
  • Another Great Day by Geoff Dyer
  • Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty
  • The Martian by Andy Weir
  • Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
  • Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
  • Nobody is Every Missing by Catherine Lacey
  • A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
  • Neverhome by Laird Hunt
  • The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
  • All 3 of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante

One of my resolutions for 2015 is to write more here. I’m hoping to review some books, post about cooking projects, and perhaps write some observations about the life of a sales rep. I’m pretty sure I make the same resolution every year, but now that I’m working from home, with no boss looking over my shoulder, I can post as I please! And it’s work-related, so there.

Happy holidays folks. See you in the new year.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Leave a reply

If you’ve read World Made By Hand, you get the feeling that James Howard Kunstler is smugly waiting for the apocalypse in his bunker just so he can say “I told you so.” Of course, this is also true in almost any other end-of-the-world fantasy, from Dawn of the Dead and its warning of rampant consumerism to Justin Cronin’s The Passage and its parable of military experiments with vampires.

In Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel manages to avoid that trap entirely. Her novel is divided between post- and pre-apocalypse scenes, each populated by fully realized characters shot through with wistful desires for what it cannot have. A paparazzo wishes for more meaningful work. A successful actor realizes he has been horrible to all three of his wives, and it has in fact been his fault. A woman struggles to remember if both light and coldness came from refrigerators in the world before. A survivor picks through an abandoned library in search of celebrity gossip magazines and Justin Cronin novels.

In Mandel’s world, a particularly virulent flu comes from nowhere to wipe out most of humanity. The survivors cobble together what they can – a museum in a former airport. A newspaper published monthly and disseminated by horse-drawn cart. A traveling orchestra and theater troupe. A cult.

And the villans, if villains there be in this tale, are those who seek to put a moral on the disaster. Who leads the violent cult? A man whose mama always told him “things happen for a reason.”

No they don’t. Nature doesn’t care about you. Only humans care.

Mandel has a masterful novel here. Not just in its narrative structure, or in its language – although it is beautifully built and beautifully told. But it is also a masterpiece in the way it illuminates the flaws of the current world and the folly of our wishing for apocalypse and the simplification it might bring.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

Leave a reply

I don’t remember when I first read William Gibson’s landmark Neuromancer, but it would have been the early 1990s, and I was entranced. That book defined, a decade before “internet” was a household word, the possibilities and dangers of an online or virtual life at least as compelling as the present flesh-and-blood one.

With The Peripheral, Gibson returns to the theme of operating a virtual body remotely, and the metaphysics of life being a little too close to gaming.

Flynne is a young woman scraping together a living in a dying town whose main industry is illicit drug manufacture. Sometimes she works as a supporting character in rich people’s video games. Paid to fly a security drone around a virtual London, she witnesses a murder. It looks real. It may, in fact, be real.

The linkage between the world Flynne lives in and the world where the murder occurs blurs the line between who’s a real person and who is merely an AI or a character in a game. What happens when a disabled former Marine uses a neurological interface device to operate a prosthetic body in another location, leaving his legless original body in a back room in a warehouse? What if the warehouse is in another universe? What if the software that runs that universe isn’t 100% secure?

What is life, after all, but a completely realistic, totally immersive, massively multiplayer game with very real stakes?  And what happens if some of the players are cheating to get ahead – manipulating the fabric of the universe as though the world were merely another virtual reality server?

Rings by Jasmine Dreame Wagner

Leave a reply

Jasmine Dreame Wagner uses abstraction, typography, and occasional injections of subtle humor to illuminate the junctions of landscape, humanity, and industry in Rings, her first full length book of poems.

There’s a recurring motif here of unclosed parentheses. Implying that there’s more. What is the statement of a poem beginning  with “(” and ending without punctuation? That there is an open ended silence? That the poem goes on without the reader and without the poet and without the book?

That even when we move on to the next piece, the prior one is still there, overlaying this one, overlaying the one beyond it, overlaying the landscape it describes, a landscape of layers of geology, settlement, industry, collapse, redevelopment, gentrification…?

“Ruin is a cultured pearl” she says. In the rust, the weeds, the buried rivers and abandoned mills and rebuilt stadiums and casinos she describes, Wagner finds  the way humans have turned life into art, and the sometimes funny ways that art and life mix the profound and the completely superficial:

(It turns out, it was advertising. There was no higher calling.

It turns out, some things speak truth inaccurately, like a light wash over a jpeg of my dinner on Instagram.

Wagner scatters aphoristic clarity in with lines you have to read four or five times, parse and re-parse, to realize that they aren’t meant to have one meaning, that some things (some poems, some places, some people) are puzzles that don’t always have solutions. It can be confusing, at points. But reading and rereading this book, I am certain I am in the presence of real talent.