The holidays are over. I’m back and work trying to get ready for the buying season which starts next week for me. The store itself slows down in January, but I’m preparing for one of the busiest times of the year. This will be my first full season as the Head Buyer for the store. I’m taking on a lot of new publishers and sales reps. I’ve got piles and piles of catalogs. I try to get ready as best as I can, looking up sales and author information. There’s only so much I can do ahead of time of course. I can make an opinion based on catalog copy but often it takes the sales rep talking to me about the book to make up my mind.
Right now I’m looking at the Putnam catalog which is a member of the Penguin Group. Here I am in the Avery medical/health section and I flip to the page of The Gut Flush Plan: The Breakthrough Cleansing Program to Rid Your Body of the Toxins That Make You Sick, Tired, and Bloated by Ann Louise Gittleman. There are two things wrong with this title. First, The Gut Flush Plan? Really? Maybe they were thinking that with such a vile sounding title people might pick up the book? Second, the subtitle is way too long. I know it’s a health book, but really. It’s not that I have anything against the subject matter of the book. Gut Flush Plan. Ugh. The words just shouldn’t be put together like that.

I finished Buddenbrooks the other night. I find it hard to believe that Thomas Mann was only 25 when he wrote this book. I know I mentioned in a previous post its intensity and I was only a quarter the way into it! The intensity kept up and I found that Mann’s sly wit and his understanding of human nature increased as the book went forward. The only negative was the what I imagined was a hurried ending. Everyone begins to die and time leaps forward chapter by chapter. But young Hanno’s death seemed forced and out of place. This is not a book that you can fly through quickly. I found myself going back and rereading passages to make sure I understood fully what was really happening. Overall it’s a great book though one I’m glad to have finally read.

I think for the next classic I’m going to read Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White. Has anyone else read it?

• New York magazine lists the best novels you’ve never read. It’s a good list which includes Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives, Calvin Baker’s Dominion (love, love this book), and Mavis Gallant’s Varieties of Exile. There’s also a lot on there I haven’t read but have heard good things about such as Sepharad by Antonio Munoz Molino and Experience by Martin Amis. I have to admit to having never read Martin Amis or any Amis for that matter. This makes me a bad bookstore employee.
• Condalmo reports that the Morning News needs book recommendations for its annual Tournament of Books. Email your favorite two books to tob at themorningnews dot org.
• I’m skeptical of Scholastic’s brilliant idea of what to do now that Harry Potter is over. Part of what worked with HP was the word of mouth. Typically when a large corporation tries to create the buzz, it fails. But what do I know? I do love Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. Brilliant and better than HP.
• Commentary magazine writes about Simon Armitage’s new translation of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight. This book also received a rave review in this past week’s NYTBR.
• Thanks to Maud, I read this interview with Andrew Wylie, power literary agent to the likes of Susan Sontag, Italo Calvino, and Martin Amis. I did not know that he was old money Boston. I do like his attitude toward getting his job done: “When you represent someone’s work, if you’re passionate about it, and that passion is sincere, it’s conveyed,” Wylie told Portfolio.com.
• This sort of ties into my next link. This post about the NBCC’s Best Recommended list debuting at bookstores is interesting, but the comments on the post really caught my attention. I’m sure to call down the wrath of the internet for even commenting on it, but I have to defend the independents from the first commenter Fran. I get that you’re upset to not have been published, but if this is how you talk to the local indies in your neighborhood, no wonder they won’t carry your book! I’d love to see her open her idea of an “independent” bookstore and see how long it lasts. Besides, is it really a crime to carry the books of Michael Chabon and Denis Johnson? Isn’t that throwing out the baby with the bath to suggest that all books from larger publishers are inherently bad? Maybe your books aren’t picked up because they’re no good! And I’ve got another statement that’s going to piss folks off: Far too many people think that they’re great writers these days. Anyone who’s stubbed their toe thinks they should write a memoir about it. It’s fine to write, go for it, but everyone shouldn’t expect to get published. There’s just no way. Rant over.
• Last but not least, Ed Champion is closing up shop for now. Is this the end of our intrepid litblogger? Will he close up shop never to blog again? I hope not, but I also  understand his decision and wish him the very best.

I have a problem. I’m finally at the stage where I am admitting it out loud. I love cookbooks. I read them, I scour them, I love reading the introductions and looking at all the recipes. I keep adding more and more to my collection each year. In my defense, I cook from many of them, but I’m at the point where there’s no way I can cook from all of them regularly. The shelf in my kitchen is full, so now there’s an annex in the living room. That just became full yesterday as I added my newest book Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson. All the papers are printing they’re gift guides for cookbooks and food lovers right now, so I thought I would mention a few that I’ve loved from this year.

First, there’s Country Cooking of France by Anne Willan. This is a thick, beautiful cookbook detailing rustic French cooking. With such great pictures, you’d think it would just be a coffee table cookbook, but the recipes actually seem simple and doable. Creole by Babette de Rozieres is a lovely book from Phaidon. Traditionally an art publisher, they’ve gotten into cookbooks in the last few years. They’re very well designed. This one has a lovely plaid cover and they carry the theme throughout the book. Also, I don’t think there are many Creole cuisine cookbooks out there.

I read Bill Buford’s article in the New Yorker on meat and of course had to try and get all of the books he wrote about. I got my hands on a copy of Roast Chicken & Other Stories as mentioned above. I also got Beyond Nose to Tail by Fergus Henderson. Both are small with less emphasis on the pictures as on the writing and recipes. Mr. Bookdwarf just made some pork jowls and the next book came in handy. I was smart enough to have bought Pork & Sons by Stephane Reynaud as soon as it came out last Spring. Another well designed Phaidon book, this one details cooking with pork. The author’s father was a butcher and his father was a butcher. They bring back a time when slaughtering the pig was a family ritual. We’ve got a freezer full of meat—Mr. Bookdwarf loves buying odd selections and these are the kind of books we need.
The only book I can’t get my hands on is The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He’s a celebrity chef in England who writes about the importance of sustainably raised meat. I saw a copy on the shelf of a small store in San Francisco this past weekend and am kicking myself for not buying it. My store has sold our last copy and it’s tough to find. Of course, Amazon not only has it but is offering a 40% discount! How unfair. They’re basically dumping this lovely book and meanwhile we can’t get our hands on any. I can’t bring myself to order it from them. Anyway, from what I saw this weekend, it’s a lovely book that I can’t wait to read and cook from.

The Litblog Co-op has chosen Matthew Eck’s debut novel The Farther Shore as the Winter 2007 READ THIS! Selection. This week will bring a lot of discussion of the book as well as some interviews and more. Dan Wickett has written a review and Levi Asher has interviewed Matthew Eck. Stay tuned for more.

I almost started hyperventilating when I saw the catalog page for a memoir by Haruki Murakami titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It’s all about how running and sports have influenced his life and his writing. Of course it touches on his love of LPs, his writing career, etc.

As someone who took up running last year, I’m excited to learn that a writer I admire so much also loves the sport. Myself, I have a love/hate relationship with it. I’m not very fast, nor can I run for more than a few miles though I’m getting better. Most days that I run, I hate it, but every now and then, I run and hit the zen moment of my body moving the way it should and my mind clearing itself. It’s those moments that keep me doing it.

I returned late last night from California to an ice storm. Frozen sidewalks greeted my walk to the store this morning. As I navigated the treacherous, icy streets, I muttered to myself that just yesterday I was enjoying the fine 55 and sunny day in San Francisco. Why did I come back? But! I was taking a quick computer break (getting the carpal tunnel I fear) and began to flip through the FSG catalog that arrived this morning. I saw so much to get me excited about the spring:

• What is the first book with a double page spread? The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer. Yes! I loved The Confessions of Max Tivoli and can’t wait to get my hands on this one.
• How about a book length essay by the new New Yorker writer James Wood called How Fiction Works? “The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novell–plainspoken, funny, blunt–in the traditions of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.”
• A short story collection from Chris Adrian called A Better Angel. He’s a student right now across the street, yet we’ve never had an event for The Children’s Hospital, a staff favorite. Perhaps we can finally host him. Also, go read his short story ‘Promise Breaker‘ in Esquire.
• Graywolf, whom FSG distributes, has an interesting book called Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist’s Memoir written by Daniel Tomasulo. I’ve never heard of him, but the brief paragraph they include peaked my interest:
  

  From August 1956 through April 1961 I controlled the traffic and streetlights in New York City and northern New Jersey. It was a daunting task for a five-year-old, but by the summer of ’56 I realized I had a responsibility I could not ignore. My identity and my mission were top secret. With the exception of terse, encrypted communications to the National Security Council and the CIA< I couldn't breathe a word.

  I would caution the Graywolf folks to omit the phrase laugh-out-loud humor from the press materials. Something about that phrase raises my hackles.

• Finally, I was so ecstatic to see that the next volume of short stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi is coming in May from Drawn & Quarterly. It’s called Good-Bye and hopefully is as good as the last two volumes The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo. You can preview his work here.

Yes, I’m off again. Heading to San Francisco tomorrow morning for the weekend. I’ll be spending time with my sister as well as a few friends. Will make my usual pilgrimages to City Lights, Green Apple Books, and The Booksmith. So far I’m planning on bringing Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Not sure what else to bring with me. Same old problem. I’ll be back on Monday.