Finished another couple of books over the weekend. I seem to be in this mode of picking books that I know I can read quickly. There’s something satisfying about that for me right now. Perhaps because work is getting so crazy. I’m never done it seems. We’re starting to plan for the holidays—I have to start picking the one hundred books which we feature starting around Thanksgiving this week! So I keep grabbing these books that don’t take too long to read, hoping for a satisfying read nonetheless. Can one find deepness in a quick read novel?

• The Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz– The second in this new series finds the Spellmans as dysfunctional as ever. There’s some nice character development as well as some hilarious escapades. This is just a fun series.
• The Kept Man by Jami Attenberg– Jarvis Miller’s famous painter husband has been in a coma for six years. Jarvis seems to be in one herself, not quite growing or changing. While parts of the plot seem a bit forced, the descriptions of Jarvis’s longing for her husband seem so genuine.
• The Eye of Jade by Dian Wei Liang– Set in present day Beijing, this first in a new detective series features Mei Wang, a modern, independent woman. She owns her own apartment and car and runs her own business, complete with a male secretary. Asked to find a Han dynasty jade of great value, she searches high and low through the city, delving into China’s history as well as her own family’s dark past. The mystery itself seemed only as a screen to write about the horrors of the cultural revolution. I liked the scenes of the back alleys, hutongs and noodle bars best.
• The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck– A small unit of American soldiers is separated from their command in a nameless city. Left to fend for themselves, the narrator Joshua Stantz recounts their wanderings, depicting the hopelessness of a city torn apart by war. The author’s own experiences give the story authenticity, making the slim novel feel like an epic.

Ann Enright has won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering.

The Washington Post Book Review has started a bookblog cleverly called Short Stack.

I woke up this morning bright and early to learn that Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’m both shocked and delighted. None of the articles I’ve read discussing possible winners mentioned her. She’s had a long career as an author and she didn’t even finish high school!

• The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded tomorrow at 1pm Stockholm time. Bloomberg news has a rundown of the current contenders, which include Syrian-born poet and critic Adonis, South Korean author Ko Un, and Philip Roth.
• Speaking of awards, the National Book Award Finalists were announced today. I’m posting the Fiction and Non-Fiction, which I think are good lists. Look at the list here to see the Children’s and Poetry:
  Fiction

  Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company)
  Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Fiction judges: Francine Prose (chair), Andrew Sean Greer,
  Walter Kirn, David Means, and Joy Williams.

  Non-Fiction

  Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)
  Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
  Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
  (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)
  Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction judges: David Shields (chair), Deborah Blum,
  Caroline Elkins, Annette Gordon-Reed, and James Shapiro.

• Yay! Self-Promotion. Rather, store promotion. A customer told us that Ellen Pompeo, of the show Grey’s Anatomy, mentioned my store as one of her favorites in a recent profile in AmericanWay.
• More self-promtion: I wrote an article on the NEIBA trade show for Bookselling This Week. It’s my first piece of paid journalism!
• Bostonist interviews Shalom Auslander, who will be appearing at Brookline Booksmith tomorrow evening at 7 pm. Yes, I’m promoting another store’s event, mainly because I like this book so much. I’ll be there and still be a square.

Update: I fixed the link on the article I wrote. Should work now.

I’m back from the NEIBA trade show with a small cold and almost no voice (I sound like Marge Simpson). I’m also trying to catch up on email from the past few weeks. Once again, I’m off on Thursday for the weekend for the dreaded parent meeting—my parents and Mr. Bookdwarf’s parents meeting for the first time. My stomach is in knots already. This might explain the cold. Meanwhile, there’s loads of interesting stuff around the internets:

• I don’t read the American Scholar, but this article on the many young authors writing in the borough of Brooklyn sounds quite interesting.
  

  To achieve this miracle, certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: “I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.” Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.

• Amazon has announced the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award today in cooperation with Penguin. 5000 unpublished authors can submit their English language manuscript, which will be critiqued by the top Amazon reviewers. Then the 100 judged best will be passed over to a panel consisting author Elizabeth Gilbert, agent Eric Simonoff, Penguin imprint founder Amy Einhorn, and NBCC President John Freeman. The winner receives a $25,000 advance and a publishing contract that they must take “as is”. Ed has wisely brought up the ethics of John Freeman’s participation. They criticize bloggers for their code of ethics, yet the NBCC is okay with closely aligning themselves with one large corporate publisher?
  
• Six leading feminists recall the book that changed their lives in the Guardian.
• I hate to say it, but I had never heard of Goodreads until I read about it on Shelf Awareness (second item) this morning. Does anyone else use it or have thoughts about it? They offer other options besides Amazon, but Powell’s isn’t shown immediately—they’re in the other category. It would be nice if they were the second option.
  
• Martha Stewart and Amy Sedaris talk bongwater!
  

Tomorrow the trade show for NEIBA (New England Independent Booksellers Association) starts in Providence, Rhode Island. It’s a chance for booksellers and publishers to come together, talk about upcoming books, gossip, etc. Imagine a smaller, homier version of BEA.
I’m having dinner with a few authors on Friday night: Rudolph Delson, author of Maynard & Jennica and Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else. Being the good bookseller that I am, I’m trying to read both books before meeting them. That’s only fair. I finished Delson’s book last night and started Hunt’s. They are very different books. M&J is a modern love story told through the voices of 35 different people, while invention tells the story of an unlikely friendship between an elderly Nikolai Tesla and a young chambermaid in the hotel where he lives.

A great trailer for Shalom Auslander’s forthcoming Foreskin’s Lament.

The Harvard Coop—not to be confused with independently owned Harvard Book Store—called the police last Thursday on three students who were collecting information for a student run textbook website after they refused to leave. The Coop claims it’s intellectual property. Also, though the police showed up, no one was forced to leave. How very civilized.