Author Archives: bookdwarf

It’s Friday!

Sorry for the silence. I am trying to get all the LBC nominee’s read by the deadline next month, so I can’t report on those yet. Plus I am moving offices and training new people, while I move into a new job. All in all, it’s busy here. But check these links out in the mean while:

Books #13 & 14 for 2006

I feel like I am falling behind already. I whipped through book #13 The Zanzibar Chest by Aiden Hartley. I found it hard to put down, even though he describes things that no human should witness nor live through. Hartley, born in Kenya and most recently a reporter for the Economist, has felt an inexplicable pull to Africa his whole life. He comes from a long line of African colonialists—his father helped bring irrigation systems and new crops to various areas. Hartley returns to Africa as a young correspondent for Reuters. Covering large swathes of Africa, he writes about witnessing the tragic drought in Ethiopia, the fighting in Somalia, and the genocide in Rwanda. The hard, gritty writing leaves nothing undescribed. Everything he saw, the bodies, the filth, the savageness of the people involved he records. Shattered by his experiences, he returns home to find the journals of his father’s closest friend Peter Davey, who lived and died on the Arabian penisula. Hartley travels there to trace Davey’s mysterious death in 1947. This story he weaves throughout the book, and though the story is less compelling than the rest, it provides him with a touchstone for an examination of colonialism and its effects. Hartley loves Africa and this loving homage to the continent provides a small glimpse into a varied and exotic land.

After reading such an intense book, I needed something a bit lighter. Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany seemed like the perfect antidote. The plot of this book is self-explanatory from the long subtitle. Bill Buford, who spent 16 years as editor of Granta and 8 years as fiction editor of The New Yorker, chronicles his experience as slave to Mario Batali’s in the kitchen of Babbo in NY. That’s really just the first part. Eventually, Buford moves to Tuscany for a bit to learn the art of being a butcher. Over the course of several years, he attempts to learn why food matters. I found his portrait of Batali illuminating—he’s way more hardcore than I would have thought and Buford’s description pushes Batali off the pedestal he’s been living on for a while now. But the man can drink a case of wine on his own and he cusses like a sailor! Though he gets too bogged down in confusing historical details in places, his humorous writing made me finish the book. If you love reading about restaurants, meat, pasta, and Italy and don’t mind the occasional boring tangent, it’s a fun read.

Links for Friday

Keep the Brown Bookstore Independent!

I firmly believe that independent bookstores provide a great service to the community. The Brown Bookstore in Providence, RI, has been an independent bookseller since 1970. Recently, Brown University has announced it is considering contracting bookstore operations to a national vendor—either Barnes & Noble College Booksellers or the Follett Higher Education Group. The Save the Bookstore Coalition, formed 3 days after the committee made its recommendation, plans to hold a rally tomorrow afternoon at 5:30. The speakers will include Brown professor Robert Coover.

I can’t say enough about supporting the local independents. Retail chains return substantially less money to the local economy than locally owned businesses. Plus do you want cookie cutter stores all over the country? And yes, I do shop at chain stores—it’s impossible not to these days. In some communities it might make sense to have a Barnes & Noble, but Providence nor Brown do not need another chain. The independent bookstore adds a flavor to the campus that a Barnes & Noble just can’t replicate.

Wednesday Links

I’m back from 5 days in NYC. Has anyone gone to the American Museum of Natural History recently? I haven’t been in almost 20 years. They’ve redone all of the dinosaur exhibits and they’re great. I had a far better experience there than at the newly redone MoMA (not that I didn’t enjoy the MoMA, they’re just…well different). Dioramas galore! Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading on the web the past few days.

  • An interesting article in the Globe about the ephemera Sara Theriault of Lorem Ipsum finds left behind in the used books she sells. Also mentioned is one of my colleagues here:

    Across town, Hilary Brant, the used-book buyer for the Harvard Book Store, isn’t so lucky. ”We haven’t lost interest” in displaying items found in books, she says, ”but we’ve run out of wall space.” Brant especially likes items evocative of a particular era, like photos of men from the ’60s wearing long hair and polyester. Taking home what she finds in books is a perk of her job. ”It’s the poor man’s antique collection,” she says.

  • Some idiot has decided to make a biopic of fictitious author J.T. Leroy. Great. That’s just great.
  • I had to drop Survey of Western Art my freshman year of college, but not before it was too late to return the doorstop that was the textbook, History of Art. I held onto that book for years—I had spent so much money on it. It moved from apartment to apartment, until I just couldn’t look at it anymore. Seems there’s a new and improved edition coming soon, according to this article. It’s interesting to hear about how they chose what artists to cut.
  • The Morning News has announced the brackets and judges (not me again dammit) of their Tournament of Books. The Tournament begins in two weeks.
  • Bookdwarf favorite Laila Lalami has written a review of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend for the March 20th edition of The Nation and a review of Amitav Ghosh’s Incendiary Circumstances for the Sunday Oregonian.
  • The National Book Critics Circle awards have been announced.
  • Scott Esposito has posted the Winter 2006 edition of The Quarterly Conversation, which includes essays, book reviews, and interviews.
  • The new issue of Context from the Center for Book Culture is available online. This issue includes essays by Dubravka Ugresic and William Gass.
  • The Orange Prize longlist has been announced. I’ve only read three of them embarassingly enough, but several of them have been on my TBR pile for a while. I think everyone should just stop publishing books for a year, so we can all catch up on our reading.
  • I’ve just started reading the excellent Words Without Borders blog, which includes Dalkey Archive’s Chad Post writing about the London Book Fair. Funny stuff.
  • I received my copy of the new literary journal A Public Space, edited by Brigid Hughes(ex-Paris Review editor). It looks great—fiction by Kelly Link, Charles D’Ambrosio (whose short story collection I am half way through and loving), Haruki Murakami, Rick Moody, Yoko Ogawa, Motoyuki Shibata, John Haskell, and Lucy Raven to name a few.

Chuck Pacheco 1949-2006

They say that sometimes you never miss something or someone until they’re gone. Well, Chuck’s absence has been felt here for a while. His diagnosis of a brain tumor came as a shock last January and he’s spent the last year fighting it. I’ve been lucky enough to work with him for the past 7 years here in the buying office. He’s probably one of the best people I’ve ever known or will ever know. Smart, funny, well-read, he’s brought his wonderful sensibilities to Harvard Book Store since 1994. He died at 12:48 Monday afternoon. This loss to the book world is immense. I’ve missed him every day he’s been gone, and I’m going to keep on missing him.

Wednesday Links

Book #11 of 75: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

I am slowly working my way through the novels of Graham Greene. The latest one I’ve read is Our Man in Havana, written in 1958. Overall, I have to say that it’s not as strong a book as The Heart of the Matter or The Power and the Glory, but I still found it enjoyable. Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, is running out of money. He worries what will become of his 17-year-old daughter Milly if something were to happen to him. When Hawthorne approaches him with an offer of $300 a month plus expenses to become a spy for the English government, he becomes Agent 59200/5. He files fake reports, filing for expenses, dreaming up a complicated miliary installation based on one of his vacuum cleaner designs, and recruiting imaginary people as subagents. The home office, so impressed with his work, even send him a secretary, Beatrice. Things turn topsy-turvy when some of the stories come to life. The whole darkly comic novel brims with satire of the espionage system.