Author Archives: bookdwarf

Monday Links

2 good links for y’all:
Number 12 of the Bat Segundo Show is available for your listening pleasure. This session features Lydia Millet.

Robert Birnbaum spoke to Ron Rash recently about all sorts of southernly things. Check it out.

People Who Get Out More Than I Do

Several authors have appeared in the area that I just didn’t have the energy to attend. Luckily, Jenny Davidson attended the Jonathan Lethem lecture at MIT and posted about it.

Plus Haruki Murakami, who is at Harvard for the year, has been getting around. He gave a lecture at MIT in the same series as Jonathan Lethem, and recently spoke at Tufts, where he was a professor. The Tufts Daily News has the beans. Murakami will be speaking again at the First Parish Church, sponsored by the Reischauer Institute with the cooperation of my store. Unfortunately, the tickets sold out very quickly, though there may be some overflow seats. Fortunately, yours truly will be in attendance. I will do what I can to record the lecture.

Books on My Desk

Just so you don’t think I’m going to be constantly dumping links on you, I’ll tell you about 2 books I’ve recently read.

The first, a paperback original from the new Harper Perennial line, is a memoir called I Am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Josh lived a double life—by day, he was a successful advertising executive and at night, he transformed into Aquadisiac, a successful drag queen. This is all on the back of the galley. They even got a blurb from James Frey, so you know it’s going to be full of drugs, if not a bit trashy (sorry, I didn’t think much of Frey’s book). It’s not as all tawdry as they would have you believe. The other executives at his firm know about his night life, mainly because he shows up at work either hung over or still slightly drunk and won’t shut up about it. I found him sympathetic though. The book mostly focuses on a relationship he had with Jack, a hot rich male escort who also has a crack habit. Josh, only several months in NYC, moves into Jack’s clean white penthouse and they settle into a sort of hybrid domesticity. The funniest parts are when Josh comes home to find some of Jack’s S&M clients tied up on the floor. It ends sadly of course, as Jack gets more dependent on crack and Josh realizes his lifestyle (the up all night wasted, spending 2 or more hours getting into his drag costume lifestyle, not the being gay part) no longer suits him. If this tells you anything about the book, there’s a note from the executive editor of HarperCollins that let’s you know the film rights have already been bought by Clive Barker.

The other book to appear on my desk this week is a fantastic smaller hardcover from the great David Godine. Bibliotopia or, Mr. Gilbar’s Book of Books & Catch-All of Literary Facts & Curiosities clearly is cashing in on the popularity of small trivia books such as Schott’s Original Miscellany. But this one is classier and looks better. The cover and binding alone make the book worth a look. The endpapers have fonts illustrating them. The book begins with the beginning of books. There are no chapters, rather the whole thing is bulleted with a heading and the facts. It’s all literary trivia, such as ‘Some Authors With Medical Degrees’, ‘Genius Award Novelists’, and ‘French Authors Pronunciation Guide’. Throughout the book are wonderful illustrations of authors by Elliott Banfield. I thought they were woodcuts or something, but it turns out he used a Mac G5 and some Adobe software. I am fascinated with this book. Everyday I’ve been coming into my office, grabbing Bibliotopia, and opening it to a random page. It’s marvelous.

Chick Lit: Yay or Nay

Read here for an interesting discussion on chick lit. Are you pro or against? I haven’t made up my mind. On the one hand, I find some of the stories too simplistic, not to mention the pastel theme that publishers seem to be pushing. A pink cover with a martini glass/shoe/lipstick immediately turns me off. But on the other hand, there’s probably a wide variety of books deemed chick lit out there. It feels too snobby to dismiss an entire genre of books. An while I might not be as vehement as Maud Newton or Jessa Crispin, but I still haven’t found my experience accurately reflected in any of these books. I don’t have any deep desire to settle down and have kids. And I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder sacrificing my chances of having marrying and having kids, which again I don’t want. Yes, I am simplifying. But let’s not pretend that chick lit is an accurate representation for all women. I don’t know where I fit into this argument. It doesn’t represent me and I wouldn’t call it “literary” in the same way that Murakami is “literary”, but still….

It’s Another Slow, Cloudy Friday

It’s been a slow week on Bookdwarf. Work is keeping me busy with the holidays coming up and all. Books have to be chosen, displays planned, schedules made, etc. I’ve barely had time to read. I’m in the middle of One Bullet Away, that you see in the left column over there. It’s probably the most well-written memoir about the military I’ve read this year (I agree with that Salon article about Kayla William’s memoir Love My Rifle More Than You), but Nathaniel Fick does get bogged down with military acronyms and making sure he gives us every detail about his missions. Overall I am enjoying it. And I am still liking King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, which is an account of the Belgian King Leopold’s plunder of Africa.
What’s everyone else reading these days? Are you liking/hating it?

Random Links

I’ve neglected to point out the exciting discussions happening over at the LBC website, where currently Nadeem Aslam’s second novel Maps For Lost Lovers is being discussed.

And mentioned elsewhere, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes put out by Andrews McMeel, is one of the most expensive books to make the NYT Bestseller list. Too bad the publisher has no plans to reprint it and the supply is running out. The same thing happened in the 2003 holiday season with The Complete Far Side, which ran out quickly before Christmas. They finally reprinted it sometime in 2004 when they realized the demand. Sheesh, publishers.

Here’s an interview with Jamie Byng, the man behind Canongate Books. He’s made a splash recently with the newly launched The Myths series featuring such venerable writers as Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and Karen Armstrong.

Also, this weekend brings us (along with some sunshine I am hoping) the 29th Annual Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. It’s usually pretty rowdy, but good fun. Last year, I saw 2 guys get into a fistfight over this first edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica (really it was because one guy was claiming Newton was a total plebe). It was nasty! Okay, I made that up. It is good fun though.

Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Shelving or How Not to Package a Book

I love getting my issue of Cook’s Illustrated every 2 months. I find the magazine both useful and fun. That goes for the several cookbooks that I own from Christopher Kimball–The Cook’s Bible, The Kitchen Detective, Baking Illustrated. So you can understand how excited I was to see their latest endeavor at BEA back in June—a huge compendium of over 1200 recipes with tips and charts and color photos called The American’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. My store received our copies today (don’t ask me about their ordering policies either, that’s a whole other story) and I have to say that it is one of the worst packaged books I have ever seen. It’s a 3 ring binder with pages and dividers, which is fine, except that the fucking thing comes unassembled. You get this crappily shrink wrapped binder with the pages and dividers in its own shrink wrapping inside. The problem with the crappy shrink wrap on the outside is that it’s too loose, so the package inside pops holes into it. The whole thing is too fucking stupid. Who would buy this? I was thinking about it, but certainly not after I’ve seen it. And particularly not after having to assemble one (you see, they give you instructions all handily printed on a card that includes one of those annoying subscription cards that fall out of magazines–I fucking hate those, but I digress) for a display copy. Imagine shopping for a cookbook, looking at an array of beautiful spines and you see this one. Imagine pulling it off the shelf and maybe those individually wrapped pages inside finally break loose. Or imagine the damage that will be done to the display copy with the pages undone (rememeber in high school when you yanked too hard on a page and it ripped out of the rings). So America’s Test Kitchen, you might want to think about this the next time you produce a cookbook.

Vacation Reading Wrap-Up

Since I am a slowpoke at discussing books I read, I am making a concerted effort these days to write about them as soon as I am done. I read 7 books while on vacation in September and have only discussed 2 of them so far. So this is just a brief run down of what I read and what I thought.
After I finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, I started on Shadow of the Sun by famed Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. Amassed from over 4 decades spent as a correspondent in Africa, it chronicles a diverse continent as it grows and changes. It’s actually a great complement to Howard French’s The Continent for the Taking, as they visit many of the same places, so you can see how much has changed or not changed in the course of 50 years. I found Kapuscinski a wonderful and skilled writer.
After that, I read The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon. This was hard, as I had just read about a continent of people who eat maybe once a day if they are lucky. And to go to a book about a troubled and depressed 14 year old who sets himself on fire, well, I found it hard to empathize with him. Perhaps if I had not read these books in the order I did, I would have felt differently. Regardless, Runyon writes the teenage mind with great accuracy, at least in my experience.
I really enjoyed the next book—it’s probably one of the better books I’ve read all year. Sarah Hall’s carefully crafted novel The Electric Michelangelofollows Cy Parker, the electric “Michelangelo” of the title, as he becomes a tattoo artist. Hall pays careful attention to how each word sounds and fits together, writing a lyrical novel with ease. We see Cy Parker grow up in a seaside English town at the turn of the century, apprenticing with foul-mouthed binge drinker Eliot Riley, and eventually moving to Coney Island. Hall’s long, energetic sentences and imaginative power make this a beautiful, engaging novel about pain and beauty and I loved reading it.
I found a nice mass market edition of Jonathan Lethem’s Gun with Occasional Music while in Barcelona. I devoured the book. I liked the warping of the classic noir novel and the bending of the detective archetype. Conrad Metcalf, a down on his luck private inquisitor in 21st century Oakland, gets reluctantly drawn into investigating the murder of an affluent doctor, whose wife he just happened to be paid to follow a week previous. There are a lot of thought-provoking elements thrown in–drug use to control emotions, genetic engineering, government control. It was a fun read.
I wanted to love Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender, which I read on the plane home, however, I felt disappointed with some of the stories. Some of them worked, and some fell flat. Bender is an engineer of language and she constructs some great stories, but I felt like she was trying too hard in several of them. It’s still worth a read though.
And that wraps up the books I read on my vacation in September. I was happy with my choices and glad that I could finally read some of these books.

Bookdwarf

Come fall into a book hole!