Y’all should go check out Tingle Alley, Carrie AA Frye’s new blog. She seems cool and reads good things and is nice.

I promised earlier to list more of the books I want to read when I got home. And I am actually going to do it! There is a whole case of books next to my desk with two shelves full of books I have not read. One of the first I want to read is Donald Barthelme’s 60 Stories, which has been recommended on other blogs. I also have wanted to read Don DeLillo’s Mao II, which is about a failed novelist. I have a mixed history with DeLillo, but I hear this is a good one. I have a whole bunch of non-fiction too. Gulag; A History, which won the Pultizer prize this year, promises to be very informative and, I am sure, very depressing. To lighten up a bit, maybe I should read Samiel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin. Pepys lived through some amazing times and wrote down much of it. I have had The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers sitting on the shelf for quite some time. I enjoyed the other book of his that I read Galatea 2.2. Whew, I have listed a lot of books. And there are more. I know this list will get interrupted by other books that make themselves known to me. And no I am not promising to have read these by the end of the summer or anything. I am not that foolish. Just listing things I want to read in the future. That’s all.

Thought I would discuss what I am currently reading and want to read in the future. If anyone wants to comment, go for it. Tell me what you are planning on reading or what you think I should read or if I am making any huge mistakes with my list.
This is hard to do right now because I am at work and a large portion of my ‘to do’ list is at home. But I have plenty of galleys sitting here with me that will be in the mix. Currently I am reading The 27th City by Jonathan Franzen (on a side note, St. Martin’s website sucks. I could not find a link to the book), which is good. And I read the first two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy this weekend. I am in the middle of the third and anticipate finishing it tonight. I have heard good things about Troll: A Love Story from my co-worker Chuck and got a galley this morning. And I also grabbed Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner, a story about a boy in a remote area of Alaska. And then there is The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux, a story that takes place in Louisiana swamps. Simon Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Csar seems fascinating. He gives us details about Stalin we have never heard before—what kinds of movies he liked, music and books (apparently Hemmingway, The Forsyte Saga and The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list). Montefiore documents the smallest details of Stalin’s reign of terror. There are many more books here. When I get home tonight, I will add to this list.

Bookslut writes today about Alex Garland’s new book The Coma and says:

It wasn’t too long ago that Alex Garland was the subject of all of those “Where’s that follow-up novel?” stories. But then he wrote the screenplay for 28 Days Later and now his new book The Coma is coming out. The Coma contains woodcuts by his father.

If my memory serves me correctly, Alex Garland did in fact have another novel after the wonderful The Beach. It was called The Tesseract and it sucked. If you check out the Amazon page, the reviews are excellent, but I put it down half way through. I liked The Beach, but I imagine it might not be as good if I reread it now. I think it’s very dated, but that’s just my opinon. Plus everyone seems to call it Generation X’s first great book, which I resent immediately of course. I think The Tesseract did not sell as well nearly as well because it was an inferior book and now everyone seems to be pretending it never happened. If only we could do that with the Garfield movie. (If you really want to giggle, read the review of the travesty by the NYT.)

I snuck an extra book in the other night. Michael Kindness, our esteemed Random House rep, gave me a copy of the second volume Marjane Satrapi’s wonderfully observant memoirs Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Satrapi wrote her autobiography in graphic novel form, which sounds strange at first, but it really works for her story. She grew up in Tehran, Iran during the Islamic revolution. If you are like me (i.e. American), you know very little about Iran or the revolution. Satrapi was nine when fundamentalist rebels overthrew the Shah. At first her radical parents are excited but they soon realize that a new totalitarian regime is taking the Shah’s place, imposing strict religious laws on the people. Satrapi’s story takes us through the war with Iraq and her parents’ struggle to educate their daughter in a rigorously religious society. Persepolis ends when she is sent by her parents to live in Austria and that is where the next book picks up. Persepolis 2 picks up Satrapi living in Vienna and her teenage years. Living with strangers exiled from her parents, she struggles to live a normal life. Four years later, after ending up on the streets, she returns to her family in Tehran, where we see her try to carve out a life amidst the repression and chauvinism in Tehran. You can read these books in one sitting easily, but they are by no means “light” reads. Tehran sounds like an difficult place to live, with Guardians waiting to check you for lipstick or an exposed wrist. The pressure seems a lot to bear. But the youth that Satrapi depicts seem like any teenagers you might meet here–rebellious, angst-ridden, etc. She went through a punk phase too I might add. I really liked the second volume, though maybe not quite as much as the first. But I think that the first volume was new and exciting to me so by the time I read the second, the newness had worn off a bit. But don’t let this discourage anyone from reading it. It is fabulous. (oh and due out in August)

There was a nice article about Philip Pullman in the Globe Ideas section this past Sunday. In it, they discuss if Pullman’s trilogy is really for kids, or did he write it with a broader audience in mind. I think the answer is the latter personally. My friend Briana got me to read them a few years ago. I grabbed a copy of The Golden Compass and sat down to read it. I read the whole thing in one sitting and could not wait to get a copy of the next book The Subtle Knife. We were out of it at my store, so rather than wait a few days for more to arrive, I went down the street to Wordsworth’s to buy one. The Amber Spyglass was not out in paperback yet so I had to borrow it from another co-worker. Basically I read the entire trilogy in a few days. In my opinion they surpass the Potter series in terms of story and characters. The issues are deeper and far more complex. Pullman adresses the nature of our souls and what life and death really mean. Plus his imagination captures you with its intensity and vision. He created a world where your ‘soul mate’, the closest being to you, is a daemon, whom you trust above all others. But there is the ‘real’ world as well, that is to say, the world we know, plus countless other worlds. Its one of the best series of books I have ever read. They have made them into a theater production in in the UK and I think are being made into movies here in the U.S. I might just have to reread them this weekend.

I finished Mark Kurlansky’s The Basque History of the World yesterday and thought I should at least comment on it. I enjoyed the book, even though it took me some time to read it. I seem to have started about 5 books at once, so I had to eventually decide to just finish them in order. Anyway, the book was a nice but brief history of the Basques. I knew very little about them other than what I have read in the paper. Apparently (though I am not surprised), what the Europeans and Americans write about in the papers is mostly biased. They are not the ‘terrorist’ group that we hear about. At least it is not that simple. Kurlansky writes well and clearly likes the subject. He has a tendency to meander so that you forget what the original point was he was trying to make. It would also have been helpful to include a short time line and a short glossary of Euskadi terms that he uses frequently. I liked that he included some of the traditional recipes in several chapters and he seemed to get a good feel for the culture. The Basques now seem like a distinct and intriguing ethnic group to me, whereas before I just lumped them in with the Spanish. But I imagine that is part of the Basque problem. They have a very nice website full of information on the Basque country and culture. I feel a newfound respect for their culture. After all, if it were not for the Basque, we would not have espadrilles.

I came across this piece in the Guardian in which the people behind the women- only Orange prize (which is announced tonight by the way) discover what are the British public’s most favorite books. Every year, people come out with these lists of ‘essential reads’ or ‘things you should have on your bookcase or your an idiot’ type things. Usually I just scan the list, say ‘Huh.’ and move on to the next web page. This one however actually is a good list. Granted they only surveyed 500 people, but they came up with some really good titles:
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Being Dead by Jim Crace
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Faith Singer by Rosie Scott
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Fred and Edie by Jill Dawson
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
Hotel World by Ali Smith
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Misery by Stephen King
Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
Money by Martin Amis
Music and Silence by Rose Tremain
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Riders by Jilly Cooper
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The House of Spirits by Isabelle Allende
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Rabbit Books by John Updike
The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Women’s Room by Marilyn French
Tracey Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Unless by Carol Shields
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
White Teeth by Zadie Smith

See? Good stuff on this list—Murakami, Welsh, Pullman. I love the His Dark Materials trilogy. Its much better than Harry Potter, though I did enjoy the Potter books as well. Anyway, maybe I will have to read some of the ones on this list I have not gotten to yet, such as Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty (never heard of this actually).

Aloft is set in the bland world of middle class Long Island. The protagonist Jerry Battle seems to be caught in a life crisis. He has coasted through life, much like the plane he loves to fly, but will only take up in perfect weather. Jerry has retired from the family landscaping business and now flies his plane and works part time at a travel agency. His son Jack has taken over the family business. Jerry admits that he is not a great man, being selfish and remote, needing attention so much so that his girlfriend of twenty years has left him months earlier. You learn that his Korean wife Daisy, who may have been manic depressive, died having mixed xanax and beer and swimming.

The plane represents Jerry’s detachment from his life. His relationship with his children Jack and Theresa is pretty shallow. He seems to coast through life as an observer. And it is intertesing to see how events can be interpreted by parent and child. At a dinner party thrown for Theresa and her fiance Paul, they discuss Jerry’s cooking abilities particularly right after the death of Daisy. Someone asks why he didn’t have Jack cook and the Theresa responds that Jerry was afraid it would feminize hm. “The fact of the matter was I didn’t want Jack to have to think of his dead mother every night, at least in a ritualized way, which in my thinking was sure to happen if he had to don an apron and fry up hamburgers. For a year or so after she dies he hardly said a word, he was just a kid with eyes, and as Theresa seemed the sturdier of the two in almost all respects, I made an executive decision to have him do other chores like repainting the back fence and rakingleaves and hosing out the garbarge cans, which he never once complained about, and I like to think it was the bracing physical activity that eventually snapped him out of it, though I probably mistaken on that one.”

Much of the dialogue seems unnatural, but Lee does make some great observations on the world, particularly on the mcmansions and spending habits of the upper middle class. To drive the book, Lee creates some events that are forcing Jerry out of his lifelong stupor. His girlfriend Rita has left him and is poised to marrry someone else. His father is fast slipping into old age. His daughter Theresa simultaneously finds out she is pregnant and has cancer. But they all seem like acts in a play, maybe showing how sterile modern suburban life can be. Some of the book feels forced, and you often find yourself wondering who is going to play certain characters in the movie. But there are some beautiful passages too: “And in the strangely comforting darkness I see not some instant flashign slide show of my finally examined and thus remorseful life but the simply framed picture of Theresa’s suggested grouping not in the least difficult to delimit or define, all our gentle players arrayed, with scant or even nothing of me in mind. I’ll go solo no more, no more.” Chang-Rae Lee’s portrait of the Battle family includes some wry and poignant observations that make rise above a melodramatic plot.

Here is a list of more reviews of this book if you are interested.

I know that a new editor has taken over at the NYT Book Review recently. It was a big deal on all the bookblogs. I did read the whole thing last week and I appreciate some of the new subtle changes he has made. There were several more fiction reviews, a nice piece on new erotic fiction by Emily Nussbaum, a nice take down of David Brooks, and just some good book choices. Included was a review of Kent Haruf’s Eventide, his follow up to . It was a good review in my opinion, agreeing with some of the things I had thought but articulated in a better way. But today, they have another review of Eventide, this time by Michiko Kakutani, everyone’s favorite cranky reviewer. What gives? Why give so much space to a mediocre book, especially one that you know many other newspapers and other Plainsongpublications are going to review? I seriously want an answer, so if anyone has an opinion, go ahead and give it. I personally would rather see them review more books, rather than review the same books twice. I remember they did the same with Joseph Wilson’s book The Politics of Truthas well.