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.

The LBC winter 2007 pick is The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck. Read all about it at the LitBlog Coop and join in the discussion, starting December 10.

• Great opinion piece from Harry Mount in the New York Times about the lack of Latin knowledge by today’s politicians. He notes that Thomas Jefferson’s most thumbed book is a copy of the Aeneid.
• Interesting article in the LA Times about the future of Powells. Michael Powell, 67, is getting read to hand over the reins to his daughter, Emily, 29. She’s been working at the store in various positions for a while, trying to learn all aspects of the business. Also of interest is what it says about other independents, that we’re still facing challenges from Amazon, used sales online, and increasingly thrifty customers. You don’t know frustrating it is to hear that someone comes to the store to create lists of books to then order on Amazon.
• Edwidge Danticat interviews Junot Diaz in the most recent issue of Bomb magazine.
• Dzanc Books announces the inaugural Dzanc Prize – a monetary award to a writer with both a work in progress, and an interest in performing some form of literary community service. The $5000 award goes to Laura van den Berg of Boston. Selected from more than 160 applicants for her proposal to teach creative writing in area prisons and on the quality of her fiction writing, the Emerson College MFA student will begin her service in 2008 with half of the prize awarded in January and the other half awarded once the service is completed.
• I’m not going to start listing all of the Best of Lists and Gift guides because that could take forever. I will mention the clever A Very Brainiac Gift Guide from the Globe because it mentions one of my favorite books of the year: “Forget Cormac McCarthy! The best new novels I’ve read this year are “Jamestown” (Soft Skull, $25) by Matthew Sharpe and “The Red Men” (Snowbooks, $16.51) by Matthew De Abaitua.”
• The Millions has commenced its Year in Reading Project.

Or at least the Cleveland Plain Dealer does. Have I mentioned how much I loved Signed, Mata Hari, the new novel by Yannick Murphy? I was so taken with her novel Here They Come last year and that I read this new one a few months ago as soon as it appear on my desk. I was enchanted.  Read the review in the Plain Dealer.

“Murphy packs more grace and vision into these six paragraphs than most novelists manage to put into an entire book. It is poetry.”

I received the Spring-Summer 2008 catalog from Harcourt today, incidentally enough whose sale to Houghton was just approved by the Justice Department. As I’m flipping through, I notice a two page spread for a book called The Calling by Inger Wolfe. It’s a mystery featuring a female detective close to retirement trying to solve a gruesome series of murders. This is a sample:

There were thirteen crime-scene pictures. Dead faces set in grimaces and shouts. Faces howling, whistling, moaning, crying, hissing. Hazel pinned them to the wall and stood back. It was a silent opera of ghosts.

What’s fascinating is the author’s bio. Inger Wolfe is the pseudonym for a prominent North American literary novelist. Who could it be? Is this some sort of Benjamin Black/John Banville split personality thing? Or just hype?

The Book Design Review has chosen its list of the best designed book covers this year. You can vote on your favorite.