Baby Got Books

With exams coming up around the corner, I thought we could all use a much needed break.  I have a few short films that I thought might be interesting for you all to check out.  If you don’t want to watch the films, you can put your heads down on your desk or work on something for another class, but no talking.

The first film is a “trailer” for King Dork.  I’ve just finished the book, and it is pretty amazing.  I’m working on a full post for the book, but this little reminder of what high school is all about should whet your appetite.

Our second movie today is a little snippet from the Daily Show featuring resident expert, John Hodgman.  Hodgman, is (was?) a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s, and is the author of the sure-to-be-awesome The Areas of My Expertise.  In this clip, Mr. Hodgman reviews some of the entries of a military-sponsored essay contest for grammar and style.  Here’s a sample:

“We should literally force the Shiite militants to pay the piper.”  Literally? …Listen professor…before you start writing policy, brush up on your Strunk & White.

Grammar comedy on the TV. And there’s a lesson there for all you kids.  OK, enjoy the films. Your collages are still due on Friday.

* with apologies to Frank Portman

Somehow, the new novel by Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan, has snuck up on me.  The NYT reviews it in today’s paper.  Shteyngart is the author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which we disussed, here and here.

Phillip Roth’s new book, Everyman, also snuck up on me.  It is reviewed just about everywhere (Times (UK), NYT, NYT-2, Guardian, etc).

Based on the runaway success of Baby Got Books, the National Book Critics Circle have set up their own blog called Critical Mass (link via NYT and BGB’s Nitro).

In all the excitement, we nearly forgot to celebrate, or even note in passing, that April is National Poetry Month. I read through “Howl” on its anniversary. Other than that - not so much. That’s just me. Our friend Shaft, on the other hand, has a friend who has actually published a volume of prize-winning poetry. Christopher Cessac’s (pronounced: Sea Sack’s) poems collected in Republic Sublime won the 2002 Kenyon Review Prize in poetry. Shaft’s claim is that they were in a band together in law school called the “Swank Rodeo Clowns” (that’s the band’s name, not the law school’s). You can check out Cessac’s work here. If you like it, pick up a copy. Hurry, the month is almost over.

Seven Types of Ambiguity (7ToA) by Elliot Perlman is one type of awesome! No, wait, let me start over. No doubt about it: Seven Types of Ambiguity kicks butt! Still not right. Seven Kinds of Ambiguity rocks! - in a relatively straightforward manner. I’ll work on it.

One of the blurbs on the cover says that 7ToA is a psychological thriller. I suppose that’s a good assessment, but I’m generally not a psych-thriller kind of guy. The book tells the story of an obsessive lover, a crime, and its aftermath. It begins with the following line:

He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time? He can.

Spooky. The novel is broken up into seven parts - each told from the point of view of a different person. Each part tells a piece of the story, with the initial chapters presenting one cliffhanger after another. Each part picks up where the last left off, and the reader (at least this one) remains unsure where it will all lead until the final pages. I won’t give too much of the plot away, because going in cold, as I did, is the best way to experience this book.

The book gets its name from a landmark book of poetry criticism written by William Empson. That book enumerated the ambiguities in poetry that open the best works to different interpretations. The obsessive lover guy (OLG) is obsessed with the book, and the parallel is drawn to the ambiguities that can exist in the types of relationships between people. That seemed a bit contrived, but OK.

There is a stretch that seems out of place in the book though. The OLG, in the middle of everything, takes time out to rail against postmodernism (deconstructionism in particular) being the downfall of university literature departments. I should mention that the OLG is portrayed as a misunderstood literary genius. I should also mention that the author is Australian and the book takes place Down Under as well. This is interesting, because the real life Australian PM wants to legislate against the postmodern school of teaching literature. Apparently, this is a national obsession. If any of that last bit of discussion makes you crabby, you can skip a few pages is what I’m saying.

The author impressed the hell out of me by being able to write convincingly in seven different narrative voices. I felt as if I got to know seven different people intimately while making my way through the book. The story itself is surprisingly suspenseful, given that the answers to questions of guilt/innocence are known relatively early in the story - and are in many ways irrelevant to the story. The suspense instead comes from the decisions that people will make that will transform their lives forever in one way or another. That’s powerful stuff.  If you like your lover’s star-crossed and your moral dilemmas murky, this book is for you.

A wild tangent:  The author of this book is an attorney - so that makes back to back books that I’ve read by attorneys.  The last was by a non-practicing Irish attorney.  Perlman is a practicing Australian attorney.  Huh.

That’s what my world is today, hey, hey…  Earlier this week, I saw that the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to March by Geraldine Brooks.   I could have sworn that was a typo, and they really meant The March by E.L. Doctorow.  That’s because I’m an idiot.  It’s actually quite simple to keep straight.  March is a story of the Civil War, while The March is a story about the Civil War.  See?  No?  March is about the Civil War experiences of Mr. March of Little Women fame, and The March is about that sumbitch Sherman.  Anyway, they were both nominated for the Pulitzer.  Other Pulitzer winners included American Prometheus by Kai Bird (Biography), a book about nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer.  The History Award went to Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky.

Next year’s field looks to be just as impressive. Surely Snoop Dogg’s Love Don’t Live Here No More will be among the nominated selections.  I don’t think it has anything to do with the Civil War though.

Sebastian Junger’s last book, The Perfect Storm, was a non-fiction thriller based upon a remarkable convergence of nature. The book was mostly well received and went on to become a major movie. Junger’s new book, A Death in Belmont, sets out to explore another remarkable convergence. The story goes like this: When Junger was a small boy in Massachusetts, a neighbor was murdered. Shortly thereafter, a black man was arrested and convicted upon substantial circumstantial evidence. Later, a handyman confessed (and later recanted) to being the notorious serial killer called the Boston Strangler. Junger makes the case that the handyman/serial killer was the actual murderer of his neighbor (although he never confessed to that crime) and the black man was wrongly convicted by a racist court system and an all-white jury. Moreover, Junger knows that the handyman/serial killer was in the vicinity on the day of the neighbor’s murder, because he was working on the Junger’s house at the time. As evidence, Junger presents a picture of the handyman prominently in the background of a picture of Junger’s mother holding him (um, Junger, not the handyman). Creepy. (more…)

I’m not sure how they’re doing it in your land, but at my Starbucks they’re pushing the soon to be released feel-good orthographic movie Akeelah and the Bee.  For the last week or so my caffeinated beverages have come with a spelling bee-winning word on the little cup sleeve thing-y.  Here’s my collection of words so far:

• succedaneum (got that one twice)
• elucubrate
• argillaceous
• brunneous
• appoggiatura
• cambist

Here at BGB, Dr J is our in-house spelling savant.  And I’m pretty sure he knows what a musical robot might sound like (run to rent the documentary Spellbound if you didn’t catch that last reference - it is so worth it).

In the Atlanta area, we have a special kind of idiot. Many (most?) of them live in Gwinett County. Here’s one now:

The “Harry Potter” book series may soon be taken off the shelves of all media centers in Gwinnett County Public Schools if a parent’s appeal is successful. A parent of students at J.C. Magill Elementary School filed appeal forms for each of the books, requesting the wildly popular series be removed from public school libraries. On the forms, she wrote that she objected to the series’ “evil themes, witchcraft, demonic activity, murder, evil blood sacrifice, spells and teaching children all of this.” She wrote she had not read the series because it is long, and she is a working mother of four.

It seems to be a rule that the parents have not even read the books when they file this kind of appeal. They just know that they are wrong, wrong, wrong.

I finished Gary Benchley, Rock Star, by Paul Ford, while on a plane to NYC early this week; sorry it took me this long to push other stuff aside so’s I could post on it. The book was loaned to me by DJ Cayenne, and I’ve purposely not read his post on it because I wanted to be able to post with a clean slate (if you can honestly call my “slate” “clean”, but that’s another story).

I absolutely adored the first third of this book. It was non-stop belly laughs, primarily because I am a wannabe rock star at heart just like the title character, and his references to pop culture (specifically music) hit me right in the wheelhouse. I did catch at least one error — referring to Mission of Burma as “Mission to Burma” — but I let that one slide. The bottom line is that the author/title character’s confusion between Sweden and Switzerland in one scene had me laughing so hard in public that my wife hid her face.

After the introduction to our main character was established and we moved more into the story of how he was going to become a rock star, though, the book kind of slowed down for me. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as engaging — it became less social commentary and more story. But as his band goes on tour, the book ramps right back up again and had me cracking up. I think anyone who enjoyed How I Paid for College or Home Land would enjoy this book, and anyone who likes music and pop culture to boot shouldn’t do without it.

Now I’m off to read the DJ’s post.

I finished Gary Benchley, Rock Star, by Paul Ford, while on a plane to NYC early this week; sorry it took me this long to push other stuff aside so’s I could post on it. The book was loaned to me by DJ Cayenne, and I’ve purposely not read his post on it because I wanted to be able to post with a clean slate (if you can honestly call my “slate” “clean”, but that’s another story).

I absolutely adored the first third of this book. It was non-stop belly laughs, primarily because I am a wannabe rock star at heart just like the title character, and his references to pop culture (specifically music) hit me right in the wheelhouse. I did catch at least one error — referring to Mission of Burma as “Mission to Burma” — but I let that one slide. The bottom line is that the author/title character’s confusion between Sweden and Switzerland in one scene had me laughing so hard in public that my wife hid her face.

After the introduction to our main character was established and we moved more into the story of how he was going to become a rock star, though, the book kind of slowed down for me. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as engaging — it became less social commentary and more story. But as his band goes on tour, the book ramps right back up again and had me cracking up. I think anyone who enjoyed How I Paid for College or Home Land would enjoy this book, and anyone who likes music and pop culture to boot shouldn’t do without it.

Now I’m off to read the DJ’s post.

Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and a regular contributor to Esquire, has an outstanding piece on ESPN 2 about Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and what it all means. BGB’s elvismith, who passed along the link, says it all adds up to genius.

Oh, that Tournament of Books is really starting to bug the crap out of me. First, it was announced in January and then took its own sweet time getting off the ground. It’s still going on, and its bracketed brethren have been long finished. I’ve got nothing better to do than wait around for this thing to play itself out? Then, THEN!, there is the surprise announcement of the “Zombie Round”. What the? In the Zombie Round, previously eliminated books On Beauty and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are brought back into the competition in new modified brackets, because they are crowd favorites. Hey, won’t that drag things out even longer? And doesn’t that sort of stack the deck? You betcha. The final and greatest indignity was suffered in yesterday’s match-up. For some reason, the TOB powers-that-be thought that it would be a great idea to get “critic” and professional asshole, Dale Peck, to judge a round. I’m no sure what they were expecting. What I was expecting was a well-considered comparison of Saturday by Ian McEwan and The Accidental by Ali Smith. What we got instead was a bunch of petulant bullshit that would embarrass the most pretentious undergraduate. And he refused to pick a book as the winner. “Look at me, I’m a jerk and I brought the TOB to a screeching halt! Hurray.” In the end, Ian McEwan lost on a coin toss so that the tournament could continue. I don’t know why I’m getting so pissed off about this, but until further notice the Tournament of Books can suck it.

Oh, wait, today is the match-up of Home Land and the once-eliminated On Beauty. I wonder how that turns out?

I picked up A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian for two reasons:

1) It had a “Nominated for the Mann Booker Prize” sticker and I’m a sucker for that.

2) It had an irresistible quote on the cover, “Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade.”

The book is by Marina Lewycka who was born in a refugee camp at the end of World War II but who has lived in Britain for most of her life. She was the first woman to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for a comedic novel. (I love Google!)

When a book has such a powerhouse first line I live in fear that the rest cannot equal it in any way. Fortunately, the book held its course. The story centers on the main character, Nadia’s, father and his aged loved affair with this buxom beauty (Valentina) who is so obviously focused only on his pension it’s amazing that even testosterone could so blind a man – especially an impotent man. This disastrous relationship brings Nadia and her estranged older sister, Vera together. With a mission before them they can set aside an old disagreement about the money from their mother’s will. In the course of visits with lawyers and court proceedings they learn about each other and, in the end, are able to come close to being friends.

The book is rife with misunderstandings and stubbornness – from all characters. I detested Valentina. She was here for money and not much else it seemed. Her presence in England tested Nadia’s liberal sympathies to the max, and conservative Vera used that as an attack tool for quite a while. She tested MY liberal sympathies as well, and I found myself cheering for her deportation back to the concrete apartments of Ukraine.

Under all of the bosom waving of Valentina and hacking, coughing, and defecating of the father there are stories of the horrors of refugee camps, war, nations falling, families being separated. It reaches as far back as a famine caused by the Soviet industrialization program where collective farming was supposed to become the norm.

So what’s the deal with the tractors? Nadia’s father is an engineer and as he deals with crazy Valentina and his protective daughters he writes a short history of the tractor and its developments. These sections of the book frustrated me at first but then I found them surprisingly interesting.

Last weekend I met a young lady from Belarus. We talked a bit about this book and she said that many different tractor functions and engineering feats came out of Belarus rather than Ukraine. I will defer to the author here since she did the research and the young lady I met is a jeweler. But the encounter highlighted something I did not know – people from that part of the world are very defensive about their tractors!!

Lewycka’s book, her debut novel, is well worth reading. It’s fun and heartfelt and exciting. I recommend it.

(ed: Here’s another BGB post on this book.)

I picked up A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian for two reasons:

1) It had a “Nominated for the Mann Booker Prize” sticker and I’m a sucker for that.

2) It had an irresistible quote on the cover, “Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade.”

The book is by Marina Lewycka who was born in a refugee camp at the end of World War II but who has lived in Britain for most of her life. She was the first woman to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for a comedic novel. (I love Google!)

When a book has such a powerhouse first line I live in fear that the rest cannot equal it in any way. Fortunately, the book held its course. The story centers on the main character, Nadia’s, father and his aged loved affair with this buxom beauty (Valentina) who is so obviously focused only on his pension it’s amazing that even testosterone could so blind a man – especially an impotent man. This disastrous relationship brings Nadia and her estranged older sister, Vera together. With a mission before them they can set aside an old disagreement about the money from their mother’s will. In the course of visits with lawyers and court proceedings they learn about each other and, in the end, are able to come close to being friends.

The book is rife with misunderstandings and stubbornness – from all characters. I detested Valentina. She was here for money and not much else it seemed. Her presence in England tested Nadia’s liberal sympathies to the max and conservative Vera used that as an attack tool for quite a while. She tested MY liberal sympathies as well and I found myself cheering for her deportation back to the concrete apartments of Ukraine.

Under all of the bosom waving of Valentina and hacking, coughing, and defecating of the father there are stories of the horrors of refugee camps, war, nations falling, families being separated. It reaches as far back as a famine caused by the Soviet industrialization program where collective farming was supposed to become the norm.

So what’s the deal with the tractors? Nadia’s father is an engineer and as he deals with crazy Valentina and his protective daughters he writes a short history of the tractor and its developments. These sections of the book frustrated me at first but then I found them surprisingly interesting.

Last weekend I met a young lady from Belarus. We talked a bit about this book and she said that many different tractor functions and engineering feats came out of Belarus rather than Ukraine. I will defer to the author here since she did the research and the young lady I met is a jeweler. But the encounter highlighted something I did not know – people from that part of the world are very defensive about their tractors!!

Lewycka’s book, her debut novel, is well worth reading. It’s fun and heartfelt and exciting. I recommend it.

OK. So I decided to roll out the new look that has been in development. Better to do it over a weekend. If you hate the header image, hit refresh. If you prefer the old look, scroll down the sidebar and switch back using our handy theme switcher. Or switch back and forth as the mood strikes. There are some bugs, which I am working on. Let me know if you come across anything funny looking.

Continuing in the YA theme, Towelhead by Alicia Erian, is the story of a thirteen year old girl, Jasira, who is coming into her own sexually and has no one to give her any “normal” advice.

The book begins with Jasira being sent to live with her Lebanese father in Houston after her mother finds out that Jasira has allowed Barry (the mother’s boyfriend) to shave her bikini line. Now call me crazy but any mother who blames her 13 year old daughter rather than her predatory boyfriend clearly has some issues. Plus the only reason that Barry was shaving Jasira was because her mother thought she was too young to have a razor. And this was just the beginning of the book……

Jasira, as well as all the men in her life, are very conscious of her body. Her father, a conservative Arab, seemed to have his own conflicting attitudes about his daughter’s sexuality. He won’t let Jasira use tampons because only married women should, but then he takes her bra shopping because he thinks she should be wearing an under-wire bra and makes her show him how these new bras fit. Do you daddies out there find that to be normal behavior?

Jasira begins babysitting for her next door neighbor’s, Mr. Vuoso, son and finds the son reading his dad’s Playboy magazines. Jasira is intrigued and turned on by the photos and figures out how to give herself an orgasm by rubbing her legs together (this quickly progresses to manual stimulation). When Mr. Vuoso finds out that she is reading his magazines, he encourages it and starts displaying sexually proactive behavior toward Jasira. Rather than this creeping Jasira out, she begins to fantasize about Mr. Vuoso and is not savvy nor sophisticated enough to realize how wrong his behavior is. The relationship progresses and without giving the rest of the story away, you can imagine where it ends up.

Concurrently, Jasira is carrying on a relationship with a black boy at her school, which is also strictly sexual. Jasira is a dichotomy because she is extremely sexually charged but also completely naive and emotionally immature - for example, she agrees to have sex with her boyfriend so that he will start hanging out with her again and she can’t see that he is just using her.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read it in 2 short sittings. It was great to just read a book for fun, that I could whip through, that was a little titallating (and who doesn’t love a little titallation) and interesting. Definitely a chick book but at this point in time - I am the representative X chromosone on this blog.

I sprinted to buy Nick Laird’s Utterly Monkey after reading the NYT book review that I posted about in January.

Those NYT book reviewers sure know how to sucker me into reading their reviews every time. It’s all about that provocative beginning. The review for this book began:

Question: what do you get if you combine the TV series “The Office” and the Guy Ritchie movie “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” with a Nick Hornby novel and the Kingsley Amis classic, “Lucky Jim”?

My answer to the question was, “I get the book”. I am unfamiliar with the Kingsley Amis book, but these other influence are all in my wheelhouse (I assumed a reference to the “good” Hornby novels). The actual book was different than that NYT quote would have led me to believe, but it was still quite good.

The story centers on two friends, Danny and Geordie. Danny has escaped his small town in Northern Ireland and “the troubles”. He’s a successful London attorney whose not real sure why he became a lawyer. He’s just broken up with his girlfriend, and he doesn’t seem to be real sure why he’s done that either. Into this existential twenty-something malaise comes Geordie, an acquaintance from back home who has none of Danny’s polish or charm. Geordie’s arrival in London is not a voluntary vacation, and trouble follows him to Danny’s sanitized world.

Shortly after Geordie arrives, Danny has to return to Northern Ireland for business. He hadn’t been back home since leaving for college. He is shocked at the Belfast that he finds on his homecoming. Since peace has broken out back home, shops are thriving and people are eating outdoors at cafes. This kind of carefree Northern Irish existence seems unimaginable to Danny, as he checks himself into The Europa, Europe’s most bombed hotel (20+ times).

For me, it was the Ireland part of the story that was the most compelling. In a throwaway observation, Laird talks about the impact of the new peace on sectarian “mom and pop” shops. Where before Catholic and Protestant pharmacies, grocers, etc. existed side by side, now there are unaffiliated big box stores that carry a huge variety and less expensive goods. As the mom and pop shops start to go under, the confused populace considers sending a letter to their respective boards of directors to find out if the new giant hardware supercenter is Catholic or Protestant. I could have read a whole book about that kind of thing.

The book is a lot of things. It has elements of the political, as noted above. It has a Grisham-esque legal component. A caper-ish thriller. All with a feel good stick-it-to-the-man ending. Mrs. Cayenne is reading the book now. She says that it is definitely a “guys book”, but she is really enjoying it - so go figure.

Laird clearly has talent to spare. One day he’ll write a masterpiece, but this isn’t it. Which isn’t to say that this book isn’t totally enjoyable - it is - but you can see the promise of greater things on its pages. The book is filled with humor and is very well written. It is also a very British book. There were parts where I didn’t understand references to the descriptions of everyday British life. This was part of the book’s charm for me, but it may have been because I have a British edition of the book (it is what showed up used from Amazon). The spellings are filled with “tyres” turned into towards the “kerbs”, etc. I, for one, totally dig that. I don’t like it when books that are set in Britain use obviously American spellings or phrases - it feels dumbed down or like cultural imperialism. So I hope the American editions preserve some of that. I also learned that in England, apparently, one gets a job at the law firm first, gets some on the job training, and then one goes to law school. Something of interest for the legal scholars on the BGB rolls.

Nick Laird is a former attorney, which may fuel some of his obvious contempt for legal workplaces (the source of the comparisons to The Office by the NYT reviewer). He’s also the husband of personal fave Zadie Smith. Prior to writing this novel, he was also a prize-winning poet. And he’s in his early thirties. Anyway, now I guess I need to find out more about this Kingsley Amis classic, Lucky Jim.

The Tournament of Books Final Four breaks down like this:

• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss vs. Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
• The Accidental by Ali Smith vs. Saturday by Ian McEwan

I’m going to go out on a very small limb and say that Ian McEwan is a mortal lock.

After a long hiatus from posting, I’ve just finished Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, which I can now move from my “to read” pile to my “meh” pile.

I imagine many of you know Nick Hornby from his earlier works, such as High Fidelity and About a Boy. I hadn’t read anything by him, and selected this one because (i) his other works seem to get mad props, and (ii) this one seemed like an interesting concept.

The book is about four people who meet on a rooftop in London on New Year’s Eve, where each of them had gone planning to jump off. I had expected the book to take place on that rooftop, with each person sharing their tales of woe and comparing notes to see who was the worst off, etc. That’s not what happened. The first part takes place on the rooftop, but the story moves on from there and follows the characters’ relationship after they all agree to not commit suicide.

I’ll give Hornby credit for his ability to write this book in the first person, but from the vantage point of four very different people. Each “chapter” is simply titled by the person who is writing it, and his ability with prose allows him to shift gears pretty well so that by a little ways into the book, you can glance at an excerpt and usually tell who’s “writing” it.

But I have to confess I was a little disappointed by the story and the character development. It was just kind of boring. There were opportunities (I thought) to do some really cool stuff, but nothing really materialized for me. As Randy Jackson would say, “It was just a’ight for me, man.”

I’m now halfway through Gary Benchley, Rock Star, and I’m digging it plenty. I’ve purposely avoided reading the DJ’s post on it so that I can read the book and post on it with a clean slate. More to come.

There are two new books that are being marketed to the “Young Adult” market that I am eager to read, and both have been getting rave reviews from actual adults. This is entirely in keeping with one of the recently discussed tenets of the “alterna-parenting” meme, namely, refusing to grow up. The first book is King Dork by Frank Portman. True alterna-parents will, of course, remember Frank Portman as the singer of the punk outfit, The Mr. T Experience. King Dork is the story of a nerdy high schooler who is bumping along through life until he stumbles across his father’s copy of the Catcher in the Rye. This most usual of high school discoveries leads to the very unusual discovery of:

…several interlocking conspiracies and at least half a dozen mysteries involving dead people, naked people, fake people, ESP, blood, a secret code, guitars, monks, witchcraft, the Bible, girls, the Crusades, a devil head, and rock and roll.

Sweet. The author has a pretty good collection of reviews on his Amazon “plog”. King Dork has its own discography. The book also comes with this sweet cover graphic, which is a defaced copy of The Catcher in the Rye paperback:

Should there be any confusion that I was born to read this book, let me offer Exhibit A, my high school copy of Hamlet.

Please note the totally punk Ghost of Hamlet’s father, sporting the anarchy tattoo on his head, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles and Black Flag patches on his jacket, the Mohawk, and the safety pin in his nose. The forlorn Hamlet has my high school’s uniform patch on his jacket. What angst! Even scarier - it took me less than three minutes to find the book.

Book two on my Young Adult shopping spree is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. What got my attention about this book was Janet Maslin’s New York Times review that began:

Markus Zusak has not really written “Harry Potter and the Holocaust.” It just feels that way.

Well, that’s certainly provocative. Then I heard the author interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered. I was sold. I would summarize what I know of the plot here, but I can’t think of how to do it without making the book sound stupid - which is my fault, not the book’s.

In the course of writing this post, I left to run some errands, so I popped into Barnes & Noble to buy this book. I couldn’t find it, so I asked for help at the information desk. The nice lady behind the counter said, ” Are you sure that’s the title that you’re looking for? That book is for teenagers”. After I convinced her that I was quite sure, she led me to the teen section saying, “I read a good review of this book, but then I saw that it was for teenagers…”. Ostensibly, this woman’s job is to sell books. I’ll let you know if these two titles live up to the hype.

Update: Frank Portman, author of King Dork, links to us here.