Baby Got Books

I was reading through the New York Times Book Review’s online edition today, which included a review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.  That Janet Maslin always knows just how to rope me in. It’s like she focus-grouped this review especially for me. Here’s a mashup of the review that includes only Maslin’s first and last sentences:

Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” is the most flashily erudite first novel since Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated.” …Q: Is “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” required reading for devotees of inventive new fiction? A: Yes.

That’s the kind of praise that has been carefully calibrated to result in my running at top speed to the closest book store.  Luckily, I noticed that the book will not be released until August 3rd.  That gives me a few extra days to clear the decks.  Bookslut’s Michael Schaub notes that Maslin’s review of “Calamity Physics” is the only one that does not mention the author’s appearance.  In keeping with that tradition, I won’t mention that she’s sorta hot.

Sweet and Low, is a hilarious story about the Eisenstadt family, who invented the artificial sweetener, Sweet and Low. Richard Cohen, the author and disinherited grandson of Ben Eisenstadt, the founder of the company, writes this scathing, witty book about the rise and fall of his family financially and morally.

The actual history of the product is fascinating in and of itself. Ben actually invented the sugar packet first (after being grossed out by the open sugar bowls in diners) but naivelly (without a patent) took his idea to the Domino sugar company who said thanks and then started manufacturing the packets themselves. He then came up with the idea for an artifical sweetener and the rest is history. Remember your childhood - the sound every morning of your mother shaking that pink packet back and forth before she added it to her coffee. Sweet and Low dominated the market for almost 40 years. It wasn’t until the 1990’s that Equal came on the market and Splenda even more recently.

This book though is so much more than a history of artificial sweeteners. It is a hilarious and scathing portrayal of a dysfunctional Jewish, Brooklyn family (an oxymoron) who let greed, pride and jealousy drive the family apart. Cohen’s relatives are so rich in character: his grandma who clearly wears the pants in the family; his uncle, Marvin, who takes over the day to day running of the business and ends up involved with the Mafia (knowingly or unknowingly is unanswered); his crazy Aunt Gladys who doesn’t leave the house in 30 years but ends up manipulating the grandma to disinherit the mother, etc. etc.

Cohen’s writing is so good that instead of coming across as a bitter diatribe against his family, the reader feels like they are being let in on a funny joke. It is such an enjoyable read. This book delivers the guilty pleasure of reading juicy gossip balanced with a description of the inner workings of a successful American company.

I am so paranoid at my new job, that I am reluctant to spend any time at our site checking things out for fear of being shown the door for goofing off. Of course, the only solution was to add a “work-friendly” theme so I could surf more discreetly. If you venture down the side bar to our handy theme-switcher, look for the “veryplaintxt” theme. Switch back and forth as the need strikes.

In other news, there is a new Thomas Pynchon novel coming out in December. It’s called Against the Day, and the author has caused a bit of a stir this week by posting the Amazon blurb himself. Richard Ford ford also has a new book coming soon, called The Lay of the Land. Hopefully both books will be more interesting than their titles. Richard Ford will be reading at the Margaret Mitchell House in the fall. Thomas Pynchon - not so much.

In movie news, Scott Rudin has production in the works for movie versions of The Corrections, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I think that’s the literary hat trick. Javier Bardem is scheduled to star in the movie adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera, while somebody named Giovanna Mezzogiorno will play the role of Fermina. I don’t know who Giovanna is, but she had better be smoldering.

Finally, I’m not a gambling man, but I am willing to bet that this is the best rap video featuring one-way ANOVAs that you see all day. I love the stats tats.

After the hard work of Book Week, I am ready to coast around here for a while. If you’re around the ATL, here are some upcoming events that you may want to put on your calendar.

This Friday the Margaret Mitchell House is having a “Midtown Mixer” with a New Orleans theme. Admission is free and includes food from Grape and live music by Zydefunk. Hurricanes will be available at the cash bar. As a NOLA native, I am required by little known provisions of the Napoleonic Code to attend events like this. I plan to back it up with the Third Anniversary party for the Alcove Gallery, featuring the musical stylings of Van Heineken. The show will feature the art of personal fav, Nina Friday, and others.

It remained for Dr J, who no longer lives in A-town, to hip me to the first Decatur Book Festival, which will be held labor day weekend in Decatur Square. Decatur has long made a cottage industry out of outstanding festivals. Hopefully this will live up to the pedigree. I am especially looking forward to seeing Roy Blount, Jr. and Wesley Stace (John Wesley Harding). Stace will be doing double duty, reading from his book, Misfortune, and performing at the music stage. It would be flippin’ sweet if he plays with former Atlantan Kelly Hogan, as he mentions on his book’s page. His cover of Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” should be considered definitive.

Yep. Another New Orleans book.  This one is called My New Orleans.

A friend of mine loaned me this book.  He said afterwards (paraphrasing),  “New Orleans is a great town for bar stool philosophers.  That doesn’t mean that you want to get them all together to write a book.”  Amen.  Of the New Orleans books that I’ve read so far, this one is at the bottom of the heap.

The introduction of the book is almost unreadable. Several well-meaning essays compare how New Orleans is like - gumbo, a pousse cafe (a local layered drink), a doberge cake - different layers/ingredients coming together to be wonderful.  Great.  This book is not a pousse cafe.

One of the essays is by, apparently, an award winning author.  His essay is about coming to New Orleans for the first time in order to receive a literary award from Richard Ford.  Hot shot author says that New Orleans seemed like a place he’d want to know, but it seemed like it would be hard work.  The end.  Really.  Did you see how he worked getting an award presented by Richard Ford in there? Sweet.

I could not be more of the exact target demographic for this book.  And yet, they missed.  If you want to read excellent books about New Orleans, I recommend Letters from New Orleans by Rob Walker (pre-Katrina) and Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza (post-Katrina). Skip this one.

This post is actually doing the work of what should have been four posts. I procrastinated so long, that I had read the first four volumes of the Y: The Last Man graphic novel series before I had posted on the first. The series is written by Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, et al. The first four volumes include: Vol 1: Unmanned, Vol. 2: Cycles, Vol. 3: One Small Step, and Vol. 4: Safeword.

I first heard of this series after reading a post by Jessa Crispin over at Bookslut. I can’t find the link, so I have no idea what she said about it. Time went by. Then I started to notice that Boing Boing drooled all over the most recent volume. (Here is their take on Vol 1). Then I heard a review of the latest installment on NPR by David Lipsky - on the same day that Nitro had posted on his book, Absolutely American. Maybe you can let that kind of coincidence go by, but I can’t. So I hustled over to my comics graphic novels purveyor, and bought my first volume, and then my second, and then…

The series tells the story of a mysterious plague that selectively kills every male of every species on earth - “gendercide”, except Yorick and his pet monkey. It is an interesting proposition. The intro to book 2 throws out some statistics that may or may not be true, but are interesting to think about:

In the U.S….more than 95% of all commercial pilots, truck drivers, and ship captains died…as did 92% of all violent felons… Worldwide, 85% of all government representatives are now dead…as are 100% of Catholic priests, Muslim imams, and Orthodox Jewish rabbis…51% of the planets agricultural labor force is still alive…

In the parts that I have read so far, Yorick is traveling across the country with a secret governmental agent and a geneticist. The trio are trying to get to Yorick to a west coast lab to figure out why he is still alive. As the last man, Yorick is an object of national security, since the fate of the planet may lie in his hands. Other governments (Israel has the best surviving military) are on his tail. Many women the group encounters would just as soon see Yorick dead for a variety of reasons, so the group chooses to protect his identity (and his sex) as best they can.

The series is flat out amazing, with subtle nuances and questions about what a single sex planet might be like throughout. For example, what about those men in the space station? What’s going to happen to them when they land? Can they even make it to earth with the lion’s share of Mission Control now dead? You’ll have to make it to Volume 3 to see how that one turns out.

I recommend this series if this is your kind of thing. If you’re merely comix curious, you can check out an excerpt of Volume I in PDF format. Unfortunately, it cuts you off just as things get good. If you have no interest in this stuff, I doubt that you’ve made it this far into this post.
I haven’t always been a comix dork. I didn’t really read them growing up. My interest began after reading Maus as an adult. My interest wained until I read Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. That book alone is responsible for jump-starting my renewed interest in the genre. So I thought it was interesting, and another of those spooky coincidences, when I saw that the Kavalier and Clay character “The Escapist” is being revived by Brian K. Vaughn, author of the Y: The Last Man series. Volume 1 of the new “The Escapists” series is in stores now. I’ll be off being a loser if anyone needs me.

My mother gave me Rising Tide by John Barry several years ago. She told me to read it immediately, because it was fantastic. Why won’t I listen to my mother? Rising Tide is one of the best non-fiction books that I’ve ever read - on any subject.

This book is not a “Katrina” book, having come out years before the hurricane.  However, it is essential reading for a full understanding of that catastrophe in its proper context. Barry does a masterful job of describing not only the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River and most of its tributaries that put 27,000 square miles under water, but also its lasting effects on this country.

Barry sets the stage by providing the context in which the flood would occur. He gives a crash course in river hydrology and fluid dynamics that this science nerd found riveting. Barry lays out why the levee system in place at the time of the flood was the worst possible choice of the available options and how the levees came to be the responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers. The book describes the power structures in place in the Mississippi Delta Region, as well as the economic might of New Orleans at the time (interestingly, the Delta was ruled by Walker Percy’s grandfather). Having grown up during the decline of New Orleans, it is difficult for me to even imagine the City as rich and nationally powerful as Barry describes.

After Katrina, there was a vocal group of poor people who swore that they heard an explosion before the levee broke. They were suggesting that the levee was blown up by the wealthy and the business interests to flood them and to stop the levee from breaking where it would damage the Quarter, Uptown, and Downtown New Orleans.  It sounds like a crackpot conspiracy theory.  Unfortunately they had the precedent of the 1927 flood to point to.

The City’s leaders in 1927, none of them elected, decided that the only way to ensure the economic survival of the City was to blast a hole in the levee and flood some other poor bastards. The idea was that it would alleviate the pressure building on the levee around New Orleans.  They settled on an area of the river in St. Bernard Parish (which was flooded to the rooftops after Katrina). The resulting flood was devastating and people lost everything - no FEMA or buses to the Astrodome.  As it turns out, a breach in the levee elsewhere on the river occurred on its own that made dynamiting the levee in St. Bernard unnecessary.

The flood changed everything.  Hoover was swept into office as President as a great humanitarian, while Wilson was exposed as completely inept during the crisis.  The handling of the flood pushed blacks out of the Party of Lincoln, and it marked the beginnings of the GOPs “southern strategy”.  The flood changed how the nation thought of the government’s duty to its citizens during a time of crisis (I honestly believe that the media stories about Katrina victims using their FEMA-funded credit cards to buy champagne at strip clubs etc. is an orchestrated attempt to swing that pendulum back the other way - but I digress).  It changed the economic picture in both New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta region for good, beginning the decline of once great economic centers.  The flood also hastened the Great Migration of southern blacks to the north.  It changed the nature of race relations in the Delta more or less permanently for the worse.  It changed America fundamentally.  It will be interesting to see in hindsight what changes Katrina will have on our national picture in the years to come.

If you haven’t read this book, I can not recommend it highly enough.  My mom tried to tell me, and I’m trying to tell you.  The rest is up to you.  Sadly, I only have one copy of this one, and it is on loan.  The great book giveaway of the last few days is at an end.

In other NOLA news, if you were considering a Katrina-related tattoo, the Times-Picayune ran a nice collection of “Kat tats” (link goes to PDF) a few days ago. I was seriously considering it for a while, but then reason took over. I’m partial to the fleur de lis with “toujours” scroll underneath in this group.

Next up on the hit parade, Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis.

World War II history is outside of my usual reading, so here’s the story on how I ended up with the book on the shelf.  A few years ago, I went to this giant used book sale at the local United Way. This book struck me, because it was clearly where the amazing, if under-appreciated, Georgia band of the same name got their handle. My grandfather was also in the Pacific during WWII (in Guam not Guadalcanal - but whatever). As an added bonus, the book is aesthetically pretty cool. It has the Marine Corps logo on the cover, and it has vintage war time-y stuff, like an inscription on the back of the title page that says:

THIS IS A RANDOM HOUSE WARTIME BOOK

The text is complete and unabridged, but every effort has been made to comply with the government’s request to conserve essential materials.

Remember when there was an expectation that the public should make sacrifices during war time to contribute to the effort? Me either.  Anyway.  I’m not sure why I bought two copies of the book. If you want my extra copy, shoot me an e-mail.

The book is a war correspondent’s diary of landing with the Marines on the small Pacific island of Guadalcanal, in what was the beginning of an WWII offensive to retake islands that had been occupied by Japan. The writing style is definitely vintage workmanlike newspaperman-ese. Apparently, the phases “shooting the breeze” and “scuttle butt” were new, because the author tries repeatedly to give the reader an idea of what those crazy phrases might mean.  The author projects a macho, patriotic, “We Can Do It” attitude throughout the book. Since it was released while the war was still happening, it also has a sort of propaganda feel to it. That said, the taking of Guadalcanal was a heroic undertaking, and this book gives some idea of what that time in history might have been like.

Students of 70’s television may be familiar with the exploits of the Navy’s Black Sheep Squadron that was stationed on the island for a time. The show Baa Baa Black Sheep (starring Robert Conrad) was based on the war memoir of “Pappy” Boyington.  Man, I loved that show.  I kept waiting for Robert Conrad to show up in the book, but all that happens after the Marines were done cleaning up the joint.  Oh, well.  Like I said, I have an extra for any takers.
Also: Rhino has re-issued two of Guadalcanal Diary’s albums Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man and Jamboree as a single CD. Kick ass.

The first book in my backlog is New Orleans, Mon Amour by Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu is a poet and the ringleader of the slightly baffling Exquisite Corpse journal. He’s also a frequent commentator on NPR. This book is not a Hurricane Katrina book, per se, but it is a nice contribution to the growing New Orleans nostalgia genre.

New Orleans, Mon Amour is a collection of Codrescu’s writing about the City of New Orleans in the twenty years preceding the hurricane, as well as a handful of pieces from after the hurricane. What’s weird is that the chronologically arranged book begins almost simultaneously with my departure for college. I didn’t know at the time that I would come back for a few summers and then slowly become a weekend and holiday visitor to my home town. It’s nice to imagine that Codrescu has been there to feed me reports on day-to-day life in my absence.

The book is a collection of very short (2-3 page) slice-of-life vignettes of Codrescu’s life in New Orleans, transforming himself from a new comer to an in-the-know insider and adopted son. Being a poet, it appears, is great work if you can get it. When not actively writing, you’re free to collect “experiences” partying, going to music clubs into the small hours, and hanging out with New Orleans’ none-to-few bar stool philosophers.

The pieces collected in the book are a mixed bag. Some seemingly have no point other than as a sort of diary entry in Codrescu’s life. Others have gained considerable weight and poignancy given the disaster that would follow. In more than one entry, Codrescu notes in passing that the city is well and screwed if the levee ever breaks. He freaks out early in the book when he sees a ship passing on the river that is well over his head. One of the big surprises in the book for me was learning that a high school class mate has become the owner of a bar in the Marigny and a poet in his own right. Crazy.

The book takes its name from an article that Walker Percy, New Orleans Pulitzer-winning author, wrote for Harpers in 1968. I have to confess that I haven’t yet read that article, but I can’t leave that kind of thing open-ended. I had my research assistant do some leg work, and a Percy collection that contains the article in question was located at the library and is in my mitts as we speak.

Tonight I’m going to immerse myself further in my city’s culture by going to see Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint at the Chastain Amphitheatre. If you haven’t heard the album that the two have recorded together, I highly recommend it. Also: if anyone wants to read this book, I have an extra copy. Shoot me an e-mail, and I’ll send it along.

A word of warning: if my rambling about New Orleans at every available opportunity is getting tiresome, it is going to get worse before it gets better. I’m reading seemingly all of the bumper crop of New Orleans books. I have a friend who has been reading them all for his own professional need to get a handle on NOLA, and he has been slipping the books that I don’t have already. Govern yourself accordingly.

In order to get myself refocused on writing about books, I’ve decided to get caught up on my personal backlog of posts on the books that I’ve been reading.  The plan is to write a post on a different book each day over the coming week (M-F).  The idea is that if I go public with the plan, then I’ll actually have to follow through.  Our other contributors will post (or not) as they see fit. We’ll see how it goes.

Unlike some people I could mention, Beth can operate a calendar.  She went to the T.C. Boyle reading in Atlanta and has a much better report than you were going to get from me.  Read all about it at her blog, A Cup of Coffey.

Well. As it turns out, those of who can read and digest information may have realized that the T.C. Boyle reading at the Center for Southern Literature is actually tomorrow. I, on the other hand, was alone in Atlanta in thinking that the reading was today. Why? I can’t even begin to guess. The web site says Thursday July 13, which is not, in fact, today. After an impressive display of traversing the city to ensure a prompt arrival when the doors opened, I found myself at a locked CSL. I did manage to infiltrate a posh corporate event at the attached Margaret Mitchell House. I was under dressed and didn’t have a name tag, so I limited my party crashing to two glasses of wine and a handful of small plates before extricating myself before the house of cards came crashing down. Dammit.

In my defense, I have had a few other things on my mind lately. You’d think that “Thursday” would be self-evident though, wouldn’t you? It’ll have to be up to some other intrepid BGBers to actually attend the reading on its actual date. As luck would have it, Shaft and I will be flying our irony flags proudly tomorrow night at Chastain Park for the twin bill of Def Leppard and Journey featuring not-Steve Perry on vocals. Rock and Roll.

If you’re considering attending the T.C. Boyle reading, Booklsut has a handy round-up of reviews of the new book.

If anyone is interested, author T.C. Boyle will be reading from his new book, Talk Talk, tomorrow evening at the Margaret Mitchell House’s Center for Southern Literature. If you go, look for me, I’ll be the guy holding the book and a beer. Sadly, the book is not about the band of the same name with the 80’s hit song of the same name on the album of the same name.

We’re firmly in Hurricane season, and so far so good.  Though I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.  The New York Times Book Review has a review by University of Texas historian and Pulitzer-winner David Oshinsky (who won for Polio). Oshinsky reviews two Hurricane Katrina books: The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley and Breach of Faith by New Orleans’ Times-Picayune reporter Jed Horne.  I have the enormous Brinkley book, and I’ll tell you all about it when I’m done.  Here’s an amazing stat from the review; chew on this:

Katrina would pummel an area the size of Britain — 90,000 square miles.

Holy crap. This seems like as good a time as any to pass along an e-mail call for photos that we recently received.  Eric Brown is helping to edit a book to be titled Signs of Life, which will feature the hand made signs that began cropping up in NOLA after the storm.  Eric has a Flickr group set up that details what they are looking for.  I’ve been the guy with the NOLA pictures and occasional reports, but my hard drive recently crashed (along with my external backup) taking most of my digital photos along with it.  If any of you have friends or family that have pictures that will help Eric’s project, please have them contribute their work.  Proceeds will benefit two Gulf Coast charities.

This book creeped me out and I can’t decide whether I enjoyed it or hated it. Icarus Girl was written by Helen Oyeyemi, a black Cambridge student, who wrote this debut novel when she was 20 years old. I was thinking that it would be written along the lines of Zadie Smith (big fan of hers) and it was - kinda.

Jessamy, the 8 yr old protagonist, is a multi-racial, highly intelligent, troubled child. While she can quote Shakespeare and often speaks like an adult, she also has has screaming fits at school and suffers from weird fevers. She has no friends and hides in closets for hours on end. Her mother, who is Nigerian, takes her home to Nigeria to spend the summer with her family in the hopes that it will “cure” her. It is while Jessamy is at her grandfather’s compound that she meets Titiola (TillyTilly as she is called in the rest of the novel) who becomes her new best friend.

Jessamy quickly realizes that only she can see TillyTilly but she is so happy to have a friend that this doesn’t seem to phase her. This is the first point in the book that annoys me because as a mother of an 8 yr old, I didn’t think it was realistic to have Jessamy think it was normal to have a friend that is only visible to her. She didn’t even question whether something might be wrong with her and I think any 8 yr old would know that something isn’t right in having an invisible friend.

Then when Jessamy returns to England, TillyTilly reappears but turns from the nice friend to the evil friend - a la a bad Stephen King novel. She does mischievious things to Jessamy’s friends and families and Jessamy realizes that she can not control her. When TillyTilly reveals to Jessamy that she had a twin that died at birth, their relationship seems to turn into a struggle over who inhabits Jessamy’s soul.

Throughout the book, I questioned who TillyTilly really was. Was she just Jessamy’s alter-ego? Did Jessamy suffer from multiple personality disorder? Or was she just an invisible friend of a very unhappy little girl? This was theme of the book that was the most thought provoking.

On the flip side - there were some very unrealistic parts in the novel such as the way in which Jessamy’s parents reacted. There are scenes in the book where Jessamy’s head is practially spinning around and it just doesn’t seem to bother her parents too much. They take her to a therapist (where Jessamy befriends the therapist’s daughter. This is also unrealistic because everyone knows that a therapist wouldn’t let that happen) but other than that - they never seemed freaked out that their daughter blames all the pranks and bad behaviour on TillyTilly.

The Icarus girl is well written, and the sections that take place in Nigeria are the most interesting. It left me feeling relieved when I finished it, yet I don’t regret reading it. If you haven’t read any Zadie Smith - read her first.

OK, so I’m late to this party, but I finally read ELIC (I had no choice but to read it given the inclusion of it on nearly every BGB “top” list from 2005) and I thought I’d use the occasion to write my first post in ages.

First, I come out as “indifferent” on the gimmicks like the pictures and the flipbook. They didn’t irritate me or detract from my enjoyment of the book, but in my opinion they didn’t add anything, either.

Next, I think that JSF did a masterful job of tackling the subject of 9/11 in a somewhat oblique way. (Whether he needed to be so oblique is a question I raise later in the post.) By including the story of the grandmother and grandfather — indeed, by having them tell their own story in various ways, such as through the letters never sent — JSF explores in depth the experience of surviving and coping with life after an unspeakably horrible event like 9/11 but without addressing that (possibly taboo) subject too directly. I found it interesting that the characters who survived the Dresden fire-bombing talk at great length (and sometimes in gory detail) about that day, but the characters who survived 9/11 talk about that day only occasionally and in the vaguest way. In fact, it’s the 9-year-old who, in his precocious but achingly childlike way, most directly deals with it. I suppose this is another device JSF uses to diffuse the impact of his treatment of the subject: no grown-ups talking about it.

So, in the end, where does this leave us? Will it be OK to write about 9/11 more directly in fifty years? Would it have been OK for JSF to do that now and not use the various buffering devices? Can we really understand what it was like to experience and survive 9/11 by hearing tales told by survivors of a long-ago wartime tragedy? Will the young people who lived through 9/11 but who lost family and friends someday be as fucked-up as Oskar’s grandparents? What will it take for them not to be? Wouldn’t talking about it, rather than avoiding the subject, help? (Mrs. Cayenne might want to comment on that.) I have no answers to those questions, but I thought ELIC was a fantastic book for getting me to think about them so intently.

The Photograph, Penelope Lively’s 2003 novel, is a psychological novel about memory and time. When Glyn Peters finds a photograph of his deceased wife holding hands with another man (her sister’s husband) he is driven to uncover the full story behind it. As a historian he takes an almost detached approach to researching the story behind the affair and whether his wife, Kath, had a history of infidelity.

He starts with Kath’s orderly and distant sister, Elaine. Elaine promptly and efficiently confronts her husband, Nick and tells him that he must move out. He settles into their daughter’s London flat. Glyn also contacts Nick’s former publishing partner, Oliver, and Kath’s best friend, Mary Packard.

What results is a haunting reflection on the past and an attempt to capture an accurate vision of who Kath was in life.

Each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective. At times the voice changes within a chapter – from third person sympathetic to first person narrative and back again. It is almost as if Lively is allowing the characters, particularly the unlikable and unapproachable, Elaine, to defend their emotions.

Kath is remembered more as an idea, as a feeling, than as a person. She is fragmented and ethereal. Everyone seems to have loved her but no one ever understood her. Very near the end of the book there is a chapter about the day Kath died and only then do you get the tiniest glimpse into the person she was.

Lively has done a lovely job of interweaving the past and present and showing the effect they have on each other. Her characters and their voices are very real. I’ve read a few reviews that criticize the book for having such unreachable and unlovable characters but I didn’t have any issues with them at all.

One warning – it is a slow-ish book, holding secrets until the very end for no reason other than to mess with your head. (Of course, that’s the whole point of literature: head messing!) Otherwise, I recommend it highly.

I just finished The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (translated from Spanish by Lucia Graves). Wow.

I had been told about this book by a friend when she and I were discussing The Kite Runner, which she and I had both read and loved. As you may recall, The Kite Runner was tied with The Confessions of Max Tivoli for first place on the list of the best books I read last year, and I was one of the ones who nominated The Kite Runner for the BGB list of the top American books of the past 25 years.

As moving and engaging as The Kite Runner was (and with no disrespect to it, because I loved that book), I thought The Shadow of the Wind was far better. If we do a list of “Best Books Written in Spanish and Translated to English” or “Books That are So Much Better Than Their Dorky Title Might Suggest”, this one is going to be at or near the top.

I’m not sure why I am comparing this book to The Kite Runner; I guess because I learned of this book during a discussion I was having about that book. But they’re very different books. The Kite Runner and Max Tivoli both featured moving storylines, beautiful prose, and great use of story structure to tell tales that spanned long periods of time. The Shadow of the Wind features all of those elements, but applies them to a story with an incredible number of layers and interconnections between characters. The book centers on Daniel Sempere, a young man who has lost his mother and works with his father in his father’s bookstore in Barcelona. Daniel comes across a book called “The Shadow of the Wind” by an author named Julian Carax and reads it in one night. He is so moved by the book that he begins to research Carax, and comes up against one mystery after another, which his young curious mind seeks to solve. We are introduced to a plethora of intriguing characters (including Fermin Romero de Torres, one of my favorite characters ever), and begin to see connections made amongst them.

I’ll admit that the first half of the book, while an interesting and engaging read, is really just the laying of the groundwork for what is to come in the second half. As you reach the midpoint of the book, you begin to see how seemingly innocuous elements of the first part of the story tie in to what comes later, and by the end of the book, Zafon succeeds in resolving every single potential red herring that you’ve come across.

This is a story of love, hate, revenge, mystery, loyalty and passion, and it unfolds on so many levels that you have to take your hat off to Zafon as the architect of such a flawless, breathtaking, engaging work. This is a must-read.