Speaking of Trends

John Dean, former White House Attorney for Richard M Nixon, will be in town reading from his new book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches. The reading is at the Carter Center, Monday Night at 7 PM. See the A Cappella Books events page for more info. The LA Times reviews the book here.

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. Goldsmith, a staunch conservative, was hired to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Only one year to go.

The Sockman

There are lots of great things about living in Intown Atlanta (as opposed to the suburbs, where I grew up). If I had to choose the one best thing about living in Intown Atlanta, I would probably say it’s being able to load up on socks while riding MARTA to and from work. And if you happen to drive on Memorial Drive with any regularity, you don’t even have to ride MARTA to get your sock fix. You can buy 100 socks (50 pairs!) for the low, low price of $10 at one of the many parking-lot sock dealers that line the thoroughfare.

I always wondered who the Sock Mogul was behind those dealerships, and my curiosity was definitely piqued the day a man carrying a big box full of something entered my MARTA train car and announced, “I stopped smoking rocks and started selling socks!” How could I not buy some? And who was this guy?

The AJC solves the mystery.

Guantanamo

I seem to have a theme going here, so I may as well roll with it. Dorothea Dieckmann’s novel Guantanamo, translated from the German, is a slim but tough to read novel. It is only 151 pages long, but it took me over a week to make it through – not because I’m a slow reader, but because I could only handle it in small doses.

The novel tells the story of a German citizen of mixed German/Indian ancestry who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time while globe-trotting. He is swept up in a military raid in Pakistan, while essentially minding his own business in Pakistan. He ends up in Camp X-Ray, the US detainment camp in Guantanamo, Cuba.

Written from the German’s (Rashid) perspective, the narrative is often disorienting and confusing. Meant to reflect Rashid’s mental state, it i soften difficult to know what is going on. Sometimes, that is all for the best. Scenes depicting torture and interrogation techniques are just brutal.

The book neatly illustrates why torture can produce unreliable intelligence, why these tactics foster terrorism rather than eliminating it, and why we (Americans) should all be deeply ashamed. Of course, the moral path here is fairly straightforward, an innocent German tourist is being tortured. It may have made for a more interesting moral dilemma if the person being tortured was actually a terrorist – or was on his way to become a terrorist as he was intercepted – or better yet, if the reader simply did not know guilt or innocence.

Related: If you haven’t heard it yet, check out the Peabody Award-winning episode of This American Life about Guantanamo – Habeas Schmabeus.

Housekeeping

I just updated our blogging software on our server.  Long overdue.  There were some visible problems that I sorted out.  If you come across anything weird, please let us know.

The Shock Doctrine

I came across a link to a book trailer on the Penguin Blog last week that floored me. The post itself is about how they got (the son of) Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men) to direct the clip.  It’s for a book called The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and it’s already #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list.   Check out the trailer here:

• The Guardian is running excerpts of the book. Hit the links in their sidebar for more.
• The New York Times reviews the book here.

The Unknown Terrorist

Australian writer Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist has an interesting premise. A young woman has a chance encounter that quickly turns into a wrong place/wrong time scenario. She quickly becomes the center of a nationwide manhunt for an “unknown terrorist.” Though innocent, she is pursued as national media coverage and political pressure allow the pursuers to overlook the exonerating evidence in hand. It’s a timely book with a poignant theme ripped from today’s headlines, etc., etc. It should be a big “important” book, but it falls short.

The woman at the center of the book is a stripper. The author seems to have gone out of his way to make her as one-dimensional as possible. She is described as extremely shallow, materialistic, and only in the game until she has enough money banked to buy a place of her own. Naturally, she is within sight of her monetary goal when things get out of hand.

The stripper is called “The Doll,” and the reader doesn’t learn her real name until well into the novel. This only seems to underscore the artificialness of the character. Maybe it was the author’s intent to create a plastic character that lacks her own dimension to serve as a stand-in for all of us. The idea perhaps being that if circumstances were different, this nightmare chain of events could happen to anyone. If so, the execution didn’t pan out. For me, the lack of depth in the principal character meant that I had almost zero emotional involvement in the story. That can’t be good.

The story that is laid out here, a government and big media recklessly feeding the fear and paranoia of the citizenry, is a cautionary tale that needs to be told. Unfortunately, this book misses the opportunity to do its premise justice. Mark my words though, this will be a movie coming to a multiplex near you. Of course, the action will happen in New York City instead of Australia. And I can see Denzel Washington in the role of the downtrodden cop just trying to make things right…

AJC: Revisited

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the title sponsor of the Decatur Book Festival. The paper should have surplus goodwill to burn with Atlanta book lovers. And yet…

At the Critical Mass blog, local author Roger L. Brown revisits the paper’s book section two months after former Books Editor Theresa Weaver’s departure. He isn’t too impressed with the results.

On Dining Alone

On September 20th, Wordsmiths Books in Decatur will be hosting an event for the new book, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler. The book includes essays by some literary heavyweights: Haruki Murakami, Ann Patchett, Nora Ephron, Steve Almond, Jonathan Ames, et al.

To mark the occasion, Wordsmiths is hosting an essay contest. That’s right, an essay contest. Keep it brief – <800 words. Here's Russ on what he's looking for:

[essays]… conveying eating alone for the individual experience. If that makes no sense, realize there’s a story in the collection about one author who, when her husband and kids are away, makes herself plain spaghetti with butter and grape jelly. With that as a concept, I’m asking folks to wax thoughtful on what eating alone means to them.

Using Atlanta, Decatur, or your city as a backdrop is also an angle that they would like to incorporate into the essays. There will be a special guest judge who crowns the winner on the night of the event. What’s the prize? A free signed copy of the book? A new car? I don’t know.

The last (and only) essay contest that I won was back in 1981. I was awarded a sweet plaque from the Knights of Columbus’ Women’s Auxiliary. I believe the topic was “what it means to be patriotic.” Or something. I plan on sending something in, and you’ve been meaning to dust off your creative writing chops, so get to it. Dust off the typewriter and get to work.

Entries are due September 14. E-mail your entry to russ at wordsmiths books dot com.

The Trifecta + 1

This is a short and arguably meaningless post, but I feel compelled to contribute something today. The dearth of recent postings from yours truly can be blamed on my inability to find a book that I feel like finishing. I did manage to finish one, but ended up bailing on three others that I started. So I figured I’d go ahead and post about all of them.

The one I finished recently is The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. This book was recommended to me by my wife, and has also received some positive press on this here blog. I won’t get into detail on it, but suffice it to say that it’s written with a stylistic twist that I found fascinating — namely, it’s narrated by Death. The book tells the story, from Death’s perspective, of Liesel Meminger, a young girl taken in by foster parents in Nazi Germany. Many characters pass through her life, including Death on several occasions. A very well-written book, and an engaging story, but — SPOILER ALERT — it’s not a particularly happy tale. Because it was recommended to me by my wife, I assumed it would be a happy book. I don’t know why I thought that, but it set my expectations in the wrong place and couldn’t help but feel like happy stuff was awaiting me on the next page. It really wasn’t. So govern yourself accordingly.

Now on to the three strikes that I’ve experienced of late. First up is Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. I’m not bashing this book by any stretch, and with all due respect to Isaacson (a very accomplished and lauded biographer), you’ve got to be properly prepared for this book and you’ve got to want to get into it the way it’s presented here — in excruciating detail. My understanding is that this is the first biography published of Einstein following the release of a bunch of letters and other documentation that had previously been held in private. And Isaacson goes over every possible nugget, detail, and fragment of Einstein’s life with a fine-toothed comb, and my short attention span sadly couldn’t handle it. But if that’s what you’re into, go for it.

Strike two was Belle and Sebastian: Just a Modern Rock Story, by Paul Whitelaw. I can safely say that I was a very early adopter of Belle and Sebastian, way before they were cool. In fact, just a few weeks before my son was born in November of 1998, I drove from Atlanta to Athens to see them play one of their first live performances in the U.S. at the 40 Watt Club; I went by myself because I couldn’t convince anyone else that the band and the show would be something special (it was). Anyway, when I saw that this book had been published, I had to pick it up and delve into some of the lore surrounding the creation and rise of the band. I managed to get through about 80 pages or so before I had to Put the Book Back On the Shelf [note: that's the title of a Belle and Sebastian song]. I was convinced that if I kept reading, I would hold the band accountable for the absolutely precious nature of Whitelaw’s writing, and I didn’t want that to happen. Again, govern yourself accordingly.

Last but not least, and with all apologies to our blogmaster (from whom I received this one), I just bailed on The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. My understanding was that this book was written to answer the hypothetical question of what would happen if humans disappeared from the earth; what would happen to everything that we’ve built, what would happen to the flora and fauna, etc. And that’s pretty much how it started — with a discussion of what would happen to buildings, roads, subways, etc., and how and why they would begin to decay and crumble. That was pretty cool. But then, and I can’t even remember how the book segued, it started looking to the past to determine what would happen in that humanless future. And again, I just wasn’t that interested or engaged by it. I had read Guns, Germs and Steel (all ten million pages), and so I wasn’t interested in hearing about fossils and artifacts, and when man first appeared in the Americas, blah, blah, blah. I wanted to hear about this (hopefully) fictional future. I don’t know — maybe Weisman was going to tie the past to the future and make it worthwhile to slog through that stuff, but I wasn’t going to risk it.

All Englander

I’m about half way through Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases, and it is truly fantastic. (See our review by Nitro).

Englander was interviewed this week on KCRW’s Bookworm show by Michael Silverblatt. Silverblatt consistently cranks out the best interviews I’ve ever heard. In this interview he renders Englander speechless with his careful reading of the novel. An especially philosophical (and rhetorical) question asked during the interview – Does the beach become a different place if a piece of quality fiction is brought to it?

Englander also shows up this week on the NBCC’s Critical Mass blog reporting on his trip to the Edingurgh Book Festival. It sounds like a bigger deal than even the Decatur Book Festival.

Atlantans, get your calendars out. Nathan Englander will be reading at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MJCCA) Book Festival on Wed, November 14. I’m there.

Booker Shortlist

This year’s Booker Prize Short List has been announced.

DBF Recap

What this Decatur Book Fest post lacks in timeliness, it more than makes up for in enthusiasm. I had big plans for the book fest, so big they required two separate posts to enumerate (1 and 2). Though I largely missed most of the authors I intended to see, the Book Fest weekend was still chock full o’ fun.

My daughter (age 3) and I were sidetracked almost immediately out of the gate on Saturday morning. Instead of hitting the Fest straightaway, we were lured to the Dragon*Con Parade downtown. We essentially traded the entire morning schedule and part of the afternoon for Eric Estrada on a motorcycle –

– and storm troopers on Peachtree Street. There was also candy.

When the parade was over, it was time for lunch and naps. (We had been up late the night before for the Braves game.) Following the eats and sleeps, we were finally ready to hop on the train to the Fest.

Since we arrived between readings, I decided on a lap of the booths surrounding the square would be time well spent. Some of the highpoints:

• I finally got to meet the elusive Lain Shakespeare near the Wren’s Nest tent, where we had just purchased a copy of the hot off the presses Soy Nut Butter high school lit journal.
• We then picked up a free C-Span Book TV reusable bag to use for all of our “aware” shopping needs.
• We visited author Aaron Petrovich at the Akashic Books tent. I bought their book New Orleans Noir, which is a redundant title if you think about it.
• We visited two toy stores on the square. Completely un-book fest related.
• Beer.
• We spent some quality craft time at the kids’ tent. My daughter made book marks for her loved ones.
• I ran into Decatur Beth on my way into the Little Shop of Stories for ice cream and to read books on the big sofas. Beth graciously took a Sherman Alexie book to get signed for me so that I could attend to my daddy duties at the LSOS. Thanks, Beth! At LSOS we picked up a copy of the very excellent book Rainstorm and bought an edition of Uncle Remus stories.
• Which, of course, meant that we had to double back to get the paperwork for our free Brer Rabbit shirt from the Wren’s Nest tent. Whew!

Our evening at the fest concluded, we headed over for the panel discussion at Wordsmiths. Many thanks to my support team, H and K-L, for keeping an eye on my daughter during the panel. Read that recap here.

Sunday we got off to a much better start. We arrived just as the fest opened for business. We were just in time to see children’s author Melinda Long speak. After a brief intro she read her books How I Became a Pirate and Pirates Don’t Change Diapers. Pirate joke: Why couldn’t the pirate kid see the movie? It was rated Arrrrrrrrrrrrr.

After coloring some more bookmarks and getting another pinwheel at the Target Children’s Tent, it was off to lunch. We burned at least an hour retracing our steps from the day before trying to locate a missing sippy cup. No dice.

The one thing that I wanted to accomplish Sunday was to catch Chuck Klosterman. Unfortunately, so did everyone else at the festival. When we arrived around the start time – a rookie mistake – the event room was sealed off. Additional seating was available in a nearby room where the event was being simulcast. Simulcast? If they were prepared to simulcast the event, why not prepare all the way and have a room that would fit everyone? Grrrr. Rather than sit in an over-crowded room watching Chuck Klosterman on TV with a three-year old that was knocking on nap time, I opted to hit the road.

My daughter and I had a great time, even though I accomplished almost none of the pre-game plan. If you’d like to read an account of the action written by someone who actually saw more than one author read/talk. check out Decatur Beth’s excellent recap.

The medium is the message

I’ve made no secret of my disdain for graphic novels. I just think that life is too short for grown people to go around reading comix. But Slate has just published one that I can finally get behind: a black-and-white comic about a cartoon figure who saw the world in black and white.

Follow Up

I was reminded today that Kevin Patterson’s outstanding novel Consumption was released in the US in August (Thanks, Russ). I reviewed the Canadian version (with the much cooler and more Inuit looking cover below) back in March.  Do yourself a favor and add it to your to be read stack.

Hiding Out

The nice folks at featherproof books (who are NOT into your capitalization trip, man) have been kind enough to send us a complimentary copy of Jonanthan Messinger’s debut collection of short stories Hiding Out.

Messinger will be reading at A Capella Books in Atlanta (L5P) on Sunday, September 9. I’ve not heard of the author until now, but after checking out his web site, I’d say he’s our kind of guy. From the back flap:

Jonathan Messinger is the founder of the Dollar Store Reading Series and the Book Review Editor of Time Out Chicago. His work has appeared on McSweeney’s, Rainbow Curve, and The2ndHand, Among Others.

We’re going to share the love with a lucky reader. Drop a comment in the comment box and we’ll send a free copy of this handsome volume to a winner that will be selected in the usual manner – the three year old picks a name from the hat. Here’s the sweetest part. The book will not be available in stores until October 1st, so you’ll definietly be the coolest kid on the block when you win this one. Leave us a comment now! Operators are standing by…

Also: featherproof has the coolest logo of all time. Seriously.

Two to watch out for

They’re handing out compliments like Chicklets over at the New York Times. What’s going on?

Jim Lewis gets the ball rolling with this:

Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop.

I’ve heard so much buzz about this book that I was surprised to learn that it goes on sale today. I tried to buy it last week. If it was just Mr. Lewis, I wouldn’t have mentioned anything. But there’s a second data point…

Michiko Kukatani’s review of Junot Diaz’s first novel begins:

Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.

That’s Michiko. She hates everything. Run, don’t walk, to your favorite indie book seller.

Nitro’s Vacation Read Wrap-up

Now that my vacation memories are fading quickly, I am going to wrap up with my last 2 books.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini was the perfect vacation read. I picked it up at 10 am once I got set up at the beach, didn’t bother to even put it down while eating my tuna sandwich (sand being the operative word) and didn’t engage in conversation during cocktail hour because I needed to finish the last 50 pages of the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book in one sitting because I just couldn’t put it down.

Spanning three decades in Afghanistan, Hosseini once again (his first novel was the runaway hit, The Kite Runner) creates a beautiful novel about Afghan culture, customs and the impact that years of war have had on this country. Even pre-Taliban, Afghanistan has always been a heavily male dominated culture and this novel told from the perspective of two women, demonstrates the inherent denigration of women in this society.

Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy business-man who is forced at 15 years old to marry a much older man. Mariam is independent and intelligent as a child but when she marries Rasheed who is cruel and abusive, she becomes a submissive shadow with no hope for the future. A few doors down, lives Laila, who has a very happy childhood with many friends and enlightened parents. When her parents are killed during the civil war, Laila has no way to survive on her own in a society where single, unmarried women are worthless. I don’t want to give away anymore but the intertwined lives of these two women is heart-wrenching.

THE (+)

• Even more engaging than the Kite Runner since it was from a women’s perspective
• Multi-dimensional characters that create instant empathy from the reader
• Demonstrates the strength and power of friendship between two women
• Educated me that while Afghanistan may have once been a beautiful country (pre Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban), it has always been an inequitable and harsh society for women

THE (-)

• I’ll have to wait a couple more years for his next novel

And I guess that whatever book I read next would have been disappointing so The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery just left me feeling ho-hum. My disappointment stems from the fact that this could have been a great book.

The setting is end of the 19th century Japan when Western culture is first starting to infiltrate traditional Japanese society. Aurelia is a 9 yr old American who travels to Japan with her missionary uncle who ends up dying shortly after their arrival. She is taken in by Yukako Shin, the daugher of the most famous temae (tea ceremony) teacher in Japan. Told from the perspective of Aurelia as an elderly woman, she recounts her life and the many changes that took place in her family and society as Japan opened itself up to the West. The details about the tea ceremony, geishas, samurai, the caste system, and the political climate at the time, were somewhat interesting but I can’t decide if Avery was too descriptive and hence lost my interest by the sheer length and density of the book or whether she was not descriptive enough to give me a full appreciation for the uniqueness of this time and society.

THE (+)

• Garnered enough interest in tea ceremony that I would like to attend one
• Learned lots of interesting facts about 19th century Japanese women – i.e. they blackened their teeth and shaved their eyebrows
• Japanese culture is so unique so you were immersed in a completely different world

THE (-)

• Too long – could have been better edited.
• Aurelia’s persona was never fully developed.
• Depicting Aurelia as a lesbian did nothing for the story and was actually distracting. The dichotomy of Japanese and Western culture was enough without adding in this additional cultural clash.

FutureTense Panel Recap

Wordsmiths’ FutureTense panel went down on Saturday Night. The panel included (l to r) author Laurel Snyder (JewishyIrishy), me – making out like I know what I’m talking about, online music mag guy Choyce Hacks (Resonator), bookselling guy Russ (Wordsmiths), and author Karin Gillespie (Southern Comfort).

I don’t participate in something like this on a regular basis, and I’ll admit that I had some doubts about the quality of a panel that would have me as a member (with apologies to Groucho). All of those concerns went out the window as Russ announced the line-up. I then had to start worrying about being the weak-link in this endeavor.

How’d we do? I have no idea if our discussion was interesting to the audience, but I could have talked to my fellow panelists all night long. As long as I’ve been doing this blogging thing, I don’t often find myself talking with actual real people about how they go about the business of their own blogs, Web 2.0/social networking, and other nerdtastic topics. I’m looking forward to another opportunity to chat with all involved over free wine.
You can read other takes on the evening here:

• Wordsmiths Russ goes with a groan-worthy opening
• Laurel Snyder is not only complimentary but also adds an exclamation point!
• And an actual member of the audience weighs in here

A special note of thanks for giving our little panel a shout out in the Criminal Records newsletter. I’ll recap the actual book fest, which was happening nearby, in another post. It’s nap time.

Also: An audience member was sporting one of my favorite tattoos of all time. Finally, someone that went to graduate school has something to show for it.