Free to a good home

I have an extra copy of Tony Earley’s new novel The Blue Star to pass along. The book is a follow up to Earley’s well-regarded novel, Jim the Boy. I’ve been told that The Blue Star is sufficiently self-contained that you don’t have to have read the first book to enjoy the second. I haven’t read either book yet, but I have them both packed to take along with me on a trip next week. (Read an excerpt.)

The novel was reviewed in several prominent publications this past week:

• L. A. Times
• New York Times – Janet Maslin
• New York Times – Scott Turow
• Boston Globe

Leave us a comment if you’d like to receive the book for FREE. The winner will be chosen randomly.

TOB: Round 1 Action

The Tournament of Books may be the least well-oiled machine in letters. Case in point, the tournament was set to kick off on Friday, but even then only got underway after 5PM EST. That’s why we love it so.

Round 1 began with two books that I have not read – Denis Johnson’s national Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke vs. Ovenman by Jeff Parker, which I had never even heard of. I wagered accordingly. The winner: Tree of Smoke. (Check out the hilarious commentary from the booth on this match . Warning: The commentators are working blue.)

Round 2 paired two books that I’ve read, so I felt a little more informed on this one. Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives took on Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida. I was genuinely surprised at how powerful and moving Vida’s novel is (plus Vida has the greatest name ever), and I loathed The Savage Detectives. HATED it. I bet my heart on this one. The winner: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.

I’m on a tear so far – 2-0. Tomorrow’s match features Then We Came to the End vs. Petropolis. I went against the conventional wisdom on this one and picked Petropolis to win. What can I say? I love the Russians. Read my review of Petropolis here. I just finished Then We Came to the End last week. I have not written a review yet, but I found to novel to be engaging and well written. However, author Joshua Ferris – not Russian.

This is Your Life

This is Your Life, by John O’Farrell, was recommended to me by a law school friend of mine who’s now working as a screenwriter in L.A. I had never heard of O’Farrell or this book, but I took a flyer on it and felt rewarded within the first five minutes of reading it.

I’ll go ahead and copy more than I should from the first page, just to give you a sense of O’Farrell’s style and thinking, as he ruminates about an insect he hears:

At the window a wasp seemed to be struggling with the insect equivalent of Fermat’s last theorem. Problem: you are confronted with a half-opened window. How do you get to the other side? Wasp answer: keep head-butting the glass over and over again. ‘Aah,’ says the wasp professor, ‘you would think so, wouldn’t you? But if you repeatedly fly into the glass of the half-opened window and you find for some reason that you cannot seem to go straight through the glass, then what do you do?’ Hush falls over the wasp tutorial as their eager brains are taxed to the limit of wasp logic. Until one brilliant young wasp, the intellectual superstar of Wasp College, Cambridge, tentatively puts up his front leg, the answer slowly coming together in his insect head.

‘If . . . one . . . cannot fly straight through the glass’ — he cogitates as the lecture room falls silent, the other wasps sensing that they are in the presence of wasp genius — ‘and we have established that the window is half open . . . ‘ he continues, his brow furrowed in total concentration, ‘then surely the logical thing to do . . . would be . . . to fly repeatedly at the glass, buzzing a lot?’

The other pupils glance eagerly across at the professor to see if this pupil has hit upon the solution, but their tutor smiles knowingly and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘The answer is that there is no solution to this conundrum. It is an impossible problem, like predicting prime numbers or putting a definitive value on pi. It is a philosophical trick question that cannot be answered.’

And so the book, the fictional story of Jimmy Conway, begins. The above is taken from the opening scene, as Conway is about to go onstage and perform stand-up comedy to a huge crowd, his performance to be televised on BBC to millions of viewers, all of whom believe him to be the best young comic in all of Great Britain; the problem is that he has never performed stand-up comedy before in his life.

The book then steps back to describe, from Conway’s standpoint, how he got to where he was. And while it’s not the most original premise in the world — someone hoaxing the public and the media into believing they are someone they are not — O’Farrell tells the tale wonderfully and with great (British) humor. My copy is filled with dog-eared pages where I had to flag a really funny insight or quote from the narrator. In fact, thinking back to my screenwriter friend that turned me on to this book (and thinking back to our procrastinating times in law school), I found the following excerpt hysterical:

I had now resolved to spend as much of the day as possible on my screenplay. Indeed, the night before I had read a whole chapter of How to Write a Screenplay and had even turned on my computer to retype the title page. ‘Avoidance is the writer’s greatest enemy,’ said the book. I decided to re-read the entire chapter on avoidance, lest I should succomb to this insidious trap.

This could be my longest post ever if I decided to pepper it with other quotes and passages, but I won’t do that. And I won’t ramble on about the plot, either. Although I think I can say, without spoiling any of the enjoyment of it, that it’s generally about the sequence of events that leads Conway into accidentally convincing the world that he’s a great stand-up comic, even though nobody’s ever seen his act, and his observations on fame and how people treat you when they think you’re somebody that you’re not.

It’s not a life-changing book, and it’s not the funniest book I’ve ever read, but it was a downright fun book to read, and it kept me rooting for Conway the whole way through. And I suspect that I’ll find myself tracking down some of O’Farrell’s other books to put in the queue.

Oh, this is rich…

First Lady Laura Bush to the Association of American Publishers:

A nation that does not read for itself cannot think for itself and a nation that cannot think for itself risks losing both its identity and its freedom…

Sounds good. As always you have to read the fine print.

Think for Yourself™ offer applies only to Conservatives, Republicans, some Libertarians, and anyone with a “Support our Troops” bumper sticker. Think for Yourself™ offer does not apply to Democrats, independent voters, union workers, poor people, citizens of Blue States, brown people, red people, climate scientists, earth scientists, health scientists, well, any scientists really, critics of US military actions and/or wars, critics of US foreign policy, critics of US domestic policy, critics of the Administration, well, any critics really. Oh, and to be clear, by “read” we mean reading any of the books from the Ann Coulter section of the book store. You know the section. If your local bookstore does not have any books by Ann Coulter and other right-thinking authors, be sure to denounce them loudly as fascists and thought police. Novels with “themes” questioning modern American life and/or America’s place in the world should be avoided. Best to avoid novels all together, actually. Also to be avoided are any books by so-called “historians” that portray our nation’s glorious history in all but the most positive light. See Lynn Cheney if you have questions in this regard. Books that concern themselves with Native Amercians, African-Americans, immigrants, gay people, child wizards, or other “special interest” groups should be avoided on principle. So what are you waiting for? Go out there and Think for Yourself™ today!

National Book Critics Circle Awards

The NBCC Awards were handed out last night in New York City.  The winners were:

• Criticism: Alex Ross – The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century (excerpt)
• Poetry: Mary Jo Bang – Elegy
• Biography: Tim Jeal – Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (excerpt)
• General Non-Fiction: Harriet Washington – Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (excerpt)
• Autobiography: Edwidge Danticat – Brother, I’m Dying (excerpt)
• Fiction: Junot Díaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (excerpt)

I’m starting to feel pretty good about betting on Oscar Wao to go all the way in The Tournament of Books.

How the Dead Dream

Here’s a prediction. At the end of 2008, Lydia Millet’s novel How the Dead Dream will be a top many year-end “best of” lists.  Count on it.  It is an offbeat novel that is incredibly well written.  Run, don’t walk, to your closest independent book store.

T., as a little boy had an obsession. He loved money.

His first idol was Andrew Jackson. He knew the vertical dart between the brows, the jutting chin, the narrow mouth; he knew the windblown coif that perched atop the great man’s forehead like a bird’s nest on a lonesome crag. Jackson’s face was fixed in a somewhat neutral expression and T. spent long hours trying to decide if it suggested idle speculation or a slight annoyance.

It’s a short trip from a childhood affair with money to spending college years biding your time, making contacts, and studying business. T. succeeds by holding himself separate from his peers in almost monastic discipline in order to achieve his goals. Graduation leads naturally to incredible success in real estate. If that was all there was to the story, the novel would be a simple satire of the shallowness of the pursuit of money. Part of the genius of this novel is the way the author keeps the reader off balance.

Eventually, several things occur that highlight how empty T.’s life has actually been: he has a chance encounter in the desert with a coyote, he has a real relationship with a woman, his parents’ sudden divorce upsets his carefully curated life, and he gets a dog. Then things get weird.

T. begins to obsessively study rare and animals and breaks into zoos to spend time alone with endangered species. He reflects on the experience of being among the last of your kind, locked in a cage 1000′s of miles from your home, and separated from the few remaining others like yourself.  He joins these animals, sharing in their loneliness from the corners of their cages.  Meanwhile, T.’s real estate empire clears fragile desert land and constructs a resort on a pristine island.

The novel is never heavy handed in exploring its themes nor does it provide any homilies. Instead the novel explores the complexity of our place in the world.  Human presence in the world is both powerfully destructive and delicately ephemeral.  Nature is fragile and nature endures.  Relationships provide comfort and security, and they leave a path of destruction in their wake.  While funny in parts, How the Dead Dream is also a powerful and serious book.  I highly recommend it.

Several people have told me that Millet’s previous book, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is even better than How the Dead Dream. I’m adding it to the stack.

50 States of Lit: Round 5

The Columbia Spectator’s 50 States of Literature series continues today with an excellent choice.  Donna Tartt’s The Secret History was chosen as the representative for Vermont.  I don’t know how representative it is of the state, but it’s an excellent book.  When did it get such a cheesy cover?  I’m outraged on the author’s behalf.

Somehow I missed Round 4 last week.  Arizona was paired with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees.

You can keep up with the rest of their selections here.

TOB Brackets

The brackets for the 2008 Tournament of Books are now available for download at The Morning News. March madness has officially taken over my feverish brain. I’ve taken the liberty of filling my picks out and making them public now. My selections will almost certainly be wrong. I hope that this exercise will reveal why I very rarely bet on anything.  Stay in school kids.

Some of the selections below are based on sentimental favorites that should advance (but probably won’t). Others are based on how I think that a judge that I am familiar with will vote (but probably won’t). And then there’s the difficulty of picking a book that you think will be eliminated early, but will be voted back in by fan vote for the quarter finals (the second quarter finals, actually).

(Click pic for larger version)

The Free Book Experiment

Some of the big publishing houses have been experimenting with making books available electronically for free.  The idea being that word of mouth may increase sales of actual printed and bound books.

Random House offered the new novel Beautiful Children by Charles Bock as a PDF download for three days last week.   The Millions reports that at least 15,000 readers took advantage of the opportunity.  The publisher is very pleased with the results of the experiment.  I downloaded the book, because I could.  I’m not sure that I’m ready to read 400+ pages on my computer though.

Meanwhile, HarperCollins had a contest to see which backlist Neil Gaiman novel they would make available for free online.  The fans chose American Gods (me, too!).  Sadly, the novel is restricted to viewing on HarperCollins site via a clunky interface, presumably as a security measure to prevent piracy.  I am even less inclined to read a book using this setup than I am a downloaded PDF.  Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, who has made all of his novels available as free downloads, is largely unimpressed with the Gaiman experiment:

Unfortunately, the “security” has also undermined the experiment’s value as a tool for getting better intelligence about the market. This isn’t going to cost Neil any sales, but it’s also not going to buy him any. We take our books home and read them in a thousand ways, in whatever posture, room, and conditions we care to. No one chains our books to our desks and shows us a single page at a time. This experiment simulates a situation that’s completely divorced from the reality of reading for pleasure. As an experiment, this will prove nothing about ebooks either way.

The only book that I’ve read in its entirety via computer screen was Crime and Punishment, which I read as a series of daily e-mails from DailyLit.  I have not felt the need to repeat that experiment.

How about you?  Have you had tried to read any books on your computer screen?  How did it go?

The Fakery Continues

From here on out, all memoirs will be considered bogus until proven otherwise.*

Exhibit A: Margaret B. Jones, author of the acclaimed memoir Love and Consequences, took her turn to tearfully admit that her story was bogus.  The book describes “her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South Central Los Angeles as a foster child who ran drugs for members of the Bloods, an infamous gang. The author’s biography on the back flap says she graduated from the University of Oregon.”  Not so true.  The gig was up when her older sister called the publisher to tattle after seeing Jones’ (not her real name) picture in The New York Times.  Ouch.

Exhibit B: No one looks good in the story of the “I was raised by wolves during the Holocaust” debacle – In this week’s other bogus memoir saga.  The publisher apparently ignored her suspicions about the story until losing a breech of contract court case with the author to the tune of $30+ Million.  Then she began to have her doubts about the story.

* – With the exception of Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards.  I know that he was actually in the bands that he names in his upcoming rock memoir.  I confirmed that with my own eyes on various occasions.

BGB Reading Series, Vol. II

We’re honored to announce that the Baby Got Books Reading Series, Volume 2 will be the very last event at Wordsmiths before they shut the doors and move down the street. Accordingly, we’ve got an excellent evening of Southern Culture (capital “S”, capital “C”) planned. The event is March 24th and kicks off at 7:30 PM. We hope to see you there.

Author Hillary Jordan will be reading from her Bellwether Prize-winning novel Mudbound. The prize was founded by Barbara Kingsolver to reward “books of conscience, social responsibility, and literary merit.” Jordan’s novel scores on all of these fronts. I’ll have a full review coming soon.

But wait…there’s more!

Following the readng, we have a full slate of excellent music. The Wayne Fishell Experiment will kick things off with acoustic-folk-indie-pop. They’re excellent and worth the price of admission alone.

Now how much would you pay?

Following The Wayne Fishell Experiment is Hope for Agoldensummer from Athens, Ga. Hope for Agoldensummer are tough to describe, but they would not be out of place on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack or the rural post World War II setting of rural Mississippi. And yet their sound is very moder. Rough Trade Records describes the band: “this is strange, soulful and deeply affecting stuff. think a rural Cocorosie, an ornate Cat Power or a female Arcade Fire.” I, for one, can’t wait to check them out.

All of this fun can be yours for the low price of $0. That’s a sweet, sweet deal my friends.

I’ll have more on the event in the weeks to come. Here are the relevant details:

Wordsmiths on the Move

Word on the street is that Wordsmiths Books in Decatur is moving to a new location. They are moving from that cool old marble post office building on Trinity Street to the even more sweet “old SunTrust building” on Decatur Square proper (545 North McDonough Street). From the announcement:

“It seems rather sudden, and, truthfully, it is. The fact is that the building we’ve been in, on E Trinity Place, has sold, which actually comes out as a nice stroke of luck, as it enables us to relocate to front-and-center on the Decatur Square, where Wordsmiths Books was meant to be all along” … “Only a bit more than a block from where we now reside, our new space will sit firmly on the Square of Downtown Decatur and will offer us all the space and room for growth that we will need into the far-reaching future. Additionally, we’re nothing shy of a few paces from the very lawn that hosts the Decatur Arts Festival, The Decatur Book Festival, the Beach Party, The Wine Fest, Movies on The Square and a host of many other festive activities that take place on the Square throughout the year”.

Wordsmiths will close on March 25th and Re-Open on March 28th in the new location.