BGB @ BEA: Day 4

Russ Marshalek, our man in the field, brings us the news via a running diary from Day 4 of Book Expo America in NYC. If you’re just joining us, you can check out Russ’s previous missives –  Day 1 – Day 2 — Day 3.  An according to the LA Times’ book blog, Russ’s BEA tweetup party was the place to be.  Here are Russ’s texts from the very last day of the Expo:

• 8:33 last day of bea. Kinda want to say ohthankgod but this has actually been a great, great weird set of days. Rushing to get to javits for a session on the google book search and archive and what it means for publishing (rights, etc), the 11 am session is beyond full so a 9am one opened. Probably not going to make it in time. If I do, it will mean sacrificing coffee, and dear reader I will not.  I’m going to have to miss one of the big things I wanted to do this weekend: luis urrea reading from his amazing into the beautiful north at kgb bar tonight.  I can’t sing the praises of that book enough. Another gorgeous day in new york, another battled hangover, and it does feel like the last day of school: you know you’ll see some of these people again. Some of them you’ve no desire to ever again talk to. Some of them have become real friends but now disperse across the country. Someone should be playing “don’t you forget about me”
• 8:54 dammit not going to make it to the most controversial session here
• 8:57 ah well. Going to miss session. Getting coffee and reading catching fire instead. Can I call it catching fireyah?
• 9:25 feel better. No one could find session. Want to make joke about google archiving rights, but can’t think of one. The exhibit hall is full of books being thrown at attendees. No one wants to lug anything back to polatka.
• 9:38 google session is hot secret ticket. Going to bumrush the 11am session
• 10:16 stephenie meyer doesn’t believe in fun
• 10:24 discussing splitting up neil gaiman and amanda palmer. Can’t tweet about that.
• 10:31 bumrushing the 11am google session. Rumor of food.
• 10:33 ppl lining up at 10:30 for a noon nicholas sparks signing? We know where the housewives are (ed: zing!)
• 12:04 google session had to compete w nicholas sparks signing next door. Was fascinating and overwhelming. I don’t mean sparks
• 12:07 basically, w google archiving content, new distribution methods mean new and added value for titles if rights can be worked out
• 12:57 never gonna pay 10 bucks for rice and beans again
• 1:26 final missive. Big top closing. Don’t don’t don’t you forget about me bea, ill always remember you. Stay sweet have a good summer.

Closing remarks:

Here was the thing with my first BEA ever-it was incredible. I know folks felt like this was a lesser/off year, but maybe it was the sheer childlike magic that is the inexplicable “social networking” , but I found myself surrounded, on the whole, with really, really good people. You know that obnoxious Kerouac quote about “the only people for me are the mad ones”? Yeah, Javits was, since Thursday, filled with those people-the mad ones. The ones mad for books and literature and in love with the written word in many forms, driven by fear and by need but also by desire and by love. This is a generalization, of course, but it’s true enough with those I encountered, either randomly or purposefully, that everyone wants to not just save publishing but revolutionize it, everyone has an idea, everyone’s so hungry for change, for improvement, for more.

I never, at all, heard anyone utter the phrase “I hate my job” and mean any more than “I hate having to go back to the hotel to get my wallet”. I challenge any industry to top that.

It’s weird-I’m so tired. SO tired. Tired to the point where last night, in a cab back from Brooklyn, I had an utter breakdown to 2 trusted compadres. About life, the universe, everything. And as we crossed the bridge, and I saw the city lights, I realized exactly how full of life the past few days have been. The hunger, the love, the joy that was in that stupid “Catching Fire” line, the publisher of SoHo press, the oldest and also sharpest human being in the Google Book Search discussion session, laying on the table for everyone exactly who we need to realize is dictating the online content pricing rules-it’s all been a whirlwind haze.

I am known for over-emotionalism. (It’s a word, deal with it). But what I saw at BEA 09 was a lot of hope. that may be, I concede, because I don’t surround myself with those who are afraid of the future, but with those who seek to embrace it. I know for a fact that doesn’t include everyone in publishing, but I’ve met enough now where I feel like, should we need to form an army, we could do it.

Now I have to get these books home. All four bags of them.

BGB @ BEA: Day 3

Our intrepid reporter Russ Marshalek continues to send missives by text message from the floor of the Javits Convention Center in New York City. Will he survive another day of Book Expo America, the publishing world’s biggest to-do?  Will he have to check in to rehab?  Here’s Russ:

• 6:41 ohmygod im still alive. Keys? Debit card? Phone? Oh, thank god, all here-so utter success. The BEA tweetup last night was amazing and insane and awesome, full of loudness and vodka and I am still not sure at all how I got home….or what that pounding in my head is. Is someone playing drum and bass? Ohwaitno that’s from the vodka on an empty stomach. Dinner of champions! I am up early to get to javis for the early bird promotion publisher little, brown is doing. Ohgodthatmeansihavetomove.
• 7:33 shower. Shave. Feel a little better. Want a bagel sandwich. Know this will not , in fact, happen. Coffee would be nice. Waiting to see if anyone wakes up to walk to javits w/ me or if it is me with the new Phoenix album on my ipod to let “1901″ put a spring in my step.
• 7:41 oh and while I am thinking about it: been trying to read marlon james “book of night women”. Can’t get into it, which I know is blasphemy to the book community. Further blasphemy? A cocktail at the tweetup was called the michiko kakutini.
• 7:54 hit the pavement as phoenix kicked in to find a gorgeous ny day. Having a really happy moment.
• 8:17 ppl lined up to get into exhibit hall. Like this is a day after xmas sale.
• 8:33 me, to person in line next to me: you waiting for the littlebrown giveaway? Person next to me: no, julie andrews. Me: oooooooooooooooooh.
• 8:36 oh f@ck. Realizing the awesome littlebrown promo is for a james patterson book.
• 8:49 still can’t get over this great awesome campaign is for a james f@cking patterson book…and I bought into it. Ughhhhhhh I need a drink.
• 9:09 got my damn patterson book. Tshirt too.
• 9:25 trying to find scholastic booth to get a copy of catching fire. Found waffles instead
• 9:40 line for catching fire wraps around the  booth. Was asked by girl in front of me if everything here is this obnoxious.
• 9:49 we are still waiting. We are not amused.
• 10:02 got catching fire. Yessssssssssssssssssss
• 10:07 pondering going to a session on YA books. It advertises having “live teens” though. That sounds like another conference entirely.
• 10:12 stopped in at akashic booth. Thinking about bagels. These two things? Not related
• 10:15 hey atlanta?  Don’t worry. Ppl go batshit nuts over karen slaughter up here too
• 10:22 to go to the 11am session on teen marketing or not…
• 10:30 11am is an NBCC session on the future of book reviews, w 2 rooms reserved. Thinking it will be a madhouse
• 10:33 hi laurel k hamilton, nice black and gold bodysuit  w matching cape
• 10:37 was wondering what author was signing and creating a madhouse in the lobby. It was actually just the line for starbucks.
• 10:46 at book reviews future session. Tempted to start reading catching fire
• 10:54 hot topics at bea 2009 apparently, if this sessions attendance means anything: twitter. Book reviews. Free stuff.
• 11:02 capacity crowd for book review future panel
• 11:04 going to wait to summarize
• 11:11 this panel is totally in the bag for goodreads and so am i
• 11:12 twitter said once!
• 11:23 panel is essentially saying that the future of book reviews is evolving constantly, and reviewers must evolve or die. Also twitter. Af@ckinggain.
• 11:41 thinking about food
• 11:47 moral of story is that book world is still afraid of user generated content
• 11:52 shit. Need phone charger. Brb yall
• 1:04 getting food before heading back to bea. Um…thatsaboutityall
• 1:38 why can’t I get a f@cking smoothie
• 2:01 headed back to javits. Missed the live teens on stage. Damn
• 2:19 there are fights at random house for alan furst!!!
• 2:30 may need some champagne
• 2:31 hey lilbrown yr galley closet is open
• 2:47 how to make mad cash at bea: sell power outlet space.
• 4:02 blogginslowly. Need coffee
• 4:45 the marvel comics booth has an open bar. Best thing evvvvvvvvver
• 5:09 bea shutting down. One more day yall. One. More. Day. A story of love loss and triumph

BGB @ BEA: Day 2

BGB’s man-in-the-field reports from Book Expo America, the book industry’s largest US convention, armed only with a venti mochachino and his wits. Missives from the field:

• 7:54 curious as to how it is that, despite last night being my birthday, all of my own drinks were bought on my own tab. That is, at least, until I ended up at the American Bookseller Association party, which had an open bar and which also offered some of the best conversation and friendliest folk I’d seen all day yesterday. Today is the first day the exhibit hall is open, meaning publishing houses and book technology companies shilling wares, also meaning…free books.   FREE.  BOOKS.  I am imagining a scene akin to the film “Jingle All The Way”, but we will see. Recession and all that, y’all.
• 9:48 there are 2 kinds of publishers on the exhibit floor: those handing stuff out like my grandparents w candy, and those hiding them like they were parents of a virgin on prom night. More in a bit, must explore and have a meeting at firebrand booth in ten min.
• 9:55 Algonquin Books booth makes me feel overwhelmingly happy. Love them like a sister.
• 10:23 I just need to find a place to sit I just need to find a place to sit I just need…
• 10:47 Overwhelmed and inundated w/ books. Forced to grab shabby tote bag so as not to kill my back like a glue factory race horse. Jonathan Lethem is signing galleys at 1, may cry on  him
• 11:12 dammit the new Dean Koontz is a book about his dog
• 11:23 lil brown is doing a crazysmart marketing campaign creating a sense of urgency for a surprise book tmrw. I need lunch
• 11:43 omg food today at Javits doesn’t suck
• 11:51 highly satisfying lunchymunchies. Girl at other table is reading new Kate DiCamillo and sniffling into it, makes me feel like high school
• 12:12 just accosted by author. Won’t say where. Feel gross. Trying to sweet talk book off of shelf, waiting for Jonathan the awesomesauce Lethem to show up
• 12:29 first in line for Jonathan Lethem. Need to pee rl bad tho.
• 1:05 where the f@ck is the coffee, bea
• 1:14 do I dare and do I dare keep walking? Almost fell over Richard Nash. I am the worst stalker ever. Also worst walker ever.
• 1:22 the randomhouse booth is a madhouse. Suffice to say the new lethem book is going to make mad noise
• 1:25 omg the empress of the atl book world, esther levine, is here. Tim find and link to that ajc article on her plssssss (Tim says:  it’s the AJC we’re talking about – that link is long broken and good luck with the “archives” – but here is a link to BGB’s shout out to Esther)
• 1:30 neil gaiman is here. Whoopeedoo.
• 1:50 finally a coffee recharge. Carrying two bags of books, under the steamy press of underpaid publishing pros, I smell like woodpulp and desperation
• 1:55 f@ck it yall, sitting on the floor. You know how we do.
• 2:08 if signage is to be believed, the new Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian, great damn book) novel, in jan 2010, involves vampire swans. Sweeeet.
• 2:20 I just figured out blues clues. They say keep caffinating.
• 2:59 need hotel break. Taking one
• 358 wish i knew how to disconap like the old folks do. as it is, i need a diet mountain dew, some shoe insoles and a bagel sandwich. going to recoup before heading to the Adaptive Blue panel, and then to the bea tweetup.
  SHAMELESS BEATWEETUP PLUG!
• 4:11 oh damn. Back to javits for the only panel w an open bar
• 4:34 late for 430 open bar. Worried all booze in the world is gone
• 4:52 the line for this open bar is longer than the line for neil gaiman
• 4:59 ready for a drink. Then going to have to go back to hotel
• 5:17 reflecting on what inspires me in publishing on walk back
• 6pm signing off dear readers. Parties to prep for. Recaps in the am.

BGB @ BEA: Day 1

Our intrepid field reporter, Russ Marshalek, tried valiantly to live blog reports from the first day of Book Expo America, the book industry’s mega confab.  Unfortunately we ran into a few snags along the way, most notably – no wi-fi at the convention center.   Follow that up with my being on the road most of today, and our up to the minute updates are now a little dated.  No problems.  Below are Russ’s hastily typed missives as they appeared in my inbox:

• Weds 8am Too  much sake last nigth. Far too much. And with that, so begins my first-ever Book Expo America adventure. I am threatened not just by the slight pounding in the back of my head but also by the looming threat that the conference center  doesn’t have wi-fi, which would definitely put a damper on any liveblogging attempts. Doesn’t matter, though-like love, debt, disease and the circus, nothing stops a blog.For me, this has already begun to feel like a weird publishing world summer camp. The book world, despite its many outlandish, teeth-grinding flaws is one that I have loved and continue to love forever, so I am like a kid in a big obnoxious candy store.Right now I need coffee like a horse needs water. Clearly.
• 8:54 almost left bag on the subway w everything in it. Obv need more coffee. Dammit bea have coffee
• 9:14 um this place, the javitz center, is like an airport but scarier bc it is full of angry awake too early publishing ppl.
• 9:40 the title of this “day of education” session is “yes we can;what the obama campaign can teach us about viral marketing”. By us I guess the title means publishing, but it may also mean ALL OF HUMANITY. We will see. Here super early.
• 2:56 PM the last few hours have encompassed an epic fail of a session attempting to encompass the Obama campaign, social media, and publishing. Basically it was some dude trying to play a will I am video and refusing to acknowledge that the javits center doesn’t have wifi. The video would chop and stop every 1.45 secs, and he’d then attempt to contextualize the half a frame we’d seen. Finally, after 20 minutes of this, a hand was raised to inform him to, um….stop.Every BEA session on social media thus far today has been in the most laymen of terms, despite the fact that I know many, like former soft skull publisher richard nash, have quality sessions to come. In fact, after the single worst lunch ever, I am skipping richards session to….write this. I also stole a chris anderson galley.
• 3:41 BEA vs russ: bea 1, russ 0. After not getting into the two sessions I wanted, I arrive back at the hotel sore, beaten and hungry. Tomorrow is the mad galley grab, happy birthday to me or something.(Side:I got to watch someone almost push who I think is patricia cornwell down the escalator)

Check back tomorrow for Day 2

The Resurrectionist

I thought that I knew what the novel The Resurrectionist by Jack O’Connell was going to be about.  The author humored me for a chapter or two then took a sharp left and kept me off balance for the rest of the book.  I had no idea what was going to happen next or where the author was taking me.  It is one crazy book.  In a good way. 

The Resurrectionist begins with a father, Sweeney, relocating his brain damaged young son to what is reportedly the best facility for drawing patients out of vegetative states.  The father has a huge chip on his shoulder from being condescended to by the medical establishment.  Sweeney is a pharmacist by training and has taken a job at the facility at a pay cut in order to provide the best for his son.  Any parent will instantly empathize with the anguish and desperation that Sweeney carries like a bat to keep the focus on his son: 

Sweeeney nodded back.  He needed the job and he’d burned all of his bridges back in Ohio.  But there was still a limit to the amount of patronizing shit shit he’d endure…”I have one concern and that’s the well-being of my boy.  You tell me what your concerns are and I’ll address them.”

This is the part of the story that I was expecting.  Then the sharp left turns begin…

Each night, Sweeney reads to his son from a collection of his favorite comic series, Limbo.  The comics are presented as chapter length stories that break up the main narrative.  The stories take place in an alternate world and feature a band of circus freaks on the run from a mysterious nemesis who wants them eliminated.  Chick, the leader of the motley group, has visions while in a catatonic state (that he calls “limbo”) that guides the group on their journey. 

Back in the real world, things are not as they seem at the esteemed neurological institute. The staff at the institute and Sweeney himself have back stories that are slowly revealed and add to the complexity and unexpected twists of the story.  Sweeney also finds himself mixed up with a group of dangerous bikers that may not be what they seem.   Then things get really weird.

Through the two story lines, O’Connell explores the boundaries of consciousness and “being” in unexpected and compelling ways.  Grief, sanity, compassion, forgiveness, and the depths of fatherly love are all carefully explored over the course of the novel.  Many of O’Connell’s themes are reminiscent of Paul Auster’s novels and  BGB favorite Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts – but are presented here in a wholly original way.  

It would have been interesting to see the comic book story presented in “graphic novel” form, but that may have come off as “gimmicky” or “non-literary”.  In any case, The Resuurectionist is a powerful noir-thriller-fantasy-Literary-experimental-post modern novel.   I highly recommend it for readers that like their novels to take them to unexpected places and leave them digesting what exactly happened to them when it is all over.

Gone Bookin’

This is the Javitz Conference Center in New York City:

In about 48 hours, it will NO LONGER BE THERE BECAUSE DAVID COPPERFIELD IS MAKING IT DISAPPEAR.

Kidding. The truth is only slightly less exciting:

In about 48 hours, book people from all over the world will be descending on the above conference center for what is, basically, the publishing industry’s version of a multi-ring circus-Book Expo America. Hundred thousand trillions, or w/e, of publishing industry professionals (read as: drunks) will all gather to discuss the future of the industry, and to marvel at Steven Tyler’s lips.

No, really, he’s going to be there.

AND SO WILL BABY GOT BOOKS.

That’s right-Baby Got Books will be the ONLY place to get the on-the-scene BEA coverage from Operative Agent Russ Marshalek…me. Yeah, third person, all that jazz.

I will also attempt to cover my own BEA afterparty, the BEA Tweetup. That may be really difficult as I’ll be drunk.

This is what my BEA schedule looks like:

Written on scrap paper, held in place with wine. Perfect.

See you starting Thursday.

Still On Holiday Roundup

Have you seen the trailer for the new Sherlock Holmes movie?  Check it:

Two views: Morrissey “greatest lyricist in the history of British popular music” and Morrissey is not a poet. From the latter:

Being solemn about pop squeezes the life out of it. Its lyrics and its tunes are not designed to be separated. The truth about pop lyrics is that if you’re reading them, you’re not really listening.

These guys may be over thinking it.   “I dreamt about you last night/and I fell out of bed twice” is still one of my favorite lyrics of all time.

Slate reviews Aleksandar Hemon’s story collection Love and Obstacles.  I saw Hemon read last week at the Decatur Library and dashed home to start reading.  

Dear Yahoo Answers, Is it OK to run an illegal library from my locker at school? (via Librarian.net)

Dude runs the risk of being labeled a “phony” – will publish a sequel to Catcher in the Rye.

The Boston Globe suggests a summer reading list.

The Reformed Vampire Support Group

After watching me struggle through half a dozen normal adult novels, only to see me complete 2 (maybe 3), Tim finally got me the perfect book.  And yes, it’s another irresistible teenage vampire story.   I was so excited I actually raced through a book, whose title I can’t even remember,  about a 75 year old woman who tragically loses the love of her life and has to deal with the memories of their life together and her future without him.  AAGH!

The Reformed Vampire Support Group is the first Catherine Jenks book that I’ve gotten my hands on, but she’s pretty well known in the youngster crowd for her previous titles Evil Genius and Genius Squad.   I kind of wish I started with the other books so I wouldn’t appear obsessed with vampires, but, well, this is the one that showed up…

After renaming herself and all members of The Reformed Vampire Support Group in order to protect their identities, 15 year old Nina, who hasn’t aged since 1973, decides to write her memoir.   For the past 30 years she’s been writing a fantasy series about the glamorous life of a crime stopping vampire named Zadia Bloodstone.  She admits she’s no Stephanie Meyer and that her books don’t make much money, but after the murder of a real vampire and the subsequent events, Nina figures it’s time to come clean.

In real life, vampires are pretty pathetic, especially the reformed ones.  They live off of guinea pigs, are extremely weak, are sick and in pain all the time, and can do nothing but watch tv and play on their computers.  Other than Nina’s mom and the sympathetic Catholic priest who leads their weekly support group, there is no contact with “other” humans.  So when a few of them try to track down this vampire slayer, they are all surprised to find the amount of  courage, the sense of duty and moral obligation, the willingness to get involved, and the actual energy and excitement to do something that they possess after all.  What follows is a late night mad cap adventure from Sydney to the country and back again that traces Nina’s journey from an angry, useless, sick, self loathing adolescent (hmmm) to a confident, self actualized adult, who just happens to have a disease.  And she can live with that.

If you’re looking for a fun, well written, sort of unpredictable break from all the grown up books you think you’re supposed to read, pick this one up.  I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Life on the shelf

I’ve been talking lately about books that operate, in some form or fashion, as a paean to a love of literature. One of the most excellent, moving books to cross my path this year on such a topic is The Whole Five Feet, by Christopher Beha.

Harper Magazine assistant editor Beha, undergoing an incredibly difficult time in his life-cancer-recovery, family death, a stillborn novel-decided to tackle the task of completing the collection of classic works known as the Harvard Classics, aka the “five foot shelf”. The chronicle of his excursion into the classics, the past and, ultimately, himself, is what comprises the brief, touching The Whole Five Feet.

I was really intrigued as to what Beha had found in the days and months following his completion of the Harvard Classics, and so he and I exchanged a few emails about his time living inside the five-foot shelf.

Interview with Christopher Beha

BabyGotBooks: The Whole Five Feet picks up as a very, very specific project and a very, very specific time in your history as a reader. What books did you read as a child/young adult that had a formative impact on you?

Christopher Beha: When I was young, my mother read a great deal to me and my two siblings –Madeline L’Engle, the Narnia books — and this was certainly formative. But I’ve never been much of a literary nostalgic. I don’t have particular affection, really, for books that meant something to me earlier in life, unless I can return to them and they still say something to me now, rather than serving as mementos. So I don’t tend to revisit or even think much about children’s books, even ones that were once quite important to me.

A friend told me the other day that she’d seen a statistic that suggested that the physical presence of books in a house is actually more important to a child’s development than being read to, and if this is the case, then I can fairly say that the set of the Harvard Classics on my grandmother’s shelf played a formative role in my early life, even though I didn’t start reading them until a few years ago.

Now, if we’re using “young adult” not in its more recent demographic sense of “pre-adult” or “late adolescent” but in a more literal way –in which case I maybe still am one — I can say with some certainty that the single most important writer in my reading life has been the late David Foster Wallace, whom I began reading as a sophomore in college and to whom I still return with great frequency now. He wrestled so movingly with one of the major issues I’ve tried to deal with in my book, that is, the place of the didactic in imaginative literature. Put in that clumsy way, it doesn’t sound like so thrilling an issue. Put differently: to what extent is literature supposed to teach you something about the world and your place in it, and to what extent is it supposed to give you an aesthetic experience, to provide what Goethe called the highest human faculty — the shudder of awe? Are these two goals in some opposition, or is it possible to do both in equal measure? In The Republic, Socrates says that all the knowledge in the world is useless without the wisdom to know what knowledge is for. Wallace, who was thought of while he was still alive as an encyclopedic writer, was so wonderful not because of his knowledge but because of his wisdom. Since his death, it seems to have become obvious even to those who once thought of him as cold and brainy that he was fundamentally a moral writer whose main concern was the possibility of connection. But that was there in the books all along. When I started reading the Classics, I chose quite actively not to read them in an academic way; that is, to read them for their wisdom, not for their knowledge. The result is that the book is not a work of literary criticism, but a book about the part that books can play in one’s life.

BGB: Since the completion of The Whole Five Feet, have you reflected back on your time with the Harvard classics-and, if so, what of the collection has stuck with you the most?

CB:On my website, I’ve been posting some things I wrote about the books while I was first reading them, and as The Whole Five Feet has come out, I’ve been re-reading some of the volumes, particularly the volumes of poetry. As my answer above would suggest, I’m more interested in what they have to say to me now, not in remembering what they said to me then. Just this morning I returned to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, which is fitting in this context, because it is in part about the extent to which you can or can’t revisit earlier selves, return mentally or physically to a past experience for nourishment:

That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence.

BGB: Your read of Ben Franklins’s Autobiography was refreshing to me-I’ve always read it (and commiserated with those who have similar viewpoints) an incredibly egotistical piece of work, and tend to miss the good stuff in it. Do you think Autobiography still is worth reading in today’s day and age?

CB: Franklin’s Autobiography is the very first work in the first volume of the Classics. I found it instructive, for reasons touched on a bit above, that the set would begin with such an unapologetically didactic work. You’re not going to get a shudder of awe from Poor Richard, but you might learn a few practical lessons. I found it worth reading at the time, but it’s not one of the volumes I would go out of my way to recommend. I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone to put down Shakespeare or Dante to pick up Franklin. Even from a purely practical point of view, I think you’d learn a lot more about how to live from Marcus Aurelius than from Franklin.

BGB: Do you feel, having subscribed to the Harvard Classics reason for being and stepping through them, bit by bit, that the five foot shelf achieves the purpose it was created for?

CB:The Shelf is idiosyncratic in many ways. To the extent that part of its purpose was canon-shaping, I think it was probably flawed to begin with, and it’s certainly outdated now. (I’m setting aside entirely the question of whether such a purpose is even worthwhile; I happen to think it is, but that’s a fight for another day.) To the extent that it’s purpose was to collect together a kind of curriculum and make it widely available, it certainly succeeded. And of course, it was a commercial venture — for the publishers, at least, if not for the editor — and it succeeded incredibly as that. Several people have written to me to say that after reading my book they tracked down a set of the Classics. I found this extremely gratifying. There may now be better ways to receive an all-in-one-place experience of the “great books,” but they’re aren’t many, and if my book sends others to the Five Foot Shelf, I’m thrilled.

BGB:What are you working on now?

CB:More than one writer friend gave me the very good advice to get as far along as possible on my next project before this one came out. I finished The Whole Five Feet nearly a year ago, and in the meantime I’ve managed to write a draft of a novel. A very messy draft, which will take much revision before it’s remotely presentable.

Hemon in the House

Atlantans: Aleksandar Hemon will be at the Decatur Library tomorrow night at 7:15 to read from his new collection of short stories Love and Obstacles. Hemon also wrote the spectacular novel The Lazarus Project, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award. (I really liked it, too.)

BGB Sells Out

Word I never thought that I’d type: Baby Got Books is now available for subscription on your Amazon Kindle.  Blasphemy?  I don’t know.  But for $1.99 a month you can have access to what is available to you on the internet for free.  Will this business model work for the Kindle?  Who knows? I read about Amazon’s program to open the Kindle to all blogs on The Millions. They are as dubious as we, but why not make your hard work available to all platforms?  The Millions also noted the disturbing fact that unscrupulous bastards could claim your blog and make money off of it.  It seemed prudent to claim our blog as our own, so I did.  Amazon helpfully provides previews of what your blog would look like on the Kindle.  How awesome is this:

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Etc. Scroll down to see what this post looked like in all of its original glory for comparison.  

If you want to subscribe to our blog to make sure that you never miss a post, I would recommend using Google Reader, which is readily available from any computer with an internet connection. For FREE.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this handy “how to” will tell you everything that you need to know.

Martin Millar Part 2: Lux

If you missed Part 1 yesterday, I reviewed the Scottish author Martin Millar’s book Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation.  Today I’m set to tackle Millar’s Lux the Poet.  The novel was Millar’s second and was originally published in 1989.  I read the two books back-to-back in an extended reading jag.  I noted yesterday that the two books are similar in many respects, but they are certainly different enough to stand on their own.  So now…

Lux the Poet

“At seventeen, Lux the poet is a natural optimist, undeterred by life’s misfortunes.”  Lux is a deadbeat living in squats and the couches of friends that he has yet to piss off.  He would certainly get beat up more regularly if he were not so handsome, in a Lana Turner kind of way.  He would also be the most successful poet in Britain if he could only find someone that would listen to his poems.  He is also an inveterate liar and a thief.

The Brixton neighborhood around Lux is in flames due to a riot of the downtrodden against the police.  Petrol bombs ignite cars and buildings. Rocks are shattering windows and heads.  And Lux is largely oblivious.

Lux is back in the riot.  He has no idea why it is going on.

“Why is there a riot going on?” he asks a stranger, an elderly man who is standing beside him watching some people across the street throwing stones.

“We are suffering more than usual,” says the man.

“Oh. Who is?”

“Us.  Black people.  No jobs, no money, policemen stopping the youth in the street all day.”

Lux is concerned to hear this…

Still, he doesn’t quite understand why anyone would riot if they couldn’t get a job.  Lux would be more inclined to riot if he had to get one.

Amid the riot, Lux is struggling to find Pearl, a girl that he is currently in love with.  Pearl has escaped from her burning house with her girlfriend Nicky. Nicky has escaped from her employer, Happy Science PLC, which was attempting to use her in some experiments involving sperm from genius donors. Nicky is also grieving for the PC that she has murdered.  The Jane Austen Mercenaries, a thrash metal band and Lux’s downstairs neighbors, are after Lux for ingesting all of their cocaine and destroying their demo tapes.  Oh, and a goddess evicted from heaven and doomed to walk the earth doing good works stumbles across the ensemble.  In short, chaos reigns.   

In Lux, Millar continues to cast stones at the establishment.  The police are racists, corporate culture is an oxymoron, and even the literary world is a sham.  All hide behind facades.  The police are behind their riot shields.  A hilarious side plot involves an accounting executive at Happy Science who calls headhunting firms to inquire about himself in the hopes of creating the illusion of a bidding war for himself among foreign multinational corporations.  Britain’s biggest taste maker in the world of books confesses that he is able to write so many excellent reviews each week by not using up precious time reading books.  Ouch.

Lux is an unforgettable literary character.  As much as you might want to strangle him, you’d be sad to see him gone.  And then he’d something from you and you’d want to strangle him again.  If you’re up for it, I wholly recommend reading both Alby Starvation and Lux, preferably when you have time to crank through them together.  They are fun, and they are smart. Read them at the beach while listening to The Clash’s Guns of Brixton.

The Clash – Guns of Brixton

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Supplement:

Lux and Alby appear to have been such popular characters that they eventually joined forces in a 1999 UK graphic novel titled Lux and Alby Sign On and Save the Universe (a new copy will set you back $325 on Amazon).

And as far as I can tell, Lux the poet is not in any way a swipe at the poet Thomas Lux, who currently holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech.

Martin Millar Part 1: Alby

The Scottish author Martin Millar has been writing and publishing books in the UK for over two decades.  As far as I can tell, his work wasn’t published in the US until only few years ago when the indie publisher Soft Skull began to roll out Millar’s novels.  I enjoyed his excellent Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me (my review), which was infinitely better than I would have thought.  Since Suzy, Zep & Me, I’ve been clamoring for more Millar. I recently picked up two more of his books and read them both back-to-back in an almost uninterrupted reading jag.  The two books are: Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation and Lux the Poet.

The novels have their similarities that are readily apparent when read together.  Both are set in Brixton among poor young people on the dole awaiting their “giro.”   Seedy characters navigate a world of drugs and desperation that is hilarious and a little sad.  Both jump from character to character in quick “edits”  between frantic story lines that will ultimately intersect.  Both seem related to the caper films of Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch).  In fact, I’d be shocked – shocked! – to learn that Ritchie is not a huge long-time fan of Millar.  The books also provide clandestine and wry social commentary.

For all their similarities, the novels are, in fact, very different.  I’ll tackle Millar’s first novel today and continue with Lux the Poet tomorrow.

 Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation

Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation was originally published in 1987.  The novel neatly captures the paranoia and desperation of the Reagan/Thatcher era.  Alby is a small-time drug dealer (sulphate is apparently a kind of amphetamine) and comic book collector squatting in various Brixton hovels. He feels generally unwell and looks much older than he is.  And he is completely paranoid.  

Alby concocts a purification program of fasting and abstaining from milk products and suddenly feels much better than he has in years (but he is still very paranoid).  He writes about his program in an alternative paper under the name Alby Starvation and the regimen sweeps Britain.  This does not go over well with the Milk Marketing Board.

The cast of characters that get swept up in Alby’s include: a beautiful assassin hired by the Milk Marketing Board to kill Alby, a Chinese mob kingpin, a hapless grocer, a zen master video game champion, a professor after an ancient relic that may have magical powers, a local nurse, and Alby’s lowlife friends and associates.  Whew.  There’s a lot going on, and Millar’s constant shift in story lines propels the novel effortlessly along.  

Alby, of course, is largely oblivious to what is transpiring around him:

I don’t understand this development in the proceedings.  Why is this person pointing a gun at me? Did I do something wrong in bed? Surely it couldn’t have been that unpleasant for her. Perhaps she wants her army trousers back, well she only has to ask.

As the story lines inevitably converge on Alby, it seems that he was right to be paranoid all along.

Millar takes gleeful potshots at government bureaucracy and corporate culture along the way.  The conspiracies of the police and medical establishments and their relationship to the lowlifes of Brixton are hilarious because they have at their hearts the ring of truth.  In the light of recent corporate greed and wrong-doing, Millar’s imagined machinations of the business elite are so crazy that they may not be too far from the mark.  There is some excellent satire in Alby’s crazed story.

Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation is good fun and a great read.  I’m thrilled that his subversive stories are finally making their way to the US.  Check back tomorrow for Part 2, a review of Millar’s Lux the Poet.

The Classics: Of Mice and Men

Following my recent first-time forays into Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Updike, why not check out some Steinbeck?  Particularly what I believe to be the shortest of his novels, Of Mice and Men.

I’ve read reviews of Steinbeck’s work, and I never doubted his ability to write, particularly about the struggles of early twentieth-century migrant workers in the western United States.  But with my short attention span, I didn’t think I could make my way through any of his longer works, and having never read Of Mice and Men or seen any theatrical or film adaptations of it, when I realized it was only 107 (small) pages, I thought I’d give it a shot.  One of the best investments of my reading energy ever.

Steinbeck truly knows how to tell a story.  And this story, of the diminutive George Milton and his oversized-but-slow partner Lennie Small, was so moving and heartbreaking that I couldn’t believe it was told in so few words.

I actually thought I knew what this story was about, but once I was a little ways in, I realized that my only points of reference were Lennie from L.A. Law and the sideways references from Bugs Bunny cartoons (all the references to bunny rabbits and George).  And so I learned that I didn’t really know anything.

Steinbeck’s ability to relay the tale of this unlikely pair’s time together, and to make you believe that they both needed one another despite their obvious differences, was effortless.  And his ability to develop characters in so few words was astounding.  Curley (and his wife), Carlson, Slim, Candy, and Whit (not to mention George and Lennie), and even the metaphorical story of Candy’s dog were described with such precision that I felt like I was there.

If you haven’t read this one, you really need to.  Heartbreaking, but not worthlessly so.

The Road Watch

The latest news on the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s On the The Road comes from the always excellent music blog I am Fuel,You Are Friends.  Heather notes that Nick Cave has been tapped to provide the score for the movie.  The post includes a BBC story about the upcoming movie that includes some of Cave’s music for the movie.  Even though this sample doesn’t reveal much, Nick Cave can certainly bring the spooky.  Even spookier, the I am Fuel post that went up on Friday includes a video of a Nick Cave song, Into My Arms, that I hadn’t heard before.  A friend used the song as the first dance at his wedding on Saturday.  Spooky!

Of interest

Sweet!: A blog post by ESPN’s Bill Neyer yesterday suggested that there is a film version of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball in the works.   It appears to be true.  The film will be directed by Steven Soderbergh.  Brad Pitt will be playing the part of Billy Beane, comedian Dmitri Martin will play Paul De Podesta, and Daryl Strawberry and David Justice will play themselves.  The wisdom of sabermatrician Bill James will be imparted by a cartoon character. 

I saw this at Neatorama:

Kindle Watch:

The Kindle succeeds because a few people buy a lot of books.

The Millions’ take seems to back this up: “Jeff Bezos today announced that among books that are available for the Kindle, 35% of the copies Amazon sells are Kindle editions.”

Tech geeks weigh in pro and con.

Actual students skeptical: “I’d need five Kindles just to hold a single thought while writing essays…Books work just fine.”

A complex flowchart to assist with the decision of when to buy the hard cover, when to go used, and when to get the e-book version.  On an Amazon blog no less.

Beat the Reaper

Tim loaned me Beat the Reaper, the debut novel by Josh Bazell, a guy with an English Literature degree who went to med school and is now doing his residency.  When you add those two up, you would assume the guy knows how to write, and that he knows a little about medicine.  And I think you’d be right on both counts.

This isn’t a world-changing book, but it was an easy, entertaining read.  It tells the story of a guy named Pietro Brnwa, a/k/a Peter Brown, who became an enforcer in the mob through a series of calculated moves following the murder of his grandparents, mainly to track down his grandparents’ killers (who he suspected were in the mob).  The book flashes back from and forth between his past and his present, where he’s in the witness protection program and working as a doctor at a hospital in Manhattan, but does so in a way that doesn’t throw the reader too far off the trail.

Side note:  Bazell throws out a lot of medical tidbits as footnotes, and I’ve been able to act like a smart guy by tossing them out at random while conversing with doctor friends.

Peter befriends the son of a mob lawyer, nicknamed Skinflick, while attending private school, and this friendship leads to all sorts of crazy nonsense.  The dynamic tension between Peter, who is only doing these mob-related things in pursuit of what he believes to be a noble purpose, and Skinflick, who is incompetent but wants to be a mobster, is hilarious.

Anyway, fast forward to the end.  I used to think McGiver knew how to make something out of nothing.  And I still think Jack Bauer is the toughest guy there is.  But when you’re knocked out cold and locked in a blood freezer at the hospital to await the arrival of someone who wants to kill you and who’s been training in knife fighting in South America for years in preparation for this moment, I don’t know that you would think to do what Peter does to prepare for this throwdown.  I’ll leave it at that.

(Read Tim’s review here.)

Back in my day

Future conversation with my daughter:

Our backpacks weighed 20 lbs.  On a good day.  If you had two science classes on the same day, you could be looking at 45 lbs.  Easy.  And then the instructors would hand out these things called “copies” or make you buy a collated collection of “supplemental material.”  I can show you what text books used to look like, I have three boxes of them in the attic.  Your mother has another two at least…

Suddenly resistance to the Kindle seems futile.

Wed Reader: Science, Money, & Health

The New York Times reports that the only remaining laboratory of Nikola Tesla is for sale. The sellers have no plans to prevent demolition of the structure as condition of the sale.  Arguably underappreciated in his time, Tesla has been staging a late comeback of sorts.  The scientist was featured prominently in the Samantha Hunt’s wonderful novel The Invention of Everything Else.  A Google-backed electric car company is called Tesla Motors.  The quote that I took from Hunt’s book for my review sums up Tesla’s review of his life as an old man:  

Some days I forget how completely I have been forgotten.

Plans are afoot to try to purchase the property and make it into a museum.  I need this to happen so that I can visit.

In the New York Review of Books, Sue M. Halpern has an interesting essay about financial success that features gazillionaire Warren Buffet Malcolm Gladwell.  A sample:

Buffett, it is safe to say, has a different relationship to money than you and me. For us it’s a means to an end. For him, it’s a vocation. He is called to it. If it’s for anything, it’s for getting more of. The man is a collector. He just happens to collect dollars.

In non-book news, The Pump Handle blog is a fantastic source for public health news is you’re into that sort of thing.  For the last few weeks there has been frequent mention in the press that x number or people die of influenza (the flu) in any given year.  The PH answers the question: How do we know how many people die of the flu in a year?  Short answer: educated guess.

Lit Blogs and Amazon

Last week, I wrote briefly about the economics of blogging.  In that post I mentioned that we link to Amazon and make a very small amount of cash from their referral program.  I caught a little bit of grief in the comments and a little more in my inbox for aligning with the evil behemoth.  Despite the pittance involved, using the Amazon referral service to defray our costs has been a nagging source of guilt for years.

Had I been current in my blog reading at the time, I would have included a link to a post over at The Millions that explains why it makes sense for otherwise right-minded blogs to use Amazon’s referral program at the perceived expense of independent sellers.  Even more interesting was The Millions’ subsequent post about how the Kindle stands to extinguish the goodwill that it has developed with book bloggers.  Both posts are part of their three part series on the future of coverage that are among the most thoughtful essays on the subject that you’ll find anywhere.  

Part 1 of the series is about the slow death of newspaper book coverage and where bloggers fit in to the picture.  A sample:

As has been widely noted, one of the hidden pleasures of publishing work online is the ability to hear responses from readers, and sometimes to engage in debate. Reviewing online feels like a lively thing, where the Sunday newspaper supplements sometimes read, as a colleague put it, as the place “where book reviews go to die.”

Each essay is worthy of the New York Review of Books, whose style the authors emulate in their essays.  This is blogging at its best.  Do yourself a service and block off some time to read the whole series.

But back to the idea of book blogs and Amazon. It bears mentioning:  the gang at The Millions certainly do support their local independent booksellers, on the ground, where it counts.  They led a walking tour of independent booksellers in New York City last weekend that was reportedly a big success.  I’d love to do something like that here in Atlanta, but I doubt there would be much interest in walking the miles between our remaining indies. Maybe a Marta tour of the Metro Atlanta indie book shops would be doable.  Maybe.