The Smell of Damp Flags in a Hall

Run, don’t walk, to this article from the New York Times Magazine about Franz Kafka’s literary estate. Life imitates absurdist fiction.

To summarize, Kafka probably asked his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished papers upon Kafka’s death. But nearly a century later, the papers remain very much unburned, and are worth tens of millions of dollars. An Israeli court will soon decide whether the archive rightfully belongs to a crazy cat lady with no relation at all to Franz Kafka or to an entity, the State of Israel, that did not exist during Kafka’s lifetime. Kafkaesque!

(I wish I could link to a clip from the great movie “The Squid and the Whale” where the teenage boy who’s trying to impress a girl–and who clearly hasn’t read the book–describes The Metamorphosis as “Kafkaesque.”)

The Litigant

There’s so much to love about this story, but my favorite is this exchange:

According to Brod’s biography of Kafka, the two met at a lecture Brod gave on Schopenhauer, during which Kafka objected to Brod’s characterization of Nietzsche as a fraud. Walking home together afterward, they discussed their favorite writers. Brod praised a passage from the story “Purple Death” in which Gustav Meyrink “compared butterflies to great opened-out books of magic.” Kafka, who took no stock in magic butterflies, countered with a phrase from Hugo von Hoffmansthal: “the smell of damp flags in a hall.” Having uttered these words, he fell into a profound silence that left a great impression on Brod.

That’s some mighty fine brooding right there. But really.

Boys and Reading: Part 1

Thomas Spence penned an Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal last week called How to Raise Boys Who Read that has had me both nodding in agreement and then yelling at the monitor in full disagreement.  Not bad.   If nothing else, the article made me stop and think more about the issue.

The “issue”: according to a study by the Center on Education Policy, State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08, Part 5: Are There Differences in Achievement Between Boys and Girls?, girls consistently have higher achievement than boys on standardized tests (in grades 4, 8, and 12) that measure reading proficiency.  An AP story followed that suggested that one answer to the problem is to get fart joke books in your young man’s hands – stat!  This story was picked up by seemingly every newspaper in North America and several in Europe.

The Solution?

Like me, Spence has some real doubts that books about fart jokes are how to best go about encouraging boys read.  As a former boy, I take some offense, too, at the idea that gross out books meet boys “where they are. ”  Spence’s ideas sound reasonable, too, turn off the TV (and other electronic devices) and fill the house with books.  A recent peer-reviewed study has found a strong correlation between home library size and children’s overall success in school. Spence has a more elitist attitude about the whole thing though, suggesting that the fart school of thought:

…is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals…Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter’s husband—Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?

Well, if he’s going to fit in around here, he had better have read both.  We like well rounded types that can effortlessly bridge the gap between lowbrow and highbrow.  Does it have to be one extreme or the other?  I really don’t think that anyone is suggesting a steady diet of nothing but fart books.

Urbane sophisticates eschew fart books.

I am also dubious of arguments that place blame at the feet of video games for all of society’s ills.  It’s too easy and often wrong.  Spence argues that the reading disparity “goes back to 1992″ and “the appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two.”  However, the CEP study, in my reading, doesn’t support this argument.  The gap in achievement is described in the CEP report as “historical” and the “female subgroup has consistently scored higher than the male subgroup at all grades tested (4, 8, and 12) since 1992, when the current trend lines began.”  Did the data gap trend begin in 1992 or is 1992 the year for which data are first available?  I’m thinking the latter, but I could be wrong.  Either way, video games were around and prevalent well before 1992.

The biggest issue I had with Spence’s article though comes at the very end:

I offer a final piece of evidence that is perhaps unanswerable: There is no literacy gap between home-schooled boys and girls. How many of these families, do you suppose, have thrown grossology parties?

It would perhaps be more answerable if Spence provided a source for this piece of evidence.  This finding is not included in the CEP report,  so it’s not possible to say “well, what about the half-dozen potential confounding variables that the authors forgot to consider?”,  for example.   I guess it really is unanswerable.   The judgement and sense of moral superiority packed into that paragraph are truly something to behold.

Take the time to read the actual CEP study, it’s worth the time if you are interested in the topic.  Tune in next week for a closer look at what the study actually says…and doesn’t say.

J’adore Paris

A few years ago I discovered Ruth Reichl, former New York Times Food Critic, and three of her books:   Comfort me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table and Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, all three of which masterfully combine funny real-life anecdotes with amazing recipes.  I recently found a similar book to add to my collection:  The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz.

Pastry chef Mr. Lebovitz left everything behind in San Francisco to start fresh in the city of many, many people’s dreams:  Paris.   He tells humorous stories of his adventures as his life unfolds in the City of Lights.  At times I laughed out loud.  Because I lived in Paris for a glorious spell in the 80′s, his experiences brought back memories for me.  Some things never change though, the French can upgrade their toilet paper but they are still French.

One afternoon while sitting around in his sweats and a t-shirt, with uncombed hair, Mr. Lebovitz has an epiphany about his attitude in his new home of Paris.  The trash needs to be emptied.   The elevator is three steps from his front door and the trash bin is exactly five steps from the elevator in the basement.  In America, people go shopping in their pajamas so who would care about what to wear to take out the trash?  This American realizes he cares.

“I extracted myself from the sofa, shaved, changed into a pair of real pants, tucked in a clean wrinkle-free shirt and slipped on a pair of shoes and socks before heading toward the door with my little plastic sac for the poubelle.  God forbid I should run into someone from my building while wearing my Sunday worst.  And that, mes amis, was when I realized I had become Parisian.”

The French can be hard to get to know. Not famous for being overly friendly, if you are determined you can find a way to get past that stoic exterior.  Mr. Lebovitz spent five years shopping at the same store with the same clerk before he managed to earn a smile from her - of course his brownies helped.

Learning your way around a new city can always be a challenge, being in a different country where the language is new could also cause frustration.  Mr. Libovitz attacks his challenges with humor and never forgets that he chose to live there.  After five years he sums it up:

“Parisians have a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes kindness seems to be a priceless commodity, doled out parsimoniously to the lucky few. Yet I’ve managed to survive any wrath I’ve invoked with my special brand of American optimism (and brownies).  I’m also grateful that I’m probably treated better than someone who moved to America would be, not speaking a word of the native language, trying to get by in a foreign land.”

Personally, I’m not a great dessert chef, but Mr. Lebovitz’s recipes appear simple to make, yet elegant. I can’t wait to try many of them (especially the chocolate cake).

Mr. Libovitz has a casual writing style that is easy to read and lucky for me he throws in plenty of French words.  He has a fun blog where you can check him out daily www.davidlebovitz.com.

I would definitely recommend you pick up The Sweet Life in Paris, tout de suite, if you appreciate the French, like to laugh and enjoy desserts.

Banned Books Week

It’s Banned Books Week.

Please govern yourself accordingly.

Friday Links

Next week is Banned Books Week.  The New York Times suggest 10 ways to celebrate.

Smarty Smartsalot over at the MIT technology blog says that the claims of the death of the book have been greatly exaggerated.  And bring the X-Y axis into play.  Oh no they didn’t!

Valentino Achal Deng reports on his school in Murial Bai, Sudan at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York.

Friend of the blog Ben Tanzer is featured in Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes.  We promise to write about his book 99 Problems about the running/writing interface soon…

Zadie Smith joins Harper’s as a book reviewer. That hardly seems fair.

The greatest book publicty stunt of the year or of all time?  Discuss.

Whatever happened to Google Editions, the planned open source “last library”?

Have you seen the video of the bus driver reading his Kindle while driving the bus? On the interstate.

This future of the book concept video is interesting.  Although – I can’t imagine anything more depressing than a work place reading group as shown in the “Coupland” scenario.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

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Books as healthy lifestyle choice

I saw this ad for a wellness campaign on the side of a bus this morning:

If you can’t make out what’s happening at this poor resolution, “thrive” is spelled out in opened and stacked books and the the accompanying text says, “because there’s nothing good on tv.”  Nice.

Elliot Allagash

I followed up the epic high school tale Skippy Dies (review) with a more comic take on similar terrain, Simon Rich’s Elliot Allagash.   Rich was the youngest writer ever hired to write for Saturday Night Live, his current “day job.”  It seemed a good bet that Rich’s take on the high school experience would be entertaining.  It is definitely shorter.  I’m also to report that there are (*spoiler alert*) no student deaths in Elliot Allagash.

Seymour Herson (aka Chunk-Style) is the least popular student at Glendale, a private Manhattan high school.  He eats alone and aside from the taunting, no one seems to care either way whether Seymour is alive.   He is befriended by the mysterious new kid, the titular Elliot Allagash.  Elliot is preternaturally brilliant and bored senseless by high school. Elliot’s  father has donated so much money to Glendale, that it is completely impossible to  be thrown out.  For his own amusement, Elliot sets out to completely undermine the natural order of high school life and to make Seymour the most popular kid in the school in the process.

Through ever more elaborate schemes, Elliot taps into the high school mindset to make Seymour appear much cooler than he is.  Rich brilliantly exploits the teen inch-deep concept of cool – if it looks cool, and we all understand it to be cool – it must be cool.  Through more direct means, Elliot also delivers a seemingly model student to the teachers and administrators of Glendale.  It is telling that the school staff seem as little interested in scratching beneath Seymour’s glossy exterior than his fellow students do.

Through the shenanigans of Elliot & Seymour, Rich highlights just how unfair high school life (and just plain old “life”) can be.  Appearances usually count more than substance.  Individual merit will only take you so far.  The fabulously wealthy make and follow their own rules.  The regular guy has the deck stacked against him from the beginning.  The question, of course, is whether Seymour will learn anything from his experience with Elliot and stand on his own.  You probably know the answer to that question, but getting there is half the fun.

Rich’s novel has blurbs from both Judd Apatow and Gary Shteyngart on the back cover.  This cross-pollination of the literary and the cinematic sent me to IMDb to see if a movie version of Elliot Allagash on the horizon.  Sure enough – “2012″ and “in development.”  And wait, what’s this?  Skippy Dies is also set 2012 and in development.  These two novels will meet again.  One will win an Oscar and one will be the comedy hit of the summer.  You can sort out which is which.

Check out the trailer:

WSJ Book Review

The Wall street Journal will soon be rolling out a stand alone book review as part of an expansion of its weekend editions.  What the section will look like is anyone’s guess.  Gawker wonders if it makes any sense, but seems mostly positive about the prospects.  Media Matters, however, raises several concerns for consideration.   The article reminds us that News Corp, the WSJ’s parent company, also owns one of the largest publishing companies in the world, HarperCollins.  That seems like it could be a pretty big conflict, no?   The article also reports that the new book section will be under the direction of the editorial page editor, rather than a features editor, as is apparently the case at most papers.  The implication appears to be that the reviews will not be under the “journalism” side of the house, which has more stringent ethical safeguards.  I could be wrong.  Check out the article for a fascinating behind the scenes consideration of what is the biggest news to come to print book reviews in a long time.

My biggest concern:  Will the Journal let us read the book reviews?  The Wall Street Journal likes to keep some of their content behind their pay wall.  Especially their editorial content.  (See what might have been an amusing story about the future of books cast as a sequel to You’ve Got Mail for an example of how annoying this is.  I had to read about what that editorial actually said over here.)   Will we be able to link directly to the great reviews and thought provoking bookish content that the WSJ may serve up?  Stay tuned.

An update:  Also worth considering – Jonathan Franzen, responding to a question from an audience member at the Atlanta reading for Freedom, mentioned that he preferred to read articles/reviews/news from people who were paid to get their facts straight and could possibly lose their job if they don’t (paraphrasing).  Which is another way of saying, the book review world is going to be better with a Wall Street Journal book review section than without it.

Bel Canto

Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett, came highly recommended to me by a very literate friend of mine while we had lunch one day.  The story takes place in an unnamed South American country, and begins during a birthday party being thrown at the Vice-Presidential mansion for the president of a Japanese electronics firm that the country’s government is trying to woo into building a plant there.  Lots of important people are there from all over the world, including a world-famous opera singer specifically flown in to entertain the Japanese businessman, who is a huge opera fan.

Well, the wheels come off when a group of terrorists break in through the home’s ventilation ducts and take the entire group hostage.  Sort of like when the cops raid a Fraternity party, except kind of worse.  And when it turns out that the terrorists had only come to the party to kidnap the country’s President — who wasn’t there because he decided to stay home to watch his favorite prime time soap opera — even the terrorists’ plans go awry.

It’s an interesting concept of a novel, which examines the dynamics between the terrorists, the hostages, and the outside world, and which takes place entirely during the several months that the Vice-Presidential mansion is in lockdown by the terrorists.  I wasn’t crazy about the book, but I can’t deny that it was pretty well-written, and that over the course of reading the story I witnessed and could appreciate the development of many of the characters, particularly Gen, the Japanese businessman’s translator, who became the primary liaison between the various parties, most of whom spoke different languages.

My biggest issue with the book was the ending.  I won’t say what it was, but it was another one of those endings which, no matter how closely you paid attention during the book, you wouldn’t have predicted, because none of the underpinnings of the ending had been set down.  It was kind of a bait-and-switch, but not the kind that I like.  I’m a fan of a good twist, but only if you can look back and realize in hindsight that it could have happened based on what had transpired to that point; the denouement here was completely out of the blue.

Friday Links

A totally not safe for work (salty language) Dostoyevsky-dissin’ trailer for an indie story collection that looks fun.  You know, if the trailer is any indication:

Atlanta’s roadside bandit haiku sign guy gets write ups in The Guardian and The New Yorker. The AJC?  Not so much. Check out the video.

Oprah supposedly picks JFranz for her next book club read.  But it hasn’t actually happened yet (as of this posting).

Read author Paul Murray’s (Skippy Dies) fictional back to school “op-ed” in the New York Times.  Read it now.

Flavorwire lists America’s top 10 indie record stores, which includes our very own Criminal Records.

Henry Owings of Chunklet magazine has turned to Kickstarter for help in getting his new book off the ground.  Check out the hilarious pitch video.

826 has set up shop in Los Angeles as the Echo Park Time Travel Mart.  Now I have to go to LA.

The long-feared iPod-ization of literature is happening.  Chuck Klosterman’s essays are available electronically for ninety-nine cents each.  I thought the iPod-ocalypse would look worse than this.

The greatest desk in the history of the world.

You can see William Gibson discuss his new book here or you can see him in person at SCAD-Atlanta on Monday Night.

Stephen Fry?  There’s an app for that.

Can you guess who wrote what is being billed as the most expensive book in the world?  It’s expected to pull in up to $9.2 Million.  It might take you that many years to guess.

Skippy Dies

I  feel sorry for Paul Murray.  His new novel Skippy Dies was released on the same day as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. You might have heard plenty about one of those books over the past few weeks.  Though included in the Booker Prize long list,  Murray’s novel did not make the Booker short list announced just last week – a week after the book came out in the US.  It was such a scandal in Murray’s native Ireland that the front page of the Irish Times decried it a “Booker Blunder.” (It is the only Booker nominated book that I’ve read, so I was really pulling for it.)

Skippy has begun to generate some buzz on this side of the Atlantic though.  The Washington Post says, “It’s the ‘Moby-Dick’ of Irish prep schools.”  That’s a nod to its length, which the NYT defends noting that novels “as smart and funny and touching as “Skippy Dies” — can be just as long as they like.”  Bookslut’s Michael Schaub also recently sang the novel’s praises on NPR. Check out the author’s photo in the story, he looks like he’s 14.  I though it was a picture of Skippy. Anyway…

Skippy Dies is actually quite a funny novel considering that we know that Daniel “Skippy” Juster, a 14-year old student at Seabrook College, does in fact die.  Not a spoiler.  It’s right there on the cover, and Skippy dies in the first few pages of the prologue.  What then, is there left to learn?  Plenty, it turns out.  Chapter 1 takes us back to the beginning when Skippy is very much alive.

Skippy is a smart kid, described as a “bit of a dreamer”, who boards at the school.  He generally tries to stay out of trouble, but trouble seems to find him.  His roommate, Ruprecht, is an overweight science nerd with poor hygiene and worse social skills.  Their cronies include an Italian student, a pair of hip hop wannabes, and others who seem to attract negative attention from older and bigger kids.

The student atmosphere is often raucous and profane – like 14 year old boys.  As a graduate of an all boys Catholic high school, I will vouch for the authentic voice of the students that Murray masterfully captures.  The dangers of adolescent life surround them – psycho bullies, unsavory drug dealers, adults who don’t have their best interests at heart, the baffling mystery of teenage girls – it’s a daily minefield out there. Despite assurances from grown-ups, 14-year old boys seldom have illusions that violence isn’t often the answer to many of life’s problems:

Violence solves everything, you idiot, look at the history of the world. Any situation they have, they dick around with it for a while, then they bring in violence. That’s the whole reason they have scientists, to make violence more violent.

Seabrook College is the oldest Catholic boy’s secondary school in Ireland.  Its graduates are among the country’s elite business leaders and alumni money flows freely to the school.  The interim principal, nicknamed “the Automator”, clearly sees the fiscal possibilities.  The Automator  is actively and not so discreetly looking forward to forcing the priests that have run the school for over a hundred years into the periphery.  With the priests sidelined to more spiritual matters, the Automator envisions himself and other business types being better able to leverage the school’s “brand.”

The teachers at Seabrook are  like teachers everywhere.  They are generally well intentioned, but many are worn out and marking time to retirement.  The teacher at Seabrook’s that readers get to know best is a “kidult,”  a grown-up who has never quite taken to the adult world.  Howard “the Coward” Fallon had his own Seabrook trauma to overcome and has failed at his first career, fiance.  He’s been taken back into the Seabrook fold to teach history.  His classes stutter hilariously at first, until Howard is motivated by the hot new geography teacher to get his boys interested in actually learning history.

What Skippy Dies does better than any book that I can think of is explore the hell that is adolescence from the male perspective. One moment, you’re king of the world, but video games, lighting farts and other social currency of male youth are suddenly worthless when girls arrive on the scene.  Bigger kids suddenly want to pummel you for no apparent reason. But that’s just the beginning of the rude awakening that awaits teenagers everywhere:

Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg — that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride that you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY store to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of ‘life.’  Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors — GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE — keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn’t necessarily need to be closed…

Skippy’s death is in many ways symbolic of the death of childhood that the teen years bring to an abrupt and often cruel end.   The final third of the novel deals with the impact of Skippy’s death on the school community.  The reasons for Skippy’s death are slowly revealed, and the answers are suddenly not as clear cut as may have first appeared.

This is a fantastic novel.  It may be the best book I’ve read all year.  It’s smart and funny, sad and haunting – throughout it all, Murray somehow consistently hits all the right notes.  I loved it, but then this novel may appeal to me in ways that it doesn’t to others.  I went to an ancient Catholic boys high school, and I was a teenage boy.  Will this novel appeal to, say, women who went to public school?   My guess is that women and teenage girls may not find as much to identify with here as I did. Virtually all women are portrayed badly, be they dowager teachers, hot teachers, conniving teen girls, mothers – almost all come up short.  I’d be interested to hear what female readers think of the book. For me though, this novel is going straight to the top of my best books of 2010 list.

Audio Bonus: The song that kept coming through my head while reading Skippy Dies was The Smiths The Headmaster Ritual, even though the song is about Manchester schools. Morrissey’s whine, “I want to go home/I don’t want to stay/write off education/as a bad mistake,” could have been written by Skippy.

The Smiths The Headmaster Ritual

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Godzilla’s tantrums explained

(from Medium Large)

Serendipity

It appears that I have a name (or at least an e-mail address) that is similar to that of a professor of educational linguitics at an as yet unnamed university.  I suspect that this is the case because my inbox has been filling up this morning with his students essays.  The assigned book that the students have written about is Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter.  Based on the handful of reviews/commentary that I received so far, Bastard Tongue appears to a fascinating read.  At the very least, I now understand why my friend’s Irish wife frequently refers to “yer man.”  From a student’s essay:

…McWhorter discusses how “you” replaces the masculine pronoun common in Old English. In modern Irish dialect a common phrase instead of a simple “you” is “Yer man” or in the sentence described: “Yer man has to be careful with these big corporations.”

Although she also uses it in a different sense.  For instance, in a conversation about Sesame Street she asked, “Who’s yer man in the can?”  I may need to check this one out.

And for those of you who may be concerned, I have let the students know that they need to recheck their professor’s e-mail address.

Friday Links

Just when you think that the mash-ups have reached their logical limits, someone moves the line:

The Wall Street Journal is launching a weekend book section.  Interesting.

The Guardian writes about social commentary showing up in haiku form on Atlanta streets.  I’ve spotted this one and this one.  This one is pretty great:

Wired has an excerpt of the new William Gibson novel Zero History.

Read an excerpt of Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic.  The book cover has a blurb from Dara Horn and Skibell is a professor at Emory.  How can we pass this one up?

Who buys books? Interesting report on market research including this: “Thirty two percent of the books purchased in 2009 were from households earning less than $32,000 annually. A fifth of those sales were for children’s books.”

Fake Mahmoud Ahmadinejad weighs in on the Koran burning kerfuffle on Twitter.  Oh, snap!

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

On paper, Rob Sheffield’s new book Talking with Girls About Duran Duran is right up my alley.  I loved Sheffield’s first book, Love is a Mix Tape, which is a powerful look at personal tragedy and the healing power of music.  (See my review, the BGB Interview with Sheffield, and a recap of Sheffield’s appearance at the first edition of the BGB Reading Series.)  Sheffield is a year older than me, so we grew up listening to the same music.  It seemed a near certainty that I would love this latest effort.  So I’m left wondering where it all went wrong for me.

Each chapter is titled after an 80′s song.  Sheffield uses the song as a loose jumping off point to tell a story from his life. Sometimes the song is a focal point of the piece, other times the connection is tenuous.  For example, the chapter Bonnie Tyler, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” features a girl with Bonnie Tyler hair and no mention of the song at all.  The results of this approach are mixed.  After mulling it over for some time, here’s what I think my personal issues are with the book:

1. I may be too close to the time period in question to accept some of Sheffield’s assertions at face value.  For example, R.E.M. is a “girl’s band.”  Maybe in Massachusetts, where Sheffield grew up, but in the south R.E.M. were the cornerstone of any self-respecting male music lover’s existence.  They gave us hope that southerners, as a group, could be seen as cool.  I’m truly baffled by this declaration.  Another one: no one remembers anything about 1985.  Because of Rambo.  Really?  How about: we all have a favorite Hall and Oates song.  No.  We don’t actually.  I hated those guys from the get go.  See what I mean?
2. Most of the stories, while interesting enough, lack the emotional punch of Love is a Mix Tape.  Granted, that book was tied to a specific life-changing event, but a chapter about Sheffield’s summer as an ice cream man seems hollow in comparison.  OK. I suppose there’s not much that he could do about that one.
3. While all of the the chapters are tied to 80′s songs, Sheffield doesn’t seem to actually like much of the music from the decade.  This is almost certainly a misreading on my part.  Yet, I was dismayed that he often resorted to  focusing on the cheese factor and knowing ironic winks.  I love the music of the 80′s, maybe not all of these particular 80′s songs…but still.  Maybe my real problem is that I wanted Sheffield’s memories and touchstones to more closely mirror my own.   I’m pretty sure that’s not a  fair criticism.

I’m afraid that this review is coming off as a hatchet job.  It’s really not.  My expectations for the book were obviously way out of line to begin with. There is much to enjoy in the book.  I particularly wish that I had Sheffield’s line “I liked both kinds of music, Echo and the Bunnymen” at the ready when my college roommate asked me what kind of music I liked our first day of freshman year in 1985 (the year no one remembers).  Sheffield also does a great job of mixing high and low culture, dropping Diff’rent Strokes references as easily as nods to Gatsby and Odysseus.  If you’ve got a strong personal connection and ironclad opinions to 80′s music though, you may want to temper your expectations.  If someone had given me a heads up before reading this, I may have come away with a completely different perspective. Govern yourself accordingly.

Audio Bonus: After writing this review, I was feeling pretty crummy about dissing a book that is not bad.  Can you tell I’m horribly conflicted?  So I went out and set up a “radio station” that includes the inspiration for all of the chapter titles (except the one about Haysi Fantayzee, which I couldn’t find and may be just as well if you’ve ever heard them) and some others songs and bands that get mentions in the book.  Take a trip down memory lane here.  It’s collaborative.  So feel free to add any songs that I missed or your own 80′s favorites.

It would also be fair to share the video for Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes, which blew Sheffield’s young mind as much as it did my own back in the day.  It predated “videos” by years and has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art.  But the geniuses at EMI won’t let us share.  So check it out here.

Award Season

While we were busy processing the DBF,  award announcements have been rolling in this shortened week.

The Hugo Award (Science Fiction) winners were announced.  The best novel award was an unheard of tie between China Miéville’s The City and The City and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.  Even rarer still, I managed to read both of these fantastic novels.  (Check out my reviews for The City and the City and The Windup Girl.) I enthusiastically recommend both.

Bringing me back to reality – the Booker prize shortlist has been announced, and I have read none of the finalists. The chosen few:

• Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
• Emma Donoghue, Room
• Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (not out yet in US)
• Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (not out yet in US – available on Kindle though.  Boo!)
• Andrea Levy, The Long Song
• Tom McCarthy, C (Published yesterday in the US)

I love the UK cover for Parrot and Olivier in America. Want. (UK on the left, US on the right)

When Homophones Attack

Each Tuesday is Taco Day at my place of employment.  Each week for years I’ve walked past this sign.  Some Tuesdays I laugh.  Most Tuesdays I sigh.

This Tuesday I will be processing the sensory overload that was the Decatur Book Festival over my tacos.  For a nice recap (like the one I hope to pen someday), check out the excellent work at the Publisher’s Weekly blog.

DBF Kids Tent

No matter what else happens at the Decatur Book Fest the kids tent is always hopping.  Here Liz Kessler entertains the masses:

Bookie Monster

At the Decatur Book Festival: Tell the Bookie Monster what you’re reading kids.

Ignatius at the DBF

I can’t believe that I saved this one for last – I’ve been talking about it the longest.  On Saturday, Tom Key, author of The Theatrical Outfit’s wonderful stage adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces (buy tickets here), will be leading a panel discussion called Under the Influences of Dunces (How the Confederacy of Dunces Affected Writing).  The panel discussion will be followed by a session called Adpating The Dunces.  Tom Key, Director Richard Garner, and the Atlanta cast of Dunces will discuss the process of adapting the novel for the stage.  The discussion will include performances of selected scenes by the cast.  Don’t miss this one.

Aaron Munoz is Ignatius