Remember the Huckleberry Finn bowdlerizing kerfuffle? Remember the folks who planned to release a “robotic edition” that replaced every occurence of “N-Word Jim” with “Robot Jim”? (Not to be confused with the “Patriot Edition”, which aimed to replace the offending word with “Navy Seal”. ) The book is out and it even has a fresh new book trailer. Check it out:
Books, Comedy | Tim | 
November 30, 2011 8:49 am | 
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I’ll admit that I haven’t been keeping up with The Simpsons as much as I once had. I made a point to tune in Last Sunday night to see author Neil Gaiman and laughed non-stop. It was easily one of the best episodes. Ever. The episode hilariously spoofs Ocean’s 11 and blows the lid off the kid lit scene. It is comedy gold. Blow off your Cyber Monday shopping plans and watch the whole episode now:
The episode has lots of great visual gags. There is a blink-and-you-miss-it salute to a Far Side Cartoon (The Real Reason Dinosaurs Went Extinct) and plenty of great gags at the Springfield Book festival. I also had to pause and rewind the show to be sure to catch the titles of Homer’s sister-in-law’s fantasy-laden bookshelf, which includes both Lev Grossman’s The Magician King and Maile Meloy’s The Apothecary.
Books, Comedy, On Screen | Tim | November 28, 2011 9:23 am | Comments (1)
The New York Times posted their 100 Notable Books of 2011 this week. I’m a fan of the accompanying graphic.
For some reason, I’ve allowed the NYT Notable 100 to be my annual yardstick to measure my year’s reading against. As I’ve noted in previous years, the list has become:
…a touchstone of sorts for this blog, since the annual notable books list is semi-responsible for our beginnings. After reading the 2004 list, I was surprised at how few of the books on the list I had ever heard of. I e-mailed the list to a few friends that were also avid readers with similar results. We collectively resolved to start paying better attention to printed reviews, to this new-fangled blogosphere that the kids were all talking about back then, and to the recommendations of our local independent booksellers. Two months later, the idea had somehow morphed into this blog, which will soon begin its [eighth!] year.
It’s generally an annual recipe for heartbreak. This year I’ve read eight of the fiction titles and zero of the non-fiction titles with a couple more sitting in the to read stack. Next year!
Books | Tim | November 23, 2011 8:42 am | Comments (1)
Oh, stop pretending that you won’t have an e-reader by the end of the year. The only question anymore is – which one will you buy? If you have been taking a look at the Kindle Fire, check out this device tour by Friend of the Blog and Atlanta author, Collin Kelley:
Update: Video has been updated to actually work. Hooray!
Books | Tim | November 21, 2011 9:06 am | Comments (0)
Hokey smokes. I saw this trailer for Being Flynn and I am really bummed that I haven’t yet the book it’s based on, Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. I guess Hollywood couldn’t go with that title. It stars Robert DeNiro, Juliann Moore, and that kid from Little Miss Sunshine. No. The other one. The dude that flipped out when he found out he was color blind. Looks fantastic. Add it to my reading stack, please.
On Wednesday night, the winners of this year’s National Book Awards were announced. I’ve read only two of the nominees and zero of the winners.
Has anyone borrowed a library book on their Kindle yet? I’ve tried it, but all the good books (i.e., the ones that I want to read) are “on hold.” What’s up with that? Shouldn’t digitization take care of the limited supply problem? Based on this borrowers experience related at Librarian.net, I may hold off entirely.
In the latest Annals of Facebook Faux Pas: Facebook decided to delete Salman Rushdie’s Facebook page because Salman isn’t his real first name. Even though only Salman and his mother were aware of that. After a brief skirmish, Ahmet Rushdie was allowed to use the name he prefers.
A worthy cause: Share e-books with our troops.
Keith Richards has won the Mailer Prize for outstanding biography. Crap. Add it to the reading stack.
Author Ann Patchett’s new bookstore is open for business in Nashville.
The website that dares to ask, “what if Cormac McCarthy wrote reviews on Yelp?”
Seven bar jokes involving grammar and punctuation
The Today Show lists five massive books you should finish. Only five?
Books | Tim | November 18, 2011 8:15 am | Comments (1)
Books, Comedy | Tim | November 17, 2011 8:12 am | Comments (1)
A confession: I was pretty sure that I did not want to read The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta. At all. The subject matter as I understood it, a story of what happens after the Rapture-like event comes to pass, didn’t seem like my thing. As luck would have it, Tom Perrotta was a featured author at the Decatur Book Festival. I went to see him read from the novel, and the next thing I knew I was getting my own copy of the book signed by the author. Signed copy in hand, it seemed that actually reading the novel would be the next logical thing to do.
I suppose what I thought the book was going to be was a wink-wink style satire of the Rapture and the people who believe that such a thing is imminent – something mean-spirited. Perrorra signals the reader that this is not where the novel is going right upfront – on Page 2 of the prologue actually – when a character reflects on what she thought of the Rapture – before:
It felt like religious kitsch, as tacky as a black velvet painting, the kind of fantasy that appealed to people who ate too much fried food, spanked their kids, and had no problem with the theory that their loving God invented AIDS to punish the gays. Every once in a while…she’d spot someone reading one of the Left Behind books in an airport or on a train, and feel a twinge of pity, and even a little bit of tenderness, for the poor sucker who had nothing better to read, and nothing else to do, except sit around dreaming about the end of the world. And then it happened. The biblical prophecy came true…
There is some disagreement over whether the baffling disappearance of millions of people from the face of the earth (and millions left behind) is truly a Rapture-like religious reckoning or something else entirely. It quickly comes to be referred to as the ”Sudden Departure” on the 24-hour news channels.
The novel focuses on how the aftermath plays out in a middle-sized town. The titular “leftovers” are stunned both by overwhelming grief for the loved ones who suddenly disappeared from their lives and the existential angst of what it means that they weren’t among those taken. It’s a fascinating premise. Naturally, many people choose to abruptly live their lives in a different way. Some see no point in living as they had been, and they frequently resort to extreme or bizarre worldviews to hammer out some sense of the inexplicable. Others try to continue on with a normal life despite the fundamental shift in the world around them.
Perrotta, to his credit, treats all of this very seriously. The novel is never cartoonish, and it’s interesting to see where he leads. This is a thought-provoking novel and a good read. I’m glad that I stumbled across Perrotta at the Decatur Book Fest, or I would have clung to my very wrong preconceptions on what this novel is all about. I recommend checking it out
Post Script: As I was finishing The Leftovers, a copy of the audiobook version arrived in the BGB mailbox. I handed it off to Anne, the BGB reviewer who uses audiobooks to keep from harming fellow Atlantans in traffic. I’m looking forward to hearing what she thinks about it. It’s that kind of book.
Books, Fiction, Review | Tim | November 16, 2011 8:27 am | Comments (1)
In case you missed it, the first trailer for The Hunger Games movie was released yesterday morning.
I recently read the trilogy to see what the hub-bub was all about. I’ll have a review sooner or later, but the short version is – I thought the series was excellent. Unlike some, my world would not have ended if the movie didn’t get it exactly right. Based on what’s shown here, it looks like the filmmakers nailed it. This is good news. I’ll be seeing this on the big screen with a few million teenagers.
Books, On Screen | Tim | November 15, 2011 8:03 am | Comments (1)
I get that there are challenges to being an armchair historian. Writing a “popular” history of a famous President can be a daunting task. There are so many facts to keep up with. I’m generally inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to writers who stumble over a fact or two – unless that “author” makes a career out of calling people pinheads on national television. This is why it brings a smile to my face to learn that Bill O’Reilly’s new book on the assassination of President Lincoln will not be carried by the Ford’s Theatre historical site’s bookstore due to too many historical errors.
And in related news, 100,000 DVDs of Part 1 of the recent film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged are being recalled for, as the article notes, totally “hilarious reason.” Some clown in marketing added the following copy to the cover of the recalled discs: “”AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…“ Hilarity! Everyone knows that helping others at your own expense is for chumps. I bet they had a good laugh over that one…
Books, Comedy | Tim | November 14, 2011 10:19 am | Comments (0)
Friend of the blog Ben Tanzer is interviewed by his son Miles. They discuss Ben’s new book My Father’s House, which is a novella about a son’s experience with his father’s death. The interview is poignant, sad, life-affirming and generally awesome. You can read my completely biased and glowing review of the book here.
Books | Tim | November 10, 2011 10:24 am | Comments (1)
Yesterday Amazon announced its picks for the Top 100 books of 2011. My first reaction was – TOO SOON! I’m not ready fro 2011 to be a fait accompli. Then I calmed down and checked it out. I was happy to see some of my favorites of the year on the list, and it highlighted some titles that I’d like to add to my reading list. Most of all it reaffirmed my need to read The Art of Fielding – Amazon’s #1 book of 2011 – sooner rather than later.
Books | Tim | November 9, 2011 10:06 am | Comments (1)
George Pelecanos. I’ve been meaning to read some of his work for years after watching so much of it on television. Treme. The Wire. He’s one of the kings of television as novel. So it would follow that he would be pretty good as the author of a novel as a novel. Right? I didn’t know where to start. The author appeared this year at the Decatur Book Festival to talk about his new novel The Cut and crime writing in general. It was excellent. The Cut is the first in a planned series and Treme is between seasons, so it seemed like the perfect time to get on board.
The Cut “stars” Spero Lucas, a returned combat Marine back from serving in Iraq. He’s a detail guy and has found a niche working for a defense attorney as an investigator. He can handle himself and is detail oriented. His work on a particular case leads to Spero’s involvement with a criminal who hires him to recover some stolen property. He works on the case for a cut of the action. Spero slowly but surely wades into the darker side of the shades of gray concerning legality around the job.
Throughout the novel, the issues of race and class in its relation to crime in DC are at the forefront. Spero is from a mixed-race family adopted by Greek parents. This background and his habit of dressing in blue collar work clothes while on the job help Spero to blend in with his surroundings in almost any situation. Add in a love for food from the corner diner to DC’s best restaurants and the reader is given a virtual all-access pass to the nation’s capitol.
Pelecanos has said that he wants readers to find in his books an “accurate, almost journalistic accounts of the life of the city [DC].” I have a friend who is a hotshot newspaper editor. His theory is that any book over 300 pages is in need of an editor. Pelecanos is clearly working from the same journalist’s viewpoint. The Cut is 292 pages, and there is little extraneous detail. Whenever someone walks into a room or place, there is a quick description of the location and personal appearances and then back to the action. The dialogue sometimes comes across as stilted as a result, but it too quickly moves on. No harm/no foul.
I’m not sure how representative The Cut is of Pelecanos’s body of written work, but it was certainly a well-crafted, tight little novel. It’s maybe not as good as the best episodes of Treme or The Wire, but it holds its own. I’ll be checking out more Pelecanos in the future.
Books, Fiction, Review | Tim | November 8, 2011 10:15 am | Comments (0)
A trailer has been released for the big screen version on The Lorax. Danny DeVito will play the job-killing Lorax. It appears that they’ve taken some liberties with the story:
World Book Night is coming to the US!
Lev Grossman reviews the new Stephen King book – the one about the time machine and the Kennedy assassination – in Time magazine. He likes it.
Thanks to Neiman Marcus, this hideous library could be yours for only $125K! Awesome!
Wait! Thanks to Anthropologie, this shelf with six books can be yours for only $2,175. What recession?
And then…THEN…there is this huge book of guitar photography called The Guitar Collection Book. It comes in its own custom guitar case. Only $3000.
Amazon to this guy: “Sorry we accidentally gave away 5,104 copies of your e-book. No, we’re not going to pay you for our mistake.”
WIRED says these are the greatest geek book of ALL TIME.
The Hunger Games parody book trailer that you ordered is now available for viewing.
Anne Rice says her vampires feel sorry for the kind that sparkle in the sun.
Books | Tim | November 4, 2011 8:10 am | Comments (0)
My sleeper hit for 2011 is the amazing Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion by Johan Harstad. I stumbled across this novel while browsing in Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store. It was highlighted as a staff pick. I had never heard of the novel before, and it’s put out by a press that I had never heard of before either (Seven Stories Press). It is translated from Norwegian by Deborah Dawkins. It has a wonderfully odd title, and it opens with the memorable line “The person you love is 72.8% water, and it hasn’t rained for weeks.” A book on my shopping list was immediately bumped and Buzz Aldrin leaped to the top of my reading stack.
Buzz Aldrin figures into this novel due to his stature as the second man to walk on the moon. Our anti-hero Mattias was born in Norway during the moon landing, with dad in the delivery room straining to hear the details on the radio out in hall. He grows up obsessed with space travel and Aldrin in particular. What’s unique about Mattias is that he doesn’t want to stand out in any way. He wants to be invisible to the world but useful. He describes it as wanting to be a cog in a machine – a cog in an important, contributing machine – that is never noticed. Buzz Aldrin, the man completely overshadowed by Neil Armstrong, is his perfect role model in this regard. Buzz Aldrin’s later problems in life also serve as a nice mirror for what lies ahead for Mattias’s own life.
Mattias’s approach to life seems to work pretty well until he loses his girlfriend of several years due in part to his need to be invisible. Mattias comes unmoored when he loses his job at a gardening center shortly thereafter. A trip to the Faroe Islands to lend support for a friend’s band goes seemingly very wrong when he finds himself face down in the middle of the street with no idea what has happened since the ferry ride over.
The silver lining to this misadventure is that Mattias is found by a psychiatrist who runs “a post-psychiatric” facility in the bucolic town of Gjógv. In an isolated corner of one of the world’s most isolated countries Mattias may have found the ideal spot to disappear from the world while being a small cog in small machine. When Mattias learns that the Apollo 11 astronauts once visited the islands in preparation for their moon landing, it seems that he may well have found his true home. Life is rarely that simple, however.
One of the many things that I loved about this novel is that I was completely unfamiliar with the people and places where the novel takes place. I frequently pulled up Google Earth to check out the Faroe Islands locations being discussed. If I ever found myself in need of a post-psychiatric facility to regroup, I think I would like it to be in Gjógv. I’m sure that I’d like to find myself there some day regardless. Check out these pictures so see what I mean. Gorgeous.
One of the characters has “an episode” after viewing a painting at the National Gallery in Tórshavn. The painting, by artist Sámal Joensen-Mikines, is called ”Hjem fra begravelse” (Home from the funeral). This is it:
It apparently takes most of a wall in the gallery. Well no wonder she had an episode.
Another fun thing about the novel were frequent mentions of the Swedish band The Cardigans. I’ve been a fan of the band for years, and it was cool to realize that the perfectly apt section titles were taken from the band’s albums. That the same four titles also feature prominently in the story is a nifty trick.
This is an amazing first novel that rarely takes you where you think it is going to go. It’s an inventive narrative that repeatedly surprises the reader. I will read anything by Johan Harstad that is translated into English. I loved it. Check it out. And I should mention again: I never would have found this book were it not for the efforts of the Tattered Cover staff to get it noticed. So hooray for independent booksellers!
Audio Bonus: Since The Cardigans are featured prominently in the novel, it seems fitting to add some of their music here as a mini-soundtrack to the novel:
The Cardigans – My Favourite Game
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The Cardigans – Erase and Rewind
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Books, Fiction, Review | Tim | November 3, 2011 7:40 am | Comments (7)
The Daily Beast ran a list recently called 15 Signs You’ll Raise a Genius. The web page is less sensationally and perhaps better titled, Smarter Kids and How They Got That Way. What’s noteworthy about this list is that it is one of the few articles that I’ve read anywhere that provides links to the primary research (peer-reviewed journal articles) that support the author’s claims. So hats off for that. We need more of it. It’s an interesting collection of what are mostly correlations, i.e. kids who are smart are more likely to have x or kids who did y scored higher on the SAT, etc. Correlation is not necessarily the same as causation. For instance, the music lessons could be the cause of higher test scores or a confounding variable like the relative affluence to afford music lessons and all that comes with it may be the actual cause. So interpret the results as you will. That said, I was particularly interested in item #5 in the list – books in the home:
A child who is raised in a home containing at least 500 books is 36 percent more likely to graduate from high school and 19 percent more likely to graduate from college than an otherwise similar child raised in a home containing few or no books.
The finding is taken from the article Family Scholarly Culture and Educational Success: Books and Schooling in 27 Nations by Evans, et al. published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. The authors of the study used the number of books in a home as a quantifiable measure of “scholarly culture” in the home. The paper says,
The scholarly culture hypothesis holds that reading provides cognitive skills that enhance educational attainment, a cultural toolkit. A home in which books are an integral part of the way of life will encourage children to read for pleasure, thereby providing them with information, vocabulary, imaginative richness, and wide horizons…For example, the larger the home library, the better children perform on standardized reading tests, net of parents’ education, across a broad range of countries…Because it generates skills and knowledge central to schooling, scholarly culture should enhance educational achievement in all societies, rich and poor alike; in all political systems, Communist and capitalist alike; and in the past as well as the present.
That last part, about the past and the present, got me thinking about the future. What will a scholarly culture look like in the future. Will the family’s “cultural toolkit” be measured by the number of Kindles in the home or number of books on the Kindle library? Will the family’s scholarly culture be as readily internalized if it is less visible? I’m interested in seeing where this research leads in the future, because I think it will have important consequences. In the meantime, journalists, more links to the research in your articles, please!
Books | Tim | November 2, 2011 8:48 am | Comments (2)
The world of books is rapidly changing. Don’t be left behind. Friend of the blog Collin Kelley offers a primer on the modern landscape of publishing at The Huffington Post, including today’s book marketing buzz word: Reverse Windowing.
Books | Tim | November 1, 2011 10:38 am | Comments (0)
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