More from Paris!

This evening f.o.b.  (friend of the blog) Collin Kelley will be reading from his new novel Remain In Light, which is set in Paris   Not only does the novel take its name from a Talking Heads album (bonus points), but it’s also nominated for for the prestigious 2012 Townsend Prize for Fiction.  The reading begins at 7:15 at the Georgia Center for the Book (Decatur Library Auditorium). 215 Sycamore Street, Decatur, GA.

French as Role Models

Speaking of Paris, have you heard about this book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting?   In the UK, it’s called French Children Don’t Throw Food.  Presumably the US publishers paused for a minute and thought, “Wait a minute, didn’t we just publish a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat?  We better call it something else, non, mon ami? Oui?”  The Guardian’s John Crace is calling merde du taureau in another hilarious Digested Read.  The French is especially atrocious.  Like mine.   The picture of the french kid with a cheesy mustache, baguettes, and an ashtray tied to his head is a nice touch as well.

Coming soon: French Men Don’t Wear Tube Socks: One American Man Discovers the Wisdom of French Sport Hosiery

The Paris Wife

I absolutely love Paris; I’ve only been there twice — both for short periods –  but I think it’s the most amazing city in the world.  And I’m slowly (as I read more of his work) becoming enamoured with Ernest Hemingway.  So Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, which tells the story of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, whom he married in Chicago but moved with to Paris, was a pretty safe bet.

I hadn’t realized that Hemingway’s final work, A Moveable Feast (which I have not read), was a memoir that told of his time in Paris with Hadley and the generation of literary intellectuals hanging out there at the time — Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and others.  McLain, having read A Moveable Feast, has opted in her book to tell the other side of the story — Hadley’s side — from the first person, relying on correspondence, notes, and incredible amounts of research.  And as you read The Paris Wife, you can’t help but think that Hadley is writing it herself.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Hemingway and Hadley’s marriage didn’t last; most who have even a passing familiarity with Hemingway know that he had many wives (four) and an untold number of lovers outside of his marriages.  But at the end of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway notably said that he would have rather died than have fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.  He ruined their marriage, but it appears that when he looked back on his life, he realized that she was his one true love.

This story is so well-written that it leaves me deeply torn.  The first Hemingway book that I read was The Sun Also Rises, and only through reading The Paris Wife did I realize that Sun was based on actual events involving Hemingway, Hadley, and a group of friends who traveled to Pamplona together.  I don’t know how I would have felt if I had read them in the opposite order; had I read Sun reflecting on how Hemingway was characterizing events and his friends as characters, I might have thought entirely differently about that book.  As things stand, I have a deep admiration for Hemingway — both for his writing, and for what he accomplished; he was sort of like a method actor, but as a writer.  It seems that all of his stories are based on things that happened in his life, and he purposely put himself in those situations to live the events, thereby being better able to write about them.

And while that is an admirable feat, arguably requiring tremendous courage, you cannot help but start thinking that he was a world-class ***hole.  He deliberately sabotaged friendships and played one-upsmanship games with people who went out on a limb for him to help him along, both professionally and personally.  It’s hard to like him as a person, although it’s impossible not to be interested in him as a character.

Hadley, on the other hand, demonstrated such strength, devotion, and loyalty, that you cannot question that she is a heroine.  And I am happy to have learned that she subsequently remarried and lived a wonderful life with her second husband.

If Hemingway, Paris, the Jazz Age generation, or biographical material interest you, you should read this book.  It’s fantastic.

Hey, what are you doing?

Friday Links

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) shows that the ranking is entirely unearned.

Atlanta ranked forth most literate city. bit.ly/xx4C3r

— AJC(@ajc) January 26, 2012

The closing of another Atlanta indie bookstore also suggests that “forth” might be too high on the list.

Electric Literature’s January Mixtape is for Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan.  I’m reading it now.  It’s excellent.

Check out Melville’s House’s Making the Cover slide show to see the design iterations for The Fallback Plan. I’m all about The Fallback Plan right now.

And speaking of Electric Literature, they somehow dug up a picture of me reading Moby-Dick to use as their latest cover.  I’m also all about the Electric Literature right now.

On average, Kindle books are cheaper than Nook books.

A list of McSweeney’s 10 best literary lists

Johnny Ramone autobiography?  Yes, please.

The new hybrid book economy

10 Bestselling Books with More than 80 One Star Reviews

What Your Favorite Blog Says About You – doesn’t include BGB  - but rest assured that if BGB is your favorite blog it means that you are awesome.  And you are probably my mom.

Sign this petition if ensuring that all children have access to a functioning school library is something that you believe in.

Maurice Sendak on Colbert

Steven Colbert visits Maurice Sendak. Awesomeness ensues. Sadly I can’t embed the clips, so you’ll have to go check it out at Comedy Central. (thanks for the heads up, Anne!)

Part 1

Part 2

Ready Player Two

Our fearless leader Tim’s review of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One inspired me to add that one to the stack, and what a great add it was.  If Tim was Player One, I guess I’m Player Two.

If you’ve read anything at all about Cline’s book, you probably know that it takes place in the year 2044, in times where our society is a disaster.  We don’t get enough information from Cline to necessarily call it dystopian (a la Brave New World), but suffice it to say that despite advances in technology, times are tough and some significant sector of society is slumming it.

Our protagonist, Wade Watts, is one of those people who is slumming it.  He is an overweight social outcast who lives with some extended family and countless guests in the “stacks” — vertically stacked trailer homes — outside Oklahoma City.  But Wade’s escape from the horrors of day-to-day life, like many others, is to log in to the OASIS, a virtual world that allows users to create a virtual identity and live in a virtual world with virtual friends, virtual toys, and virtual joy and excitement.  Even though Watts is poor, he at least has a computer and the necessary equipment to log in to the OASIS (where he also attends high school virtually), which he does in his secret hideout inside a van at a nearby junkyard.

So far, so good, right?  Standard futuristic blah, blah, blah, right?  Well, this is where Cline takes his novel into a direction that, while not completely original or unexpected, is flawlessly executed.  The man who founded the company that created the OASIS, James Halliday, has passed away and in his will has disclosed that he’s hidden an “easter egg” somewhere in the Oasis, and that the user who can find the three virtual keys to pass through three virtual gates to access this easter egg will inherit his fortune (including the OASIS).  This sends the entire world into a tizzy as companies, teams of individuals, and independent “gunters” like Wade Watts, a/k/a “Parzival”, put aside their lives to embark on a quest for the easter egg.

To this reader there were two elements of Cline’s story that struck a chord.  The first, which might only resonate with me and others from my generation, was that Halliday was a child of the 1980′s, and so his clues and the tasks that users must accomplish to advance in their quest are all tied to the 1980′s.  Movies, tv, music, video games, etc.  So it was unavoidable for me to try to test my own skills as we went along.  I didn’t fare as well as I would have thought.

The second really cool thing about Cline’s book, and this would be equally valid for any reader regardless of how much you know or care about the 1980′s, was how Cline blurred the line between the real and virtual worlds.  As players’ avatars interact with other avatars, and as greed and hostility manifest themselves in the OASIS, it becomes clear that certain participants aren’t playing fair and are using their money and power in the real world to gain an advantage.  This includes monitoring real people’s behaviors, and eventually murder.  Alliances that are formed in the virtual world extend into the real world, and mystery and adventure ensue.

No spoilers here, other than to say that once the story got going, it was literally (meaning I mean it) a virtual (meaning I read it on my Nook) literary virtual-reality page turner.

The Abstinence Teacher

After listening to The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (my review)  I was interested in checking out some of his other work.   I chose the audio version of The Abstinence Teacher, frankly because it was immediately available at the library.

Ruth, a divorced mother of two girls, is a Sex Education teacher at the local high school.  She is serious about her subject and wants her students to be armed with all of the facts.  Seemingly overnight, complaints about the curriculum are grabbing the attention of the school and local school board.  Coincidentally, the congregation of The Tabernacle, the local Evangelical Church, is becoming a louder presence in the community and suddenly Ruth is instructed that “abstinence only” will be taught, no questions asked.   The order doesn’t end Ruth’s continued conflict with the school officials and the new beauty-queenesque “Abstinence Consultant.”

Added to Ruth’s career angst, her personal life is boring.  A re-connect with her pudgy teenage-sexual-partner-turned-hard-body is a complete bust.  Then one day, Jesus-loving Tim enters her life and she is shocked and embarrassed at the feelings he stirs within her.  To add insult to injury, not being a fan of the Tabernacle doctrine, her daughters come home and tell her they want to go to church to “get to know” Jesus.

Tim, divorced father of one daughter and former drug addict/alcoholic/rocker, is a new member of the Tabernacle.  He is trying very hard to live a successful Christian life with his new Christian wife, but constantly struggles with his former self.  He can’t stop thinking of bedding his former wife as she greets him at the door in lingerie.  And the thrill of having played the guitar in a rock band must be currently fulfilled by jamming during church services.  Tim enters Ruth’s life when, as soccer coach to Ruth’s daughter, his faith overcomes him after a game and he prays with the team.  When Ruth hears about this, she and he have a heart to heart meeting which temporarily halts Ruth’s continued actions against him.

Contrary to what the title may suggest, The Abstinence Teacher isn’t only about Ruth.  Every character in Mr. Perrotta’s book abstains from something –whether by choice or not.  Ruth’s students are denied the facts, Ruth’s gay friends are denied the right to get married, her previous pudgy teenage sex partner must be denied the food that he used to enjoy, Tim’s ‘Christian’ wife denies herself in order to please her husband, and the list continues.  By bringing all of these characters together, Mr. Perrotta creates a story about this suburban town and what happens when the Christian Right invades and imposes their beliefs on everyone.   If I think about this subject too much, I become aggravated as The Abstinence Teacher poses more questions than answers about what should/could be done in this situation which seems to be currently happening all over America.  Thus, I choose to enjoy the story simply as entertainment.  Becoming upset is not the goal of listening to audio books during a long commute.

I have concluded that I have enjoyed all of Mr. Perrotta’s books thus far (Little Children, The Leftovers, The Abstinence Teacher) because I can put myself into any one of his stories.  Some readers don’t want stories so true to life – too depressing.  However, I find Mr. Perrotta’s sarcasm and humor extremely entertaining as I sit in traffic.  The Abstinence Teacher allows you to go deeper if you want to, but you can also enjoy it as is.

NBCC Awards Finalists

The National Book Critics Circle have announced the finalists for their annual book awards.  I’m always interested in this list because (a) I’m a member of the NBCC (but my nominations rarely make the cut), and (b) the list always includes books I’m not remotely familiar with.   Here are the finalists in Fiction and Nonfiction:

Fiction

• Open City by Teju Cole
• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (my review)
• The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst
• Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
• Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

Nonfiction

•  A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
• To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild
• Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War by Maya Jasanoff
• Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Other categories include: biography, autobiography, poetry, and criticism.

For an idea of what my voting looked like, see my year-end favorites.  Check out the NBCC website for the full list of finalists.

Friday Links

George Lucas has been doing the publicity circuit for his new movie Red Tails.  One of the crazier revelations is that a movie-maker with his track record was forced to finance the whole thing himself when “studios balked at the marketability of a film with all black leads.”  Given the hype of the film, it seems a good time to direct interested readers to the book Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II by friend of the blog Todd Moye.  Todd also appears in the George Lucas documentary Double Victory, and his book also appears on  top Air Force General’s annual reading list.

The Art of Fielding gets The Guardian’s Digested Read treatment.  Spoilers, ahoy!

Apple’s big announcement?  An app that some have called “Garage Band for books” that allows anyone to create a multi-media e-book.  The app is geared towards writers of textbooks.  “Apple has unveiled a glimpse of the classroom of the future, launching a new version of its iBooks software that will allow publishers to create interactive textbooks for iPad-owning students.” Interesting.

Wait.  That brave new world of e-books is already here.

Cormac McCarthy’s newest piece of writing is his first screenplay.

If the internet is to be believed, we didn’t lose our British accents, the British lost their American accents.

More news from Arizona:  ”Lupita Garcia, an opponent of the MAS program who oversees the district’s ethnic studies programs. She unabashedly told the students that racism has nothing to do with color and that Mexico is where Mexican studies is taught, not America!… When students asked why European studies has not been banned, nor any other area studies discipline, the administrators had no response. ”

Hey, how did that internet blackout thing staged earlier this week to protest SOPA/PIPA turn out?  The numbers are in.

The Simmering Cauldron of Outrage

OK. Yesterday we joined the anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout to vent our rage at those pieces of legislation.  Yet, YET!, in many ways, it pales in comparison to what’s going on in Arizona. On Tuesday evening, the day after MLK Day, I was reading a piece by Carolyn Kellogg that was about whatever Apple’s upcoming announcement would be about .  I got to the bottom and was stunned to come across this:

Meanwhile, textbooks for elementary and high schools must be vetted by state and local officials, an entirely different challenge. Arizona, for example, has banned ethnic studies classes statewide; this week, to remain in complaince and receive millions of dollars in funding, Tucson schools removed a number of now-banned books, including “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement” by Arturo Rosales and William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Does Apple really want to jump into the middle of that?

What? Arizona banned ethnic study classes?  Books on Hispanic civil rights and The Tempest are being removed from libraries?  Wait.  William Shakespeare’s The Tempest?  A Tucson teacher explains the predicament that the law places on teachers:

We study this work by Shakespeare using the work of renowned historian Ronald Takaki and the chapter “The Tempest in the Wilderness” from his a book A Different Mirror where he uses the play to explore the early English settlements on this continent and English imperialism. From there, we immerse ourselves in the play and discuss the beauty of the language, Shakespeare’s multiple perspectives on colonization, and the brilliant and courageous attention he gives to such important issues…However, TUSD is basing our compliance upon their appeal and Mr. Kowall’s ruling. Thus, I believe our administrators advised me properly when they said to avoid texts, units, or lessons with race and oppression as a central focus…. In clearer words, if I avoid discussing such themes in class, yet the students see the themes and decide to write, discuss or ask questions in class, we may also be found to be in violation…Due to the madness of this situation and our fragile positions as instructors who will be frequently observed for compliance, and be asked to produce examples of student work as proof of our compliance, I cannot disagree with their advice. Now we are in the position of having to rule out The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, etc. for the exact same reasons.

So, apparently, until further guidance is provided, teachers have to eliminate teaching anything that students may interpret on their own as containing themes about civil rights, race, colonialism, etc.  Doubleplusgood.

Save the Apostrophes

UK high street book seller Waterstone’s has unleashed all manner of wailing and gnashing of teeth by changing their name to Waterstones.  That’s right, they dropped the possessive apostrophe.  MobyLives summarizes the discontent:

…it’s John Richards, the chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society, whom we quoted in our earlier report, who continues to lead the charge, saying, “It’s just plain wrong. It’s grammatically incorrect. If Sainsbury’s andMcDonald’s can get it right, then why can’t Waterstones. You would really hope that a bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English… “

In other news, there is an Apostrophe Protection Society.  Their website was apparently last updated in 1996.  My eyes!

Friday Links

The list of competitors has been announced for the 8th annual Tournament of Books, my personal favorite literary award.

Newsworthy:  Michiko Kakutani, New York Times book reviewer who apparently dislikes all fiction, likes this book.

Publishing house Picador is celebrating its 40th anniversary by releasing special editions of some of its best loved books with very cool covers.  Check ‘em out.

Study shows that you cannot read too much P.G. Wodehouse.

Agreed:  WANT: a program that prints the spines of books I’ve read on my Kindle, to stick on the wall…

Why Authors Tweet and Twitter: The Virtual Literary Salon.  It’s worth it to start a twitter account just so you can keep up with Salman Rushdie and Gary Shteyngart who are masters of the genre.

MTV original VJs Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter and Martha Quinn have scored a book deal for an oral history of the early days of MTV.  No love for Triple J (JJ Jackson)?  That’s cold.

I am late to the Downton Abbey craze, but I am catching up feverishly on the first season now.  The NYT reports on how publishers are looking to cash in.

The shortlist for the Hatchet Job of the Year for the most savage book reviews has been released (with quotes and links).

A web resource for banned (not just challenged) books.

McSweeney’s rounds up the clever literary user names that are already taken if that was your plan for impressing the ladies.

10 novels that nail the college experience.

The Great Sperm Squeezer Mystery

And maybe this was only a mystery to me, but just in case… About a month ago, I was minding my own business reading Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (my review).  Early in the novel Harbach presents the President of Westish College’s back story.  It discusses how Dr Affenlight discovery of a lost Melville manuscript changed his life.  Affenlight became a man of letters:

The dissertation, a study of the homosocial and the homoerotic in nineteenth-century American letters, turned into a book, The Sperm-Squeezers (1987), and the book turned into a sensation: academically influential, widely translated…it wasn’t Moby Dick, but it sold more copies in its first year The Book had, and it became a touchstone in the culture wars.

First thoughts: Sperm-sqeezers?  What in the what?  Why sperm-squeezers?   Is it supposed to be funny?  It doesn’t seem to be.  I figured that it was either a weird throw-away joke (wink wink) or a reference that I didn’t get and moved on.

It turns out that everything that I needed to get was right there in that paragraph. At the time I was in the middle of an almost year-long slog through Moby-Dick.  The Art of Fielding, with its many Melville and Moby-Dick references inspired me to get back to it.  No sooner had I returned to the novel than I practically tripped over some sperm squeezers.  The sailors on The Pequod were up on deck processing the spermaceti of a slaughtered whale by heating it and squeezing out the lumps.  It is also a fairly obviously reference to the homosocial and homoerotic contained in this particular nineteenth-century American letter.  Of course!

I thought that I’d share this in the fairly specific off chance that you missed the reference as badly as I did in The Art of Fielding.  Here’s Melville’s passage for context:

Understanding all of this better sets up what comes later in Harbach’s novel.  Having said all of that, it was really this review in The Guardian that made me see the novel in a different light and underlined what Harbach was up to.

The Third Reich

Roberto Bolaño.  I’ll admit that he’s a writer that I struggle with.   I was so annoyed with his novel The Savage Detectives that I posted an angry 1000+ word snarky review venting my frustration – “To say that this book disappointed me is a bit of an understatement. Frankly, I was a pissed off, if not relieved, when I finally reached the end of its 592 pages.”  I was taken to task for my “typical hipster-hype” reaction in the comments.  Contrary to that commenter’s opinion, I get no joy in writing negative reviews.   I want to like the books that I read.  I want to share my love of great books.  Bolaño is widely regarded as an important literary voice, and I wanted to get that novel.  But I didn’t.

Bolaño’s next super critically acclaimed novel released in English was the mammoth 2666.   At almost a 1000 pages, it didn’t seem to be the novel that I should try again with.  I’ll freely admit that I was intimidated.  Bolaño’s latest work in translation, The Third Reich, weighs in at a svelte 277 pages.   If I was going to give Bolaño, this appeared to be the ticket.  So with some trepidation, I dove in.

The Third Reich, I should quickly point out,  is not a World War II novel and has little to do with historical Nazis.  The title refers to a World War II themed board game.  Udo Berger, a young German, is the national champion of a federation of war game enthusiasts.  He begins the narrative as a journal entry of his first day of vacation in Spain with his girlfriend Ingeborg.  This will be, in part, a working vacation.  Udo is excited to set up a few tables in the hotel room and test various strategies that he’ll write up for war game newsletters and journals.   His actual job job is of little consequence.  Udo is upbeat as he reflects on the weeks ahead:

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my life has never been better.  Most of the credit goes to Ingeborg.  Meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to me.  Her sweetness, her charm, her soft gaze, put everything else–my own daily struggles and the back-stabbing of those who envy me–into perspective, allowing me to face facts and rise above them.

Despite Udo’s sunny self-assessment, he reveals through his actions that he is petulant, full of himself, and a bit of a bore.

Udo and Ingebord soon make the acquaintance of another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hannah.  Charly is a good-time windsurfer who immediately tests Udo’s patience.  Through Charly, Udo also comes to know some seedy local beach characters, known as the Wolf and the Lamb.  The most indelible new acquaintance of the summer will be El Quemado, which translates to “the burn victim” in Spanish.  True to his name, El Quemado’s body is covered with horrible burn scars.  The source of the disfigurement is not immediately revealed.

El Quemado is essentially homeless, choosing to live on the beach in a depression dug under the stack of paddle boats that he rents during the day.  In time, El Quemado and Udo begin playing a game of Third Reich.  Udo is very condescending in engaging  Udo in the game.  The self-evident distastefulness of playing a game in which one tries to relive World War II and emerge with the German army victorious seems completely lost on Udo.  For Udo, the game is entertainment.  El Quemado, however, may view warfare in an entirely different light that becomes more apparent as the game plays out over weeks.

The game, coupled with Charly’s mysterious disappearance, casts a pall over the beach vacation.  Udo remains in Spain as the sunlight begins to disappear into fall, waiting for news on Charly and the conclusion of the game.  Over the course of these events, Udo’s early “perspective” on life is shown to be inaccurate and completely shallow.   At its heart, The Third Reich is a coming of age story – wait, he’s German – let’s call it a bildungsroman.  Udo’s experiences force to come to grip with an immature view of the world and his place in it.

I enjoyed this novel.  It appears that Bolaño and I can get along after all.   I’m not sure that I am ready to tackle 2666, which everyone seems to agree is his masterwork.  At least now I can see myself considering the possibly of tackling that tome, which was not the case prior to reading The Third Reich.   

Book Pitch: I can readily imagine an upated US version of this book where an American video game blogger takes his X-Box on vacation with him to work on mastering Modern Warfare 3 and meets someone who doesn’t view playing warfare as “fun”.

Also: I received copies of the hardcover and the audiobook at roughly the same time.  In an unusual move for me, I went back and forth from the novel to the audiobook as time allowed.  The chapters are mostly named for dates, so it was relatively easy to listen in where I had left off in the book and vice-versa.  The audiobook is read by Simon Vance who does an excellent job.  Through the audiobook I was better able to get a handle on pronunciations of names, places, and words in languages that I don’t speak than I would have otherwise had. Vance’s world-weary approach seemed to capture Udo perfectly.  Check out an audio clip from the first chapter:

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The Joy of Books

Toronto’s Type Books put together this amazing film of what goes on in their store when the staff goes home.

The Terror of Living

No, the title of this post is not a teaser to lead you into a deep, moving essay I’m writing about the world we live in; it’s the title of Urban Waite’s debut novel.  The Terror of Living came recommended to me by Goodreads in the same slew of recommendations that offered up Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, a critically-acclaimed novella that I found rather disappointing.  So why would I listen to those recommendations again, you might ask?  Well, I’m all about giving second chances.

And Waite’s book isn’t bad.  It isn’t particularly special, but it’s not bad.  It’s a suspenseful crime thriller that takes place around Seattle and the Canadian border.  Phil Hunt is a man with a past who has been making his living smuggling drugs.  Bobby Drake is a smalltown deputy sheriff whose father was also a deputy sheriff who fell to the dark side.  Drake messes up a deal that Phil works on, and then a slew of rather stereotypical characters come into play:  “the lawyer” who faciliated the drug deal; Hunt’s friend and drug-smuggling boss Eddie; Driscoll, the experienced DEA agent; two nameless Vietnamese men trying to recover the drugs; Roy, one of Hunt’s friends from their stay in prison together; Hunt’s and Drake’s innocent wives; and Grady, the ruthless serial killer sent to find and kill Hunt.

Waite is a straight-shooter as a writer, not getting caught up in tricky prose or overworked language, and he is very good at one of my favorite things:  writing short chapters.  The book jumps from chapter to chapter, checking in on what’s happening with different characters, pretty much in real time relative to one another.  So there are lots of breaks, each of which represents a good stopping point to put the book down and know that when you pick it up again you won’t be in the middle of a specific scene.

This is a quick and easy read, and it’s not not good.  It’s just not a standout; there’s nothing here that is wholly original, and perhaps because I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest, the storylines and backstories didn’t sink in with me in a way that moved me.  But if you like the thrill of the chase without being bogged down by deep symbolism, this might be right up your alley.

Friday Links

Spin has the ten best music books of 2011.  How have I not read I Want My MTV yet?

The most overlooked books of 2011

Flavorwire’s top 10 most anticipated books of 2012

The Daily Beast also has selected books to keep an eye out for in 2012

Omnivoracious has ten (not new) books to read in the new year

Want more?  The Millions has an extensive list of anticipated books in 2012.  Start mapping out your year in reading now. (Also:  I love you China Mieville, But I am having a hard time imagining a world where your new novel  is going to be – um – good.  ”Never has his kinship with Melville been more apparent than in his new young adult novel, Railsea, in which a character named Sham Yes ap Soorap rides a diesel locomotive under the command of a captain obsessed with hunting down the giant ivory-colored mole, Mocker-Jack, that snatched off her arm years ago. ”

This guy wrote out selections from books, and sometimes entire books,  one word at a time on grains of rice.  True story.

Sexting icebreakers for English grad students

How to be a successful “bookstalker” in 2012

A “christian” parenting guide is implicated in children’s deaths.  You’re doing it wrong!

In time for tonight’s season premiere of Potlandia! comes this story of Portland’s mini libraries.

Lev Grossman reveals his reading list for the upcoming third book in his planned Magicians trilogy.  Which is totally excellent BTW.

Top coloring books for people who hate their children

Train Dreams: Audiobook Preview

Exclusive! (And by exclusive I mean that you would have to actively look to find this someplace else.) After reading Shaft’s review of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, the publisher of the audiobook version sent along this preview clip. Check it out for yourself.

Update:  Now working again.

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This just in

Last week, while the weather was still nice here in Atlanta, I took a walk during my lunch break. I made my way over to Woodruff Park and found a table to read in the sun for a while. It was only on my way back to the office that I noticed that I had wondered into Woodruff Park’s Outdoor Reading Room.

There are carrels with books and magazines for borrowing/browsing, nice Woodruff Park branded umbrellas, etc.  When did this happen?  The Downtown Atlanta Improvement District has the scoop on this wonderful new addition:

The Woodruff Park Reading Room is an open-air reading room in northern portion of Woodruff Park. In partnership with the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, carts are stocked with a selection of books, periodicals and newspapers, with readings and programs at lunchtime. Movable furniture creates an intimate environment. The programming, publications, and environment of the Reading Room are available to everyone for free, without any need of cards or identification.

See the link above for info on donating books.  This is completely awesome and I had no idea it was there, despite working just a few blocks away.  It appears that I’ll have to wait a while for lunch time weather to improve to visit again.