Friday Roundup

It turns out that Hamlet’s Ophelia just needed a Sassy Gay Friend.

The world’s most beautiful bookstore.  Yes, it is.

Grisham is going big into the world of YA with Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer.

Today’s greatest thing ever:  Google Books now has every issue of Spin in their entirety.  Holy time machine, Batman! The 80’s issues are blowing my mind.

The Tournament of Books is back.  And the first round is over already.  How did I forget to mention it here?  I’ve been checking it out daily, and you should, too.  I’ve only read two of the books in this year’s lineup, but I am going to have to go back and check out many more.

The Guardian catches up with Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the subject of Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun.  There are spoilers a’plenty, so you may want to skip it if you haven’t read the book yet, which you really need to do.

Apparently there will be no mention of Patti Smith or her amazing book Just Kids this week.  I’ll redouble my efforts next week.

Her Fearful Symmetry

I really liked Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife.  In fact, I liked it so much that I didn’t see the movie because I didn’t think the story could be replicated on the big screen in a way that made sense.  And for a linear thinker like myself, the fact that she was able to tell me that story without getting me utterly confused and lost is a testament to her writing skill.

I just finished her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, and I while I liked it okay, I think that many among you will absolutely love it.  Because it’s a ghost story.

I’m not really into vampires/werewolves/ghosts/wizards/hobgoblins, etc., and so if I had known it was a ghost story, I might not have ventured into this one.  But I didn’t, so I did.  And I’m glad I did.

The story takes place in London, where I had visited just last summer.  So I thought that was cool.  And while there is a significant cast of characters, Niffenegger does a pretty good job of developing each of them.  Including, most importantly, the twenty year-old twin girls Julia and Valentina, who are the focal point of the story.  As soon as I realized there were going to be twins, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.  Despite the fact that I couldn’t see them.  But she does a good job of bringing you along to appreciate not only the twins’ similarities, but also their differences.

The twins’ mother, Edie, who lives in Chicago, and their recently-deceased aunt, Elspeth, were also twins.  And while those two sisters had not been in contact in many, many years, when Elspeth died, she left her flat in London to Julia and Valentina, subject to a few conditions.  And when the twins take the offer and move to London, living in the same building as Elspeth’s mourning lover, Robert, the story begins to take shape, and the twists and turns (and ghosts) come out in droves.  I have to confess that at one point, I had to read and re-read a certain part of this book multiple times, and refer back and re-read an earlier part multiple times, to try to get my brain to absorb some of the plot points.  But I did it, and so can you.

I think this is the closest thing to chick-lit that I’ve read in as long as I can remember.  And it wasn’t a bad thing.

BGB Recommends

I picked up the latest from the lit mag on steroids Granta, Issue #109: Work, because I saw that a favorite author (Steven Hall) had a non-fiction  in the work-themed issue.  This is only the second Granta that I’ve bought and the first that I’ve read under new editor John Freeman.  Granta costs $17, which seems a little spendy.  This issue, at least, is worth every penny.

Some highlights:

Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts) reports from a US robotics lab:

TANK is a robot with a job.  He has had lots of jobs–he once worked for NASA–but wasn’t very good at any of them. After a string of demotions, TANK now works as a receptionist at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. At least, that is what he’ll tell you.

Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) reports on the alarming book piracy endemic to Peru:

Suddenly it was August and I still hadn’t been pirated. I was starting to get nervous…Then, on the morning of August 14, my last day in Lima, my editor called with the good news. He’d seen the book for sale in San Isidro, on the corner of Aramburu and Via Expressa…My editor’s tone was congratulatory.  I was frankly relieved. (Read the entire essay. See the slideshow. Check out Alarcon’s conversation with John Freeman.)

Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin) remembers his father, a newspaperman, telling him to stay out of the newspaper business.

The issue also contains work by Salman Rushdie, Jim Crace, Julian Barnes, Joshua Ferris, and others.  Check out the video intro to the issue here.  Then grab a copy.

Good Fortune

After reading a little about Noni Carter, I was very excited to buy her book Good Fortune to continue my search for black history.  Ms. Carter is only 18 years old and currently attends Harvard.  She grew up in Georgia listening to stories passed down through generations about her great-great-great-great grandma who came to the United States from Africa as a slave. How lucky their family is to have this oral history!

In a nutshell, the book tells of a girl who is taken from her family in Africa when she was four years old.  (So as not to confuse anyone I don’t use a name because she has three names throughout the book).  It is written in the first person as we accompany her on her journey.  She is sold to a plantation in Tennessee where she becomes a house slave and is “adopted” by the black woman who oversees the household help.  When she takes the white children to their lessons she stands close enough to the school house to listen to the teacher in order to educate herself.   One day after learning that her brother plans to escape, she decides to go with him.  She and her brother flee the plantation and eventually find themselves in a small, black-only residential area outside Dayton, Ohio.

Ms. Carter shares with us a compelling story about a young African American girl with all odds against her who never gives up on her long term goal of an education.  This character finds creative ways to memorize what she learns and hide those facts in a time when it was illegal for her to have any sort of book knowledge.

At first I had a hard time following the book, and I hate to admit this because I realized it is a young adult book.   The girl has several flashbacks to her time in Africa and she has a lot of dreams, I found this a little confusing at first.  Ms. Carter is a poet and she writes beautifully but I found it a bit drawn out at times.  However, once I gave the book some dedicated reading time, I enjoyed it a little more.  My experience may have been more positive if my expectation was a story and not a history lesson.

This book is being compared by some critics to Roots by Alex Haley.  After picking up a copy of Roots to re-familiarize myself, I searched for reasons why.  They are both about Africans being sold into slavery in the United States.  Ms. Carter’s book, however, is about one girl, Mr. Haley’s book spanned generations.  Ms. Carter is a poet and that is evident in her writing style as she colorfully describes many situations.  Mr. Haley was a journalist.  Roots was ground-breaking, there had never been such a comprehensive book on black history ever written in the United States.  Since Roots was published there have been many books about the slave trade.   Perhaps there is a hope that Good Fortune will ignite a spark in young people to take an interest in their family history and even a different side of American history that is often overlooked.  And we can’t ignore the fact that this story reiterates the importance of an education and what everyone can do with more knowledge.   Roots is more than 30 years old now – Good Fortune is new and may appeal more to the YA reader.

In the end, I am glad I read Good Fortune and would certainly recommend it to young readers. This is Ms. Carter’s first book and I know we haven’t heard the last of her – remember, she’s only 18.

More Patti

Can it be that I haven’t mentioned Patti Smith or Just Kids at all this week?  Let’s fix that.  Check out Part 2 of Patti’s interview with KCRW’s Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt:

Then check out my review of Just Kids.

Read This

What’s that?  You haven’t read Zeitoun yet?  Of for the love of Pete.  Read this interview with Dave Eggers and get to reading the book already.  Geez…

Jewish Confederate Saved by Talking Parrot

Check out this article by BGB favorite Dara Horn for an amazing story that would strain credulity if it weren’t true.  Then check out our two (!) interviews with Dara Horn over there in the sidebar.

Heartbroken SWM Seeks Bookstore To Love

A year ago, I had my heart broken.

It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that there were signs the relationship was going to fail from the beginning. We spent too much time together from the very beginning, basing our foundation in dreams. When the fallout came, it was long and painful for more than just me-I wasn’t the only one hurt by the dissolution, and by far wasn’t nearly the one who suffered most. If anything, I got out easy, left with a handful of great memories to look back on fondly.

I am, of course, talking about when Wordsmiths Books closed in March 09.

The bookstore, which had made its home in downtown Decatur, GA (for which I’d served as Marketing, PR and events director since its inception, and had, with my friend/boss Zach, seen the project from birth to death)-had been a daily/hourly/to-the-minute part of my life, and the lives of others, for years. This isn’t about those others. It, like everything I write, is about me, and how I flew my book-weary (“weary”’s an easy word, here, “exhausted” is better, “totally damn over it” is infinitely more accurate) heart from Atlanta to New York closed off to the book industry entirely…and found true love.

Let’s be frank: when Wordsmiths closed, it sucked. IT. SUCKED. And it left a lot of people in tailspins. For me, I’d then seen the glitzy, glamorous side of publishing, but I’d also spent, at that point, way too much time nose-first in the filth of the book world and I was over it-over what I viewed as the big publishing houses’ failure to understand retail, and for most indie bookstores to understand that they need to…well, to try harder.

I was burnt out on galleys and grids and Barbara Walters’ stupid string cheese needs & her massive lack of book sales-all of it left me wanting to run as far away from publishing, from bookstores, from caring about an industry made around stupid ideas about monetizing dead trees and stupider ideas to monetize electronic dead tress, as possible.  This would prove to be difficult, partially because my life plans post-Wordsmiths involved moving to New York and partially because the majority of contacts I’d amassed in the years I’d had my head up publishing’s colon were all, well, in the book biz.

But I was damned if I was going to give my heart to books ever again.

Then I came across a little bookstore called Word in a little area of Brooklyn called Greenpoint that reminded me of Decatur, GA done properly, and everything changed.

Like the great poet Kelly Clarkson once said, here’s the thing: we started out friends. The store’s manager Stephanie, basically the world’s most famous bookseller thanks to Twitter-also a friend of mine, also because of Twitter, bless you Twitter-forwarded me a position that had opened doing events at Word right when I was moving. Timing didn’t really work out, but in the process I became intrigued by the bookstore that I didn’t really know.  My first free day in New York, I Hopstop’d my way to Greenpoint. This was way more difficult than it might seem. Queens, where I was living (and still live now), to Brooklyn is a three-train trek, one that I’ve become quite accustomed to now but then? Less than a week into New York, three trains was NOT something I was prepared to navigate. Also, as anyone who knows me can attest, my sense of direction is…nonexistent.

New York requires a lot of its residents in terms of directional navigation.

Three Trains.

Dear Gentle Readers, I got lost on the G train.

As such, hours after I’d left, I arrived in Greenpoint-shaken, sure, but relatively unmolested (HEY Y’ALL THE SUBWAY’S NOT THAT SCARY!).

I came with my heart closed to Word Brooklyn, the bookstore with the name shockingly only two syllables away from that of the bookstore I’d recently seen shuttered. A small corner bookstore in a hip neighborhood not gunning for hipster cache (see: only one Bret Easton Ellis book stocked, which should be a total deal-breaker for me, no Joanna Newsom on the stereo in-store), basically just being itself: trade paperback fiction-focused with a small selection of new-release hardcovers, thoughtfully-stocked sections, a small and smart staff…
Yeah, love was inevitable, wasn’t it?

And it happened, it did-the store’s thoughtful, purposeful existence, the incredible events that have found me, amongst other things, gushing to Kate Christensen about how hot her sex writing gets me, the staff that takes a constant interest in not just hot books, or just important books, but in books. If the Word staff are to be believed, books are the stuff of dreams-a sentiment that a year ago would’ve had me spit on the ground and say “bah, humbug”, but right now? Right now, yeah, I can buy into that, thanks to the friends I’ve made at Word.

A good independent bookstore should do more than sit quietly-it should foster community. Word does just that-beyond book-related events, they have a basketball team, a group Sunday run, cooking events, this awesome date night that involved classic cocktails. Also, they helped me find the perfect Valentines card.

Oh…oh, yeah, about that… I found love, too, on their bookstore matchmaking board, but you can read about that elsewhere.

I may give off the general perception of being callous if not apathetic, but it’s been through the Word Brooklyn community that I’ve come back to seeing the publishing world with new, fresh eyes-eyes that don’t see how much money’s wasted on Stephanie Meyer but rather what falling face-first into a great book, like Emily Mandel’s Last Night In Montreal, can do to alter life permanently. Like the Grinch when whatever it was that made his heart grow ended up happening…yeah. You can read this however you want.

Word Brooklyn celebrates its third anniversary this month, the same month that will mark a year since my last bookstore community, Wordsmiths Books, shut its doors for the last time.  In that time, I’ve made and lost friends, fallen in and out of love, and read books both great and horrible.  I thought I’d given up on being giddy about publishing…and that, too, has changed. And, ok, maybe Word’s not responsible for all of that (as I am, ya know, given to over-romanticizing), but it’s amazing the little part of your heart, and your life that can be filled by the perfect bookstore.

Hey, Word? Thanks for being just that. I love you, you complete me, etc etc. And happy birthday.
Also what’s up I’m your mayor on 4Square.

Linky Links

I geeked out late last night listening to Michael Silberblatt interviewing Patti Smith on KCRW’s Bookworm.  And it’s only Part 1!  Listen to it. It’s at least twice as good as the interview with Terry Gross that kept me in my car a few weeks ago.  Fun fact: The Devil’s opening in Sympathy for the Devil, “Please allow me to introduce myself…”, is from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.  I’m not going to shut up about Just Kids anytime soon. (My review)

Speaking of which, I was enthusing about the book on Monday night with some tasteful and erudite dinner companions who let me know that PBS aired a documentary about Patti Smith, Dream of Life, a few months back.  I had no idea, as is usually the case.

The New York Review of Books examines Publishing: The Revolutionary Future. (Thanks, Dr J.)

The Count goes medieval on Edward.

In the New York Times: The Math of Publishing Meets the e-Book.

To see the new math in action, check out what the new math means for friend-of-the-blog Ben Tanzer.

Check out this comic about why DRM means that checking out an audio book at the library is a simple  22 -step process, and you may agree with this comic that suggests that DRM creates the very thing it tries to control – piracy.

Kathryn Borel Jr Uncorks in the ATL

Atlantans, mark your calendars.  There’s a very cool reading in town this weekend that you’ll want to check out. Kathryn Borel will be reading from her memoir Corked on Saturday evening at the Savi Urban Market in Inman Park. There will be free wine.  Free. Wine. And I trust Savi to bring the good stuff.

I first became aware of Borel when Boing Boing posted a video of the author demonstrating how to open a bottle of champagne with a sword.  That’s a skill you can use.  They posted another Borel video titled How to Sample Wine Without Looking Like a Clown.  That one’s fairly self-explanatory.

I’ve been meaning to check out Corked ever since. I was alerted to Borel’s upcoming Atlanta visit by Russ Marshalek, sometime BGB contributor and the hardest working man in books.  Russ sent an impassioned e-mail to his Atlanta friends and associates urging us all to drop everything and check out Borel’s reading.   Well, I’ll let Russ speak for himself…

(Dramatic interpretation of an an original e-mail by Russ M created by the Baby Got Books Thespian Society.)

The reading is at 5PM on Saturday March 6. A Capella Books will be there to hook you up with a copy.  Here are the directions.  You remembered the part about the free wine, right?

Let the Great World Spin

True Story:  I was visiting the eye doctor a few weeks back, and I needed to get my pupils dilated to finish the examination.  It takes about half an hour for the drops to take effect, so I was sent out to the waiting room.  Rather than look at old copies of Redbook, I walked two doors down to the local indie bookseller to browse for a while. I came across Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin on the shelf and picked it up.  For reasons unknown to me, I was dead set against  this novel despite it being a National Book Award winner and having garnered near universal rave reviews. With my vision starting to blur, I read all of the accolades on the first six(!) pages inside the cover (and then more on the back cover) and remained unconvinced.  Then I noticed the epigraph, which is a quote from Aleksandr Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (read my review):

All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere.  That is what the world is.

That passage is underlined in my copy of Hemon’s book, and it finally sealed the deal for me.  Then my eyes lost focus with the bonus of my retinas searing from the sunlight streaming through the bookstore windows. It was time to throw some bills on the counter and leave with my purchase.

The prologue of the novel is a brief passage recounting Phillipe Petit’s walk on a high wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center in the 1970s.  That’s him depicted as a stick figure on the paperback version of the book.  From there the novel bounces between the stories of various people of wildly disparate backgrounds living in New York City at the time.  Each of the strands has a connection to Petit’s almost incomprehensible stunt.  Eventually the various strands connect in entirely believable but totally random ways.  Like life.

The high wire act that McCann pulls off with this novel is writing about the September 11 terrorist attacks while barely touching on the act itself.  Invoking the image of the towers before their completion and Petit’s incredible act of artistry is enough for the reader to fill in the blanks for themselves.  The last few chapters of the book hopscotch over the eighties,  nineties, and 2001 directly to present day.

Back to that Hemon quote epigraph.  A central theme of this novel is certainly the richness of life and the many unseen connections that we all have with one another.  The world is made up of people that we will never know and possibilities for ourselves that we may never fully realize or even recognize.  The challenge that McCann lays before us is to find the connections within the breadth of humanity we encounter  in our everyday lives and to look within ourselves for the lives that we could/should be living.  If that’s not as powerful a “message”  as you are likely to encounter in contemporary fiction, I don’t know what is.  If you’ve waited as long as I did to get on board the Let the Great World Spin bandwagon, do it now.

Just Kids

I was driving home a few weeks ago and heard Terry Gross interview Patti Smith about her new memoir Just Kids.  It was one of those interviews where you sit in your car and keep listening well after you get where you’re going.   I picked up the book days later and dove in as soon as I could.  It was the right choice.

Just Kids focuses on the unusual and enduring relationship that Smith had with photographer/artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith, at the age of 20, had set off to New York City to try to make her mark as an artist and poet.  On her first day there, she met Mapplethorpe, himself a struggling artist.  The two eventually developed a romantic relationship and move in to a Brooklyn hovel together.   It’s the Summer of Love, but neither is much into the hippie thing.  They are each preparing for the Next Thing.

Their early New York days are the archetypal starving artist experience: constant struggling to pay rent, going hungry when money is tight (and money is always tight), getting lice from seedy lodgings, etc.  And if that sounds romantic to you, consider this:  Patti’s first hint that her soul mate might be gay surfaces when Robert begins street hustling to help pay the rent.  Even as Smith describes her dismay at seeing her boyfriend go out into the night, she can sense your judgement and offers simply:

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

Difficult as it was, Patti and Robert make unlikely and important connections within the art world almost from the very beginning of their life in New York. For example, Patti first met Beat poet Allen Ginsberg when he bought her a sandwich in a Manhattan automat. It turns out that Ginsberg thought that she was a very pretty young boy. Ginsberg would later champion Smith’s poetry and he provided introductions to Gregory Corso and William S. Buroughs.  Corso teaches Patti how to avoid giving boring poetry readings, and Burroughs is among the earliest attendees of Patti’s rock shows at the nascent CBGB’s.  She meets Hendrix and provides relationship advice to Janice Joplin.  After the romantic side of her relationship with Robert runs its course, Patti dates Jim Carroll, Sam Shepard, some guy in the Blue Oyster Cult, and Fred “Sonic” Smith (who she would eventually marry).

The young couple eventually found themselves residents of the famed Chelsea Hotel, all but sealing their fates as artists of renown.  Patti became famous first.  Just as their career trajectories were primed to seriously take off, the pair landed their first and only joint art show.   Patti describes the show:

We chose to present a body of work that emphasized our relationship: artist and muse, a role that for both of us was interchangeable.

And that’s the point of this book.  This is the story of a relationship that was greater that the sum of its parts.  Neither would have realized their artistic potential had the other not been in their life.   Each provided what the other needed in support and nurturing companionship to get through the crisis at hand and strive to create another day.

The book also provides a fascinating look at tortured process through which art comes into the world.  Smith did not set out to be a rock star and Mapplethorpe had less than no interest in the field of photography.  Robert Mapplethorpe took the now iconic cover picture for Patti’s first album (listen to the Fresh Air interview to find out why the record company hated the picture). From there he went on to become a controversial giant of the art world.  The books ends after Robert’s death with AIDS, as it must.  Smith promised Mapplethorpe that one day she would write their story. She has made good on that promise, and it is quite a story.  This is a beautifully written book that is sure to top many year-end “best of” lists.  It will be on mine.

Post Script:

As a fortuitous accident, I read Just Kids not long after finishing Helen Weaver’s The Awakener (see my review), a memoir of Weaver’s relationship with Jack Kerouac.  Between the two books, a picture emerges of the avant garde art scene in New York from the 1950s through the 1980s.  A direct line between the Beats and the punk scene that would emerge from CBGB’s can be clearly drawn, which was a revelation for me.  The two memoirs have notable similarities. Both authors write about transformative relationships with men who certainly had their demons.  Each woman survives their subject’s death – deaths that were caused to an extent by “lifestyle” choices.  Both credit/blame their subject’s Catholicism for important aspects of their personalities.  It’s an interesting comparison and progression through the decades.

But wait, there’s more:

Clearly this a book that begs to have some music to accompany the review. Let’s start with my favorite Patti Smith song that’s not Because the Night.

Patti Smith – Dancing Barefoot

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I have no idea why that’s my favorite.  It just is.  Another of my favorite Patti Smith recordings is her backing vocals on the R.E.M. song E-bow the Letter.  Her spooky and ethereal keening is so emotive, it kills me every time.  I saw Patti Smith join R.E.M. for a live performance of the song just last year.  If I had any hair, it would have stood on end.

And some songs by singers that were clearly influenced by Patti Smith (according to me):

PJ Harvey – Good Fortune

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Pretenders – The Adultress

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Cat Power – Speak for Me

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Video of 10,000 Maniacs covering Because the Night, a Smith/Sringsteen collaboration

And lastly, I include Sympathy for the Devil since it was mentioned specifically in the text. Smith remembers that Mapplethorpe was completely taken with the song on first listen and seemed to relate to it as he was beginning to explore what he considered the darker side of himself.

Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil (Neptunes Remix)

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And if you need more, you can tune into the Just Kids station that I set up on Pandora to complete my Patti Smith immersion experience.

Let’s see you top this, Mr. Author-Interview Man

I hope Tim is taking notes. This is how it’s done.

Sugar

One way to get my attention is to begin a book with a vivid murder scene of a little black girl in the 1950’s.  Bernice McFadden, the author of Sugar shocks the reader to attention in the first few pages.  Sugar is a book I wouldn’t normally have found, because I don’t choose my books based on the color of the author – this book can be found way over in the African-American Author section.   In my case, the book literally landed in my lap so I gave it a try, and I was surprised that I didn’t want to put it down.

Pearl lives in a small town in Arkansas.  She is a church-going woman who lost her little girl to a brutal murder fifteen years prior to the beginning of the story.   The day Sugar moves in next door to Pearl is remembered by the entire town:

The storm walked into their small town on two legs in spiked red patent leather heels.  She waltzed right through the main square, blond wig bounding to the rhythm of her walk, a leopard print pocketbook slung over one shoulder, matching suitcases in each hand.

Sugar is a prostitute and is shunned by all of the church-going women in town (which is of course, all of the women).  Pearl ignores the rumors she hears and befriends Sugar.  Slowly and gradually, their friendship grows into a deep internal bond that surprises both of them.  Their friendship is such that after having “words” with each other, they miss each other and quickly forgive because being apart or even the thought of being apart is too hard to imagine.

Sugar helps pull Pearl out of her 15 year depression by introducing her to experiences she has never had.  Likewise, Pearl helps Sugar see a calmer, loving part of life that Sugar has never had.  As their friendship develops, Ms. McFadden seamlessly pulls the reader into each of their painful pasts and develops the characters so completely that we want to help them ourselves.

Ms. McFadden brings us this moving, thought-provoking story that contradicts the Beaver Cleaver/Happy Days image a lot of us have of the 1950’s – she makes it “real.”   June Cleaver certainly never used the F word!  And although this story could happen to people of any color, Ms. McFadden subtly makes us aware that it still the 1950’s with Jim Crow laws in full effect.

The blind man had other one-night gigs to do, the chitlin curcuit was sixty-five nights of giving yourself over to segregated toilets and drinking fountains, and scared white people that suspected your lyrics carried something other than sadness or happiness.  Suspected that maybe those words carried seeds of contention.

Throughout the book, Ms. McFadden reminds us through her characters that horrible things can happen to each of us, but we are all still alive!  We need to appreciate and love those around us.  If we are quick to judge others we could miss an opportunity to come alive more fully, to experience people and places that we never thought we could or would.

At the moment when I thought (or was hoping) that the fairy tale princess ending would happen, Ms. McFadden twists the story another way, then when I really thought I knew the ending, she surprised me again!

Sugar was Ms. McFadden’s first novel ten years ago.  She has re-released it in order to reach a broader audience.   Hopefully the book will reach this audience and can be enjoyed by people of all ethnicities.  Ms. McFadden’s second book is titled This Bitter Earth and I’ll be reading it soon.

10 Rules for Writing Fiction

The Guardian collects writing tips from an all-star gallery of authors:

Part 1

Part 2

A few highlights:

• Philip Pullman – “My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.”
• Colm Toibin – “Stay in your mental pyjamas all day” and “No going to London.”
• Roddy Doyle – “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”
• Anne Enright – “The first 12 years are the worst.”
• Jonathan Franzen – “ Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.”
• Neil Gaiman – “Write.”

One Finally Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I’m not a film fanatic, but I have friends who are.  I don’t dislike film by any means, but I’m not nearly as well-versed as my, well, uhm, well-versed friends.  And any way you slice it, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is rated as one of the best films ever made.  It won the big four Academy Awards — Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress.  Only one film before, and one film after, had won all of those (do your research — it will serve you well on trivia night).

I, however, haven’t seen that film, and took it upon myself to read the book first.  Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, first published in 1962 or 1963 (I can’t tell from this printing that I have) is flat-out astounding.  I’ve read lots of books about power struggles (Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, etc.), but this is the one the one that really struck home for me.  It didn’t resonate with me because of my time on the funny farm (which may or may not have happened); it resonated with me because of the humanity exhibited by our protagonists.

The book is narrated by Chief Bromden, a half-Indian patient in the insane asylum, who everyone thinks is a deaf/dumb/mute.  It turns out that he’s not, but he carries on throughout a good portion of the book maintaining that front.  The main character is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a patient who is sent to this hospital from a prison work camp because of his behavior.  And then the fun begins, as you (and the characters in the story) try to figure out who’s crazy and who’s not, and they wrestle for control of the facility.

There are multiple dynamics at work here, between McMurphy and the other patients (to determine who’s the alpha male of the ward, a/k/a the “bull goose loony”), between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, between the patients and the orderlies, and between patients themselves to figure out what their roles are in the “therapeutic community” model of the ward.  And there are a cast of characters — Chronics, Acutes, and Vegetables — each with their own story and peculiarities.

As much as I want to recount this story, I really don’t want to say anything more about the “field trip” that a group of the patients take, or about the party they throw at the facility.  I assume that many of you have seen the movie.  But when I’ve spoken to people who’ve seen the movie, they undoubtedly don’t recall some of the most critical elements of the book.

If you’ve seen the movie and liked it, you should read this book. If you’ve seen the movie and didn’t like it, you should read this book.  And if you haven’t seen the movie, you should read this book.  I think that about covers it.

I myself can’t wait to see the movie.  While Jack Nicholson can get on my nerves a little bit, I think the role of McMurphy is absolutely perfect for him, and I’m excited to see this story play out on the screen.

Don’t Call it Filler

The 2010 Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet is this Saturday!  If you are local, you must go. It’s amazingly awesome.

The Obamas stock White House library with socialist tomes. J’accuse!  What?  Oh…oops. Update: Read Carolyn Kellog’s more thoughtful take on this ridiculous story.

And from the Library of the Absurd: Queen Victoria – Demon Hunter

Cory Doctorow christens this year’s Sci-Fi “it” novel.

Before you plunk down your hard-earned on an e-book, know what you’re buying with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s e-book checklist.

Ripped from today’s headlines, Sherman Alexie’s Ode to My Sharona:

The Army of the Republic

The first thing that struck me about Stuart Archer Cohen’s The Army of the Republic was it’s Banksy-like artwork.  The image captures a man in what appears to be a politically motivated act about to launch himself along a violent arc.  As it turns out, it is an image that perfectly captures the essence of the words within its cover.   The conflict between words and images turns out to be a central theme of the novel, so it’s an interesting choice on that level as well.

The Army of the Republic takes place in a dystopian United States that some would say didn’t seem all that unlikely just a few years ago.   A right-wing administration operates under its own interpretation of the laws of the land.  A  judiciary stacked by the ruling party seems unlikely to enforce laws detrimental to the Administration.  Questionable electronic voting returns threaten to eliminate the power of the ballot.   National security interests serve as a smoke screen to all manner of shady dealings.   The use of mercenary forces (think Blackwater/Xe) for hire by both the government and corporations ensures that the non-governmental security forces are effectively answerable to no one.  Right-wing talk shows serve as an echo chamber for the Administration, reinforcing their message through repetition of sound bites and artfully edited images

Lando (not his real name) is a young a young idealist who has decided that enough is enough.  He belongs to a secretive organization known as The Army of the Republic (AOR).  The AOR aims to disrupt the information flow of the Administration and highlight the injustices of their corporate cronies by conducting high profile direct actions, which have recently come to include violence, destruction, and general mayhem.  In other words, the AOR wants their own images on the evening news to counteract the story lines of corporate news services and the Administration’s talking points.  As the AOR’s campaign begins to ramp up, support for their tactics and their cause begins to grow, and a showdown with the administration seems imminent.  However, Lando’s view of the world (and justice) as black and white becomes clouded when his parents become engaged in the looming conflict – on opposite sides.

A fascinating part of this novel is the glimpse into the operations of how extreme shadow organizations of the left and right are organized and operate.  Cohen also does an excellent job of highlighting the many ways that news and information become distorted on its way to consumers.  (In a brief comic note, the news coverage of the action of a riot is called by what amounts to a play-by-play man and a color guy.) It’s enough to make a reader extremely paranoid.  The novel stuck with me, and I had lots of questions floating around my head.  Luckily the author was  gracious enough to submit himself to an interview by the likes of us. Come back tomorrow to check out my interview with Stuart Archer Cohen.

Audio Bonus: The whole time I was reading this book, the soundtrack in my mind was playing the political punk songs of the late seventies and early eighties – songs by bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, etc.  But the song that seemed to get at the ethos of this novel the most was this one:

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Red Rockers – Guns of Revolution

Friday Links

Have teenage vampire romance novels finally run their course?  From the looks of this, at least one YA author hopes so…

In other news, an Emory University professor with an awesome/incredibly unlikely last name has made an incredible Faulkner discovery.

This item at McSweeney’s notes the passing of Timothy McSweeney, explains who he was, and why their literary journal was called Timothy McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern.

Comics Round Up

Somehow, I’ve found myself well into February still writing about books that I’ve read in 2009.  Maybe I should just let it go, but for some reason I’ve become obsessive about writing about ALL OF THE BOOKS that I read over the year.  So to satisfy my OCD, I’ll try to wrap up last year in as few posts as possible.  I was particularly slack in writing about the comics that I read last year for two reasons: (1) my approach to comics is completely haphazard, i.e., I pick things up that look interesting without much forethought and (2) I don’t know how to write about them.  Here, allow me to  highlight item number “2″ for you:

Fables 1 and 2

This series came highly recommended to me from various comics aficionados.  The series kicks off with Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile. We learn that the characters of our childhood fables are real and they have been driven from their world into ours.  Unsurprisingly, they live among us in New York City where they are able to keep a mostly low profile. Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, etc. are real people with very human shortcomings.  It seems those fables were an idealized version of these troubled souls.  In Fables Vol. 2: Animal Farm, we learn that the non-human fables (like the three little pigs) are forced to live apart from their human counterparts on a farm up-state.  This doesn’t sit well some of the animals.  And that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  The day that I went to buy the next edition, my comics dealer was sold out of Volume 3’s.  I haven’t felt the need to overcome this surmountable obstacle.  This is one of the problems that I have with comics series: how long do you continue on the potential of a story line before you call it quits?

Cecil and Jordan in New York

Cecil and Jordan in New York was a comic of a completely different stripe.   Think of a collection of wry short stories about life for twenty-somethings in NYC and you’ll have a good idea of what Cecil and Jordan offers.  These are fresh and interesting stories that somehow were meant to be told with the assistance of pictures.  My only complaint is that the slim volume is over too soon. I picked this one up while visiting the bookstore of the comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly.  If you find yourself in Montreal, don’t miss this store for any reason.

A Drifting Life

A Drifting Life is the comics memoir of “the godfather of Japanese alternative comics”, Yoshihiro Tatsumi.  It is also a doorstop weighing in at 800+ pages.  This is a fascinating look at a man and comics movement that I knew absolutely nothing about.  It also provides an intriguing glimpse of daily life in post-war Japan and its relationship with the US. One of my issues with comics in general is that the medium tends to set limits on the length of the stories that can be told.  However, A Drifting Life, decades in the making, provides a near immersion experience.  It took me a week or so to make my way through this excellent book.  It’s staggering to think about how many hours of work must have gone into this.

Exit Wounds

I’d say that of the comics discussed in this round-up, Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan was my favorite.  A terrorist’s bomb in a busy market brings a strange young woman into the life of Koby Franco.   Franco’s long-estranged father may have been among the victims of the blast, and the young Russian woman at this door says that she was his lover.  The officials say that Koby’s father was killed in the blast, but his girlfriend has her doubts.  The unlikely pair set off to learn the truth, and each brings their own expectations and baggage to the search.  Exit Wounds masterfully depicts modern Israeli life while telling an intriguing story.  Thumbs up.  I picked this one up at Drawn and Quarterly, too.

Nemi (Volume 3)

Nemi is the anti-Cathy.  She is a goth.  She’s Norwegian.  She drinks and swears.  And she’s not putting up with any crap from you.  Nemi is presented primarily in the traditional 4-panel style of the funny pages.  I have not read Volumes 1 or 2 of Nemi’s adventures, but Volume 3 is charming and funny in that sassy, goth, Scandinavian kind of way.

See? All over the map.  I have been comic-less so far in 2010. If you’ve got some titles that I should check out, leave your suggestions in the comments.