Friday Links

The Sisters Brothers wins the Tournament of Books!

The NYT discusses raising an e-reader, as in a reader (child) that reads electronically.  Interesting takes.  A teacher says,  “Old books don’t really cut it anymore,” she said. “We have to transform our learning as we know it.”  And then someone who actually studies learning says:

“Right now, the state-of-the-art, in terms of research-based practice is: read traditional books with your child,” said Julia Parish-Morris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied e-books and how children interact with them. “We don’t have any evidence that any kind of electronic device is better than a parent.”

Good. My job as a parent is safe. For now.

Your Brain On Fiction – the neuroscience of reading stories.

An excellent overview of how big a deal the appearance of the Harry Potter series in e-book form is for JK Rowling.  Even cooler, the author is making the series available for digital loan from libraries.

The assclown that wrote a book about being manly that came out two weeks ago says that adults shouldn’t read YA books.  Ever.  He says, “I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.”  Laurel Snyder, Atlanta author of books for children says:

When adult authors suddenly write Op-Eds that disrespectfully stir the Kidlit/YA pot, they are FLACKING THEIR OWN BOOKS. Please ignore them.

— LaurelSnyder (@LaurelSnyder) March 29, 2012

Uh oh.  Facebook is asserting copyright claims over the word “book.”

Ian McKellan and Stephen Fry swoop in to rescue a pub called The Hobbit from copyright police.  The pub may have actually gotten off easy.

An interesting read about the lost original manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces.

The e-book reader of the future – as imagined in 1935

This is not the official Baby Got Books tote bag, but it ought to be.

A friend sent me this article – “Ann Arbor man punched during literary argument.”  I’ll bet the guy who got punched wouldn’t shut up about Atlas Shrugged.  Totally justified.

This is awesome.  How a book is made.  The paper kind:

All My Friends Are Still Dead & Hilarious

Remember our enthusiasm for the dark comedy gold of All My Friends Are Dead?  Imagine how psyched we are to learn about the sequel, All My Friends Are Still Dead.

Women

In the long list of “people I think I’ve heard a lot about and therefore think I know what they’re all about despite having no actual interaction with them”, add Charles Bukowski.  I’ve heard enough references to him over the years that I think I’ve even taken it upon myself at times to refer to a thing or two as “like Bukowski”.  But I had never actually read anything by him.

So I decided to indoctrinate myself to him via his novel Women, published in 1978.  What I find fascinating is that, while reading one of his novels in many ways showed me that I didn’t actually know a thing about him, in some ways I feel like I knew him all along.

In terms of what I guess I knew all along, assuming this novel is at least semi-autobiographical (which I believe it is), Bukowski was essentially a selfish, self-centered, drunken lecher.  His character, Henry Chinaski, was a Los-Angeles-based poet who begins to achieve minor fame for his poetry and makes his living doing readings, often traveling across the country to do them (and being reimbursed).  All the while, all he seems to think about is drinking and having sex with every woman near him.  This is further exacerbated by the fact that friends and acquaintances often call or just drop by with beer, and women begin to write him and call him wanting to meet him and be with him.  And he never received an offer he could refuse.

This is a pretty filthy book.  It is base and demeaning in the way Chinaski thinks about and treats women, and it features raw sex scenes.  But it is also honest in the sense that Bukowski didn’t have any problem shielding his thoughts.  What was news to me in reading this book is that Bukowski writes with the most simple prose I think I’ve ever read.  Unlike other writers that I had sort of lumped him in with in my head (Kerouc, Burroughs, etc.), Bukowski’s writing is not extravagant whatsoever; he uses small words, short sentences, and straightforward storytelling.  And this novel/memoir is essentially just a series of anecdotes told sequentially, almost all of them involving Chinaski, booze, and women.  Bukowski (at least in this book) is not heavy on deep thoughts.  About the deepest he gets is a nugget like this:

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink.  If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

Other than a few observations like that, there’s not a whole lot here that’s immediately rewarding.  I think with Bukowski, much like the other authors I mentioned in my parenthetical earlier, and like others who have dedicated their lives to creating stories they could write about (e.g., Hemingway), the whole is more than the sum of its parts; like a concept artist, Bukowski appeared to have led his life knowing that it was all the subject of his writing.  That’s a form of dedication that most other self-centered drunken lechers can’t rely on to try to excuse their behavior.

History of Books

For homework, my second grader is working on a project concerning how communications have changed over time.  She decided to do her project on the history of books.  Her brainstorming session for research ideas looks like this:

We had a great discussion this afternoon, but I can’t stop researching the topic for my own edification.  I’ve stumbled across some cool web resources as a result:

• Wikipedia has a nice overview
• What this U Penn web site lacks in pizzazz it makes up for in thoroughness
• This page hosted by UCSD (also lacking in utlilization of 21st web design) has some great info
• This page, on the History of Graphic Design site, is beautiful and well done
• History of Information’s info is very nice, too
• UNC-Pembroke has resources on the history of books “from cuneiform alphabets to Curious George”
• This History of Visual Communication website has nice chapters on The Art of the Book, The Printing Press, and The Master of Type

Friday Links

When I heard that this was a parody of Jay-Z and Kanye West song, I went to check out that song (the one with the unsavory reference to the gents in Paris).  I don’t like that song so much.  But this, this is pretty great.

The folks at St Martin Press had a package addressed to someone who doesn’t work there with 11 pounds of pot inside.  No one knows who is responsible.  Definitely wasn’t the stoner in the mail room.

Doubleplusgood?  A new film version of 1984 may be in the works.

Goodreads wrote an interesting article about discovering books on Goodreads and other places.  Interesting pie chart.  Mmmmm.  Pie.

This seems inevitable.  There is apparently a booming business for people to write positive book reviews of your book for you on Amazon.  The going rate seems to be $5.

When my daughter sees this, we’re going to have to pack our bags for London.

Cool:  Monks defaced illuminated manuscripts with complaining marginalia.

16 things Calvin and Hobbes said better than anyone else.

Are you still keeping up with The Tournament of Books?  My early pick, The Art of Fielding was eliminated this week, but it appears to be poised to return in the Zombie Round.  My new favorite book, The Sisters Brothers knocked off Swamplandia!, and I think it could be the dark horse to win it all.

And don’t forget to listen to Christopher Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are.

Rin Tin Tin

(Another guest post by our friend Debbie in San Francisco. :

I never saw the TV show “Rin Tin Tin”. Never saw a single film starring Rin Tin Tin. Never owned a dog. And yet, and yet….Susan Orlean’s opus to the showbiz dog told me all that was necessary to know about the story of this beloved canine character. The book tells a story, wrapped up in a story, wrapped up in yet another story.

The first story is a plastic figurine of Rin Tin Tin that the author’s grandfather keeps in his office. He does not let the children touch or play with the beloved item (more on that later). The next story is the author feeling compelled to share the story of this wondrous showbiz dog and how she became compelled to do so. Then of course, the next story is of the dog itself, and the man who created the legend. It doesn’t end there. Yes, there is another story, and that is of the continuing parade of dogs that keep the Rin Tin Tin legend alive and the dramas as they are pulled into service to share with a rapturous audience, both on the large and small screens. Then the final story is the denouement, the aftermath….and like many things in life, it fades to black.

While all this sounds convoluted (too many stories?) it is not. Orlean is a master at weaving compelling narrative, and she helps the reader make sense of it all. She is a generous writer, in that she is explanatory and helps us all keep things straight in our minds as we’re turning pages.

The tyranny of the years is sadly apparent in this book, as I was hoping for a little more emotive narrative, a la “Seabiscuit”, which made me cry. I did not cry in one place in this book, which surprised me, as I was prepared to do so. Those of you who are interested in Hollywood history will enjoy this book, as “Rinty’s” story could not be told without sharing the underbelly of the entertainment business at the time. With a bit of Kismet, the quasi-silent “The Artist” has won an Oscar this year. We learn a lot about the migration of Rin Tin Tin films from silent to dialogue-filled “talkies”. The author has some beautiful prose about the magic of movies and the emotional spell they cast on audiences. I was riveted.

This book is a life story. It’s a life story of not one dog, but of a character, an idea and a celluloid creation. The idea keeps a number of people happily employed, and we learn of their sagas in turn. When the last pages are unfurling, the reader feels a sense of joy for having known the story of Rin Tin Tin.

p.s. at the end, the author shares that her grandfather had a momentary lack of judgment/generosity, and lets the kids play with the Rin Tin Tin figure he treasured. Guess what happened to it?

The Book Club Cookbook, Take 2

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a contributing member of a book club. Or a non-contributing member for that matter.  I like to read books, and I like to talk about books, but I just haven’t gotten it together to merge the two.  At one point, I thought it might be fun to start an US magazine book club, where all us moms could drink yummy cocktails and talk about sparkley dresses and reality shows that I don’t even watch, but really I would just want to have the drinks and chat.  Yet somehow, the gods of free books found it in their hearts to send me a copy of the coolest book club book ever.  Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp, creators of bookclubcookbook.com have come out with a revised and updated second edition of The Book Club Cook Book: Recipes and Food for Thought from Your Book Club’s Favorite Books and Authors.

I missed it when the first edition of this book came out, but I have loved pouring over this second edition.  Even the Table of Contents is fun; each book title is paired with a recipe title so you can search for your favs and decide if you’d want that recipe.  Ahab’s Wife (by Sana Jeter Naslund) comes with a seafood chowder recipe (of course), Bel Canto (by Ann Patchett – when do I get to go to her Nashville bookstore?) is paired with eggplant caponata, and The Great Gatsby has you drinking mint juleps.   The titles and food ideas are endless!

After you check out how many of these books you have already read (most), it’s fun to see what has been written about them.  Each entry includes a brief synopses of the book along with the recipe, but the book club gals have also included discussions with many of the authors about why certain foods or recipes were included in the story or their own reasons for choosing particular recipes. So, sometimes the author’s family recipe for, say, vanilla kipferls (crescent cookies), thank you Markus Zusak, show up because the author has shared that that was what he remembers his own grandmother baking and savored those memories while writing about life in World War II Germany (The Book Thief).  The Novel Thoughts sections after the recipes and the More Food For Thought sections after that include even more information about the books as well as interviews with specific book clubs about their own book/recipe pairings.

When asked about the creation of The Book Club Cookbook, the authors share that each of them discovered a connection between books and food in their own book clubs, a specific pairing of certain books with particular foods, and then a realization that most authors included descriptions of food based on cultural, ethnic, and familial traditions.  Because food figured prominently in their own book club experiences, the authors ‘…thought it would appeal to book club members to have delicious, thematically appropriate recipes at their fingertips…”. It sounds like book clubs around the country really get into connecting what they’re reading to what they’re eating.

I’m not real sure I’ll get to experience this book the way the authors have intended, as I have read most of these books already, do not participate in a book club, and lack the ability to plan ahead.  But, I do hope to at least try some of the recipes (ahem, Demetrie’s chocolate pie, sans poo poo), and I will definitely continue to enjoy reading what the original authors as well as the Book Club Cookbook authors have to say about their books and their food. If you happen to belong to one of these clubs and you still haven’t read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, go buy this book and start working on some glogg to enjoy with your Swedish meatballs.

Ten Thousand Saints, Take Two

After reading blogmaster Tim’s glowing review of Eleanor Henderson’s novel Ten Thousand Saints, I had to dive in at my first opportunity.

I’m not sure why, but this was a slow read for me.  Not because of any complexities in Henderson’s prose, or any funny business with flashbacks or other tricky literary devices; it just took me a long time to read.  Perhaps it was my failure to identify with the characters (a condition that has impacted me on countless otherwise fantastic reads), or perhaps it was my inability to choose sides in the conflicts that developed between the characters.  I don’t know, but I’ll assume it was something that wouldn’t affect other readers.

The story starts in a small town in Vermont in the 1980′s, centering on two best friends, Jude and Teddy.  They are high school students that live in the margins, not part of the mainstream in school, and both come from broken homes (using that term generously).  There’s a complex and depressing history surrounding each of them involving adoptions, divorces, drugs, abandonment, and general oppression.  On New Year’s Eve they meet Eliza, Jude’s estranged father’s girlfriend’s daughter, who has taken the train up from New York City, and at a party to which they were not invited, bad things happen.  The story takes off from there as various characters try to cope in the aftermath.

We are introduced to various subcultures as the story unfolds, from small town Vermont to the straight-edge scene in NYC’s East Village, from high class uptown Manhattanites to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, from hippie pot growers to upper middle class jocks.  And what I guess I struggled with was that the characters in the story seemed to be so passionate, but I couldn’t really figure out where that passion was directed; I couldn’t really identify their motives or what they were fighting so hard to achieve.  Maybe that was the point.  Maybe Henderson was trying to illustrate that everyone has their struggles and their goals, and there’s no objective measure of the worth of what drives people.  Not to say that there aren’t fundamentally important and meaningful themes here — death, substance abuse, unwanted pregnancy, class war, AIDS — it’s just that she seemed to set the stage for them against a backdrop far from what you might expect in “classic” literature.

This one made me think a lot — that might be what took me so long to read it.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Those Who Save Us

Germany during WWII is such a horrific part of history, why do I continue to become engrossed in this time period?  Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay remains one of my all time favorites. Why do I torture myself?  Since I don’t feel like digging into the self-help books to find out, I’ll just continue reading this genre because even after turning that last page I never stop thinking about them.    Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum is no exception.  Ms. Blum took me on another emotional ride through this part of history.

Trudy is a college professor embarking on a study of Germans who lived in Germany during World War II.  She questions them about their lives during this time, what they saw, how they acted etc…. she encounters some very interesting people.  In reality, she is using these interviews as a means to understand her mother.  Anna, her mother, isn’t talking.  She and Trudy moved to America from Germany and although Trudy was a little girl during this time she doesn’t remember the details about how they survived.  Frankly, Trudy has no idea about the truth of her existence.

Ms. Blum keeps the story moving even as she alternates between Anna and Trudy’s current life and their past life in Germany.  The story begins with Anna as a young adult who takes care of her father in their home.   She doesn’t get out much but when she does she encounters a Jewish doctor with whom she ultimately falls in love.  The war begins and life drastically changes for the worse.  Anna manages to hide her lover in a crawl space in her house.   He is ultimately discovered by Anna’s father who promptly turns him over to the authorities and throws a pregnant Anna out of the house.

Anna takes refuge with the local baker, who is still able to keep baking, thanks to subsidies from the German government.  More unfortunate events occur while the two women raise Trudy and then very unexpectedly, Anna finds herself running the bakery alone.  A Nazi officer enters the bakery one day, likes what he sees (in Anna, not the bread) and proceeds to make weekly visits taking what he needs from her (in the upstairs bedroom).  Anna figures out quickly how she can use this officer to keep herself and Trudy alive.  Her neighbors look at her accusingly and want nothing to do with her.   At the end of the war as her neighbors yell profanities, calling her a traitor, she is saved by an American soldier who marries her and brings her and daughter to America.

Interspersed between Anna’s story, we take an emotional journey with Trudy as she learns more and more about herself and her mother while conducting very painful interviews.  Through these interviews, she meets a man who knew her mother in their German town and her history begins to unfold.

A quote from the Nazi soldier sums up all the characters in this story:

 “Do you know, you alone save me. Your purity, your values – our shared values – they elevate me above the filth that surrounds me every day. You are my savior, he says. After all, if not for you, I might have been pulled into Koch’s decadence [reference to an unethical commander], and then I too would have been removed from my post. We might never have met, Anna! I often think of that.  As do I, says Anna.  As do I.”

In retrospect, every character in this book is being saved by someone and is saving someone else from something –  from emotional issues or frankly, from death.   The relationship between the Nazi officer and Anna is the most thought-provoking one to me in this story.  I’m a sucker for mother/daughter stories.  Obviously, Anna wouldn’t have chosen to be involved with this man, especially knowing that if the truth was revealed about her daughter’s father.  Having been involved with a Jewish man in this manner could have been death for them both.  But Anna had her sweet little girl.  If you’re a mother you know that you would do anything and everything in your power to keep your baby alive.  I can only imagine the mixed emotions Anna lived with every day – the sickening feeling of having this man force his way into her life, but his actions equal survival for them both.

Fiction? Supposedly.  But Jenna Blum herself is of  Jewish and German descent.  I imagine that much Those Who Save Us is based on her own family history.  If you are also intrigued with this genre or heart wrenching mother/daughter tales, then add Ms. Blum’s first novel to your list.

Happy St Patrick’s Day

What says St Patrick’s like a leprechaun-eating Ulysses-reading cat?

(Photo:  Journopal, Brooklyn, NY)

Friday Links

My new favorite blog: Least Helpful.   The site serves up a steady stream of the least helpful customer reviews on Amazon.  Hilarity.

Finalists have been chosen for the NYC Public Library’s Young Lions Award

The Children’s Choice Book Awards have also announced their finalists

The Wall Street Journal examines what women read…when no one can see the cover.   Us dudes, on the other hand, are all Proust, all the time.

Check out this awesome US literature map from the thirties.  Back then it wasn’t all Brooklyn.

Gandalf comes out in support of pub against copyright bullying

List of the best novels of all time. Hasn’t this been done?

Kids’ books that take the scary out of science

Author parleys with the e-book pirates

Don’t forget to check in daily at the Tournament of Books now underway

The Sisters Brothers

There was no post here yesterday because I was up waaaay past my bedtime the night before finishing The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt.  I wanted to be sure to finish before yesterday’s Tournament of Books match-up between The Sisters Brothers and Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder.  (Spoiler: The Sisters took it handily.)  I started reading the book on Monday night.  I would have read it in a single sitting if it weren’t for pesky work, having to be alive in the morning to get kids to school, etc.  Holy crap, what a good book.  I can’t believe it took me so long to read it.  To start with, check out that flippin’ sweet cover:

Charlie and Eli Sisters are brothers, “the mean one” and the “husky one”  as one unfortunate soul describes them.  They are also hired gunmen feared throughout the west.  The story begins with the brothers leaving their home in Oregon City for their latest assignment for their book The Commodore.   First stop is to check in with The Commodore’s hired detective who has been tailing their target around Gold Rush San Francisco. What should be an easy assignment turns out to be anything but.   The adventure will change the brothers lives forever.

It’s a cracking adventure, too.  The novel has been compared to True Grit and the author has been described as “like Cormac McCarthy with a better sense of humor.”  The novel was also short-listed for last year’s Man Booker Prize.  Those are big boots to fill but deWitt pulls it off admirably.  It speaks volumes about the author’s ability that a Western historical novel that is at turns violent, crude, and “ribald” can also be sentimental and literary.

Getting all lit-101, the brothers/sisters dichotomy serves to highlight the internal struggle of the brothers to find peace with who they really are, underneath the yoke of their unusual occupation,  The job colors how others see them, and it weighs heavily upon them to live up the billing.  The novel is set during  the Gold Rush, but it’s take on San Francisco could also be used to describe the city during the modern Gold Rush of the internet boom or the greed that has taken over Wall Street. The brothers meet a stranger who, sensing their new arrival, tells them about the madness that has gripped the city with the influx of so much sudden wealth:

“The whores are working fifteen-hour shifts and are said to make thousands of dollars per day.  You must understand, gentlemen, that the tradition of thrift and sensible spending has vanished here. It simply does not exist any more. For example, when I arrived this last time from working my claim I had a sizable sack of gold dust, and though I knew it was lunacy I decided to sit down and have a large dinner in the most expensive restaurant I could find…So it was that I ate a decent-sized, not particularly tasty meal of meat and spuds and ale and ice cream, and for this repast, which would have put me back perhaps half a dollar in my hometown, I paid the sum of thirty dollars in cash.”
Charlie was disgusted.  ”Only a moron would pay that.”
“I agree,” said the man.  ”One hundred percent I agree.  And I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively.  Furthermore, I hope your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.”

When the brothers finally meet their target, he turns out to be the sort of old coot/poetic madman that populates the best films and books of the old west.  When he tells Eli that “most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives,”  Eli can’t help but take the words as the most apt description of his own life.

Wil Wheaton, the judge of yesterday’s Tournament of Books match-up has this to say about the two books:

If State of Wonder made me feel like I was struggling to stay awake during The English Patient, The Sisters Brothers made me feel like I was sitting in a movie house in Red Dead Redemption, watching an episode of Deadwood that was written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by the Coen Brothers. If I was the wrong audience forState of Wonder, I’m pretty much the perfect audience for The Sisters Brothers.

I’m pretty much the perfect audience for The Sisters Brothers, too.  It may not be for everyone, but if it sounds like it’s your thing, don’t put it off another minute.  A great novel awaits.

Guitar Zero

I recently caught the end of an NPR story about a book called Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning by Gary Marcus that sounded fascinating.   As the NPR story says, Marcus  ”took up guitar at the relatively ancient age of 38, by starting with the video game Guitar Hero.”  In the book Marcus uses his experience to discuss the science of learning and why certain tasks like learning to play a new instrument or learning a language become harder as we get older.  As a student who took up guitar later in life than Mr Marcus and a science nerd to boot, I had to check it out.

I once heard a younger acquaintance remark “well, any monkey can go off and learn how to play guitar.”   Marcus and I are here to tell you that’s not the case.  At least not well.   An old canard popular in the telling of the punk rock movement  is that the bands barely knew how to play their instruments.   While it’s true that they may not have had the mastery of some musicians, I recommend that you try to play along if it’s so easy.  Playing basic chords really fast and in time to create a song that actually sounds (arguably) good are actually several different cognitive skills that are all relatively difficult to master.  That anyone ever does borders on the miraculous.

Marcus walks through the cognitive processes involved in learning the tasks of having your left hand (for righties) bend into impossible shapes on specific strings at just the right moment, while your right hand is doing something entirely different.  Being able to create your own songs, Marcus explains, is its own separate skill.  It’s a relative rarity that some people are able to both learn an instrument and compose new songs on it.   Depressingly, he discusses the barriers to this kind of learning that come with age.

Marcus notes that cognitive scientists estimate that to become proficient at some new skill (like playing an instrument) requires roughly 10,000 hours of focused practice on average.  Some folks may never become proficient, while others may be rock stars in significantly less time.  Marcus investigates why this rule generally holds true, and what happens with those who accelerate the timeline.

In the best sections of this book, Marcus masterfully breaks down the elements of learning to play guitar and puts it in the larger context of how our brain learns new tricks, especially extremely difficult new tricks.   A chapter on what expert musicians know that you don’t is also insightful.  The book strays when it wanders afield of its subtitle.  The chapter on why some music sounds better than others and what the worst (theoretical) song in the world sounds like was a chore for me to work through.   This is, overall,  an interesting read for the mature budding musician and others that are interested in the science of how our how brain learns to make music.  It may come off as  complete mumbo jumbo for  readers lacking a strong interest in at at least one of those subjects.

Friday Links

The Tournament of Books is back!  Catch up on Round 1 and Round 2.  Click the link on the bar at the top to see the brackets.    My pick to win it all…The Art of Fielding.  I will be wrong.

If a tournament of books isn’t your thing,  visit Grantland’s Smacketology to determine The Wire’s greatest character.

The 2011 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced.  My streak is intact!  None of the books that I nominated won.  Again.

This just in…The New York Times says that e-book readers that do other things, like play Angry Birds, may distract some of us from reading.

The Wall Street Journal counters with  the 10 things that e-book readers won’t tell you.

The 100 Best Opening Lines From Books

The 10 Best Fictional Bookstores

The Ithaca NY Library, home of Eleanor Henderson, has compiled a link-tastic guide for her novel Ten Thousand Saints

Video:  The  Shutesbury, MA Public Library turns to ukuleles and YouTube to raise over a million bucks for a new building.

Another video:  Muppets spoof The Hunger Games

Recommended Reads

One of the benefits that I’ve enjoyed, now that I’ve switched over to the dark side and own a Kindle, is reading long-form non-fiction pieces that until recently had no place in the market.  These pieces are too long for any but the most profit averse magazines and too short to be sold on their own.  Enter the e-book to save the day.  I’ve recently read two such pieces that I highly recommend.

The first is a Kindle Single that I had to read because it is written by one of my favorite authors Dara Horn.  I’ve interviewed Dara Horn twice (see the sidebar on the right) and we have not coincidentally reviewed two of her novels, All Other Nights and The World to Come.  Horn was also named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

The Rescuer is a non-fiction account of the life of Varian Fry.  Fry was responsible for rescuing many famous Jews, including Marc Chagall, from occupied France during World War II.  Horn explores why this courageous man is virtually unknown.   Horn is clear that this will not be the typical  Hollywood version of Holocaust rescue stories:

I’ve long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant — as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper.  When I was 23 and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering.  It is a very distant world from what we are taught to assume in American Culture, where happy endings are so expected that even our stories of the Holocaust somehow have to be redemptive.  In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there wasn’t much of that.  Instead one finds cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance.

It’s  a quick and fascinating read. Check it out.

The second e-book I’d like to recommend is Vanity Fair’s How a Book is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding by Keith Gessen.  The author founded the hot literary mag n + 1  along with Chad Harbach.  Harbach is the author of a BGB favorite,  The Art of Fielding (my review).  Gessing and Harbach became friends when the two took “an intense, five-person seminar of Herman Melville” their sophomore year.  This e-book is an “inside baseball” look at how books get published.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is just incredible to read that the novel was rejected.  Repeatedly.  Some of those that didn’t see the promise are named.   And then a bidding war breaks out for the suddenly red-hot novel.  Especially fascinating to me are how Gessing’s impressions of his friend’s novel change over time.  He goes from…:

So the shortstop couldn’t make a throw to first.  So?  I didn’t say it at the time, but it felt a little like a Disney film.  (The Bad News Bears go to liberal-arts college.)

to…

Reading the galley, I saw that Henry’s anguish about perfection, and his sudden inability to make the throw to first, mirrored Chad’s difficulties completing the book, especially with so many people around him demanding that he just do it.  I saw other things, too.  But mostly I was just delighted.

This is absolute required reading for anyone who loves books.

Book Club Cook Book & Book Clubs

Every once in a while, something unexpected shows up at BGB Headquarters that we weren’t expecting but are happy to check out once it’s here.   The Book Club Cook Book by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp (creators of bookclubcookbook.com) is one such book.

The book is a great starting off point for new book clubs or clubs looking to shake things up.  The book matches recipes with books.  The recipes are sometimes supplied by the author, other times the food is mentioned or inspired by the book.  Each book/recipe combo also includes a brief discussion of the book.  The recipes look good and doable. (I haven’t attempted any yet.)  Sadly, there are no glossy color food porn shots of what the finished product will look like for any of the recipes.  In fact, there are no pictures of food at all.  That’s ok though.  Stay for the books.

The book selections are varied and intriguing – not just what I would have thought of as standard book club fare.  The book includes recipes for books by Faulkner, Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Sebastian Junger, Dennis Lehane, and many others that would not have topped my hypothetical list.  That’s a good thing.   This isn’t neccessarily your mother’s book club, which I think is the point.  The cook book had me wanting to join a book club and discuss some of the books over the smells of delicious foods cooking in the oven.  However, being male, I may be left to read along and make these recipes at home with a smaller audience.

I know that there are book club’s that exist out there with men in them.  I just don’t have much experience with them.  (Hop in the Wayback Machine and check out this post from 2007 on book clubs in general and the only book club that I ever belonged to specifically.)   Given that lack of male book club opportunity, I was surprised to come across the story of this all-male book club which seems tremendously dorky and excellent all at once (even if the highlighted book is total shite).

I Heart Kelly Hogan

As I like to repeat over and over here at BGB, I love when the books and the music collide like a big ‘ol Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.  I am a huge Kelly Hogan fan.  When I first moved to Atlanta, the singer floored me with her incredible voice and range.  I was heartbroken when she left for the bigger pond of Chicago but heartened when she emerged as a back-up singer on my favorite Neko Case albums.  Neko Case!   So I was very excited to read that Kelly Hogan has a new album coming soon that includes songs written by some of my favorite music-type people.  Check out this list of collaborators:  the late Vic Chesnutt, the Magnetic Fields, Andrew Bird, M. Ward, Jon Langford, and Robyn Hitchcock.  The most interesting collaboration – which gets to the music and books intersection – is a song co-written by Andrew Bird and author Jack Pendarvis.  You can listen to the song here and check out my review of Awesome by Jack Pendarvis here (spoiler alert: it’s awesome).

Friday Links

Pictionary: The Cormac McCarthy Edition -

A BGB favorite Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad has been named a finalist for Best Translated Book Awards.  Hurray!  Read our reviews here and here. Then read the book.

The co-author of the Berenstain Bears passed away this week.  This writer at Slate has some issues that may go beyond the annoying bear family – “Among my set of mothers the series is known mostly as the one that makes us dread the bedtime routine the most…What I do recall is throwing the book away in a fury during my second pregnancy, lest my subsequent children find it and become as attached as the first one did…”  Calgon?

Is your new local indie bookseller your library?

Fantastic novels with disappointing endings

Cool:  beloved children’s books as minimalist posters

Pulp Shakespeare

Oprah’s Book Club Fight Club

Cooking with Poo! and other poorly-titled tomes

Nick Flynn on Fresh Air

Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was on Fresh Air last night.  The book has been adapted into a movie called Being Lynn.  Nick Flynn and director Paul Weitz are interviewed by Not Terry Gross.  Sadly.  It’s a fantastic interview.  (Maybe Weitz calls DeNiro “Bob” too much, but still…)

Multimedia overload: Read the book.  Check out the interview and check out the film trailer below:

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

If you don’t buy one e-book this year for reading on your electronic reading device – let it be Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.   My wife and I were looking for a book that we both might want to read to download onto our brand new Kindle.  We clicked through some menus, came across a familiar title – which we both vaguely remember hearing something interesting about – and hit the buy now button.  In mere seconds we were reminded that it was the cool collection of found vintage photographs presented throughout the book that was the interesting thing that we had heard about the book.  Cool found vintage photographs that look like ass on a Kindle.  Dammit!

The found pictures are a grandfather’s proof to his grandson that the fantastic stories of taking refuge during World War II on a Welsh Island are all true.  According to the grandfather’s telling, the island was home to a children’s home filled with kids with fantastic abilities and pursued by evil monsters are all true.  When the now high-school aged grandson sees his grandfather attacked but what seemed to be a monster (large animal?) of some sort, he becomes more sure that his grandfather’s stories were true.  Everyone else begins to doubt his sanity.

In therapy, the grandson plans a trip to Wales to visit the island.  Everyone agrees that having the boy see that the setting  of his grandfather’s stories is a non-magical island in the middle of nowhere will be a step to getting over his delusions.  Of course, the trip proves just the opposite, and the boy learns that his grandfather’s life was more dangerous and complicated than he ever knew.

The story is marketed for a young adult audience, and it often reads as a modern fable.  The grandfather’s stories are a tidy metaphor for his escape from the horrors of WW II to the bucolic island.  The monster’s pursuit of the “peculiars” through time highlights the inherent danger of being different.  Miss Peregrine explains the dangers of being “peculiar” at its most basic level – “Can you imagine, in a world  so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”

These themes of otherness are sure to resonate with the angst-y teen reader.  For this adult reader, the story sometimes comes across as a little forced and chances to develop the thematic elements on a deeper level may have been missed.  Still, it’s not a bad book, and it’s worth checking out for the unique use of found vernacular photographs into a coherent and magical story.  But whatever you do, DO NOT read this novel as an e-book; spring for the hardcover.