The Sorted Books Project takes a group of books from a library and groups them so their titles tell a story. (Link from Boing Boing)
Doesn’t this make you want to sift through the spines on your shelves?
My husband G. Grod, my friend Blogenheimer, our friend EJ, and I attended Neal Stephenson’s reading at the Barnes and Noble Galleria on Friday night. NS read from his new novel, Anathem, and signed books after.
NS seemed game to be there–not his favorite thing, but he was polite and funny. The question session went well; no one asked where he got his ideas, or told him how cool Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon were. He has no plans to write again about Enoch Root. He didn’t want to go back to the Baroque Cycle world because it would be like falling into “an event horizon.” And he chose to set Anathem on a fictional world, rather than Earth, because historical fiction is like “darning a sock” and making things up requires much less interpolation. He was stumped when a woman asked what the first bedtime book he remembered was. He said he couldn’t, but that he had great affection for D’Aulaire’s book of Greek myths, and found it funny how Zeus was always “marrying” other women.
For his signing, in addition to Anathem, I brought a copy of Quicksilver, the first novel in his Baroque Cycle trilogy. I handed him the trade paperback of Quicksilver, and explained that my husband had advised me to bring the hardcover copy, but I’d chosen the trade paperback instead. That was the copy I’ll read, and I want the inscription in the one I’m reading, not the one on the shelf.
“You must have interesting conversations in your house,” he responded, with only the slightest emphasis on “interesting.” Was it a compliment, or a polite way of saying he thought I was crazy? G. Grod and I both think the latter. And G. remains adamant that the hardcover was the way to go.
Esquire doesn’t even pretend to objectivity in its “75 Books Every Man Should Read“:
An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published.
That’s a good thing. And many of the books are pretty good too. For men AND women–I’ve read 12 of them, and many more are on my TBR shelves. But I think I only counted one female author–Flannery O’Conner–on the entire list. Come on. Only men can write great books for men? That’s just silly.
Link from The Morning News.
Several years ago I read Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl, and was surprised to find books I remembered so fondly from my childhood contained such objectionable stuff. (The book’s analysis of the construction of the Rosa Parks myth is fascinating, too). I went back to the Babar books, and the criticisms weren’t exaggerated; naked, African Babar’s mother is shot, he quickly gets over his grief with a move to Paris, where he is taken in by a lady who dresses him and civilizes him, so that when he returns to the elephants, he is quickly chosen as King.
Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker, “Freeing the Elephants,” doesn’t dispute this, but he works rather too hard to portray Babar as a comedy of the bourgeoisie rather than as an apology for colonialism. I agree with him about the art, though:
The completed Babar drawings, by contrast, are beautiful small masterpieces of the faux-naïf: the elephant faces reduced to a language of points and angles, each figure cozily encased in its black-ink outline, a friezelike arrangement of figures against a background of pure color. De Brunhoff’s style is an illustrator’s version of Matisse, Dufy, and Derain, which by the nineteen-thirties had already been filtered and defanged and made part of the system of French design.
Link from The Morning News.
Marmeladov to Raskolnikov, from Crime and Punishment:
But if that’s a lie,” he suddenly exclaimed involuntarily, “if man in fact is not a scoundrel–in general, that is, the whole human race–then the rest is all mere prejudice, instilled fear, and there are no barriers, and that’s just how it should be!…
Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy;
Writer David Foster Wallace killed himself this weekend past. The books and essays of his that I’ve read have challenged, surprised and entertained me. Reading them, it wasn’t hard to “hear” the author’s depression. I imagine that his head, with the morass of thoughts, learning, and tangents that he wrote about, was an often difficult, painful place to be.
Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
ETA: Harper’s has gathered links to Foster’s essays for that magazine. (From the NBCC blog.)
A fall U of MN English event:
October 29: Junot Diaz, “We Are the New America: A Reading,” 7:30 pm
Diaz published his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao eleven years after his acclaimed short story collection Drown–and ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Sargent First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani characterized Diaz’s writing in the novel as: “a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a.k.a. New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.” Esther Freier Endowed Lecturer. Coffman Theater, 300 Washington Avenue SE, Mpls. 612-625-3363
Thanks to my friend The Big Brain for the heads up.
I often vow to read more books off my shelf and not buy new ones. Feel free to mock me.
From Big Brain Comics:
Zot! 1987-1991 by Scott McCloud,
The Black Diamond Detective Agency by Eddie Campbell
The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard by E. Campbell & D. Best
Superpowers by David J. Schwartz (a friend of a friend)
From Half-Price Books Roseville:
The Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust
The Book of Athyra by Steven Brust
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles, Mary Lamb, ill. by A. Rackham
Hamlet (Chamberlain Bros. edition with BBC production dvd)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Far Side of the World by Patrick O’Brien
Hamlet: The Poem by Harold Bloom
From Dreamhaven:
The Book of Taltos by Steven Brust
Making Book by Teresa Nielsen Hayden
The Paths of the Dead by Steven Brust
The Lord of Castle Black by Steven Brust
Sethra Lavode by Steven Brust
From Half-Price Books St. Louis Park:
The Eensy Weensy Spider by M. Hoberman, ill. by N. Westcott
Skip to My Lou by Nadine Bernard Westcott
Miss Mary Mack by M. Hoberman, ill. by N. Westcott
Romeo and Juliet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Hamlet dvd (with Ethan Hawke)
Heat dvd
Spartan dvd
Shakespeare by Peter Ackroyd
Crime and Punishment transl. by Pevear, Volokhonsky
The Early Bird by Richard Scarry
The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban, ill. by David Small
Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura
The Birthday Box by Leslie Patricelli
As if all these weren’t enough, and as if we didn’t have enough to read, we bought this at Big Brain Comics last night. It does double duty: it’s a novel and a bludgeoning weapon!
Let me know if the photos are legible; this is my first big photo foray.
Last month, Anne Trubek’s article at Good Magazine questioned Catcher in the Rye’s place in the canon, and wondered whether other, more recent fare might suit students as well or better. (Link from ALoTT5MA, among others.) Most commenters were outraged that she even suggest such a thing, and further ridiculed several of her choices. My question is why not complement, not replace, Catcher with something else, so as to compare and contrast? I commented at the article to this effect, and more.
I reread Catcher within the last few years, and found it a mixed bag. I did not empathize with Holden. MFS, who blogs at Mental Multivitamin, one of my favorite learning blogs, is an unabashed defender of Holden. I think he’s worthy of questioning. I also enjoyed Frank Portman’s irreverant homage/critique of Catcher, King Dork.
Half-Price Books (a US used book, movie and music store) is having a sale over Labor Day Weekend with an extra 20% off everything in the store, which is almost all at least half price already. Our little family brought home quite a stack of books and dvds last night; a pic to come, I hope.
At the Atlantic, “Two–Make that Three–Cheers for the Chain Bookstores.” Link from the NBCC blog, Critical Mass.
Although there is some reality in the image of the chains as predators (ours is a capitalist economy, after all), it is not the whole truth or even, perhaps, the most important part. The emotional drive behind the anti-chain crusade is an understandable mistrust of big corporations allied with the knee-jerk snobbery that is never far from the surface in American cultural life. “I am a reader,” the interior litany goes, “therefore I belong to a privileged minority; I patronize exclusive bookstores known only to me and my intellectual peers.” With the chains, which target a wider public and make the process of book buying unthreatening to the relatively less educated, the exclusivity factor disappears.
I enjoyed the article, because I’ve always enjoyed Barnes and Noble and Borders. (Not so much Books a Million.) On a trip to London, I can’t tell you how many happy hours I whiled away browsing in Waterstone’s, and admiring their floor by floor displays. I also shop at amazon.com. And my independent book and comic stores. I love books; I love shopping. Therefore I love bookshops.
I was aware of Helen Oxenbury’s work before I had children, because I oversaw the kids’ section at a large used-book store. But I didn’t own any of her books till after I had my own child. The first thing that raised my interest was an article I can no longer find*, I think from the Guardian or Times, about best books for children that included at least one of Oxenbury’s quartet, Say Goodnight, All Fall Down, Clap Hands and Tickle, Tickle. The second was a post by kidlit/librarian blogger Book Moot about Farmer Duck, whose author is Martin Waddell. We owned, and both Drake and I loved, Owl Babies, by the same author. It had humor, and a wonderful almost-rhyming text that was a joy to read. Farmer Duck, a Parent’s Choice award winner about a lazy farmer who takes advantage of his hard-working duck, delighted us as well. Finally, a comment from a reader (was that you, Loretta?) about the Tom and Pippo series made me seek those out. After Guppy was born, we bought all four of Oxenbury’s baby books that were recommended in that first article, Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, and the four “I” books: See, Hear, Can, and Touch. He adored all of them, and they were his favorites for a long time. Now that Drake is nearly 5, I’ve added the Helen Oxenbury Nursery Collection and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and both these are often off the shelf.
Many of Oxenbury’s books, such as the Tom and Pippo series, and the charming It’s My Birthday, are out of print. But they’re still in circulation at many libraries, and on the shelves at used bookstores. I highly recommend Oxenbury’s illustration. She captures something that clearly speaks to my children, and draws them into the books. Her style is distinctive and accessible, yet not saccharine.
I highly recommend the books I mention above. Seek out those in print so that they stay in print. Perhaps we’ll be fortunate to see others come back.
(For anyone who wants to have a go at finding it, here’s what I recall. It was an English best-of list, probably from 2005. It included work by Oxenbury, Shirley Hughes (Alfie’s 1 2 3 or A B C) Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo, and Baby Brains. But I may be conflating two lists. I think it was a part of a series of many best-ofs, like novels, or non-fiction, and not just confined to the previous year.)
At Pages Turned, SPF writes about books read and un-, the latter of which includes Lin Enger’s (brother of Leif) Undiscovered Country, and Daniel Wrobleski’s Story of Edgar Sawtelle, both inspired by Hamlet. The former is set in Minnesota, the latter in MN’s next-door state WI.
And while I was searching for possible productions of Love’s Labor’s Lost, I came across this information on this upcoming, far-away production of Hamlet. (Be sure to read down to see who plays Claudius.) Shall we all go, if only in our dreams?
The days of overdue books, hefty library fines and interminable waits for best-sellers are over in Chicago.
The city of Chicago just got a big tech upgrade to its library system. Patrons can now reserve and renew books online, resulting in fewer overdue books. (Link from Blog of a Bookslut)
Not, to gloat, but we’ve had that at the Minneapolis Public Library for ages. (Suck it, Chicago! Heh, heh. Just kidding.) It’s a great system. I hate to burst the bubble, though, but there are still interminable waits for bestsellers. For example, I’m 116 (of 163) on the request list for the Into the Wild dvd, and I placed the request in January.
Have you visited your local library lately?
NPR talks to independent booksellers and gets their picks for summer reading (link from Morning News). I haven’t even _heard_ of many of the books, though I’ve read one of them, Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I recommend.
Here are last year’s picks.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, now the “Man Booker”, six books were shortlisted earlier this month for a Best of the Booker special prize. A similar prize, The Booker of Bookers, was given for the 25th anniversary in 1993, and awarded to Salman Rushdie for his first novel, Midnight’s Children. That book is the odds on favorite for Best of the Booker as well.
You can vote here. The six shortlisted books, chosen from the list of 41 Booker Prize and Man Booker Prize winners, are:
Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995)
Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999)
JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974)
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)
My sister Ruthie sent me a card with this message for Mothers Day, and it’s so true. Today I’ve cleaned up vomit, diarrhea, and snot, none of which was mine. This is not a glamour gig.
But there are compensations, however brief, like the snuggling of a small, warm head against my shoulder while we read three new finds from the used bookstore:
The Guest by James Marshall
Fox, Outfoxed by James Marshall
Minnie and Moo: Night of the Living Bed by Denys Cazet
For myself, I was delighted to find a slipcased set of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights by the Misses Charlotte and Emily Bronte, with engravings by Fritz Eichenberg. From 1945, they’re fragile, but lovely to look at. They’ll display nicely on my recently created Bronte/Austen shelf, and bring me much bookish geekjoy.
The PBS Complete Jane Austen finished Sunday with the second part of a new, 3-hour adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Much stronger than the other new adaptations of Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, SS08 benefited from its extra 90 minutes of screen time. It was able to do justice to the story and to characters that the other, shorter adaptations simply couldn’t manage. It does, though, have the tough circumstance of comparison to both the popular book and Ang Lee’s popular 1995 film adaptation.
SS08 opens shockingly, with a steamy love scene. Outraged, I thought, “That’s not in the book; they’re sexing this up on purpose!” A few seconds later I recalled who the couple must be, and that this scene WAS part of the book, though not told in present-tense detail. Interesting, I thought, but pointless to all who have read the story, and even all who are somewhat familiar with Austen’s books, which all include an initially charming guy who turns out to be a cad; in SS it’s Willoughby. And Willoughby, in this new adaptation, is so obviously oily and up to no good that it’s a mystery why Marianne falls for him, and why no one else suspects him.
I’ll skip to what I liked first. Hattie Morahan was absolutely wonderful as Elinor. Sympathetic, believable, vulnerable, and strong. David Morrissey as Colonel Brandon was likewise quite good. He ably captured the quiet, steadfast, tormented older man who’s had his heart broken, and has no pretty illusions.
I’d forgotten why SS was my least favorite Austen novel, and in a well-drawn but painful sequence SS08 reminded me why. Marianne, while often foolish and trying, is talented and spirited. After she is dumped by Willoughby and rescued by Brandon, she slowly grows to love the latter. For all his upright nice-guy-ness, though, Brandon is nearly twenty years her senior, and he’ll have a muffling effect on her exuberance. SS08 captured this in a scene where Marianne enters his dark library, sits down at the pianoforte, wipes a hand across the top–affection, or dusting?–and proceeds to play a slow, dark tune in minor key. The interior scene is interpolated with one of her going outside to see Brandon, who has unhooded his hawk, set it “free” to fly, then called it back and snared its feet. In the book, Austen attempts to gloss over their differences by saying that they will be good for one another, but I think some of bright, dynamic Marianne will be lost forever in that safe, stable marriage. That may have been Austen’s point, but it doesn’t endear the story to me.
My other reservations about SS08 are minor, but they accumulated. The mother’s character is muddy–instead of foolish like Marianne she comes off as merely stupid. Dan Stevens as Edward Ferrars seems to be doing an impression of Hugh Grant from the ‘96 film. Likewise Claire Skinner as Fanny Ferrars Dashwood seems to be doing a Miranda Richardson impression. There’s far too little of Mr. Palmer, and I missed his snarky comments. There were far too many moody shots of water crashing on rocky shores. And, as with the other new adaptations, WHY OH WHY the shaky, hand-held camera? That’s gotten tired in action movies; there’s absolutely no call for it in Victorian England!
At the end, I found it a mixed bag. Some excellent things, some good things, several bad things. Worth watching on television, but I would not buy the DVD. For more commentary, see Austenblog, and Maureen Ryan’s The Watcher.
Also, raised as I was by a feminist mother, on Ms. magazine, the sense that you can have it all was instilled in all of us — and I’m really glad that it was. But when motherhood pulls you in one direction, and work pulls you in another, that sense becomes diluted. Somebody said to me long ago that it’s not a question of having it all, but that you can have a lot of most things. That’s a nice way to think about it. Think about if your life is going in the direction you want it to go, and try not to be riddled with self-doubt.
(interview link from Bookslut)
Wolitzer’s new book is a fictional take on the work/home mommy debate, set in NYC. It’s gotten a good review at EW, and at Mental Multivitamin. I keep saying I’m going to get back to my home book shelves, but there’s too much that tempts me, like this.
Last November, children’s book author/illustrator extraordinaire Mo Willems announced that he was writing a new Pigeon book, and that the title began, “The Pigeon Wants A…” School kids were invited to write in with their guesses. The publisher received over 13,000 replies; many schoolteachers galvanized their classes for group replies. (Links thanks to ALoTT5MA)
Well, April 1 was the announcement date. Here is what the Pigeon wants. Unfortunately, it may be what my son, 4yo Drake, wants too.
We’ll get the book. Not the other thing, though.