You can also catch the selections AND discuss the book here on the blog.

Our Latest Pick

ELLA MINNOW PEA by Mark Dunn

I actually read Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea several years ago for a book club I was part of and it stuck with me, so now I want to share it with you.  While clearly a literary exercise (as letters fall off a statue – they are removed from the written and spoken vocabulary of an island community by its totalitarian government), it is also a really good story and a thought provoking political statement.

I have read other books that felt like literary exercises to me.  Some work and some don’t.  The one that pops into my mind first is Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.    The book was very highly acclaimed but I found myself distracted by some of his literary devices, and for me that took something away for the book.  I felt like it was a project for a graduate level writing class.  It would get an A for sure, but I want to feel the emotion and discover the plot rather than be cleverly deviced to death.

But back to Ella Minnow Pea.  In this book, the literary device framework does not distract.  Instead it lays a fantastical framework for character development and political observation.  Here are some of the questions the book brought up for me.

How silly are some of the things we worship or revere?

How long would you put up with rules or laws that made no sense to you?

Is there something other than language that we take for granted but couldn’t live happily without?

I could go on and on.  But I’ll let you discover the rest on your own.  If you haven’t already, check out the book club email.  It includes the discussion questions and a great recipe for Spiced Pecans from the Starwoodgal’s  Something’s Burning blog.

Let me know if you try the recipe, what you thought of the book and get ready for a great beach read next month!

– Dana

Before a recent trip to Savannah, Georgia, I was asked the same question each time I mentioned the city: “Have you read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?”  I wondered why so many people found this book to be synonymous with Savannah and decided I’d better check it out.

The author, John Berendt, explains how he came to Savannah on a whim in the 1980s and became fascinated with the city and people he met.  He recounts the decade-long murder trial of wealthy antique dealer Jim Williams, weaving the lives of his circle of friends and enemies into the storyline.  It’s easy to forget that the book is based on actual events as the eccentric characters blend with a suspenseful murder mystery and make it read like fiction.

Berendt includes interesting facts about the city’s history, giving insight into modern Savannah where the book has a noticeable presence in the city.  It is referenced at almost every tourist attraction.  Additionally Mercer House, former residence of Jim Williams, has been transformed into a museum and replicas of the “Bird Girl” statue from the book’s cover can be found throughout the city.

So now I get it.  If you’re taking a trip to Savannah…this is a must read.  And you might want to check it out even if you don’t have a trip planned!

- Kathryn Gosaynie, BWB Aquisitions & Guest Reviewer

This book piqued my interest not because of the obvious timeliness of the release with the election, but because Dave Eggers contributed the writing for Illinois. I don’t recognize any of the other authors, but What is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius were both great reads.

I just ordered my copy and I am interested to check this book out. So far I’ve only seen 32 states and this book might be a way to check some others out. Look for a review in future posts…

I don’t know why I thought I would do better with the topic of The Almost Moon.  It’s a tough one to swallow, too.  I’m not giving anything away by telling you that on page one we learn that the main character has killed her aging mother.

While the work is crafted with great skill – the main characters are all fairly unsympathetic and the opening chapter is so disturbing I almost put the book down.

That said, I do think The Almost Moon would make a good book club selection if you can stomach it.  The conversations it would open up and the character discussions could be very meaningful and engrossing.  I can just hear my book club both complaining about it and really getting into it.

To give you an idea of why his book is particularly boring, try this quote on for size: “[Web 2.0] worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone — even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us — can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 ‘empowers’ our creativity, it ‘democratizes’ media, it ‘levels the playing field’ between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is ‘elitist’ traditional media.”  Oh heavens no!  Next thing you know people with degrees in History and Poli Sci will be writing books about the internet!  Come, help me scoff at the so-called “art” of the proletariat.

For that matter, isn’t that the best part of the internet?  I love being able to see and hear the creative output of thousands of people with no budget, who would never be signed by a major label and never would have Payola to get them on the radio, people who would never get a book deal selling tons and filmmakers with a whole new canvas to go with their liberation.  Not everyone can afford NYU film school, talent or not.  The Web provides us with an unbelievable view, not into the uber-educated necessarily (although those people are certainly represented online as well).  I wonder how someone like Keen can be so displeased with the collective editing of information when the past has been riddled by books in classrooms dominated by serious biases of the authors (hence the wild popularity of A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn).  Really, he’s just an opportunist: it’s always sexier to disagree with the populous on something-to criticize the great work of art-to try and make a name for yourself than it is to agree and try to innovate.

His elitist, aristocracy loving, democracy hating pandering can be read here I would get busy eviscerating the tedious, pedantic tripe that is this text, but Speak Media did a great job.  Enjoy! (and notice the reviews of the book, 198 reviews, 2.5 out of 5 stars).

In any event, this level of connectedness is not to be ignored, and therefore let me suggest that you both pick up the excellent article by Smith, if you enjoy writing, and the solid, if at times dusty, work of Wood.

For those of you not in the know, the OED (or Oxford English Dictionary) is the bible for our language.  Have a question about a word?  Check the dictionary.  Having an argument with a Ph.D or need an etymology?  Check the OED.

Personally, I only have used it online, but apparently for those of you who are stonger than I, there is a print version.  To give you an idea of how intense this really is, the subtitle of the book is “One Man, One Year, 21,730 pages.”  YIKES!  This task sounds David Blaine-esque, but I like it.

Haven’t read it but sounds by all accounts to be really interesting/funny as it doesn’t pick apart the words so much as the words and task pick apart the author.  The OED I’m sure is fascinating, but I’ll stick to light reading, CSI or ping pong…

I’m not going to weigh in on the societal effects created by product names, it’s not what I’m good at.  What I am good at, however, is finding books for you to check out if this kind of thing interests you.

It’s a little bit of a heady book at times, and don’t let it’s small stature fool you, it’s a bear, but “I and Thou” is also a fantastic philosophical look into the way our own language and understanding of it changes our feeling or tinges it.  Martin Buber navigates claustrophically narrow nuances of language and blows them into vast expanses of thought.  Whether it’s the difference between saying “I’m sorry” where you just free yourself or asking someone “forgive me” and putting the power to them to free you, this book endeavors to show that sometimes the Thesaurus is not more factual that a bad English translation.

Currently we have none in stock but we do have this excellent analysis:

On the left we’ve got Delaware Senator Joe Biden as the Vice Presidential candidate.  From him we’ve got last year’s effort: Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics.  (Note, this has a 4.5 rating averaged from 41 reviews… whoa.  That’s quite high for a political book…)

For the right side meet your offering, the 44 year-old Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.  Unless your name is Rudy Giuliani there’s not much of a chance that you’re below Washington level politics and have written a book, so we can’t see any of Palin’s scribing, but we can go to old faithful, Wikipedia for some info.

When more (book related) info comes out, you’ll be the first to hear it.

I haven’t read it yet but consider it ordered.  Anyone read this one?

In my quest I even went so far as to read One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish, The Aeneid in Latin and tried to muscle my way through Dante’s Inferno in Old Italian (this, admittedly, proved to be too difficult).  I was ready.  Armed with my library card and Half.com I plowed through books on my hour long train ride and subway commute to and from school each day and in classes and at lunch, but eventually, an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and that object was Jane Austen.

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was simply too much to bear.  As a 17 year old boy, commuting to school everyday with thousands of others on their way to New York City, I couldn’t make the jump to that era and persona.  I could struggle to breathe with Vonnegut in Dresden, I could tackle an enormous beast (and play the cuckold) with Sir Gawain and I could even serve in a field with a Jesus-esque slave, but I could not for the life of me wear jodhpurs and muscle down the clandestine courtship of a big house novel.  This would prove my undoing as I would later be derailed by Hardy’s Far from the Maddening Crowd.

So I ask you reader, at what point do you know to put down a book?  I feel that there are too many great books to be read to suffer bad literature, but when is the point where you say “I give up?”  Or do you soldier on, looking for the redemptive qualities as your eyes cross and head turns to mush?

On the plus side, my education up to that point (it was about halfway through my senior year) had been solid on the literary front and I loved books so I didn’t actually have to cover all 100, probably only about 70 of them.  The quest enraptured me though, so I found other lists, differing in selection, to make sure that I had truly read the greatest 100 and not just a crude selection made by a team of marketers and all of the sudden I was up to more than 100.  Yikes.

I started taking out 7-10 books each month and soon became well known to the librarians who gave me help with inter-library loan and quizzical looks when I offered my quest.

I was coasting through senior year and the help came from teachers as well.  I had gotten into Holy Cross and was killing my classes so most of them let me read whatever book I was working on instead of listening to the lectures in exchange for hearing how it was going or talking with me about the books (thanks Doc Kennedy!).

For the most part the effort was amazing, I opened books I never would have thought to read that I loved (Call It Sleep by Philip Roth, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Federalist Papers, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and others that I loved anyway (Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand) and books with some of the most troubling and engaging characters of all time (Humbert Humbert of Nabokov’s Lolita, Raskalnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey).

[Continued in next post...]

I realized in my viewing fervor as they repeatedly mentioned old greats or referenced Olympic glories or disasters that my own knowledge was limited at best.  Sure I remember Barcelona, Atlanta and Athens just fine, I even have my thoughts about Nagano, Lillehammer, Turin and the others (Oslo maybe?).  But if I’m going to spend this much of my life on this, I need to educate myself better.  Come along:

Owning the Olympics First things first we need to know about this one.  After watching the CRAZY opening ceremonies, I want to know more about this Olympics and about China as it appears they’re coming into their own as the world’s superpower.  1.3 billion people and a massive martial arts/explosives presentation with lighting up war drums.  Yikes.

Get Talking Chinese This simply couldn’t be a bad idea.

A Century of Olympic Posters This is perfect, I love graphic design and you can tell so much from the promotional material of any event.  Besides, is this not a supreme coffee table book?

Triumph No history of the Olympics would be complete without information about Jesse Owens.  This particular is written by Jeremy Schaap, who also wrote Cinderella Man, the book that became a movie starring Russell Crowe and Renee Zelweger (directed by Ron Howard I believe).  Jeremy is not as sharp as his father, Dick, but I trust that this account will be excellent.

Rome 1960, the Olympics that Changed the World I keep hearing about this book as it’s rather new.  I’m inherently reluctant to read something with a decidedly histrionic title, but if this Olympics truly changed the world and I have no idea what happened there, sounds like I had better get reading.

Pre As a runner and lover of athletic lore, there is no better story than that of Steve Prefontaine.  He was the first athlete to ever wear Nike shoes (his coach was building them by hand) and he was an all-around running stud that made Oregon into the track powerhouse it has been since.  His story is both invigorating and tragic, but totally worth reading.

1. Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips.  If you’ve ever wondered what happened to Zeus and the gang from Mt. Olympus , this book is a must read.  In addition to being very clever, it’s wicked funny.
2. Hell to Pay by George Pelecanos.  Gritty, smart, edgy.  One of the best pieces of detective fiction I’ve read in awhile.
3. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole.  This might be one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.  Take that, intellectual elitists.
4. White Noise by Don DeLillo.  Another smart, funny ready.  If you’ve ever experienced an airborne toxic event, had a twenty minute conversation about what rain is, or thought about death, this book is for you.
5. Dubliners by James Joyce.  Simply amazing.  I think I might have to go back and read all of the books that were assigned to me in high school and college that I didn’t read.
6. Middlesex by Jeffrey Euginides.  Lovely, romantic, and incredibly creepy all at once.  And I’ve loved every word of it. 
   

His story is at once inspirational and sticky, covering everything from addiction to various related illegalities (no doubt the capillaries of such serious problems) to raising children and the foibles of relationships in a life when you can’t even handle personal responsibility.

On the plus side he is no apologist, he is very clear about who is at fault and that he was making serious mistakes–for which he has atoned to whatever extent one can in a perhaps short stint of sobriety.

His approach as journalist rather than nostalgist is a placement that should prove more appropriate than other stories about substance abuse that create a carefully arranged menagerie of facts, but qualms are still to be found.  For one, undoubtedly you are going to make some other people look very, very bad, including possibly your own family, if you engage in something like this.  Although the idea could be to clean one’s own slate, the fact is a story like this can smack of a certain self-indulgence–the duality of dragging oneself down to try and come out cleaner on the other side.  I’m not going to indict Carr for selfishness, hopefully that behavior was at least mostly left by the wayside along with his affection for drink, but the possibility is there and the risk is high when relations have already been strained.

Ultimately, I would say check it out, see for yourself.  David Carr is a great writer, and perhaps it behooves us to give him a chance, recognizing the lack of makeup, even if his cross-bearing is live and in HD.

In the same way that the Russian composer group: “The Mighty Handful” of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakriev and Borodin defined what it meant to be a Russian in music, Solzhenitsyn takes his place among brilliant minds and realist Russian philosopher/writers such as Tolstoy and Doestoevsky.

Having brought the world around to see the terrors of the Gulag, the prison system in Russia, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in literature in 1970.  Like Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn was increasing critical of the cultural systems of the west (particularly lashing out against rock music when he was exiled to the US) but fixed on a goal of ameliorating a situation many had given up hope on in his home country, then the USSR.

The amazing part about him though, is the time and tenor under which he wrote his works.  Today, if someone as prolific as Solzhenitsyn were to go to a publisher he would be awarded a lucrative book deal and a massive marketing campaign, but because his work was deemed “subversive to the Russian state” he stated this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “…during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known…”  But luckily for us, his works would see the light of day and cause a huge uproar in the USSR and USA alike when the three volume Gulag Archipelago came out and rocked the public in a fashion similar to if a prisoner were to release a tell-all about Guantanamo (and there were even less info about it currently).

Hitchens writes that “Solzhenitsyn lived as if there were a thing as human dignity” and one is tempted to believe him.
_______________________

Find his works here.  My suggestion would be not to start with Gulag, but rather with A Day in the Life… or if you love Dante’s Inferno try on The First Circle which is about the first circle of hell where the writers and intellectuals are cursed to stay for eternity.  His writing The Cancer Ward is also unique as he spent time in a ward while cancer almost took his life in 1954.

Amidst the spatterings of James Patterson’s Cross and Danielle Steele’s The Long Road Home it is admittedly a breath of fresh air for the twenty something male, but I can’t help but wonder how 12 years of books aren’t able to take a somewhat mediocre tale off the shelves…

If we’re going to assess Kay Ryan, we’re going to need to delve deeper than her experience, we’re going to need to, as my former “Modern American Playwrights” teacher would say, “please use the words, Mr. Hanlon, not the ones in your head but from the page.  Or at least try a mixture of the two.”

Before we do that however, it’s important to note some things.  First of all, Ryan has an decidedly alternative background from your average Poet Laureate.  She’s a left coaster who opts to teach at a small community college north of San Francisco.  Next to note is her engagement in the community could not be less like Pinsky or Collins (with his Poetry 180 project to bring poetry into high schools), from her own speech:

I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers conferences. It’s been a point of honor: the whole cooperative workshopping thing, not for me. I have never taken a creative writing class, I have never taught a creative writing class, and I have never gone, and will never go, to anything like [The Association of Writers and Writers Programs], I have often said.

Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference. Thirty minutes into the keynote address I had a migraine. It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side. It took her years to do a pocketful. You just know she doesn’t go to art conferences. Certainly not zillion-strong international ones, giant wheeling circuses of panel discussions.

It is interesting then, that she has been handed the mandate of “promoting poetry” (in the vague sense) as Ryan has been more low-profile loner than academic and promoter and in her hermitage, more Solipsist than Ascetic.  How will this mesh with the “office” of PL and will it force Ryan to step outside her comfort zone?

For that matter, when one relies on a

writing process [described] as “a self-imposed emergency,” the artistic equivalent of finding a loved one pinned under a 3,000-pound car. These “emergencies,” she says, allow her to tap into abilities she wouldn’t normally have, much like a father who single-handedly lifts a vehicle off his child. (from here)

one can’t help but wonder the frenzy inspired by writing for assorted State events.  If a normal writing in Northern California is lifting a 3,000 pound car then a gathering of the most powerful men and women in the world must then be a Superman like feat.  One can only hope that adrenaline doesn’t eschew technique for ideas of talent.

Ryan’s no slouch, though, that can’t be denied.  Winning the Ruth Lilly Prize in 2004 netted her $100,000 and being picked from obscurity like a hopeful on American Idol, and this time with no Simon (nor drunk Paula Abdul) to stop her from ascending to the most prestigious position around in her profession.

Her writing at first glance is a study in William Carlos Williams (a previous Laureate himself) in its shape and dependence on white space on the page, but her own frenzy disallows her from the poignant conciseness of his work.  Instead, she maintains a degree of precision and opens the doors for further commentary, not just painting a scene, but shading in it’s emotional landscape.

The aesthetic quality of Williams never seemed overdone, and rather it seemed a necessary element, whereas Ryan’s can become tired.  There are only so many times I am willing to accept the need to put every single line
in a three
or perhaps then a
four line phrase,
and her work is
rife with it.

I was ready to maintain my frosty front against Ryan, I was ready to scoff at her approach and wait to either by wowed or to make myself motion sick from constant eye-rolling, luckily, the wow came first:

“Repulsive Theory”

Little has been made
of the soft skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and in-curved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it’s got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth …

Undeniably carrying her own sense of solitude, or repulsion from groups (or you name it), “the tone is both ironic and sincere; it is the case, I think, that repulsion is genuinely seen as a virtue, but there is a loss that the speaker skates over—namely, the loss of true intimacy, of the possibility of sustaining a genuine “private life” while also not withdrawing from the clamor and love and pain of the world around you.” (Slate)

In an America that lives with the reality of terrorist attacks, ongoing war with no end in sight and rising costs with a drooping dollar, one wonders if the withdrawl is more appropriate for citizen than Laureate but tiny emergencies won’t be hard to conjure.

After dabbling in Collins I was drawn naturally to his predecessor, Robert Pinsky, who was (and remains) teaching at my college sweetheart’s Boston University.  At the time he was engaged in a fantastic process that I learned about (via Slate), the Favorite Poem Project.  Although his own writings, take At Pleasure BayEliot but relatively “sexless” in the decidedly non-literal sense (think Pinsky is to Mozartian flute as Eliot is to on the street nighttime tenor sax)–his project had something real and meaningful to it.  It involved famous authors, commonfolk and Pinsky himself reading the favorite poems selected from some 18,000 Americans. for example, were decidedly too “Etudes in Modernism” for me– the aforementioned poem reeking of the lyrical quality of

In their ways, Pinsky and Collins each brought something decidedly American to the role of Poet Laureate, Pinsky in the ultra-literal: taking his post and creating a forum promoting both poetry and patriotism in its way, and Collins in the less expansive but more interwoven: investing (and inventing) himself in the tradition of American Poets with a sense of oral tradition-like storytelling.

Since then the (rather silent) tenures of Glück, Kooser, Hall and Simic have gone untested by my eyes and work-feebled brain.  It’s time I reentered the field; let’s talk about latest Laureate, Kay Ryan.

[to be continued tomorrow]

In Pittsburgh, a graffiti artist decided to tag the library with the quote “I wish I were a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”  Now the careful reader recognizes the lack of a line break after “claws” as the author would have intended.  But the best part is really that the graffiti artist attributed the quote to a “J. Alfred Prufrock.”

The line, cribbed from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is arguably the most famous work (although some would say The Wasteland) of expatriate Modernist master T.S. Eliot.  The question here really, is how do you have the level of education to quote the line exactly, but so grossly botch the attribution thereof?  God forbid someone mismatch his own work with that of Banksy (although Banksy would never be so sloppy).

Oh, and who tags a library, I mean really.

Sidebar (from yours truly, a total Eliot nerd):

For your enjoyment, the full poem is here, but I personally can’t stand reading poetry online, in which case you want to pick up any of the following:

-A great copy of The Wasteland (with annotations from Ezra Pound, who was his introduction into London society when the premiere critic of the time read “Prufrock” and said to Pound something to the tune of “Your friend doesn’t need a publisher, he needs an asylum.”  This is a great text with which you can work through the poem).

-The Complete Poems and Plays (this one is just great, try “Four Quartets”)

-Old Possums Book of Practical Cats (this is not good, just don’t go here)

-The Sacred Wood or Christianity and Culture (if you like G.K. Chesterton you’re going to love these, when Eliot delved into Christianty he did so with restraint and a distinctly intelligensia/modernist tinge, very interesting!)

P.S. – for the eco-inclined, Cradle to Cradle is also waterproof.

Not that:

For the hundreds of our BetterWorld.com customers who are still buying James Frey’s book, A Million Little Pieces, and the hundreds more thinking about it, I have one suggestion: you deserve better.

If you’re looking for a memoir about addiction, scrap Frey’s book and check out An Officer and a Junkie.  Here you’ll find a well-documented story about a humble guy named Mike Winder going through the horrible realities of addiction.

The story begins as his parents drop him off for his first day at West Point Military Academy and chronicles how he became addicted to various drugs. His drug use at first is reminiscent of a Hunter S. Thompson dope journey but changes course as the years of drugs take serious toll on his body, his mind and his relationships with family.

Mike and I grew up together and he was one of my first friends when my family moved to a new town.  We often played hoops together, caused trouble here and there, but also stayed up late occasionally doing homework or studying for physics tests.

The fact is that An Officer and a Junkie simply has more value for people and society. Chances are that, whether you are aware of it or not, you know someone that is an alcoholic or a drug user and functions in his or her everyday life. Some people can even achieve at the highest of levels while simultaneously stuck in the snare of addiction (some examples – Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and Mickey Mantle).

I saw my friend Mike during most of the stages of his book, from his acceptance to the Academy, his drug abuse, graduation, addiction and recovery. He lives with the physical and mental repercussions of his drug use everyday – his doctors assure him a lifelong sentence of antipsychotic and mood-stabilizing medication – but he is committed to sobriety and living a healthy life.

We all know about the James Frey Oprah debacle. If you think it’s important for a memoir to be true and want to read a good book, check out An Officer and a Junkie.

Which is more important in this case: the story or the truth?

Ack, dear reader!  Don’t go any further!  I realize that a book may be awesome, and it may even look delicious, but going so far as to digest it’s blank final page is a bridge too far!

I know “you are what you eat” but perhaps content yourself with “you are what you read” and have a graham cracker or nilla wafer (mabye a plain rice cake?) for that papery taste.

(find the PostSecret Collection books here)

In addition, also please don’t use our bookmarks to start the teething process, I promise that the previous prescribed Nilla Wafers or rice cakes will work way better in taste and execution.

It is not my nature, or perhaps the nature of any blog that attempts to be linked to a company and based on fact, to approach subjects that are more dire than say, an indictment of modern lit or the praising of a book about a political topic.  However, sometimes, amidst all the noise, one hopes for a clear sound to ring out, to wade through the incessant chatter of people bent on getting their opinion heard and media engines looking to hock the latest wares.  Sometimes a person needs to stand up and at least say “Now hold on a second…”

I’ve heard plenty about Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and I’m saying “Hold on here…”.  On one hand, he is an author praised for his very well respected Everything is Illuminated (even thrown the fincky label of “genius” by the New York Times) and perhaps there is something to be said, some type of Pirsigian “Quality” to his latest text that creates such a stir amongst the reading public about it.

However, by nature I hate the book.  I am inherently biased against any book that looks to use 9/11 as a vehicle for its story, and even moreso when it comes from the hand of a writer who wasn’t there.  Those of us who were closer–those of us who were in New York–realize that the disaster was global, but the suffering is still uniquely ours in its way and affects many everyday on a conscious or subconscious level.  So a book that wants to take me through a story about it is not exactly inspiring me the way, say, something about the Black Sox would or even something grittier about the Troubles in Ireland.

I’m sure you can tell, but I have a distinct distaste in my mouth about it, one akin to getting so hungry that you can taste your stomach.  I realize that the story undoubtedly looks to add an element to people’s understanding rather than capitalize on the infamy and confusion surrounding the event, but this seems to fail on the “too soon” meter, falling flatly while approaching some type of addendum to Godwin’s Law (which Foer already breached having discussed the Holocaust and Antisemitism in Everything is Illuminated).  It’s hard, however, to swallow a sense of trying to convey emotion over some capitalizing kitsch when Foer has sold the rights to this latest book such that it be made into a film (on that note, Everything is Illuminated will actually be out soon, I suppose he’s two for two).

Perhaps I’m making an error; only I will lose if I restrict my reading list, especially should I cut out books that have been lauded to whatever degree and credence that we are willing to offer the Public, but I will no sooner tell my Japanese roommate about a love story across internment camps in the West than I will have someone traipse through the memories of such a day, be it with stream of consciousness or with a 14 page flipbook or some “Pearl Harbor”-esque abomination filling theatres.

Please, no political commentary below, but feel free to tell me why I’m wrong about this book.  It’s time we stopped talking about if Oprah likes it and started talking about if it’s a worthwhile read and why.

In reading Black Voices for the second time, I am even more inspired to walk into my destiny versus the first time I read it as an undergraduate student. This book is a compilation of great short stories, and poems of some of the worlds most famous African American writers and poets including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright just to name a few. The substance of this book really deals with some of the most complicated, and also the simplest issues that African Americans have faced since the beginning of American history. Even if you only gain some of the knowledge that this book offers, it’s an excellent read for all book lovers, as well as any aspiring writers.

Books: A Memoir is the story of how McMurtry has gathered 7 buildings worth of books “creating what he calls a book town in Archer City, Tex., modeled on the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye.”  The story, a paltry 272 pages in comparison to his heavier tomes, blows through 109 chapters, frequently asking questions without offering much by way of answers.

I haven’t gotten through the full text yet, but as someone fascinated by books and the people who hoard/love/loathe them, it’s a must read.  In its way, the story also offers a side of McMurtry that his writing would never tell you, of journeys and a subtle humanism that his distinctly western writings, in many facets, belie.

If nothing else read it to see what kind of rope that a master storyteller, hand steadied in epic tales, can make from a hundred tiny strings.

I’ve just picked up Tom Robbins’ fantastic Jitterbug Perfume and the following is the “Prologue” of sorts, which he calls aptly “Today’s Special.”  If this doesn’t get you to read the book I simply don’t know what will…

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic people get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t—.

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic [expletive]—and when you aren’t sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)

An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.”

That is a risk we have to take.

Blood Colony, the third in a fiction series of books by Tananarive Due, focuses on a mysterious sect of people who are immortal, and live in a secluded colony in the Pacific Northwest.  Blood Colony in particular tells the story of Fana, a young woman who holds the power to cure nearly all mortal diseases with a few drops of her blood.

Fana is an integral part of the new Underground Railroad – a distribution network to heal people with “Glow,” the street name for her blood. Because of the nature of her talents (reading minds, regeneration, etc…), Fana has been shielded from the outside world. However, as a teenager’s rite of passage, Fana decides to run away from the confines of home to try and share the gift of her blood with the world. Her parents, Jessica and Dawit, set out on a desperate mission to find their once sheltered daughter, but little do they know that there is another group of immortals seeking to locate Fana – religious fanatics that wish to fulfill a prophecy to cleanse the world with “the Blood.”

This book will take you to every end of the emotional spectrum – pain, agony, gut-wrenching laughter, horror and hope. Due is an excellent writer that uses beautiful imagery to keep the reader’s attention but this book has more: filled with sharp social commentary, cynical remarks and moments of terror that will have you gripping the pages. I finished in 5 days (reading slowly because I’ve been waiting for nearly 7 years for this book and I was not disappointed!). I highly recommend this book for anyone that may enjoy a thrilling series that spans over 500 years. However, you should read the two novels preceding this one, namely: My Soul to Keep and The Living Blood, before you attempt to read this book. It’s the only way you can fully appreciate the storyline.

Roselle – Smart Women Finish Rich (by David Bach, video interview with DB coming soon!)
Erin – Hell to Pay & Soul Circus & American Gods & Good Omens
Lora – Manner of Death & 11 on Top & Thr3e & The Good Guy & The Taking (overachiever!)
Jozi – Emotional Intelligence & Christine & The Enchantress of Florence & She Got Up Off the Couch
Courtney – The Five Love Languages
Angela – The Last Juror
Will – Black Voices
Ayanna – Shattered Trust & Rich Dad, Poor Dad & Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
[Library Team member] – Think and Grow Rich & No Plot, No Problem

Xavier: The Landmark Herodotus (seriously it’s like 980 pages of history)
Geoff: Let My People Go Surfing & Crossing the Line
Justin: The World is Flat & The World Without Us
Elina: Chinese Takeout: a Novel
Jack: Made to Stick & Jitterbug Perfume

Made to Stick was great, Green to Gold is a little amateurish in parts for someone already involved in the scene but it’s a great conversion book for the old guard and I’ll elaborate on my feelings on the Alchemist soon enough.

Those reviews are coming, but what I’m really excited about is a new book by Byron Coley and well known avant-garde Sonic Youth guitarist/indie rock historian Thurston Moore: “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980.”  Usually I bear no particular love for art books, per se, however their previous effort re: CBGB’s, 2005’s “CBGB & OMFUG: Thirty Years From the Home of Underground Rock,” was polished and great so I expect nothing less here.  However, CBGB’s attacks 30 years, digging deep and producing profound moments from a fabulous collection, how can this new book capture the camera flash of a movement that enthralled and destroyed the Lower East Side in it’s brief 4-5 year shelf-life?

Well, that remains to be seen, but I trust that the effort will be fruitful in learning for the uninitiated and will have pearls for even the most accomplished in the genre.  “No Wave” a term said with wink and a kick in the rear to the “new wave” of The Cure and such bands was a music devoid of the previous tropes of rock and is to be particularly appreciated for it’s elevation of female rockers (who dominated the scene unlike any before it, save “serious musics” such as opera).  As someone entrenched in the roots of John Cage over John Lee Hooker and Steve Reich rather than Steve Perry, I’m ready for a book that shows the visceral and raw nature of a music that pulled no punches about displeasure with the current music situation.  I’m ready for No Wave.

I can’t express this enough, this series is awesome.  Whenever I’m going to do a book review, I like to make sure we have it in stock, and if we don’t, take the steps needed to get it in stock.  This series I was so excited about I was crossing my fingers when I checked Betterworld.com (which makes it much harder to type, incidentally) but we have many of them!

Anyway, the series in question is called “33 1/3″ (after the RPM of a record player for an LP).  You can find their blog here, or the wikipedia entry here.

Yup.

If you’re looking for an objective review of our first book: Jazzocracy, head over to All About Jazz.  Also, in addition to our normal level of giving, proceeds from this book will help benefit the New Orleans Public Library rebuild and Music for Tomorrow!

An excerpt from the review:

How Will Two of American’s Quintessential Icons Foretell the Future?

Presenting Jazzocracy: Jazz, Democracy, and the Creation of a New American Mythology by Kabir Sehgal (Better World Books)

If one wonders how two of the most quintessential American icons relate to each another, consider this thought by one of New Orleans’ favorite sons: “Jazz is democracy in action,” said Wynton Marsalis.

Ever more so in New Orleans, where the birth of jazz reflected the ease of a mix of many cultures: Caribbean, European, African, among many others. The intent of these cultures to express their ideas to one another via music, civic discourse, festivals, and of course, books, is one of America’s most vivid successes.

With its commitment to the promoting literacy worldwide, Better World Books is pleased to return to the New Orleans Public Library for the premiere of the very first book of its new publishing imprint.

On April 17, Better World Books will bring Jazzocracy: Jazz, Democracy, and the Creation of a New American Mythology to New Orleans. Written by Kabir Sehgal, an exciting new author who began the book under study with Douglas Brinkley at Tulane University, Jazzocracy argues the evolution of jazz and democracy is forming our next set of mythologies to govern culture, politics and economics.

For any other writer under the age of 30, these might be dusty topics. But new author Kabir Sehgal magnetizes the two using his personal experience as a jazz musician, political campaign consultant, economist and writer. A graduate of the London School of Economics and Dartmouth College, Sehgal is also a professional jazz bassist, and has played with the Wynton Marsalis Orchestra. He has also worked with the presidential campaign of Sen John Kerry, as well as in the offices of Senators Max Cleland and John Rockefeller, IV. He is an economist with JPMorgan in San Francisco. Jazzocracy is his first book.

[CONTINUE...]

Hey readers, I was just checking out the New York Times when I saw that their feature “Reading Room” was tackling Tom Wolfe’s great-text-cum-awful-movie, Bonfire of the Vanities.  “Reading Room” is an excellent discussion about a text.  In this case it begins with an hour long podcast with Wolfe, discussing everything from journalism to his thesis to his works and then moves forward with some really fascinating discussion about race and the book as a period piece (which I would say, and they would agree, that it is most certainly not).

Anyway, here’s the beginning and here’s the rest (N.B. like any blog, start at the bottom to sift through the lot).

On my trip, I’ve been to a number of fantastic places, including the St. Louis Arch, the Great Plains, Arches National Park and today the Grand Canyon.  Tomorrow I’ll be going to the Hoover Dam and crashing in L.A. (anyone have a place to stay?).  In honor of this I thought I’d find some books about each of them because seriously, if you’ve never been, go to them!  Tomorrow’s post will be chock full of great books about some of the landmarks that you should check out be you a visitor to the US or someone who lives here.  (The drive through the Rockies on I-70W is of the “life-changing” variety.  Unbelievable).

Also, meeting the incredible people I’ve met, in diners, gas stations, national parks and on the road helps keep me even more in touch with our mission of simultaneously promoting global literacy while lining your bookshelf.

By the way, if you’re traveling, may I suggest the “Lonely Planet” series.  They’re funny when they need to be and well laid out.  I lived in Ireland and traveled around most of the countries in Europe and without my guides I would probably still be lost in Germany somewhere.

Every once in a while, you read a book that crosses the line of entertainment  and into the realm of life changing. I am no longer the same since reading SOLD by Patricia McCormick. An easy read, this cleverly written tale follows thirteen year old Lakshimi’s life in Nepal , and the devastation that led to her sale into child prostitution. The realities of the torment that follow, literally had me covering my mouth, in an attempt to stifle the moans of anguish I felt for her. As I read of Lakishimi’s struggles to survive in this world so new and so devastatingly cruel, I found myself, hand over my heart, thinking of ways to rescue her. But in the end, I found myself sighing with relief and celebrating her victory. READ THIS BOOK! It will give you a perspective on life that is sure to change you forever…hopefully.

Decide for yourself at www.betterworld.com