Arrivederci amore, ciao

I have found a character who is more deplorable, lacking more morals, and more of a complete asshole than any other I have ever read. (I'm trying to convince you to read this book - is it working yet?) He is worse than Jack Taylor or Sgt. Brant. Worse than "Citizen" Vince Camden. Worse than C.W. Sughrue or Balram Halwi or Bruce Medway or anyone else you have nightmares about. Massimo Carlotto's Giorgio Pellegrini of The Goodbye Kiss, is a convicted criminal, murderer, serial womanizer (actually, he is worse than a plain ol' womanizer - he is abusive and debasing to most of the women he meets, bilking them for cash and a place to crash, while he either ignores or sleeps with all the others he comes in contact with), and a genuine, bonafide sociopath.

We unwittingly stumble into his life story while he is in Central American exile, just as he calmly puts a bullet in the brain of his closest friend. Although this is the first time he has killed anyone, we soon discover that Giorgio has no problem with death and actually seems to relish the killing stroke. "I always liked murder", he later admits. He is on the run from Italian authorities regarding his connection to a bombing death but decides to return to Italy to "cooperate with the authorities and turn a new leaf". Of course, that "new leaf" involves becoming an informer for the corrupt police department and Giorgio becomes the man to know inside the prison walls. The rest of this vignette into the psyche of Pellegrini is all about his release from prison, his work as a bartender, the double-crosses he pulls on his employer, prostitution rings, drug running, violence, sexual abuse, a new "new leaf", a life as a restauranteur, a return to violence, drug running, sexual abuse, and more murder. I think that covers it - he's quite a guy. Actually, upon reflection, I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this - as much as I loved The Goodbye Kiss, I absolutely loathed Giorgio Pellegrini. But of course, this is Carlotto's point - Giorgio is apparently everything that is wrong with modern Italy: rife with corruption, harboring a propensity for violence, and enjoying the exploitation and abuse of women, he is the living embodiment of the seediest underbelly in all of Europe. The book is lean & mean, hitting at a frenetic pace, slamming you repeatedly with the inner workings of Giorgio's mind, which is a dark, dark place. Under the guise of normalcy, the rotten soul of the narrator slowly begins to take shape, leaving the reader uncomfortable, enraged, and amazed at Massimo Carlotto's abilities as a writer. I wondered what it must have been like to write this from such a perspective of depravity. It's not just that we are witness to atrocities by this man, but rather we see the looming specter of possible crimes and acts of violence. Giorgio becomes such a normal, friendly man about town, that we are lulled into thinking that his depravity is saved just for the darker past sections of his life - in fact, the worst is yet to come.

---

Interestingly enough, Massimo Carlotto has had a similarly checkered life to that of his narrator in The Goodbye Kiss, although without all the violence, depravity, and sexual abuse. Check out his website for more on his life on the run during the 1980's.

Everything Matters! Everything Matters!

Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.
Imagine that you were born with the absolute, unquestionable knowledge that the world would be destoyed in a fiery comet collision somewhere in the vicinity of your 36th birthday. How would you live your life, knowing that every single thing you do or say or think is essentially futile - or at least more finite than we are comfortable thinking about? Would you use your knowledge to try and save the world? Or just your own family? Would you just chuck it all and drink yourself to death? Or would you just live your life as normally as possible? Does anything you do matter? These are the questions posed to Junior Thibodeau, born with an all-seeing, all-knowing voice inside his head. The voice shares its vast knowledge with Junior, whether regarding other people's personal secrets or the impending destruction of the planet, turning him into an lonely, introverted, alcoholic genius who feels that no one really knows him, since he cannot share his knowledge, since no one would believe him. He peppers his life with poor decisions, all under the ruse that nothing he does in life matters at all, since the outcome is so devastatingly pre-determined. But the one constant in life, he finds, is love, and no amount of destiny can impede that emotional connection to other people in your life.

This was an absolutely astounding book that completely caught me off guard. I had a copy on my shelf for several months, not really knowing what to make of it, and I needed something a bit more substantial after breezing through a Ken Bruen & a Denis Johnson pulp novel the week before. Ron Currie is a force to be reckoned with. He has taken a highly unusual, potentially disastrous premise and created a completely plausible, emotionally resonant life story around this Junior Thibodeau, born with a unprecendentedly unique prespective on the world. Junior spends most of his 36 years dwelling on the fact that the world will be destroyed - so much so, that he doesn't know how to actually live a life based in the moment. Once he discovers - perhaps too late? - that life is all about living from moment to moment, that unique prespective he had completely changes, even if the fate of the world may not. Thankfully Currie allows his readers to avoid the potential for morbidity and overwhelming depression of such an end-of-the-world story, by writing this tale with substantial humor and grounding Junior in reality by lending his "inside voice" a deep-seeded, genuine bonhomie. Despite his mistakes, I cared a great deal about Junior and those he loved - in spite of the fact that I shared his absolute knowledge that he would certainly go down with the ship when that fateful comet arrived. Currie is capable of striking an emotional nerve and helping the reader forget just how absurd the whole idea of a prescient genius boy from Maine really is. What can I say, it really hit home with me. I knew from about halfway through that I will read this book over and over and over again throughout my life, always having my own unique perspective, I'm sure of it.

---

Listen:

Everything ends, and Everything matters.

Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you've got - your wife's lips, your daughter's eyes, your brother's heart, your father's bones and your own grief - and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don't ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.

The Signal by Ron Carlson (Review)

I may tell myself that I'm not completely taken with Ron Carlson's new novel, The Signal, but there is definitely an air about it that is compelling enough that I've already read it twice.

Carlson's previous book, 2007's Five Skies, was far & away the finest novel I read during that calendar year - a year filled with the likes of Denis Johnson, Michael Chabon, Don DeLillo, and Michael Ondaatje, so nothing to sneeze at. What struck me most about Five Skies was Carlson's ability to create a place where the only ceiling is the darkening sky and where there are no physical walls to be found anywhere. The Signal, while it does lose a bit of its narrative path towards its conclusion, shares that same expanse of space, brushing through the pines and casting flies into the clear lakes of Wyoming. Carlson has the unique ability to create that sense of quietude and stillness that comes from walking the wilds of the world.

The premise is rather simple - Mack and Vonnie have seemingly reached the end of their ten-year marriage. Mack has made some terrible decisions in that decade - abandoning his life and livelihood on his family ranch for supposedly greener pastures laden with drink, drugs, and cash - essentially forcing Vonnie's hand, despite her love for Mack. As a final farewell of sorts, Vonnie agrees to accompany Mack on their annual September hike into Cold Creek, one last time. She sees this as a way of closing off their relationship and mending broken hearts, while Mack sees an opportunity to prove to Vonnie (and himself) that he is still the man he once was, despite his mistakes. Of course, he has one last mistake to make before their time in the mountains is over - one set in motion by the actions in his life without Vonnie that may destroy all that he cares about in the end.

"Valentine Lake was a twenty-acre heart of silver, blue rimmed to the edge by pines and red sandstone. They came over the low ridge and saw it set out as if invented this morning."

Mack and Vonnie's relationship is complex enough to carry the underlying love story plotline - Carlson has a deft hand when it comes to the human heart, I have no doubt - but he falters a bit when the third act action crescendos and stumbles towards a conclusion. Things end up being a bit like a cross between the gunfight at the OK corral and a white trash bar fight, but maybe I see it that way because Carlson's true talent is so evident throughout the rest of the book. The visuals are so clear, vivid, and eloquent - the mud on the trail, the smell of waning campfire, the sun glinting off the ancient lakes, the whisper of the breeze through the pines - that it reads like a John Muir nature narrative or, as Carlson says, "a love letter to camping", however modestly dull that may seem. I have never read an author who so expertly draws you into the world he creates. I imagined Carlson writing this narrative actually out in the woods of the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming - how else would he have been able to capture that essence? (He denies this, actually, so I don't know how he does it.) Mack's impeccable knowledge of this wilderness is comforting, especially in light of his bumbling experiences in the world at large. One of Carlson's reoccurring themes is of the encroachment of the "civilized" world on the old, green spaces of the land - this encroachment is never more evident than in the embodiment of Mack. He cannot survive in the cities and towns of the world, making error after error, ruining his own life and those of whom he cares for most. But once he is set out into the mountains and forests, he has no match and truly comes alive. This hiking trip is more an opportunity for Mack to live again after having death hover above him for the better part of the previous year. Watching his transformation from greedy, stupid fool in town to peerless naturalist and woodsman in the mountains is truly the great strength of this novel.

"He walked back and opened the tailgate and sat, finally lifting his eyes to look east across the tiers of Wyoming spread beneath him in the vast echelons of brown and gray. It was dark here against the forest, but light gathered across the planet, and he could see the golden horizon at a hundred and fifty miles."

After reflecting a bit, I realize that my issue with the third act of The Signal actually has nothing to do with the writing or the plotting - it's entirely on my end. The conclusion is taut, suspenseful, and perfectly paced, I just resent the fact that such an ending was necessary to begin with. The leisurely pace of treking through the mountains which Carlson sets out with becomes so comfortable that I was jarred awake by the rockslide of events on Mack & Vonnie's fifth day out. I was so content to linger near the icy glacial lakes, sniffing the pine trees and fishing for trout, that I failed to fully notice the outside world's encroachment. Civilization slowly creeps from the edges of Mack's memories to being fully formed and roaring above the treeline, destroying the tranquility of the wilderness. I resent that. I resent Mack for making such idiotic decisions prior to their trip that lead to the disruption of that perfect, wild splendor. Again, this is a Carlson theme - the human world at large has an uncanny ability to intrude on the natural world, whether there are those of us who like it or not. So in that sense, the third act, in all its human action and greed-fueled violence, fits perfectly into that thematic view of the world. I just took it personally, which is a testament to Ron Carlson's abilities as a remarkable writer.

PC-illin'

I planned on getting some new posts up this weekend, as I've been off the Catapult for the better part of a month it seems (dead cats, weddings, & birthdays), but spent a pathetic chunk of my day today trying to remove an unbelievable pain-in-the-ass virus from my hard drive instead. ("System Security 2009" hilariously disguises itself as a legit Microsoft product. Good times.) Problem now solved, book stuff coming - thanks for sticking with me, faithful reader.

Coming this week: reviews of Ron Carlson's The Signal and Ron Currie, Jr's Everything Matters! Books that will change your life!

Breakthrough Novel

Since the entire process is spread out over half a year and my part ended months ago, I forgot to check back & see who the winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award was - not that any of the manuscripts I read made it anywhere near the finals, thankfully. The winner, who receives a publishing contract from Penguin Putnam, was James King for his novel Bill Warrington's Last Chance. You can read an excerpt on the ABNA page or just wait until the book is published, I guess.

I wish that my scathing reviews for the manuscripts I read were also available on the site, but they didn't publish any PW reviews for books not in the top 100. The egos of those developing writers must be preserved, I suppose.

Bye Sillycat

The Sanctuary That is Jack Taylor

'Well, Mr. Taylor, they did warn me that you have a caustic tongue, but regardless, I'd like to engage your services.'

I let him hear me sigh, went, 'Let's hear it'

He cleared his throat and I wondered if he wore a cravat - they nearly always did. He said, 'My only daughter Jennifer was sixteen a few weeks back and, naturally, I got her a pony'

Naturally.

Ah, there's nothing better than settling in for a new Jack Taylor rip. I think that it took me all of 3 hours reading time to get through the latest Ken Bruen - Sanctuary - from my first break at work yesterday to 7:45 this morning. This seventh Jack Taylor novel is leaner and meaner than the previous six - clocking at just around 200 pages of double spaced, massive font - and would probably serve the reader better as a pocket sized novella. I've always thought these books should be printed as such - under-sized trade paperbacks that you can stick in the back pocket of your faded black jeans - isn't that how Jack himself would handle things? (I am not complaining, really, and this is no knock on Mr. Bruen, who has deity status in my house, it's just that 3 hours of reading is a hard sell at $24.95.) I'm getting away from the true point here, though: the book is substantially brilliant, as always.

Bruen's writing is so sparse, so visceral, that the short format fits the bursts of prose and sharp verbal jabs perfectly. A 400-page introspective Jack Taylor novel would maybe not pack as much of a punch, although the middle books in this series were much meatier and just as well-rounded. I much prefer to have my teeth kicked in for 3 hours (figuratively, not literally) rather than have Jack change his ways just to fit into a longer novel. I won't go into too much plot for this one - there are some major, major personal revelations for Jack in this - but I will say that Mr. Taylor is never fully free of the demons inside his head, even as he edges towards normalcy and sanity (as towards the end of the previous book, Cross) something horrible will always happen to him to suck him back down into the abyss. Jack is also waking up to the realization that he lives in the "new Ireland" - one of "non-nationals", new wealth, and ever changing landscapes. It seems that this revelation, coupled with Jack's lack of meaningful friendship in his life (or so he thinks) that is driving him towards leaving the land of his birth for the greener shores of America. Whether he ever leaves remains to be seen. Bruen has a wondrous way of exploring the choices and decisions Jack makes - even the bad ones, you can see coming.

"Here's the horrendous deal: an alcoholic can stay dry under the most trying circumstances. You'll hear people wonder that he didn't drink at the wedding/funeral/when everybody expected him to.

An alkie can stumble drinkless through all these minefields, and then one tiny incident, like a shoelace snapping or a carton of milk spilling, and wallop, he's off on the most almighty binge."

Jack sells himself short here - his "shoelace snapping" is a bit more life-altering than that. But I do love the handling of his unavoidable falling off the proverbial wagon - with humanity and grace, the explanation is clear. It's not that it is not Jack's fault - he readily admits as much - but that it is an inescapable fate for him, as there is only so much that his tortured soul can take. Do I drop everything when these books arrive because Jack's life makes me feel better about my own self? Why do we revel in his pain & madness?

Probably because he would just retort, to this sympathetic reading, with either a "Jesus" or a "Bollocks". My only complaint is the length - now what the hell am I supposed to read?

Borders Invents Handselling

About one year ago, the story broke that Borders, the trash heap of brick & mortar bookstores, had begun to employ the radical, experimental system of displaying books face out in order to increase their visibility to the customer. The company received glowing praise in an article written by Jeffrey Trachtenberg for the Wall Street Journal (see my post on the subject from March 2008) and harsh criticism from every indie bookseller with a pulse. (My friend & co-worker, Scott Ehrig-Burgess, finally got himself published because of this news item, in the form of a brilliant letter to the WSJ's editor. Again, see my previously mentioned post.) I thought that that was fairly insulting - the idea that Borders was the first bookseller to realize that books are printed with visually attractive jacket covers - but this week's "breaking story" is far, far worse in my mind.

In an AP story written by Hillel Italie, it is revealed that Borders also is responsible for making select books, such as David Benioff's City of Thieves, into huge national bestsellers simply by "handselling" them to their customers. For those of you unfamiliar with the term "handselling", think of every time you have been into a Borders or a Barnes & Noble and have asked a sales person for a book recommendation. If you have ever received a reply to this inquiry, rather than a blank stare, this would qualify as handselling. At least half of the books sold at independent bookstores are handsells, whether the staff literally puts the book right into your hand, or if they just talk it up enough that you seek it out yourself, or if there is just an impassioned, written recommendation sticking out of the book - this is handselling. My book reviews and recommendations on this website - handselling. If your corporate office decides that you need to place a certain title at your front counter, this is not handselling.

"...the idea was to select a few works favored by Borders national sales officials and promote them nationwide in the spirit of a local seller, from prominent placement to personally advocating ("hand-selling") books in the stores." (from the AP article)

Not handselling. Handselling 101: when our primary book buyer passed over the book, The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany back in 2006, I decided to order 5 copies for the store, since I had read it and loved it. I knew, without a doubt, that I could put this book in the hands of my customers - people who read and look to our booksellers for recommendations - and they would read it, enjoy it, and tell their friends about it. After selling over 400 copies in 3 years, it still resides on our bestseller display, with a written recommendation attached, for the times when I am not there, personally, to espouse on its many attributes. This is handselling.

Borders says its weekly market share for City of Thieves has been as high as 69 percent. Don Redpath, Penguin's executive director of national account sales for paperbacks, would not confirm that number, but said that Borders has had "an early and intensive impact on sales." (For the record, "director of national account sales" means that Redpath is the head of Penguin's sales force for the national chain stores, like Borders and B&N.)

City of Thieves was handsold to me by our Penguin/Putnam sales rep, Tom Benton, the recent recipient of Publishers Weekly's Sales Rep of the Year Award. Tom simply talked it up and I took a chance. He had actually read the book and gave a passionate speech about why he cared about it, why it separated itself from the rest of his list, and why he thought I should read it as well. Benton was also the sales rep who repeatedly sent me copies of Ron Carlson's Five Skies back in '07 until I read it. He also gave me a manuscript of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet last Fall. Forget for a minute that Tom is acting as a sales representative for a company - he put all three of these books in my hands simply because he knew my reading habits and that I would end up loving them and in turn handselling them to my customers as well. H-a-n-d-s-e-l-l-i-n-g. And he was right. Righter than right, as those were the best books I read in their respective years. And I don't care what sales figures the Borders executives throw around concerning City of Thieves - Benioff knows who butters his bread. When I met him last month, I apologized for only having 75 people at his Saturday evening book signing. He laughed, thanked me, and said that he had had a signing at a Borders or a Barnes & Noble somewhere else in California and only 5 people showed up. Five. The only explanation for this is that it occurred prior to the new "handselling" policy. As for the 69% market share: Borders has over 900 stores in the US (including their Waldenbooks, Borders Express, etc) and they're still only the second-largest book retailer nationwide. There is only one Warwick's. How much market share can we possibly take when the world is overwhelmed by chain stores? We've sold over 100 hardbacks and over 100 paperbacks of City of Thieves - I'm pretty happy with that. That's 200 happy people who have had their book needs met by hand-tailored bookselling.

Handselling books is at the fundamental core of bookselling. Recommending books that you have read and personally enjoyed should never be a matter of corporate policy. This should be the enjoyable part of work for the bookseller - how great is it to just talk about books all day? The Borders idea of the handsell is not having booksellers walking the sales floor, asking customers if they need help, tailoring book recommendations to their specific tastes - it is instead sending large quantities of certain titles to their stores, featuring the titles in large, colorful displays, and asking, at the checkout counter, "Would you like a City of Thieves with that?" Books are not hamburgers or checkout aisle candybars - there is something inherently personal about books. That personal element is the reason I write about books in my spare time. It is the reason you are right now reading what I have written. Booklovers have a personal stake in these items of paper, ink, and glue - they are more than just afterthoughts at the supermarket. Books are the reason some of us get up every morning - some days the only part I enjoy about my job is convincing someone that this book that I hold in my hands is The One. This is the best book you will read this year. This book will change the way you think, the way you read, the way you feel about all other books you have ever read before and will change the way you will read every other book for the rest of your life.

Each book we select leads to the next - they are not to be taken lightly or as simply part of the retail bottom line. True, Borders has a massive share of the book market, yet they are struggling mightily to maintain. Every time we read about the dire straights they are in, they bust out with a tried and true independent bookstore method for selling books. Maybe it is we who are on to something. Where is my AP article? Where is my feature in the Wall Street Journal? I crave not these these things - I will instead go back to quietly telling my friends about the incredible book I have just read. It will change your life...

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Review)

"A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that will surely outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price."

The long-awaited followup to Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind is finally on its way - due out on June 16th after almost five years of very patient waiting on readers' parts. SOTW was a huge grassroots bestseller in indies all over the country in 2004 - and remains so, actually, in my store at least, still anchoring down that bestseller display. The Angel's Game, the next of Zafon's books to make it into the English-reading market, came to me hot on the heels of the quintet of mind-numbing manuscripts I read in March and was a welcome recharge to my reader-brain. Translated into English by Lucia Graves, also Zafon's translator for SOTW - I cannot stress enough the importance of an expert translator for novels in translation. If you've ever read one brilliant novel by a Swedish mystery writer and found their next book to be clunky and poorly written, 9 times out of 10 they have different translators. Zafon's first book soared to unexpected heights in the hands of Ms. Graves - it read with a flow and sentence structure that really seemed as if it had been original to English. The Angel's Game is equally brilliant, both in translation and originality.

Here's the skinny: impoverished, orphaned David Martin begins his writing career penning pulp serials for the back page of the floundering newspaper, The Voice of Industry in 1920's Barcelona. What starts out as a whim on the editor's part, turns into a lucrative endeavor for all, with Martin developing a devoted following for The Mysteries of Barcelona among the masses. He receives praise from both his benefactor/father-figure, Don Pedro Vidal, as well as from the mysterious French publisher Andreas Corelli, who sends him cryptic, prescient notes at strangely opportune times. When he is released from the paper, he immediately signs a book deal to continue writing in the realm of the pulps and his pen name is met with wild success. He purchases the home of his dreams - "a huge pile of a house" - and cranks out the pulps, all the while beginning to write his decidedly non-pulpy magnum opus, The Steps of Heaven. When his unrequited love interest, Cristina, in the employ of Pedro Vidal, comes to him for assistance in secretly reworking Vidal's own failing novel, Martin begins a self-destructive path of writing two novels at once, day and night, with only one obvious outcome in store. When "Vidal's" rewritten novel becomes a huge bestseller, David's fails monumentally (even his own mother tosses it in the trash, unread), driving him into the depths of despair and self-loathing. Even Cristina seemingly abandons him, opting to marry the new literary darling, Vidal. As if the personal and professional failing weren't bad enough, David is met with physical failing as well, in the essential death sentence of a terminal brain tumor just behind his left eye. Hovering on the line between sanity and insanity, Martin seeks normalcy and companionship on a visit to his one true friend, the bookseller Sempere. (Booksellers are everyone's best friend, don't you know.) Martin desperately asks for help in saving his book - and essentially his own self - leading Sempere to bring him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

The Cemetery featured prominently in The Shadow of the Wind - a magnificent, secret labyrinth of a hidden library below the streets of Barcelona - and Martin's visit here is the heart of this new novel. Sempere brings Martin there to hide his book - in effect, save it - until someone else comes along to become it's protector. For every book you leave in the Cemetery, you must take one out with you, acting as it's protector for the rest of your life. For reasons completely unknown to him, Martin chooses a bizarre religious text called Lux Aeterna by an anonymous "D.M." Upon his return home, he receives an invitation to meet with the publisher Andreas Corelli, asking for Martin to consider a proposal for work. David, faced again with the desolation that is his life, instead falls back into his own private hell - living in a dream world of pain and misery. Seven days later, Lazarus-like, he awakens, realizes that he has nothing left to lose, and decides to meet with the enigmatic Corelli.

"I want you to bring together all your talent and devote yourself body and soul, for one year, to working on the greatest story you have ever created: a religion."

In return for his work creating a new religious text, Corelli offers David the promise to "give you what you most desire" and David awakens the following morning pain-free for the first time in months, his tumor seemingly gone. A disturbing series of coincidences then begin to pile up: after meeting with his pair of sleazy publishers, who have no desire to release Martin from his contract of pulp-writing, their office burns to the ground and both men are consumed by flame. Could Corelli be responsible? David then discovers that Lux Aeterna was written on the very same typewriter that he has been using - one he discovered, abandoned, in his home when he first moved in. Has he, in effect, been tasked with writing Lux Aeterna himself? What actually happened to the original D.M.? As the police begin to take an active interest in the deaths of the publishers, (among various other suspicious deaths and disappearances in David's orbit) David begins to realize the true manipulative nature of Andreas Corelli - could the publisher be something altogether otherworldy and sinister?

As the mysteries begin to surface and the suspicious circumstances that have come to comprise David Martin's life emerge, Ruiz Zafon's gift for remarkable storytelling begins to truly shine. The atmosphere of pre-Civil War Barcelona is rich and vivid, it's culture of literacy leaves the modern reader pining for such days. The clack of the typewriter, the smells of Sempere's dusty bookshop, the very idea of pulp short stories being printed in the newspaper - all are evocative of a lost era of literature and a culture surrounding the printed page. Even David's home is a living, breathing (perhaps "wheezing" is more appropriate) entity in Ruiz Zafon's hands - musty, dark, and filled with whispers of the past, it operates as a character with many secrets central to the tale. Perhaps there are moments where the plot is too labyrinthine - over-populated with twists and second tier characters - and some of the religious imagery and death foreshadowing is a bit heavy handed, yet every element ultimately has its purpose in driving the story towards its conclusion.

The further into this labyrinth David goes, the more the reader questions his decisions, motives, and his sanity. As the storyteller, David feels no need to justify himself to the reader - the tale is his explanation in itself - and offers a reasonable attempt at explaining his actions and motivations to the investigating detectives. But does the explanation matter if no one is actually who they say they are, even the narrator? Is everything we read fabricated to further David's version of the "truth" or is he just being manipulated by the sinister puppetmaster/publisher? Is he instead just stuck in a writer's hell, damned for eternity to write this religious text until "Corelli" is satisfied? Therein lies the brilliance to this novel - the questions abound, yet Ruiz Zafon never insults the reader by stooping so low as to fully, categorically explain the answers. You are left to find your own way out of the labyrinth - a pleasant fate for a reader to have to face.

Spivet Tuesday!

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen arrives in your local bookstore on this coming Tuesday, May 5th! Destined to be the best book of this relatively new year, I guarantee that it will blow your mind, warm your heart, and change the way that you think about the culture of the book as you know it. (See my full review right here.) It will change not only the way that you read a book, but also your perceptions of what a book can truly be - the heights that literature can reach. In this age of immediate, instant information, reality television, pop-up ads, and the God that is Google, Reif Larsen has created an island in the hurricane of modern life that acts as an alternative to the breakneck pace that is our world. Sit down, relax, and let Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet be your guide to the world for awhile.

Get out your diaries, mark your calendars: I am so firm a believer in the brilliance that is this book, that I will even go so far as to agree with Stephen King for the first time since Carrie exacted her revenge. Larsen scored a major coup for a debut novelist in landing a King blurb for the book jacket: Good novels entertain; great ones come as a gift to the readers who are lucky enough to find them.

As much as it shames me, I couldn't have said it better myself.
Check out Larsen's book site for more.

Andrei Codrescu, My Arch-Nemesis

I understand that authors are only humans like the rest of us - just because they can produce stunning works of literary artwork from time to time does not really set them apart from the masses. Everybody has bad days. And all booksellers have had bad experiences with authors who may not necessarily carry bad reputations around. So Michael Dibdin showed up drunk and chainsmoking or Christopher Moore made fun of you in front of a crowd or Chris Reich throws a hissy fit - these things happen (and actually did), as they are just people after all. And for every one of these experiences, there is one where an author has an unfounded reputation for mayhem and they turn out abundantly cooler than expected (T.C. Boyle, for one). So I say, let bygones be bygones - there's nothing better than a second chance, right?

In this one particular instance, I was willing to chalk things up to a faded memory of a past experience - maybe this guy wasn't really as bad as I remembered, maybe he was having a pissy day last time I saw him and that was why he acted the way he did. I first met Andrei Codrescu in New Orleans in early 2002 - he had a book signing (for Casanova in Bohemia, I believe) at the independent I worked for down there and, as he lived in New Orleans at the time, he had a rather large following and a hefty turnout for the signing. From what I remember of the evening, he was great with his fans as he signed books - chatty, friendly, witty - and completely standoffish with me - the monkey hauling chairs, selling books, solving problems - not to mention with the owner of the shop, who put up with the author's air of superiority with a smile, as his shop was still in the fledgling stages of business. Maybe he didn't even notice, I don't know, but Codrescu was the first author to just rub me the wrong way. He made me feel as if I were the invisible boy - presumably because I wasn't a glowing fan and was just the shameful commercial side of his successful career. I've met hundreds of authors in the years since then and honestly, the only other time I felt treated that way was with Joan Collins and I was happy to be the invisible boy that day, believe me.

So, when when my current employer booked an event with Andrei at the downtown library, I requested to work - I figured it had been plenty long and perhaps my memory of his behavior was skewed by time lapse. Besides, I had that whole New Orleans thing going, he had just had a book signing at my old store in NO a few weeks before - how could things go bad? With any normal person, these personal connections, uncovered in a far away location like San Diego, would be conversation starters or at least mild talking points. Right. The event itself went great - Andrei's new book, The Posthuman Dada Guide, is an esoteric, high-brow, over-my-head, philosophical minefield, but the 100 people who turned out to listen to his talk seemed right in tune with it all. He was witty, sharp, and genial on stage, leaning over the podium and growling in his thick Romanian accent into the mic, throwing around tales of dadaist vampires and fictional chess matches. The signing line was 50 people strong and he seemed to continue that genial streak with them, chatting and laughing with everyone who approached his table. He had several very long conversations with some attendees, including a young Russian woman who sat in the wings, waiting to talk to him some more, once he was finished with the signing. As this was sort of a hybrid bookstore/library event, I was pretty hands off at this point and the show ran itself. I just sat patiently in one of the second row seats with my modest pile of books and waited until the line dwindled down. When I introduced myself as being from the bookstore, Andrei's face visibly fell - it sort of blanched when he realized that I was not another devoted dadaist, but was just the guy humping books for The Man. So I quickly played my multiple aces, perhaps in too-quick succession: I handed him my copy of Obituary Cocktail by Kerri McCaffety, which Andrei wrote the stellar introduction for. (Cocktail is my favorite New Orleans book - Kerri's brilliant photography book on the bars and saloons of the city - and has a huge cult following in NO.) "I used to work for (the bookstore in New Orleans). (The co-owners) are good friends of mine." He looked at me with mild surprise. "Oh yeah?" Then he flipped through the pages of Cocktail - "This is Kerri's book." "Yeah," I said, "I know, but I really like your introduction." Like I needed to explain this? How many people show up to his book signings - especially in Southern California - with Obituary Cocktail under their arms? "So, Marlena, what eez your last name?", he asked the Russian girl, as he spoiled my copy of Obituary Cocktail with his hand writing. Apparently, we were done. "This is my Dada Guide", I whispered, as I handed him my other book. He signed it with a straight signature, as if it were stock for the store - which is exactly what it became. He quickly scribbled his name in my ten copies for store stock, all the while talking to the Russian, and I was summarily dismissed when he just stopped signing at the end of the pile and never once looked up at me. I gathered the books and stepped away with my best serial killer smile, silently plotting the violent death of this obnoxious, Romanian P.O.S. (Its hard to rant without swearing.)

That's it - I just packed up my gear and had to ride the elevator downstairs with Mr. Important Author, the library staff, and Marlena the Russian Muse. Never once did he thank me or my store - we had done two events with him on that day, sold 70 copies of his obscure, University Press philosophy book, and even fed him lunch, but he never even looked at me after I initially shook his hand. I'm writing about this because of the unusual nature of this encounter - again, of the hundreds of authors I've met, Andrei is the only one, really, who just doesn't feel like giving me the time of day. It felt as if he were looking at me as a blemish on his otherwise perfect evening of holding court, as if I was a reminder of his true nature as a (gasp!) commercial entity. Why go out on tour at all if this is the reaction you deliver to the booksellers who pay your bills? Every other author I've met has expressed some degree of gratitude over the selling of their books - some writers much more famous than this Eastern European hack philosopher have been remarkably humble and genuine in their thanks. So what gives? Don't get me wrong, this is not about his expressing gratitude to me or my bookstore - I don't need that - it is about basic human interaction and a modicum of respect. To not even look at me again after I extended my hand? To have no reaction to my connection to his adopted hometown and his local bookstore there? You're done with me, then I'm done with you. My only regret, though, is that I allowed his dirty claws to paw at my book, forever soiling it with his mark.

City of Awesomeness

Check it out: Jenny & I complete a David Benioff sandwich on a Saturday night at Warwick's.

I am happy to report that he does not intend on ditching the art of the printed word in favor of a more lucrative life penning only X Men films and gladiator flicks - it may be a couple of years, but he has begun the creation of another novel, at least inside his own head. To tide everyone over, he is spending all his time on scripting George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice & Fire into an HBO series.

Good enough for me.

The Anonymous Awards

There is a great editorial by Elinor Lipman in this week's Publishers Weekly on the broken, biased system in place for the selection of the National Book Award. I have never made it a secret that I loathe the process we have accepted for the selection of major book awards, but I've never been able to put it so eloquently as Ms. Lipman has. Here's her Soapbox.

When the NBA judges were announced last year, I dismissed Lipman as a "moderately respectable" author of "ladies' fiction". I take the "moderately" part back and offer my humble apology - (I still think she writes "ladies' fiction") - because it's refreshing to hear an insider get upset over the way things work in the industry. No one wants to listen to the crazy, profanity-prone blogger from Southern California, but people read PW - and, I will begrudgingly admit, they also read Elinor Lipman. Essentially, she calls for anonymity in the process - something that is, shockingly, not already in place. Her idea would be to simply have publishers submit title-less, author-less, 50 page manuscripts - no finished copies, not bound galleys - in an attempt to get the judging panels to just shut up and read. The 50-page element is especially intriguing - if you're not falling over yourself in love with a book by the fiftieth page, it is simply not worthy of the National Book Award. The elimination of bias would be a breath of clean, cool air to a stuffy, dank process - no longer would judges consider or dismiss on the basis of the author's name recognition, bestselling status, or because they "looked rich" in their jacket photo. Petty attitudes like these should be shelved if you're on the selection committee for a major award - there's no denying the purchasing power of those little stickers that get put on the jackets once an award is bestowed. Does anyone think the sales for The White Tiger and Shadow Country would be half of what they are without their respective awards? Hell, five minutes before I left work on Thursday I had a customer ask me for some paperback Pulitzer winners for her upcoming plane ride. She dismissed a signed copy of People of the Book by former Pulitzer-winner Geraldine Brooks simply because it wasn't the book she won the award for and thus did not have the Pulitzer sticker on the jacket. (She may have settled for the Aravind Adiga, so all is not lost.)

Maybe that sort of buying attitude is naive and foolish, but it's not going anywhere - this is how people buy books. They listen to Oprah, they read the NY Times reviews, and they look over the stacks at Costco for the little golden stickers. The least we can do is offer them an unbiased, evenhanded assessment of what the best books culled from the herd actually are. Having this sort of "blind taste test" for award selection would, hopefully, lead fools like NYT's Sam Tanenhaus to never again select 90% of the year's best books from one single publishing house or for the NBA judges to give Peter Matthiessen an award for 15-year old material that he probably should have won the first time around. Maybe this attitude is, in and of itself, naive of me - it's never going to be a perfect system across the board, for all major awards and I realize that, but it does beg reform.

*Please note, this mild rant has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that David Benioff, author of City of Thieves, was snubbed by every major award panel, as well as the New York Times Notable list in 2008 because he's married to a Holywood starlet and he wrote the screenplay for Troy. Nothing at all. (Prove them all wrong by meeting Mr. Benioff on Saturday, April 18th at 7:30pm at Warwick's in La Jolla, CA.)

Still Alive!

The first rule of being an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award judge is: you're not supposed to talk about being an ABNA judge. The second rule...

So, I'm a week removed from finishing my five assigned manuscripts and sending in my five reviews to PW - I still can't share anything about what I've read or what the process entailed, but I can direct anyone who's interested to Amazon's ABNA site, where all 500 quarterfinalists in the competition have excerpts available to read online. Fascinating, overwhelming, and rather enlightening, I found.

Since finishing the...wonderful books I was assigned to review, I have been reading (ie: resetting my brain) the forthcoming book from The Shadow of the Wind author, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game. As enticement, since it is a fantastic book so far, here's the first paragraph, as it is fairly relevant:

"A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that will surely outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price."

And just to prove that I certainly have not lost any of my well-known cynicism or bitterness in my weeks away from this blog - in fact, I feel that my cynicism is all the more stronger after reading those manuscripts - I want everyone to know that I am fully aware that Marley the dog (Marley & Me) rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Friday. What better way to acknowledge the fact that millions of us have lost the majority of our meager savings during the last seven months than by having a dog - no, sorry, a fucking dog - ring in the close of trading on the stock exchange floor?

"Bong! I'm the world's richest dog! Now buy my DVD, assholes!"

Hey Buddy, Whatcha Doin'?

My life in the world of books has been decidedly busy as of late - if only there were enough hours in the day to read and write as much as I want. I worked a book signing with Senator George McGovern last week, I finally got the new warwicks.com up and running, and finished reading Ron Carlson's forthcoming The Signal, The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry, and Tom Rob Smith's followup to Child 44, The Secret Speech, but am just mid-review on all three. Yet my best guess is that I'll be taking a few weeks off from posting regular reviews on the Catapult, for a couple of reasons. I mean, it is March Madness, after all. 'Nuff said, no?

A more interesting (and, frankly, more plausible) reason for this semi-hiatus is that I have been selected for the judging panel of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. This is part of a joint partnership between Amazon.com, Publishers Weekly, and Penguin Putnam in which individuals submit their unpublished fiction manuscripts for award consideration. The manuscript deemed the most worthy (and most readable) will be declared The Winner, the author will be awarded a healthy publishing contract, and Penguin will make their manuscript into a real, live book. I am on the quarterfinal panel - comprised of reviewers from Publishers Weekly - who will read through and review the manuscripts, selecting the best to move on to the semi finals. I have been sent five manuscripts and have until March 30 to read and review as many as I can - not leaving much time for reading other things, nor reviewing other books for this site, let alone watching the Tournament. Not an entirely unhappy prospect, of course, with the exception of the lack of basketball watching, as it is a great opportunity for me to hone my skills a bit in the real world. Here is the layout of the process, culled from Amazon's contest rules:

Amazon Editors narrow the field of entries to 500 Quarterfinalists. Publishers Weekly will then read the Quarterfinalists' full manuscripts to rate and review them based on five Judging Criteria: originality of idea, plot, prose/writing style, character development, and overall strength (This is what I do). Then Penguin Editors will select 100 Semi-Finalists and then read each Semi-Finalist's manuscript, and using the Judging Criteria will select three Entries from the 100 as Finalists. Amazon customers will then read excerpts and vote on the three finalists to select the winner who will be announced on May 22, 2009. During the Finals, an Expert Panel (Sue Monk Kidd and Sue Grafton are headliners) will weigh in with their comments on the three finalists' manuscripts for customers to consider while voting.

Anyway, this is a huge opportunity for me and I'm looking forward to it. The fun part is that there is far from any guarantee that whatever I am assigned will be any good. Can't wait.

Tom Benton, Super-Rep

Just a quick shout out: Tom Benton, the Warwick's sales representative from Penguin Putnam has won the prestigious Publisher's Weekly Rep of the Year Award! Tom is the brilliant rep who has turned me on to Ron Carlson, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, and countless other great books and authors over the years. I can't think of anyone who deserves this honor more. Congratulations Tom!

PW's announcement.

Olen Steinhauer Rocks It

Way back in November, I crumbled under the pressure of receiving an advance reading copy 6 months in advance of a book's release by reading & reviewing Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist. In my review, I called The Tourist "a taught, well-paced modern spy novel that threatens to finally launch Olen onto the bestseller lists and into the hands of le Carré readers everywhere." Amazingly, just a day after the release, my prediction for Mr. Steinhauer has started to come true: The Tourist has received a rave review from Janet Maslin of the New York Times:

"Some of the book’s minor characters even survive this hard-boiled story and stand ready for another one. As for Mr. Steinhauer, the two-time Edgar Award nominee who can be legitimately mentioned alongside John le Carré, he displays a high degree of what Mr. le Carré’s characters like to call tradecraft. If he’s as smart as “The Tourist” makes him sound, he’ll bring back Milo Weaver for a curtain call."

Clearly, Ms. Maslin reads the Book Catapult. I'm flattered. There is also a Sunday NYT Book Review on the way March 15 - expect more of the same deserved praise.
And here's the L.A. Times' take, also glowing.

Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles Trilogy (Review)

After slogging through Roberto Bolano's 2666 for nearly the entire month of December - a book I still cannot wrap my head around enough to write a full-length review of - I turned to Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles Trilogy for some friendly, crime-noir, end of the year escape reading. The first book, Total Chaos, periodically called out to me as I passed it amongst the trade paperback mysteries in my store, yelling obscenities in French and spitting at my feet. On the basis of this, I recommended it to a friend/customer, who proceeded to tear through the whole trilogy faster than... a depressed French detective with a bottle of scotch. He fully convinced me of Monsieur Izzo's brilliance when he said that the tension and horrible events in the third book, Solea, caused him to set it aside so he could catch his breath. This is coming from a guy who reads Ken Bruen as comedic escape. (Like I said, he's a friend.) So I agreed to meet Fabio Montale, Izzo's flawed Marseilles detective.

The trilogy is essentially a love letter to Izzo's hometown of Marseilles, with all its faults and ugly blemishes. As a port, Marseilles is a melting pot for the Mediterranean - populated by French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, and African - and has all the resultant racism and deep seeded problems that such a place would produce. Fabio Montale is a product of that volitile soup. The child of Italian immigrants, he was raised in Marseilles and spends the first book in the trilogy, Total Chaos, as a detective working against the corrupt political system that surrounds him. When an old friend turns up dead - possibly at the hands of fellow law enforcement - Montale must decide who he can trust and who he can endanger by sharing his theories. You can see the shell around Montale begin to grow in this first book - or rather, further solidify from a lifetime of calcification. Although he is driven to solve the crime that ended his friend's life, he is further driven away from the light, and retreats into himself, surrounding himself with just a handful of people that he cares about, while cutting everyone else off like cancerous growth. His home is his sanctuary - hot food and a bottle of scotch keep him safe - and this is where he heads when faced with a racist, corrupt police force he once felt a part of.

By Chourmo, the second part of the trilogy, Montale has left law enforcement and brought home the (supposed) love of his life, Lole - except that she has already tired of him and moved out by the time Chourmo begins. "Chourmo" refers to the solidarity of rowers in a galley ship, striving to one common end - escape.

"In Marseilles, you weren’t just from one neighborhood, one project. You were chourmo. In the same galley, rowing! Trying to get out."

Living, for Montale, has become all about food, drink, and the sea. The sea is central to Montale's psyche - his home is perched cliffside, with a series of steps to the water where he retreats to his small boat with a bottle whenever the need strikes him. While he is still reeling from Lole's departure, his cousin - and first love - Gelou comes to him, desperate for help. Weak from his love for Gelou, Montale agrees and searches the streets of Marseilles for Gelou's missing son, Guitou, while maintaining the "pervasive rot of cynicism" (as the New Yorker put it in 2006) that tells him that the boy is not alright. Local racial politics again come into play when Montale discovers that Guitou had been secretly dating a Muslim woman - a fact not lost on her violent, fundamentalist brothers. While undergoing his fruitless search, an old social worker friend of his is murdered right in front of Montale, threatening to upset the ship, sending Fabio sprawling across the port city in a vengeful quest for justice. Crime solving is a bit of a roller coaster ride in Izzo's books.

And then there's Solea. The tension in Solea is unlike any I can remember reading in another volume and I honestly could not predict the page-to-page fates of either Montale nor any of his friends and family. He jokes that food and scotch are all that matters, yet it is the patchwork family he has assembled that means more to him than he or Izzo can ever verbalize. In the opening pages, Montale finds "love" only to have it ripped from his hands almost instantly, leaving both fictional character and reader filled with a bitter pessimism concerning Montale's happiness. While still trying to deal with that shock and grief, he is contacted by his old friend, Babette, an investigative journalist in hiding from the Mafia, of all people. These are not the Hollywood Mafia of New Jersey or The Godfather - these are the modern, organized, unpredictable Mafia of the late 20th-century. (Read Roberto Saviano's stunning Gomorrah for more on the international web of the modern Camorra crime syndicate.) If you, like Babette, write something that paints their activities in an unfortunate light, it may be better to hide. Forever. Babette chooses to hide, but not before sending Montale a set of computer discs with all of her findings stored on them, thus putting Montale and everyone he cares about in grave danger. In an attempt to get Fabio to give back the discs, the Mafiosi begin targeting his friends, leaving both Montale and the reader hoping against hope that no more innocents get hurt before Babette returns to Marseilles. The tension is almost unbearable as Montale struggles to protect Honorine, his motherly, septuagenarian neighbor, from the evils that he has brought to her door. His true character begins to resurface in Solea - one of a man who will do anything in his power to protect those he loves.

The tense pacing of these novels, as a whole, is absolutely perfect. Montale's general pessimism and detachment from the world at large grows with each turn of the page, yet his is not a depressing or negative existence. He has just resigned himself to accept his fate - we're "chourmo", all in this together, so we may as well make the best of every day we have. He is very much full of life, it's just that that life consists of eating, playing cards, and drinking booze in his rowboat. It takes the love of others and Montale's love for them in turn, to break him out of his shell in each book, just enough for him to help them out before retreating again. In the end, he realizes that there is no where else to retreat to - nor the need to keep retreating, for he has everything he's ever truly wanted, right at home.

In addition to the Marseilles Trilogy, Izzo only wrote two other full-length novels - neither of them crime fiction - before he died at age fifty-five in 2000. (All five of his books are available through Penguin Putnam's awesome Europa Editions imprint.) The Trilogy firmly belongs amongst the best crime noir I have read - on par with Chandler, Hammett, Bruen, & Kerr. They are gritty, violent, & shocking books at times, but the author's undying love of the city of Marseilles shines through all the negativity and pessimism, leaving a love letter in the wake.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen (Review)

"Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside of your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?"

It seems that too often we label intelligent children "precocious" when we are really just frightened by the fact that they are smarter than we are. In fiction, child narrators often get a bad rep because their narrative voice seems too adult, too intelligent for someone so young, not allowing us to accept that they would think or speak in such an unchildlike manner. First person narration with a child character is notoriously difficult to succeed with, because of our very adult, preconceived notions about how we think at young ages. The quote above is from the 12-year old narrator of Reif Larsen's debut novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. At a second glance, it is a rather childlike perception of the world - and that's where the magic lies within this astounding novel.

Twelve year old genius cartographer, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet lives on a ranch in Montana with his family - to his young eyes, his mother is a floundering entomologist and his father is an unloving, gritty rancher. Ever since his younger brother died tragically the summer before, T.S. feels as if his parents do not care whether he's present or not, and he retreats into the mapping of his world. Larsen delivers this revelation concerning T.S.'s family quite subtly - his mother casually ignores him, being engrossed in her research, and his father is a rancher, while T.S. is a scientist - there's not much common ground there. There is no heavy hand here, no "mommy and daddy don't love me" moment, but rather a palpable distancing that T.S. experiences, resulting in his creation of an alternate sense of reality. He spends every waking hour mapping the world around him. Not maps in the traditional cartographic sense, but rather he creates elaborate diagrams and illustrations of every object, experience, and thought that he deems important enough to put down on paper. An elaborate diagram of a "Freight Train as a Sound Sandwich", the history of 20th century, mapped according to 12-year old boys eating Honey Nut Cheerios, the structure of the Bailey train yards in Nebraska. The scientific drawings he does for a professor friend at Montana State are so accurate and so beautifully rendered, that the professor sends them off to "the attic of our nation", the Smithsonian in Washington, without T.S.'s knowledge. When the museum awards T.S. the distinguished Baird fellowship, without knowing that he is only in junior high, T.S. debates whether to accept his new life or to continue in anonymity on the ranch. In light of his parental ignorance, he decides to slip off under cover of darkness, hop a freight train, and make his way across the country, on his own, to accept his award in D.C.

On the road - as this is essentially a "road novel" - T.S., of course, gradually learns more about the family he left behind once out of their orbit, and realizes how important that truly is when faced with the world at large. Just before leaving, he steals one of his mother's scientific journals from her study - "...but I wanted a piece of her to bring with me! Yes, I do not deny it: children are selfish little creatures." But after opening the journal, he learns that it is not scientific in nature, but rather a fictionalized account, written by his mother, of the life of his great-great grandmother, Emma, a pioneering 19th-century geologist. Oh, the importance of family - more important that scientific data journals! It comes as a shock to T.S. that his mother has been spending more time on Emma than on the search for the tiger monk beetle in the prairies of Montana.

"Okay", you say, "I get it. Little smart boy runs away for greener intellectual pastures only to realize that what he is leaving behind is better than he thought." Sounds like a fairly standard child narrator book. The difference is in Reif Larsen's delivery system for this tale, which is quite unlike anything I have ever read. As T.S. is a cartographer - a very visually oriented young man - his maps need to be included in his story in order for that story to be fully told or understood. So, intermixed with T.S.'s narrative are diagrammatical footnotes in the margins as a sort of illustration of whatever T.S. sees or thinks about. When confronted by a bible-thumping hobo, T.S. illustrates the man's terrifying features under the journal heading, "Fear is the Sum of Many Sensory Details". He has never seen a car with spinning rims before - "The Car With Black Windows That Drove Backwards While Traveling Forwards". The added element of these illustrations creates an entirely different book - one that transcends mere novel and becomes a visual, physical mapping of a story. A novel as art, if you will - in a more literal sense. T.S.'s humor, naivete, and intelligence become remarkably magnified through his maps. Everything he experiences becomes heightened and the writing takes on a more evocative air when coupled with these remarkable additions. How could there possibly be another novel this year that is more of a complete package than this? I was left stunned by it's brilliance and humbled by Larsen's talent.

As a reader, I relish those books that challenge my perceptions of what a novel is meant to be. We think that there are rules for narration - and there are, don't get me wrong - but these rules, in the hands of talented, imaginative authors, can be bent in order to create something truly original and groundbreaking. Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), and David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas). As of this writing, I am mired in Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler - these are all novels which bend the rules of fiction to the point of breaking, only to allow the narration to snap back to relative conformity. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet certainly falls within their ranks quite easily, if for slightly different reasons. Spivet is firmly linear, unlike Mitchell and Calvino, but it's labyrinthine structure lies within the play between the text and the illustrations, re-training the reader's brain to comprehend both without missing a beat. To force a reader to alter the way that they read is not something to be taken lightly - only in the hands of an author operating on another plain of existence could this be achieved. It has a frighteningly brilliant flow to it, fully immersing the reader within T.S.'s world. Once he reaches his destination and begins to ache for home, so too do you ache for him to feel that warm parental embrace. It is a difficult thing for an author to convey emotive qualities in his/her characters to a point where we actually believe what we say about them once we're disengaged from the page. We throw around these ideas of feelings and emotions, but how often are we really, truly emotionally invested in a fictional character's well-being? Not often enough, I say. There is a decidedly easy, contemporary feel to Larsen's writing, which some may feel diverts it away from the nearly impenetrable Borges and Calvino, but this is so meticulously crafted and so different than anything else I've ever read, that it should stand the test of time. Something that every author strives for, but so few achieve.

So where do we go from here?

Triple Short-Review Tuesday

Happy Short-Review Tuesday!

The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay
The premise behind Tremblay’s debut novel, The Little Sleep, held much promise and potential for edgy hilarity – a hard-boiled narcoleptic detective from South Boston – that it seemed destined to either rival Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn in brilliance & originality or just tank phenomenally. The tanking isn’t necessarily phenomenal, but tank it does. Tremblay never really exploits the narcolepsy to it’s full potential - stumbling over it as a narrative device - resulting in an almost complete lack of sympathy for his sleepy private detective, Mark Genevich. Hinting at Mark’s tendency to hallucinate full conversations, but never exploring the element much beyond the novel’s opening sequence and a hastily constructed conclusion, results in a lack-luster, dime-store detective novel. Without the narcolepsy, there’s absolutely nothing interesting about Mark – and he’s a terrible investigator. Really, why would he choose such a profession if he falls asleep all the time? In light of Mark’s lack of any sort of detection ability, the back-story feels sloppy and pasted together – not because of Mark’s lapses in consciousness, but because of poor plot construction. I know it sounds tempting with the narcolepsy, but avoid this one - it will just disappoint.

Sucker Punch by Ray Banks
Banks’ debut novel from 2007, Saturday’s Child, introduced another hard boiled detective character poured from the mold of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor. Manchester resident Cal Innes is not officially…well, anything, but manages to drive the novel with his own brand of face-punching investigation. In Sucker Punch, Banks delivers flashes of brilliance, but fails to cobble together enough of an interesting overall plotline and instead populates the book with empty shells of characters from other people’s novels. (Anyone not living in England is stiff, wooden, and way too one-dimensional.) Innes is out of prison (a result of events from Saturday's Child) and is tasked with chaperoning a young boxer to Los Angeles for a friend. The opening scenes in Manchester, England are quite good and would fit easily into a Bruen-type canon, but the mid-section of the book just cannot absorb the punches and falls flat. Innes (and Banks, for that matter) is at home in England, not SoCal. The drizzling rain, the smoky pubs, and the thick accents of Manchester suit Innes so well that it seems too early in this blossoming series to take him away from that. This could have been Banks' breakthrough novel with this character, except that he removed him from his comfort zone, thus rendering him ineffective and lost. Upon the novel's conclusion, Innes returns to Manchester and lands in a much more interesting grit-fest - only to have the novel wrap up soon thereafter. I'd rather that had Cal stayed home for all the fun, rather than ending up in the sloppy story he wound up mired in while Stateside. I'm drawn to Cal because of his faults - bad decisions and pain pill addiction mostly - but this is a generally frustrating book. Read it if you enjoyed Banks' first book, as it's good to see Cal again, but skip it if you've haven't. You'll just end up frustrated either way, actually, but there's still hope for further novels.

Nemesis by Jo Nesbo
Jo Nesbo has supplanted Henning Mankell as my favorite Scandinavian mystery author – scandalous, I know. His poorly named protagonist, detective Harry Hole, is much less whiny and plenty edgier than Mankell’s Wallander – drinking & smoking when he shouldn’t, rockin’ the Doc Marten's, & being generally morally ambiguous under the guise of solving crime. When he wakes up to find himself implicated in the murder of an old friend, it’s fun to see how far he’ll go in the name of justice – making deals with gypsy criminals, flying to the Caribbean following "leads", generally upsetting all his superiors. Amidst the complex, racially charged atmosphere of modern Norway, Nesbo expertly brings Harry to life as the next in the long line of great crime noir detectives. Nesbo is a very talented genre writer who throws in enough intelligence and cultural atmosphere to his narrative to put him head and shoulders above the rest. I'm not drawn to Harry like I am to Cal Innes, but he's intelligent and independent enough to drive the story along solo. And he could definitely beat Wallander in a fight.

OMG!

Just a little bit of work-related excitement for me this week - Warwick's has booked David Benioff for a signing on April 18 for the paperback release of City of Thieves, and, as if that wasn't good enough, we've also booked Ron Carlson for June 2 for the release of his next novel, The Signal. In case anyone has forgotten, City of Thieves was the best book I read in 2008 and Carlson's Five Skies was the best I read in 2007.

I think I'm having a heart attack.

Stephen King Hates Stephenie Meyer

For those of you only getting your internet news from the Book Catapult:
I know that I have promised to never write about Stephen King again, but c'mon, you knew that was never going to be the case. Sometimes he says things that are just..."so choice". In an interview with Brian Truitt from USA Today - posted on "journalist" Lorrie Lynch's blog this week (don't ask me how I first came across this one) the King bashes fellow authors Stephenie Meyer, Dean Koontz, and James Patterson. Hard.

"You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful."

Oh, snap! Well, I can't say I disagree with that assessment of Patterson. (See my old, ranting, crazyman post on King and Patterson.) And although I don't know Dean Koontz from Sue Monk Kidd, what established writer - especially in the genre we're talking about here - doesn't hit and miss from book to book? I've never said that King is a terrible writer - he certainly has found that niche and I'd be a fool to say otherwise, but even within the confines of that niche he has turned out some stinky dead fishes from time to time. (Exhibit A: Cell published in 2006 - people turned into zombies by their cellphones. Not that I read more than the jacket copy.) Even the more literary authors that actually can "write like hell" can't get it right all the time - Jose Saramago, Philip Roth, Garcia-Marquez - all have bombed in recent years. Hell, even the late John Updike had some relative duds, although it's sacrilege to say so these days. (James Patterson, on the other hand, has clearly signed an agreement with Lucifer.) Here's the really juicy part of King's interview though:

"Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good."

Oh dear. First off, doesn't King know better than to bash Stephenie Meyer on the internet? Her people are everywhere - they're even reading this post right now! Furthermore, where does someone who writes pop-lit tripe like King get off criticizing another pop author's skills? Since when is any of this about writing talent? King found his groove, made a boatload of cash, got comfortable, and has been churning out the chum for 30 years - once you sacrifice writing literature for something like horror, you forgo the luxury of literary criticism. Does Paris Hilton criticize Lindsey Lohan's acting talent? Even his book reviews for Entertainment Weekly...wait, need I say more? He gives an "exclusive" interview with USA Today, writes a column for Entertainment Weekly, and still has the balls left over to criticize other popular authors? Case dismissed on the grounds of the plaintiff being a white trash author. Even his bashing of James Patterson needs some perspective in light of his own resume - where does he get off qualifying Patterson as one thing, while considering his own work as something else? Where's that Pulitzer, King? Or the National Book Award? Or the Quill, even? While I don't know if Stephenie Meyer is a good writer or not, I just think that King's comments come off a bit bitter or hard-hearted, considering that she's the hot author where he once was himself. Kettle, Pot. Get over yourself.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In all fairness, King is Pulitzer-worthy compared to Patterson. I couldn't resist adding these opening lines from J.P.'s 1st to Die, just for fun:

It is an unusually warm night in July, but I'm shivering badly as I stand on the substantial gray stone terrace outside my apartment. I'm looking out over glorious San Francisco and I have my service revolver pressed against the side of my temple.

"Goddamn you, God!" I whisper. Quite a sentiment, but appropriate and just, I think.

Cloud Atlas Film Rumor

I hate to jump all over another man's breaking news, but this one hits far too close to home for me to ignore - there is a Cloud Atlas film adaptation in the works involving the Wachowski Brothers. Oh Shit. No no no no.

Director Tom Tykwer - of the upcoming Clive Owen film, The International - is apparently working on a script for David Mitchell's novel with the "everything-we've-touched-since-The-Matrix-turns-to-crap" Wachowskis. FirstShowing.net ran a little piece on Thursday about an interview they had with Tykwer in which he mentioned the project:

"I'm trying to adapt a novel called Cloud Atlas, which is a novel by David Mitchell that I'm really completely excited about. And I'm sitting down with the Wachowski Brothers and trying to adapt that for a screenplay. It's very interesting."

The Hollywood buffoon who wrote the FirstShowing.net piece, Alex Billington, shows his hand by wondering "which of the six (storylines Tykwer) would be focusing on...the next big question to be answered." Sorry to be a Book-Snob, but I am what I am: the WHOLE POINT of Cloud Atlas is that the six different narratives intertwine to create a larger whole - the six individuals cannot exist without the others! Focus on one story - ha! I don't mean to yell, but anyone who knows me knows how I feel about Mitchell's work - there is no novelist alive that I more eagerly anticipate the next volume of work from. (Well, maybe Salinger?) Mitchell has gradually become my favorite author over the years and has become my slamdunk, this-book-will-change-your-life handsell at the bookstore. I have tagged him as my Franchise Author. I will sign him to a long term contract. He will not be traded to the Wachowski Brothers.

Sorry - bit of an incoherent rant there. For those who've not yet read Mitchell, his books Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, and presumably his upcoming "Nagasaki" novel, rely upon multiple narrators and multiple storylines to weave together a broad-reaching overall plot. There is a lot going on in a David Mitchell novel and they tend to demand multiple readings, simply for the reader to be able to fathom the depth of what they have just read. Atlas is a very intricate, multi-layered, intertwining onion of a book and I can see how it might translate to film - there's no denying that it has tremendous visuals and the complex narration could be fabulous in the right hands. Tykwer may be the right guy for this - his adaptation for Patrick Suskind's Perfume was fairly spot-on - but I think the Wachowskis would be a mistake, as they have failed to produce any film of lasting value since the original Matrix. Speed Racer? The third Matrix film? Speed Racer? I think that their rumored involvement in this project has to be directly related to the final two sections of the novel - the futuristic societies of An Orison of Sonmi-451 and Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After - I can see them being able to pull those sections off, visually, but the other four parts would require a more gentle touch. There's no denying their skills as cinematic visionaries, but their penchant for George Lucas-like dialogue worries me. Cloud Atlas would demand extra attention in order to get the complexity right - I think the only way this could be put on film correctly would be with David Mitchell's help. And I'm sure ego would interfere here, as this is Hollywood afterall, but maybe different directors for each section would be the way to go - each has such different style, pace, and characters that to trust anyone other than Mitchell himself to bring all six to life would be nearly impossible.

The project seems to be in a very early stage, but it still strikes fear into the depths of my very soul.

John Updike: 1932-2009

What could I possibly say about this man, that has not already been said, especially in the wake of his death, when everyone has a tribute to share?

I always loved Updike's New Yorker reviews more than anything else - embarrassingly, I never found I could really invest myself in his fiction, and it has been many years since I last tried. But his book reviews were a true writer's review - elegant, eloquent, and pointed - they were the style of criticism book reviewers everywhere should aspire to. So I thank him for that.

Famous Patrick

As a response to the current economic downturn, NPR is running a continuous series on being unemployed in America on their Day to Day program - a program that itself will soon be off the air due to budgetary cuts. Their first interview with one of the unemployed masses was with my brother-in-law, Patrick Mulhearn! As further enticement, the story's title is "Zookeeper, Topless Bar Manager Ready To Work". Check it out.

The Lost City of Z by David Grann (Review)

"The finished story of Fawcett seemed to reside eternally beyond the horizon: a hidden metropolis of words and paragraphs, my own Z."

In 1925, the internationally known superstar explorer, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, disappeared into the vast Amazon rain forest with two companions, never to be heard from again. His vanishing captivated the world at the time - his exploits in South America had been followed all across the globe via news reel, wire reports, and newspaper headlines - only to have it all fade into obscurity as the century aged. Fawcett was a man obsessed - he spent his entire adult life searching for a rumor, a myth, his own personal "el Dorado" - an ancient city deep within the Amazon, forever eluding the Western explorer, that he had secretively dubbed "Z". Since he vanished over 80 years ago, generations of explorers have gone searching for Fawcett and his city of Z, only to be consumed by the forest themselves. When journalist David Grann stumbled upon Fawcett's story - which by the 21st century had faded far from the public eye - he became obsessed in his own right with uncovering what had happened to the Colonel and his companions.

The Amazon, even today, is mostly uncharted wilderness - over 2 million square miles of dense rain forest and the most bio-diverse region on the planet. Imagine what that might have been like for a Victorian-era explorer - no satellite imagery, no GPS, no radios and plenty of poison frogs, billions of mosquitoes, bot flies, vampire bats, and possibly hostile local tribes. Fawcett first arrived in the Amazon in 1906 - sent by the Royal Geographical Society of London as an impartial cartographer. The region was so unexplored and virtually uncharted, that Bolivia and Brazil could not agree on their shared border through the forest - hence the R.G.S. sent Fawcett to chart the region and help define that border. So, without ever having been to South America before, let alone anywhere near the Amazon river, he successfully charted the territory - a full year faster than anyone anticipated. By 1911, Fawcett was an international celebrity - his success on multiple charting missions in the rain forest was unprecedented and captured the imaginations of most of the developing world. He managed to befriend most of the indigenous tribes he met, virtually ensuring his survival in the region and seemed to have an uncanny knack for not falling ill or getting injured while exploring. It was around this time, through discussions with tribes and exchanges of rumors, that Fawcett began developing his theory that there had at least at one time existed a large scale civilization within the rain forest, rivaling that of the Inca, Aztec, or the Maya. It became his life obsession.

"Anthropologists," Heckenberger said, "made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth century and seeing only small tribes and saying, 'Well, that's all there is.' The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That's why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements, that, later, no one could ever find."

David Grann, a journalist for the New Yorker, stumbled upon Colonel Fawcett's story while researching an Arthur Conan Doyle piece in 2004. Fawcett was rumored to be the inspiration for Doyle's The Lost World - a tale of a plateau hidden deep in the rain forest where dinosaurs had avoided extinction - and Grann unearthed some private papers of Fawcett's which seemed to act as a guide to his ultimate destination when he disappeared in 1925.

Strapped for cash and in danger of losing his once vaunted international acclaim (victim to a 1920's "what have you done for me lately" sort of thing), Fawcett had decided to head out on one final foray into the jungle in that fateful year, accompanied only by his 21-year old son Jack and Jack's best friend Raleigh Rimell. As part of his deep obsession with the city he called Z, Fawcett left behind false clues as to his actual destination to throw off any would-be explorers that may have followed in his wake. Grann, in the midst of his burgeoning Fawcett obsession, uncovered the true starting point for the actual destination Fawcett was headed for in 1925 - something no one else had managed to do in the 80 years Fawcett had been missing.

Grann pens Fawcett's tale with fabulous narrative aplomb - constantly keeping you guessing at what may lie across the next uncharted river or through the next stand of massive, sunlight devouring trees. The pace is perfect throughout - Grann sprinkles just enough of his comparatively anemic 21st century excursion into the jungle within the history lesson that is Fawcett's life to keep the reader fully engaged and, well, a little bit obsessed with the story. His own obsession pales in comparison with that of the Colonel - he follows him, yes, into the heart of the Amazon, but with the express goal of coming out again to write this story, not to perish in the rain forest without any answers. (To perish would be decidedly Victorian and not very New Yorker.) But the most compelling element, even with the mounting suspense over what actually happened to Fawcett and his son, is in what Grann learns while searching deep in the forests of Brazil. His jungle conversations with archaeologist-gone-native, Michael Heckenberger, reveal some truly remarkable and archaeologically groundbreaking finds that actually lend some truth to Fawcett's theory of the Lost City of Z. The final chapter reads like an edge-of-your-seat adventure novel, complete with bombshell surprises and a cliffhanger ending, while keeping grounded in reality by the journalist's presence. Could this crazed, Indiana Jones-type have been onto something - even without having any real proof? Could there have existed a massive, advanced civilization - complete with highways, bridges, and multiple townships - beneath the impenetrable canopy of the Amazon rain forest? There seems to be a certain irony that the life of this explorer has been as obscured by the annals of history as his obsession - Z - has been obscured by the forest canopy.

One final note: my suggestion to you, not just as a bookseller, but as a friend, is this: as soon as this book is published (February 24), just get yourself a copy and read it, because Fawcett's story is going to become fairly common knowledge in the years to come. Brad Pitt purchased the film rights to Grann's book back in April of 2008 and is rumored to be in pre-production already with his director, James Gray. Don't let him ruin it for you.

Notable Addendum

I would just like to apologize to Richard Price and Tom Rob Smith for neglecting to add their wonderful books to my notable list for 2008. I'm not sure how I managed to forget Price's Lush Life and Smith's Child 44 when I was compiling the list, but it certainly has nothing to do with the authors or their novels. Lush Life is a fantastic novel about crime in New York City and the layers of human perception that affect how we view those crimes. Filled with great characters that breathe deep in the Manhattan night, slamming shut their windows to keep out the city. And Child 44 - reviewed at length here - is a pitch perfect crime novel set in the terrifying environs of Stalinist Russia. The tension is palpable throughout - not in the simple crime plotline, but in the dangerous task of fighting the morally-ambiguous State in an effort to reveal the truth.

Anyhow, they both deserved to make the list, I just dropped the ball a bit.

Headed to the Pulp Mill

As if his last book title wasn't hilarious enough (Hot Mahogany anyone?) bestselling author, Stuart Woods has produced this gem: Mounting Fears.

Possibly subtitled: "A Novel of Sexual Dysfunction"?

Coming in June: Sweaty Leather
And in July: Out of Ideas

The First Day of the Rest of Our Lives

I honestly never thought that January 20th, 2009 was ever actually going to arrive. It seemed like a mythical endpoint - a date that existed in pure fantasy, the day that we would all be rescued. Eight long, painful, horrible fucking years watching this country slide down the slippery slope of muck and greed into the abyss of neverending dark. Can this man stop the descent? Can he pull us up out of the darkness? Can he right the wrongs?

I have no idea, but I'd rather watch him try than anyone else.

Godspeed.

Blogjammin'

I am currently experiencing some mild writers block. Please stand by.

How do some of these book bloggers crank posts out on a daily basis? I have 3 or 4 half-finished reviews that I can't seem to wrap up and nothing seems to have caught my attention (or my ire) in the book world enough for me to feel like writing about it. (Hey! Simon & Schuster has a new website!)

In the half-mad world of blogging, if you don't have anything so say, you should probably just say it anyway. The more you post, the more people read what you have to say, even if you're not actually saying ANYTHING. It makes me crazy.

I'm just going to go read.

Trash Heap

It's that sobering, reality-soaked time of year again - the Christmas decorations are coming down, winter is setting in, and it's time to return the unloved dregs in the bookstore from whence they came. While cleaning house for our annual inventory, this particular collection of pathetic, also-rans designated for return caught my eye today: Jerome Corsi's Obama Nation, David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama, and the rush press edition of the childlike Sarah Palin biography. So long, losers!
--------------------------------------------------------------
In other news, there has been a rather disheartening update to the Oregon court case concerning the law restricting the sale of "sexually explicit material" to minors. You may remember this issue from my post "Its Raining Porn in Oregon" from last year. In Oregon, if a 12-year old walks into a bookstore and opens, say, a sex education book or "The Story of O", that just so happens to have some images or passages related to human sexuality in it, under the Oregon law, this can be construed as "furnishing sexually explicit material to a child" and the bookseller can be prosecuted - up to a year in prison and/or a $6250 fine. U.S. District Court Judge Michael W. Mosman decided last month that the Oregon law was right in line with every Constitutional precedent he could think of, so it was A-OK by him. An appeal is currently being considered by the ABFFE and the other plaintiffs.

Glenn Goldman

I feel I would be remiss if I did not mention the passing of Book Soup owner/founder Glenn Goldman this past weekend. Book Soup has been a Sunset Boulevard institution since Glenn opened up in 1975 and his influence in the Southern California bookselling community has been positively monumental. I didn't really know Glenn personally - I had met him just a handful of times, cocktail parties here and there - but I do know those who knew him well and cared a great deal about him, so his untimely passing at 58 comes as a great shock.

He was a passionate proponent of the written word and for that, we all owe him a sincere debt of gratitude. It is a horrible over-simplification to say he will be sorely missed....

As a wonderful way of remembering Glenn, the folks at Book Soup have set up the Glenn Goldman Booksellers Scholarship Fund. To donate, please visit booksoup.com.

Intocht van Sinterklaas!

I was just sitting around with my family on this blustery, 60-degree Southern Californian Christmas Day, reading David Sedaris holiday stories out loud for a laugh. Here's his "Six to Eight Black Men" story about Christmas in the Netherlands. The creepy Dutch Christmas fable picqued my interest. Sinterklaas lives in Spain and arrives in the Netherlands each November by steamship. He is accompanied by several black-faced ("Zwarte Peit") assistants (possibly Moorish in origin) who throw candy into the waiting crowds. (This event actually happens and is show on television like a bowl game.) For the resultant holiday, if children are good, Sinterklaas and his team fill their shoes with candy. Bad children may either get beaten by a chimney sweep broom, have their shoes filled with salt or small sticks rather than candy, or may be thrown in a gunny sack and taken back to Spain for the rest of the year. Happy Sinterklaas!

Seth's Notable List 2008

Every book blog has a "top-whatever" list for the end of the year - the Book Catapult is no exception, this being the third annual such list. So, maybe you're sick of lists and think that they have no intrinsic value, everyone has one, so what's the point, yadda yadda, bah humbug - well, too bad - these are the books that I would like to champion for the year. Deal with it, friend.

These are the ten best books of the 45 or so that I, Seth Marko, read during the calendar year of aught-8. If you have not read them, either go find them at your local library or head down to your local independent bookstore (and there IS one near you somewhere) and buy one or two of these yourself. If you read this blog and buy your books from Amazon or one of the big box stores, under the auspices of "saving money", I think you're missing the point. Does anyone from those places offer you such stunning book recommendations? I think not....

City of Thieves by David Benioff
What else can I say about this book that I haven't already said? (Here's the full review from back in May.) Easily the best book I read all year, yet this was somehow snubbed by all the major awards - no Pulitzer, National Book, no New York Times Notable - although it was named the Book of the Year by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association (SCIBA), of which, of course, I am a member. Benioff's writing is amazingly crisp and vibrant, bringing remarkable life to his characters - leading men Lev & Kolya are hilarious, humble, emotional, and real, real, real. The story is absurd, really - one of a search for eggs during the WWII siege of Leningrad, to stave off execution, rather than starvation, and of an undying friendship forged under the harshest of circumstances. Benioff has been critically accused of pretentiousness in light of his familial connections within the story itself, but this is nothing but bitterness and sour grapes. He is a magician with the written word, there's no doubt about it. If there's oonly one book that you go out and purchase for yourself this year, this has got to be the one.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Another book that I have written about quite a bit here on the Catapult. This was the surprising recipient of the 2008 Man Booker Prize - I had thought it to be far to edgy for the Booker crowd - and now a huge national bestseller as a result. The story of lower caste dweller, Balram Halwi - the type of man who will buck the system, throw off the shackles of oppression, kill his boss, and seize his true entrepreneurial destiny. Tired of accepting his fate every time an election is fixed (the three main diseases in India are “typhoid, cholera, & election fever”) or a rich man’s crime is pinned on him, Balram acts as our guide through a caste system world that most westerners don’t even know exists.

The Boat by Nam Le
A great debut collection of short stories - named a NYT Notable book for the year and one I reviewed for KPBS, back when I was still doing that. Le's stories are disparately different on the surface, but there is a subtle connection - humanity, grace, and identity, I suppose - that runs through them all, inextricably linking them together. The first and the last stories are the strongest - they serve as solid bookends for the collection, telling tales of post- and pre-immigrations. An author to keep tabs on.

Breath by Tim Winton
Another that I have reviewed here on the Catapult - sadly snubbed by the Booker commitee in 2008. The more time that goes by since my reading this book - back in July - the more I realize that it's really staying with me. I wasn't crazy about the ending, but not in a "man he really blew that one" type of way, but it felt a little forced, a bit rushed to the presses, if you know what I mean. The meat of the book, though, had me totally engrossed - Winton's capturing of that magical, indefinable element to surfing and laying it all out there for you in erudite, brilliant prose that makes this well worth the read. And one of the best books I read this year, clearly.

Cross by Ken Bruen
Would there be a Seth's Notable List without a book by Ken? One of the best Jack Taylor books - here's my review from March (Jack's "is an emotional decline that is palpable, visceral. Since you live in his head for the duration, the emotions feel, somehow, more raw, more tangible.") With a comment left by the man himself, Mr. Ken Bruen. Still pretty proud of that post.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
A crazy, crazy book about ninjas and mimes and the end of the world as we know it, with a plot twist that even the most jaded, sci-fi junky nerd wouldn't see coming. In my earlier review, I said: I could feel Gonzo Lubitsch and Ronnie Cheung and Humbert Pestle and Master Wu and Zaher Bey moving and breathing all around me, long after the book was closed and reshelved. In such a wacky, unpredictable, bizarre novel, Harkaway was able to wallop me in the face with such real people, that I was completely caught off guard, and in fact only realized their impact on me after I had wrapped things up. It is a very well-paced, well-crafted, surprisingly intricate and intelligent book that defies genre pigeon-holing and forces the reader to reexamine our own current reality and the state of the world. Are we so far off from this nonsense?

Black Flies by Shannon Burke
A NYT Notable Book for 2008 - received an outstanding review by Liesl Schillinger in their Book Review, which is how I noticed this little indie gem from Soft Skull Press. This is a raw novel, man. As in, you feel rubbed raw by it's gritty, real-world atmosphere and it's harrowing exposure of what happens to trauma experts when they're exposed to too much trauma. The plot is really just a year in the life of NYC paramedic, Ollie Cross - and the general mental descent that that year involves. Burke once worked as a paramedic above 125th street in Harlem (after leaving a similar existence in New Orleans) – it is this resume item that allows him to write this novel with such visceral, resonant reality. In fact, knowing this, it reads more like a memoir than some memoirs of recent publication - you know that Burke is not making this stuff up, and that is some scary shit. Watching Ollie’s 11-month descent from med school-bound rookie to world-weary, shattered battlefield medic is swift & shocking, but seeing him decide whether to pull himself up off the street is even more arresting and profound. A surprisingly moving novel about the people who save our lives every day & are too often overlooked.

The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri by David Bajo
Beautiful, lyrical, flowing, hypnotic, and ethereal. Bajo received almost no critical attention for this debut - I'm really not sure why, actually. It's sort of a smarter, sexier version of Shadow of the Wind, if I may be so cliche. When Irma mysteriously disappears one day, she leaves behind all 351 books in her library for Philip. He uses his own mathematical formula for selecting the order in which to read them, to better understand where Irma may have gone. There is a certain mystery element here, but, like it does with Philip, this becomes secondary to learning more about who Irma and Philip are, both together and apart. A great, mult-faceted love story.

2666 by Roberto Bolano
I have had the hardest time writing a full review of this monster - every other critic has given it raving, I-just-drank-the-Bolano-kool-aid-type reviews, presumably out of the fear that their lack of complete understanding of his book will be exposed. (With the exception, of course, of Jonathan Lethem's NY Times review - of course he gets it, he's the man.) It's a vast tome of a brain-twister in every sense, that pulses with a writer's lifetime of experiences to deliver a broad, sweeping vision of the fragility of life and the imminence of death. A handful, to be sure. Every review has made a point of mentioning that Bolano never lived to see his 900-page magnum opus published, having succumbed to liver disease in 2005 at the age of 50, as a way of explaining the themes to his final novel. I don't know, I think maybe we're reading into those themes moreso because of his untimely death, but it surely loans a certain weight to the book, knowing his history a bit. But what is it really about, you ask? Good question. There are five distinct sections - separate novellas, really - that interconnect to complete the whole. Four scholars pursue an elusive German novelist to the border town of Santa Teresa, Mexico where they meet a widowed philosoper - who goes a little crazy (in my opinion) in the border town of Santa Teresa, where his daughter meets - an American reporter investigating the murders of dozens of women in the border town of Santa Teresa, (see a theme here?) where a police detective struggles to solve the unsolvable murders of now hundreds of women in Santa Teresa. And the life story of the elusive German author, Benno von Archimbaldi, is revealed - leading him, of course, to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa. Have I scared you off yet? It's kind of a bigger, heavier, more daunting version of Cloud Atlas - not for everyone, but a magnificent novel if you can give it the appropriate time to mull through.

To Siberia by Per Petterson
A beautifully written novel of mid-century life in the far reaches of Denmark, by the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses, last year's indie-press surprise and a runaway bestseller. I haven't read Horses, but if it's written half as well as To Siberia, this guy's a truly remarkable talent. Petterson has a certain flow to his prose that comes out like an exhalation into winter air - comforting warmth in a landscape of utter cold. There is a palpable, ethereal, dreamy quality to the writing, similar in some ways to David Bajo's writing, and is one of those books that helps you escape out of your life and into that of the characters. Very nicely done.

There you have it. Have a nice holiday season, thanks for checking on the Catapult, and go out and read some books!

Nothin' But Rants

This past weekend, in an op-ed column for the New York Times, Timothy Egan wrote of the karmic unfairness of Joe the Plumber's impending book release this month. "The Plumber", in actuality Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, the mongoloid, unlicensed pipefitter who badgered Barack Obama on the campaign trail in Ohio, has managed to write a 192-page book and get it published, albeit by a suspiciously self-promoting publishing house (Joe's publisher, PearlGate, has 2 books: Joe's and his co-author's).

"The idea that someone who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair."

True enough Mr. Egan - there is something intrinsically WRONG about someone like Wurzelbacher getting a book published before someone who's toiled over their work for years, only to be rejected time and again by publishers everywhere. In this case, he stumbled into his 15 minutes and has managed to drag us all into it for a half an hour by convincing some doofus to publish his inane drivel - all under the ruse that this is what "The People" want. Hell, his website (yes, he has a website) is called Secure Our Dream.com (whatever that means) where for $19.95 you can sign up to be a Freedom Member and "become an integral part of an American movement to preserve our American Dream". Man, when does that 15 minutes end?

"For...you friends of celebrities penning cookbooks, you train wrecks just out of rehab, you politicians with an agent but no talent — stop soaking up precious advance money."

Even worse than Joe the Bummer, however, is this: How to Talk to Girls by Alec Greven, a nine-year old boy from Colorado - available at self-loathing bookstores everywhere. Nine, dude! This kid is nine years old! Seriously, what could he possibly have to tell anyone about women? He has never kissed a girl, gone on a date, seen a woman naked, other than his mom, or possibly grandma. I understand that this most likely started out as a sappy, cute, jokey book, and it's part of my hard-hearted nature (see My Life with George) to hate things like this, but HarperCollins has signed him to at least three more books - How to Talk to Dads and How to Talk to Moms, among them, both due out in 2009. And, 20th Century Fox (a subsidiary of News Corp, as is Harper) has optioned the rights to the film. The film! Did I mention he's nine? Alec began writing his book when he was 8 (last year) as a writing project for his third grade class! AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

It's all just wrong. I know life is unfair, but this is ridiculous. What is it about the buying public that makes them crave such utter garbage while there are writers out there - even ones with book deals and published works - who can't seem to get anyone to read their brilliant books. Sorry Alec, I'm sure you're a very nice boy, but I simply resent you. You and Joe the Plumber have wandered into a world that has brainwashed everyone into thinking that your junk is what they want to read. What happened to literature? Which magnificent books got passed over by HarperCollins this year so that they could make room in their catalog for your little book? How can that be fair? In actuality, Alec, you're being exploited by Harper and Fox - although I'm sure you've gotten a pretty sweet deal on all this - who're just trying to capitalize on your naive musings on the opposite sex, of which you can't possibly know anything about. Believe me, I was a nine year-old boy once. And man, kids in college are going to make fun of you - I know I would - once you're a decade or so beyond this, you're never going to be able to live it down. "Yo Grevan, tell me again how to talk to your mom?"

"...publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage."

I'm sure that there's a place for Alec Grevan out there, but it's just hard to swallow, knowing that there are brilliant novels out there that will never be published, because publishers like Harper have us convinced that we need How to Talk to Girls instead. Yeah, I'm a bitter, hate-filled man, but what are you gonna do?

Jacket Add-on

Here's a late addition to the Catapult's Best Book Jacket Awards for 2008: Carrie Fisher's memoir, Wishful Drinking. Hilarious.

Take Me to a Happy Place

I hate to always seemingly get my book-related news stories from a single source, but it's hard to ignore the power of the New York Times Book Review and their various lists. Every year, they produce what they have annointed as the Ten Best Books published for the year - I can't count how many customers I've met over the years who either wanted select titles from the top ten or would only purchase books with the little "New York Times Notable Book" sticker on them or were carrying the actual torn-out list itself in their sweaty little grip with the hope of purchasing the whole dectet. Today the Times' Ten Best Books for 2008 list was announced - 5 fiction and 5 nonfiction, selected from their 100 Notable Books List. The fiction are: Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser, A Mercy by Toni Morrison, 2666 by Roberto Bolano, Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. The nonfiction are: The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes, This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust, The World Is What It Is by Patrick French.

Great. I don't agree with the list as a whole (I've only read one of them), but I can respect their selections, based on the presumed merit of the works themselves. Lists are always opinionated. And I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth - there's no denying the power behind this list as it's certain to help bookstore sales everywhere. I'm sure that the editors of the Times know what they're doing, right? Yes. As a matter of fact, they do.

The problem actually stems from where these books all originated - nine of the ten were published by pub-behemoth Random House. Nine. Bolano's book was the lone holdout as a Farrar, Straus, & Giroux title. And that one was pretty much a no brainer anyway - a super-hyped, literary tome by a dead Chilean? I mean, come on. But I'm supposed to buy the story that Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus supposedly sifted through all the books written this year, by every publisher out there, and decided that 9 of the 10 best came from one single source? Somewhat suspicious, at best. The written word is entirely subjective, of course, and every reader is entitled to draw their own conclusions regarding the value of the books they read. But as an educated, well-read person, with a certain basic level of knowledge of the book industry, what conclusion am I supposed to draw from Tanenhaus's selections, other than that he is firmly in the pocket of someone over at Random House? The whole thing just stinks.

I'm being uncharacteristicly polite over this, I know, and it's because Ed Champion has gone there already on his Reluctant Habits blog. How can I top his beautifully pornographic hate rant?

New York Times Notable List 2008

Fat from turkey dinner, it's the "list time" of year. The New York Times has released their 100 Notable Books of 2008 list - and reviewers Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani have put together their personal top tens for the year. More importantly, The Book Catapult's immensely influential annual list will follow in the weeks to come. Lists seem to have an inescapable appeal for us - we love to either heartily agree or vehemently argue over any lists, whether it be the Notable list of books or Rolling Stone's Top 100 Guitarists or Albums or Singers or Ham Sandwiches of all time - it seems to just be in our nature to express strong opinions over these likewise extremely opinionated compilations. We feel the need to continually challenge the opinions of others and to defend the items or individuals omitted from any one particular person's list, even though it really doesn't matter what we think. You don't like the list? Make your own, chump.

So, in the spirit of the moment, My Opinion of the NYT list is this: they have included several fantastic books which I have fought to champion over the last 12 months which have apparently managed to gain the recognition necessary to make the top 100 - this I feel good about. Lush Life, Breath, The Boat, Black Flies, My Revolutions, A Voyage Long and Strange, and 2666 all deservedly achieved Notable status. Of course, books that I suffered through or put down out of boredom also made the list: Beautiful Children, Atmospheric Disturbances, The Lazarus Project - all considered to be among the best for the year. I suppose we can agree to disagree, although I cannot say that these are not good books, having never been able to finish them. And it is curious that the controversial winner of the National Book Award, Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen failed to make the list at all. Hmm. See why we love the list?

That said in the interest of being impartial, yadda yadda, there are two rather enormous, glaring, shocking, appalling omissions from the Notable list from this (once) esteemed news organization: City of Thieves by David Benioff - easily the finest work of fiction produced in the year 2008 - and the Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. For shame! For shame! I guess I will have to manufacture my own list.

Sometimes You Gotta Judge...

With all the time I spend within the actual pages of books, I thought it was about time I simply judged them by their covers. Therefore I present the Book Catapult's selections for the Best and Worst Titles and Book Jackets for works published in 2008. This was easier said than done - while this project was inspired by a profoundly bad title, compiling other bad titles and covers proved to be rather challenging. If anyone notices any glaring omissions, let me know.

Winner of The Book Catapult's Best Book Jacket for 2008:

The Boat by Nam Le (Knopf) The design is by Carol Devine Carson and the photo is Clifford Ross, from his incredible "Hurricane" series.

Runners up:

- In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography by John Gartner (Macmillan)
- China: Portrait of a Country, Liu Heung Shing, editor (Taschen)
- The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri by David Bajo (Viking)
- Once Were Cops by Ken Bruen (Macmillan)
- Maps & Legends by Michael Chabon (McSweeney's - designed by Jordan Crane)
















Winner of The Book Catapult's Best Book Title of 2008:

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story by Christina Thompson (Bloomsbury)

Runners up:

- Hairdos of the Mildly Depressed by Doug Crandell (Virgin Books)
- The Butt by Will Self (Bloomsbury)
- When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (Little, Brown)
- The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri by David Bajo (Viking)
- Everything But the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain by John Barlow
- 2666 by Roberto Bolano (FSG)

Winner of The Book Catapult's Worst Book Jacket of 2008:

The School on Heart's Content Road by Carolyn Chute (Atlantic Monthly Press)



Runners up:

- Liberty by Garrison Keillor (Viking) - where's Waldo?
- Arctic Drift by Clive Cussler (Putnam) - cover design submitted via fax machine. You really should seek this out in person, to better appreciate the blurry, Microsoft Paint-created iceberg. Truly awful.
- Foreign Body by Robin Cook (Putnam) - subtitled "Has anyone seen my hedgetrimmers?"
- My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco) - flat out ugly.
- Man in the Dark by Paul Auster (Henry Holt) - good book, bad, bad cover.

Winner of The Book Catapult's Worst Book Title of 2008:

Hot Mahogany by Stuart Woods (Putnam) - This is the book that started all of this. What the hell is this title supposed to mean? Anyone? Mr. Woods, are you out there?

Runners up:

- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press) - as a bookseller, I have heard every variation of this title, not one of them even remotely correct. In fact, I didn't know that the word "peel" was in there until last week.
- Three Shirt Deal by Stephen J. Cannell (St. Martins) - author also responsible for A-Team scripts, FYI.
- The Complete Idiots Guide to Snack Cakes by Leslie Bilderback (Penguin) - I don't know if this one is bad, per se, but just hilariously stupid.

2008 National Book Award Winners

The winners of the 2008 National Book Awards are:

Fiction: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Nonfiction: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed

Poetry: Fire to Fire by Mark Doty

Young People's Literature: What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell


I can't say much about the other categories, not being a strong enough reader or critic of them to be able to honestly weigh in, but the fiction selection...this seems like the worst thing that could have happened to the book industry. Peter Matthiessen wrote the three components of this "novel" in the 1990's - the first almost twenty years ago - published them separately to no great acclaim or accolades, and moved on. Now, in 2008, a version of these three novels is re-edited by Matthiessen and re-published by Random House's Modern Library, and is somehow deemed the best work of fiction written in the United States for the current year? A travesty. I have already complained about the selected finalists - there are, of course, glaring omissions to this and, really, any list of award finalists - but at least the other four had been written sometime in the current century. I know I'm reading way too much into this, but what message is this sending, both to the reader and the writer alike? Would it be okay if Cormac McCarthy re-edited his Border Trilogy, rereleased it, and won the National Book Award again? How about Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe books? Can those be resubmitted as one huge tome? Let's let George Lucas throw all the Star Wars films into one huge mess and see if he wins an Oscar.

I just feel "bad" for Marilynne Robinson, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Kushner, and Salvatore Scibona, because, although they have the amazing distinction of being National Book Award finalists, they lost to a rehashed trilogy from the previous decade that never should have made it as far as it did - I don't care how good it is.

Ninja Redesign

The good people over at Book Ninja hosted a book jacket re-design contest last month - won by this hilarious reimagining of The Road, designed by Ingrid Paulson. Imagine the utter terror that soccer moms everywhere would encounter within this Nicholas Sparks version. Brilliant.

Other favorites include the Sarah Palin Confederacy of Dunces, the "gay cowboy" version of Blood Meridian, and the Baen Books inspired On the Road. Check it out.

Merry Apocalypse Everyone!

As if the failing economy wasn't enough to keep people out of bookstores this holiday season.... Crazed fascist right-wing radio host Glenn Beck has found it necessary to create this abomination of publishing - his attempt to tap into the annual soft, squishy Christmas novel market: The Christmas Sweater.

Ah, the story of a stupid twelve year old boy named Eddie who tragically receives a sweater from his mother for Christmas instead of a bike. This ruins his life.

"Scarred deeply by the realization that kids don't always get what they want, and too young to understand that he already owned life's most valuable treasures, that Christmas morning was the beginning of Eddie's dark and painful journey on the road to manhood. It will take wrestling with himself, his faith, and his family — and the guidance of a mysterious neighbor named Russell — to help Eddie find his path through the storm clouds of life and finally see the real significance of that simple gift his mother had crafted by hand with love in her heart."

"Storm clouds of life"? Barf. It somehow makes this all the more nauseating knowing that it poured forth from a hatemonger like Beck. Here's some Beck background: the book is published by Threshold Editions - the same pub that brought us Jerome Corsi's Obama Swift Boat book that attempted to divide an undividable country over the summer. Beck has made the "socialist" label for Obama (and presumably the 66,624,424 of us who voted for him) his rallying cry - he even has a pathetic video on his website featuring the liberal socialists praising the "messiah" with a plodding Soviet era anthem. Even worse, he has called the people who remained in New Orleans after Katrina "scumbags" that he hates more than 9/11 victims' families. ("And when I see a 9-11 victim family on television, or whatever, I'm just like, "Oh shut up!" I'm so sick of them because they're always complaining.") You get the idea. That's some big hate there - writing a lame book about a boy who hates his mother isn't going to undo all that. I know it sounds naive, but I just can't understand how someone can tell himself that he's capable of writing a feel-good story about faith and family while he makes a living tearing down people who don't support the NRA. Its insane. Sad and insane.

The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer (Review)

Olen Steinhauer's latest novel, The Tourist (St. Martin's Minotaur), isn't due to hit the shelves until March 3, 2009, but since the publishing world loves to taunt me with Advance Reading Copies 6 or 7 months out from the pub date, I have no choice but to read & review. What else can I do?

Steinhauer is best known - although, not very well known at all yet - for his series of detective novels set in an unnamed Eastern bloc nation, spanning the decades from the 40's to the 80's. The Bridge of Sighs, The Confession, and last year's Victory Square mark the highlights of the 5-part series that has put Steinhauer on the crime noir map, earning him 2 Edgar Award nominations and substantial critical acclaim, not to mention my undying loyalty as a fan. In March, his first novel set outside of his series hits the shops - The Tourist is a taught, well-paced modern spy novel that threatens to finally launch Olen onto the bestseller lists and into the hands of le Carre readers everywhere.

I think that the only reason I picked this book up in the first place was because of Olen Steinhauer's name on the cover - his previous novels are some of my favorite books to put in the hands of mystery readers looking for an author they have never read, but this one is somewhat outside his usual vein. The Confession is among the best crime novels I've read in the last decade, but more for its depth of character and its departure from traditional crime novel pacing than for a crime-solving plot. For similar reasons, The Tourist breaks from the traditional spy novel genre and offers a compelling look at the spy trade of the new, post-9/11 world.

What happens to spies and assassins when the CIA begins to make budgetary cuts? Is there really a place in this new global society for James Bond-types? There is an unusual degree of what feels like actual reality in Steinhauer's spy-world - a breath of fresh air for the genre. Too many spy novels are simply that: novels with spies as protagonists. They attempt to impress you by navigating through a complex plot involving murdering a high level government official and rescuing so-and-so, yadda yadda yadda. Fine for reading when you're trapped on the subway and all you can find to read is the wall or a discarded Clancy novel, but not much for furthering your literary intelligence. Steinhauer offers something more - situations that are entirely feasible in the world that we all actually inhabit. What would happen if Congress realized that it was stretching its military budget too thin and noticed that the CIA was keeping deep cover operatives on retainer all over the civilized world?

Milo Weaver is a former "tourist" - one of those anonymous deep cover operatives - who has left the world of international espionage behind for a wife, a family, and a desk job. When sent out into the field one last time - always a harbinger of doom - he is forced to analyze where his loyalties lie, who his true friends are, and whether his enemies truly are just that. Sounds like standard spy-fare, to be sure, but it is the sheer modernity of this tale and Steinhauer's crisp writing that brings it home. In light of the past 8 years of the Bush administration, it somehow doesn't seem that far-fetched to think that there is a mid-level puppetmaster somewhere in the layers of government, working toward their own skewed agenda.

This is by no means Steinhauer's finest work - Milo is a bit stilted as a leading man and some of the finer plot points seem to be a bit of a stretch at times. (The man atop the international terrorist watch list is, of course, a former CIA operative gone horribly rogue. And the old "Trusted friend turns traitor, other trusted friend manipulates protagonist, who realizes his mistake and clears first friend's name while he turns on the other friend" storyline. Didn't see that one coming.) Are these issues and cliches simply genre issues? Maybe so - perhaps these are unavoidable, even in a well-crafted book such as this, simply because that's the name of the game if you plan on writing a spy novel. But overall, this all works as a fine, modern espionage novel with enough literary machinations to keep even the most jaded reader entertained.

And if the book sales lag, there's always George Clooney to pick up the slack - he has already aquired the film rights to The Tourist.

We are the ones we've been waiting for...

"This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can."

Tony Hillerman

Edgar Award-winning author Tony Hillerman died this past week at the venerable age of 83. Hillerman wrote seventeen novels featuring the Navajo detectives Leaphorn & Chee, brought an awareness to modern Native American culture and society, and won every major accolade that there is for mystery writing, but I've always loved him for his fantastic author photo. Just cinch that belt around your waist - we don't use belt loops out here on the reservation.

25th Hour

Why has it taken me this long to read The 25th Hour by David Benioff? It is flat-out brilliant - I am reading it now as if my hair is on fire. It has a breakneck pace that has me quickly alternating between needing to weep with this guy's friends and family over his impending prison term and wanting to smack his stupid face for letting them all down. Lawdy, what a book!

Also, the new Ken Bruen arrived in bookstores this week: Once Were Cops. Go get it from your neighborhood independent NOW!

National Book Awards

Last week, hot on the heels of the Man Booker Prize announcement, the National Book Foundation announced their nominees for the 2008 National Book Awards. (Since I really only read fiction, for the purposes of this rant, I will only refer to the fiction portion of these awards. Thank you.) The NBA's are given annually for literary excellence by US citizens for books published in the States within that particular calendar year. The NBA judging panel - comprised of five authors working in that genre - selects 5 finalists culled from the ranks of what has been submitted over the past year. Would this year's panel be able to bring us a list of worthy titles? Perhaps their names alone would foretell the quality of the finalists. The panel: Gail Godwin (chair) - never read her. Her books strike me somewhat as "ladies' fiction". Rebecca Goldstein - never heard of her. Elinor Lipman - more ladies' fiction. Not my thing, although moderately respectable. Reginald McKnight - never heard of him. Mr. Jess Walter - one of my all-time favorite authors and hopefully the man who will save this year's awards. Not sure if he has gotten over getting hosed in 2006, when he was a finalist for The Zero.

Here's what they came up with:
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
Telex From Cuba by Rachel Kushner
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
Home by Marilynne Robinson
The End by Salvatore Scibona

I was just going to complain about the list and how there are not any books worth reading on the list and how there is nothing that really appeals to me among them, and I started think about all the books I read in 2008 that didn't make the finals - pointless thoughts, really, from a man without any influence, outside the walls of the bookstore where I toil and within the meager pages of this blog. But as I looked over the list of books I have read in the past year, there actually were very few American novels that struck me as worthy of the National Book Award. I think that David Bajo's 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, while not widely read, is certainly brilliant enough to make the list here. Is Nam Le eligible for The Boat? I don't know, but he should be. Personally, I am shocked that David Benioff's City of Thieves is not a finalist - this is far and away the finest piece of fiction, American or otherwise, that I have read in the past year. It is really a tragedy that is not on the list at all. The only "consolation" for him is his winning the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Fiction last weekend. At least I was able to vote for him on that one. Sigh.

So I think I will complain about the quality of this list after all! Robinson can't win - she already has a Pulitzer within the last five years, so that just wouldn't be fair. But I have to think she's the favorite. Peter Mathiessen seems to be stretching the rules of the award a bit with his "new book" - a re-edit of his trilogy from the 90's (Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone). He has cut a significant portion from the books for the new edition, but it still seems like a stretch. He is a 3-time nominee now, with one win (The Snow Leopard, 1980 winner for General Nonfiction paperback) and while his body of work is extremely worthy, is it really fair to give him the award for best fiction of 2008 for 3 reworked novels from 1990-1999? You can see from my list of my read books on this site that I never finished The Lazarus Project - it still intrigues me, but there's something about his style that just keeps me out. Telex From Cuba received quite a bit of positive press when it first was published and I think it may be the darkhorse in this. It does sound compelling (and I still may end up giving it a shot), but I've stayed away from it because of the soccer moms and La Jolla elderly that have come looking for it. And I have never laid eyes on The End, nor have I ever heard of Salvatore Scibona (above). He and his novel may be very fine, but I can't really get on board with nominating a book I've never heard of for the best book in all the land.

I've said before that it is unfortunate that these award panels feel the need to pat themselves on the back every year and nominate books that they feel are worthy despite their lack of consumer demand or critical acclaim. Look at the sales history for NBA nominees & winners just from the 2000's - its a who's-who of publisher returns and remainder titles. It's this snobbish, backward thinking that has lead us to abominations like the Quill Awards - a useless, embarrassing series of awards that has the opposite effect by allowing the unread masses to overload the nomination boards with Nora Roberts titles. There needs to be more of a middle ground - how can you put Salvatore Scibona on the list and leave David Benioff off it? What are you trying to tell me, the well-read consumer, about the quality of titles available? The NBA Foundation should take a cue from the mess surrounding the Booker longlist this year - see my post on that from August - there was substantial fallout from the snobbery surrounding Jamie Byng and his whining over the commercialization of some nominees, but ultimately Booker got it right with Aravind Agiga - the best book in the bunch.

I'm not saying that the National Book Awards need to be fan-friendly or even critic friendly, but they should follow the buzz from the last year's worth of publications as a guide to how to select the best of the best. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle has gotten substantial buzz over the summer - mostly from Oprah, true, but it had a solid industry following before The O caught on. Yet it is surprisingly not on the list. City of Thieves. Ethan Canin's America America maybe. The five books that made the list are not buzz-worthy and therein lies the rub - I want to want to read the books nominated as the five best novels published in America for the year. These five don't wow me and send me out to buy all five. They are unfamiliar and feel pretentious and elitist - the woman in Omaha who happened to read Edgar Sawtelle for her bookclub is going to feel ostracized by an award foundation that picks 5 books that may not even be available in her local bookstore. What message is this sending to our diminishing reading public? "You're too stupid to even understand how we select these titles, so just shut up and buy the ones with the gold stickers on the cover."

Billy Collins at D.G. Wills

Former US Poet Laureate (or "lariat", depending on who you ask) Billy Collins, was at D.G. Wills in La Jolla on Sunday the 16th for a reading from his newest collection, Ballistics. I am not much of a poetry reader, as I'm sure many have noticed, but I do read Billy Collins. Hearing him read his work aloud though, something else entirely. His performance far outpaced anything I could have expected - his perfect, dry, deadpan delivery made every line that had seemed innocent and blunt, take on a sharper, wittier edge that I had never picked up on in reading them myself. Later in the evening, I was one of a lucky, honored few who had dinner and drinks with the esteemed Mr. Collins - really one of those once in a lifetime sort of things. For those of us who remember the bulk of the evening, of course....

I will leave you with his title poem from the new collection - taken unceremoniously without permission from the pages of the book:

When I came across the high-speed photograph
of a bullet that had just pierced a book - the pages exploding with the velocity -

I forgot all about the marvels of photography
and began to wonder which book
the photographer had selected for the shot.

Many novels sprang to mind
including those of Raymond Chandler
where an extra bullet would hardly be noticed.

Nonfiction offered too many choices -
a history of Scottish lighthouses,
a biography of Joan of Arc and so forth.

Or it could be an anthology of medieval literature,
the bullet having just beheaded Sir Gawain
and scattered the band of assorted pilgrims.

But later, as I was drifting off to sleep,
I realized that the executed book
was a recent collection of poems written

by someone of whom I was not fond
and that the bullet must have passed through
his writing with little resistance

at twenty-eight hundred feet per second,
through the poems about his childhood
and the ones about the dreary state of the world,

and then through the author's photograph,
through the beard, the round glasses,
and that special poet's hat he loves to wear.

-excerpted from Ballistics by Billy Collins, available at fine independent bookstores everywhere.

Eastern Europe

For those that know me and have been asking for photos from my Eastern European trip, here they are - they can be viewed in full at picasaweb.google.com/smarko199. When you're there, I would suggest clicking on an album (they are actually in reverse order, so start with Prague. There is also an explanatory paragraph for each on the right side once you're in the album) and viewing it as a fullscreen slideshow. You might want to either extend the time for each photo or just us your arrow keys to flip through, so you can read the captions. Just some suggestions from a perfectionist. Below is a taste - in order: Prague, Czech Republic; Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic; Dubrovnik, Croatia; Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina; Ston, Croatia; Split, Croatia; Hvar, Croatia; Budapest, Hungary. Enjoy!

Adiga Wins The Booker!

Awesome breaking news on this Tuesday: 34-year old author, Aravind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his masterful debut novel, The White Tiger.

Visit the venerable Man Booker Prize site for more - and you can read my humble review from back in August, right here. That's right, you heard it here first...finger on the pulse an' all that.

Crumley

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." - from The Right Madness.

In my previous post, I mentioned the death of author David Foster Wallace - an author I can respect, but not one whose work I have ever read - while I neglected to mention the loss of a hardboiled crime-noir icon, in Mr. James Crumley. Crumley died in Missoula, Montana at age 68 from complications from kidney & pulmonary diseases on September 17. He was the creator of one of my all-time favorite flawed, lowlife private detectives, C.W. Sughrue. These were my thoughts after finishing what may prove to be Crumley's final novel, The Right Madness:

Man, “madness” is right. This makes other “hard-boiled” detective novels look like The Secret Life of Bees. C.W. Sughrue is the lowest of the lowlifes – a violent, cynical man who drinks & fights to terrifying excess while working as a private investigator in Montana & points north. He finds himself wrapped up in a long-reaching conspiracy with his best friend at its center that threatens to tear his fragile, hard-earned sanity down around him. All the while his past hovers above & behind him like a swarm of insects on a hot day, following the stink.

Crumley wrote just three books featuring Sughrue (one of which I have been unable to get my hands on), three others with Milo Milodragovitch, and one with both characters. Of his leading men, he once said "Milo's first impulse is to help you; Sughrue's is to shoot you in the foot." - of course, a perfect summary. I stumbled upon his books when The Right Madness arrived in 2005 - I don't think I had ever even heard of him before that - maybe vaguely. He never won any substantial accolades, his books weren't raved over in the New York Times, and they were never national bestsellers. Yet, he certainly left an impression on the genre - his books inluenced modern writers just as much as Chandler or Hammett and made me think, "What kind of crap was I reading before I found these?" Perhaps the acclaim he always deserved will fall on him posthumously. Who knows. I'm just sorry that he didn't write more - although that just makes the novels he did produce all the more special.


The Crumley Reading List:
One to Count Cadence (1969)
The Wrong Case (1975) Milo Milodragovitch series
The Last Good Kiss (1978) C.W. Sughrue series
Dancing Bear (1983) Milo series
Whores (1988) short stories
Muddy Fork and Other Things (1991) short fiction and essays
The Mexican Tree Duck (1993) Sughrue
Bordersnakes (1996) Sughrue and Milo
The Putt at the End of the World (2000)
The Final Country (2001) Milo series
The Right Madness (2005) Sughrue series

Marko Returns

I'm back.

In the midst of economic disasters, vacations in Eastern Europe, and the prospect of participating in the most important Presidential election in history, I missed a few things in the world of words that I'd like to throw out on the table - just some topics that have arisen in the last few weeks that are worth mentioning:

- News of the worst kind: author David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 14. (I was out of the country then & didn't hear until I returned at the end of the month.) I'd be the first to admit that I have never read one of his books (Infinite Jest is incomprehensible jibberjabber) but it makes my heart glow to see these soccer moms coming out to pick up his titles. What is it about people that makes them go out and buy an author's books as soon as they die? "Hey lady, if you liked 'Pat the Bunny', you'll love 'Infinite Jest'!"

- The book "Jewel of Medina" by Sherry Jones is to be published by maverick publisher, Beaufort Books. Why is this significant, you ask? "Jewel", originally slated to be published by Ballantine (a Random House imprint) in August, is a fictional rendering of the life of A’ishe, the child bride of the prophet Muhhamed. Ballantine canned the printing when they realized that the author took some creative liberties with the character that was deemed to be potentially offensive to those of the Muslim faith. Beaufort, whom you may remember from such books as "If I Did It" by O.J. Simpson, decided that the book was worth salvaging and has brokered a deal with Jones to publish this fall. At the end of September, the home of Martin Rynja, publisher of the UK edition of the book, was damaged in an apparent terrorist attack. Eric Kampmann, president of Beaufort and creepy Bible-thumper, believes that it is his civic duty to publish "Jewel", as it has become a free-speech issue for him. "We can’t have groups telling us what we can and can’t publish,” he said. Stay tuned.

- Finally, an independent bookseller in a position to have people listen to them, has taken a stand against the things that are wrong in the industry. At the fall trade show for the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, outgoing president Carol Besse made a call to arms for indies to explicitly explain to their customers why it is bad for them to purchase books from Amazon.com and blasted publishers and their authors for offering chain-only selections. She called for a "grassroots effort to re-educate every author" when they visit independants and laid into publisher Chelsea Green for their Amazon-only release, Obama's Challenge in August and author Jonathan Alter for signing with Borders's State Street Press for his upcoming book. If I could only get people to read this blog, we'd really be onto something.

- Rumor had it that Tina Fey said she wanted a "literary" press to carry her upcoming "memoir". Then why did she choose Little, Brown? Ah, who cares, do the Palin impression again!

- If you live in San Diego - or the greater SoCal area, for that matter - don't miss Mr. Billy Collins appearing at D.G. Wills Books in La Jolla on October 19th at 5pm. Collins will be reading from and signing his new collection, Ballistics.


And, for those of you who actually know me personally, I am almost done uploading all my photos from my trip to Czech Republic, Croatia, and Hungary - I'll have the link on here just as soon as I am ready. Check back soon. (This one was taken off the coast of the Croatian island of Vis.)

Catapult Hiatus

For the millions of Junior Catapult Operators out there, I just wanted to let you know that my lovely lady and I are going on a much needed vacation in Eastern Europe for the next two weeks, so the 'Pult will be silent. Dry those tears - I shall return to regale you with tales of Prague, the Dalmation coast, Budapest, and beyond.

(Actually, when I get back, I'll most likely just write more jibberish about books, as usual. Thanks for visiting! Love, Seth)

Booker Shortlist Announced

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced today and the two books that I have rallied behind are still breathing. Oh yeah. Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. The former colony is up in yo face!

The shortlist is:
The White Tiger
Sea of Poppies
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Salman Rushie, survivor of fatwa, ex of Padma, six-time Booker nominee, and winner of the 1981 prize and reigning Booker of Bookers, surprisingly got the axe. As did fellow favorite Joseph O'Neill (Netherland) and controversial pick, Tom Robb Smith (Child 44). The inclusion of Smith to the longlist has been covered at length on the Book Catapult (as well as on more reputable sites and publications) but I think that it's missing of the cut here actually hurts the prize itself. I mentioned before that snobbery and complaining about including the "thriller" genre threatens to ostracize the average reader and is endangering the cultural significance of awards like the Booker. Two days after I wrote about the uproar over Child 44, I, and some of my fellow booksellers had the opportunity to address 75+ people at my bookstore for a book recommendation night for local book clubs. In my (riveting) portion of the talk, I discussed The White Tiger and Tim Winton's Breath, and mentioned their connections to the Booker. When I was met with relatively blank expressions, I asked "How many people know what the Booker Prize is?" Maybe 20 raised their hands. When I asked "How many of you have read Life of Pi?", they all raised their hands. "That won the Booker." "Ohhhhhhhh."

This is not their fault - the audience was filled with some very well-read people - their lack of awareness is simply due to the of the lack of mainstream titles to be included on the list each year and the snobbery invloved in the selection process. Hell, I don't even know anything about The Northern Clemency or The Clothes on Their Backs - they've yet to be released in the States. The Linda Grant book doesn't even have a US distributor yet. I know that the Booker is a British award, but Americans are heavies in the book buying world - how can people be expected to care about the prize if they can't get their hands on the books? Booker needs to lose the 'tude, give my man David Mitchell the Prize next time or they're going to lose all cultural relevance and be relegated to the remainder stacks. And none of us want that.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (Review)

I think my initial reaction to this book, upon reading the first 10 pages or so, was, "What the hell is this?" (or some f-bomb-laced variation thereof) The galley is a tough HOT fuscia in color, but the copy on the back read that it "combines antic humor (think Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut) with a stunning futuristic vision (a la A Clockwork Orange and 1984, with a little Mad Max thrown in)". Intriguing. And actually, the resulting book is pretty magnificent, I have to say. It's one of those novels that sticks in your craw and keeps surfacing back into your consciousness, interrupting your life with mimes, ninjas, and the end of the world as we know it.

Published in the UK in June to some substantial acclaim (see reviews in The Guardian and The Independent), The Gone-Away World is just now making it's way into American bookshops - although, not every one. Perhaps if people were aware that Nick Harkaway is the son of bestselling author, John le Carré, they would be further enticed? In order to be able to write a novel that was truly his own, Harkaway changed his name and does not openly publicize his heritage - it is not mentioned at all in the jacket copy. As a result, his work stands firmly on its own - a brilliant move actually, since this could not possibly be any less like a John le Carré spy novel. In illustrating the differences between his and his father's work, Harkaway said "There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carré novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few." That may give an indication of what we're dealing with here. Although, actually, you cannot imagine.

What would happen if our government was able to devise a weapon that would actually just make our enemies disappear? To literally cease to exist. This would seem to be a perfect form of warfare, right? No blood, no mess, no collateral damages. Not so much. In Harkaway's world, the damages left behind by making things "go away" are far, far worse than the initial threats. And when your enemies manage to devise a similar weapon for use against you, the world ends up with more substantial gaps in its very existence than anyone anticipated. When the earth is erased, it seems that our imaginations cross over into reality - creating monstrous figments come to life to fill in the gaps. All of our worst fears are physically realized: war is a physical presence, sweeping across the landscape like a black cloud; hideous, half-human creatures roam the landscape; images torn from our very nightmares confront their makers.

"Sometimes, the nightmares look like people."

Fortunately (or so one would initially think), the government figures out a way to keep the nightmare world at bay - or rather, Gonzo Lubitsch and his team of mercenary problem solvers figure it out. See, the bad things in the world are a result of the Stuff - residual fallout from the gone-away war machine. The Stuff sort of drifts across the landscape, wreaking havoc, making nightmares real. However, FOX ("the magic potion which kept the part of the world we still had roughly the same shape day by day") was discovered to have antidote properties to the Stuff, so the government built the Jorgamund Pipe - an earth-encircling pipeline filled with FOX which manages to create a safe perimeter of a livable zone. Still with me?

Of course, no government is to be trusted, least of all one which created a weapon of mass existential erasure, so there is an even larger, more sinister layer to all this, involving a good ol' fashioned vast government conspiracy. Which brings me to the biggest question: Who, exactly, is this unnamed narrator and what is his role in all of this? This is without a doubt the most intriguing storyline - and one which I cannot divulge any information regarding. Sorry, but I'd just be ruining it for you.

This is a crazy book, make no mistake. It is sci-fi, alternate reality, loopy stuff, but paired with very skilled writing and an amazingly rich cast of characters. After I finished this, I thought I was done with it - in the sense that a reader is usually able to move onto the next book, without feeling like they're leaving something unfinished behind. In her book The Thirteenth Tale, a novel I did not particularly care for, Diane Setterfeld posed this query to the reader: "Do you know that feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you." Hell yes. These characters were real, man. I could feel Gonzo Lubitsch and Ronnie Cheung and Humbert Pestle and Master Wu and Zaher Bey moving and breathing all around me, long after the book was closed and reshelved. In such a wacky, unpredictable, bizarre novel, Harkaway was able to wallop me in the face with such real people, that I was completely caught off guard, and in fact only realized their impact on me after I had wrapped things up. It is a very well-paced, well-crafted, surprisingly intricate and intelligent book that defies genre pigeon-holing and forces the reader to reexamine our own current reality and the state of the world. Are we so far off from this nonsense?

Despite all of that "reality of character" talk, the most incredible facet about this book is the fact that even on the pages within, you are never really sure who is actually a real person, and who is just a nightmare become real from the fallout of the Gone-Away War. Pretty cool.

Donkeys

This book arrived at my bookstore today. Yes, it was ordered on purpose. I just wanted to share. Perchance it was selected as a political statement? (donkey, democrats, you know.) One can only hope that that was the thinking behind it, but sadly, I think we thought our donkey section was lacking.

The Donkey Companion: Selecting, Training, Breeding, Enjoying & Caring for Donkeys by Sue Weaver ($24.95, Storey Books, a division of Workman Publishing)

Available at fine bookstores everywhere!

Butterflies

I meant to bring this up last week, since he is one of my favorites, but I suppose, better late than never - Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome, has a righteous new short piece in Granta 102, fresh to the shelves in your local independent bookshop. Even better, you can read Butterflies on a Wheel right here at Granta. Here's a taste that I particularly dug:

"This year, as the leaves of spring unfurl, it’s as if I can feel the energy pumping through the interior of my cells, mitochondria careering around, charged ions bouncing off membranes, everything arranging and rearranging, some ancient physiological dictate sending its psychotropic messengers galloping through my nervous system: sell the furniture, scrub out the refrigerator, call in sick."

Rose

My little sister turns 30 today. Happy birthday old lady.

Anyone for Irony? (a brief rant)

"Uh, I'm looking for this book, I can't really remember the title, but I think it had something to do with remembering words?" (the customer side of a conversation overheard in the Warwick's book department this afternoon)

How do people who speak in inane jibberjabber like this manage to maintain basic life function? How did this woman manage to get out of her home, drive her Mercedes the five blocks to Warwick's, get out with both high-heeled feet on the ground, walk into the bookstore, and form those words through her collagen-injected lips - without killing anyone, let alone realizing the utter inanity of what she was saying. There's no possible way she realized that what she was saying was laced with such ironic humor. Wouldn't a normal, self-respecting person have just stayed home, eaten a grilled cheese sandwich and Googled "word memory book"?

I realize that every bookseller has their own, very similar stories, but here are a couple of my all time favorites, omitting the several conversations with people trying to ask for the book, The Memory Bible, but who just can't seem to remember any part of the title - I've lost count of those stories.

"What was the title of the book you ordered?"
"Uhhh, something about Alzheimer's. I don't remember."

Seriously, you just said that? How can you expect me not to laugh? I mean no offense, but how am I to be expected to control myself?

Then there was the concerned mother who wanted to make absolutely sure that her 12-year old son would not stumble across any sexuality in Ender's Game - a sci-fi novel about a six-year old boy who fights space aliens. Granted, the alien creatures in the book are called "buggers", but I decided she didn't need to know that. This was a hard enough conversation to have without telling her how much time her son was already spending just thinking about sex, let alone having it with someone else. Poor bastard. When her total purchase was calculated at $69.69, five minutes later, I received no reaction from this irony-free, humorless, somehow sexless mother. Hilarious. But I didn't laugh.

PS: Just when I though I was done with this rambling rant, I stumbled on this great homeschooling website, where a book reviewing parent had this to say about Ender's Game:

"...the story is overflowing with profanities and horrific descriptions that include the torture and deaths of animals, as well as several of the book's characters. What parent really wants their child reading books that will certainly generate troubling images and thoughts? It's been several days since I finished reading Ender's Game and I still can't get it out of my head. Publishers and reviewers might say that makes the book great. I say it makes it dangerous. Ender's Game is not appropriate for children of any age."

Marko Approved, vol. 4

Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman is one of the funniest writers alive - if you have no idea who he is, you are a loser*. His typical gig is writing sharp, witty essays and observation pieces as a culture critic for Esquire, sometimes for the New York Times Magazine, Spin, The Believer, and the like. His story "The Amazing McNugget Diet" (available in the collection Chuck Klosterman IV) - a chronicle of his attempt to eat nothing but McDonald's Chicken McNuggets for a full week - very nearly made me soil myself. From laughter. Downtown Owl is his first foray into fiction - and a highly successful one at that.

Owl, North Dakota circa 1983 is a place where no one to really wants to live, but a place where no one can seem to think of a good enough reason to leave. Mitch is a high school kid who wants his football coach to die a horrible death. He hates rock music - or what passes for rock music in 1983, like ZZ Top - and fully admits that the Georgetown Hoyas basketball team are the only black people that he "knows". Julia is the newest resident of Owl - fresh from college, she moved there to take a teaching position at Owl High School. She's not really sure why she did that. She decides to spend her time hopping from bar to bar, getting trashed, and talking to Vance Druid - the mystery man of Owl. (Vance is a former high school football phenom who only listens to the Rolling Stones and reluctantly raises bison as a profession.) Horace has lived in Owl his entire life. In his later, widower years, he spends much of each day at the coffee shop listening to his circle of friends complain about the world at large. "The way young people talk these days, you'd think Christopher Columbus was the Caucasoid Pol Pot" - a response to which may be, "You know, they say Columbus was a rapist....I'd hate to think we didn't get our mail this morning in tribute to an Italian rapist."

What do these three people mean to you and me? They are the United States of Owl, North Dakota. Klosterman, using the perspectives of this amazing triple threat, gives us a story that is equal parts coming-of-age, quarterlife crisis, and one of coping with grief and the prospect growing older. Each is a wonderful human being who breathes and pulses within a different period of life, providing a darkly comedic, all encompasing view of white, middle American life in 1983. (You know you've been dying for a novel about white, middle Americans in 1983.) I was surprised by this book, actually - I wasn't sure what to expect from it, being familiar with his non-fiction, but Klosterman has managed to maintain the wit and social awareness that he's known for and have it translate into his novel. The result is a very compelling story about the lives of these three people - lives that never actually intersect, even in the ridiculously small town of Owl - who offer a complete view into this window of small town American life. A very, very funny and well-crafted book - and one that I hope will be the harbinger of good fiction from Chuck in years to come.


*Sorry, that was unprofessional and cruel. I have no idea if you are a loser, but your ignorance** of Chuck Klosterman should be no basis for loserdom.

**I mean "ignorance" in the nicest possible way, of course.

Obama Selects Biden

As I'm sure you are aware - since no one gets their breaking news from a book blog - Barack Obama selected Senator Joe Biden from Delaware as his running mate this morning. A complex choice & one that I'm not sure I'm completely on board with yet.

Biden fills in the foreign policy gap on Obama's resume fairly well, being well known in international circles as a diplomatic force - currently serving as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I like that he has been to Georgia in recent weeks, (the former SSR, not the Peach State) which should help deflect some of McCain's criticism of Obama, who was on vacation while Georgia was invaded by Russia. On the other hand, he's got a bit of a mouth and some of his comments about Obama - particularly during early campaign debates - are a little bit worrisome. Last year, he called Obama's preparedness for the presidency into question, claiming that "the presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training." Wasting no time at all, McCain has already prepared a negative television commercial using Biden's comments - but I don't know how much effect this will have on undecided voters.

David Brooks from the NY Times thinks that Biden's comments will be out weighed by his directness and intelligence, since "voters are smart enough to forgive the genuine flaws of genuine people." In today's political climate, where hate-mongers like Jerome Corsi can get the footholds that they do, this seems like an awfully naive assessment, especially coming from an experienced op-ed guy like Brooks. But I actually think that Biden's comments were harmless - spoken in the midst of a presidential run by Biden himself, of course he would call his opponents records and abilities into question.

Biden did vote for the war in Iraq - a decision he, like HRC & others, came to publicly regret. I can't really forgive that one, as it was one of my main sticking points with Clinton as well - how do we ultimately sift through the rubble left in the wake of that congressional decision? And he is more of a Washington insider than I would have liked - he's been a senator since 1972 - not exactly the "change" I'd been hoping for.

But all that said, I do like his directness - it's refreshing, actually, in this world of double-entendre politics. His assessment of Rudy Giuliani last year during a debate was particularly barbed: "There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11." And, even though he has been critical of Obama's lack of foreign policy experience, I like his experience in that area and I really think it helps Obama to fill that gap, as they say. I think he offers the correct amount of balance to the campaign - an experienced, vocal, (and yes, white) senator - to give the other side enough trouble in the coming weeks and to assuage the concerns of the undecided voter. I approve - now let's get this damn thing done.

Scarf-Ace

This week's Sign of the Apocalypse, or, this week's Biggest Waste of Paper and Ink Since David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish, or, this week's Sign That Scarface Still Sucks:

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the release of Scarface (1983), Harry N. Abrams, Inc is publishing this lovely $40 illustrated hardcover book - the definitive collection of Scarface detritus.

The Scarface Book - available at fine retail bookstores everywhere this fall!

Obama Favre Ticket Announced

Corsi-gate Update

Obama's campaign today issued a 41-page document entitled "Unfit For Publication" as a point-by-point rebuttal to Jerome Corsi's book The Obama Nation (see previous post). Unlike John Kerry's campaign, which sealed Kerry's fate by not responding quickly enough to the negative press generated by Corsi and his "Swift Boat book" in 2004, Obama's people have made short work of ripping Corsi to shreds. The report outlines every inaccuracy within Corsi's book and spends several pages pointing out all the racist, bigoted comments he has made, both within the book and in the world at large.

Some Corsi gems highlighted in the report:
- “Let’s see exactly why it isn’t the case that Islam is a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion? Where’s the proof to the contrary?” (Free Republic)

- Corsi believes that the Bush administration is attempting to create a North American Union by conjoining with with Mexico and Canada and that the traffic from NAFTA resulted in the Minnesota bridge collapse last year.

- He believes that there is no global oil shortage and questions the scientific validity of the actual creation of fossil fuels: “I’m at the point where the dinosaur theory seems silly. You take a pile of cats and you bury them, dig them up 10 years later and you don’t get oil.”

Gideeyup!

For more, check out The Huffington Post and BarackObama.com.

Eratta Non Gratta

I have made an egregious error. I have accidentally squashed the wrong anti-Barack Obama book, allowing another to slip through my fingers to emerge on the world's stage. (Please see "Hate Has No Place Here") Jerome R. Corsi's book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, has clawed its way out of the publishing pit from whence it came and dragged its pustuled, blubbery, hate-filled self onto the front page of the presumably left-leaning New York Times, thus into the collective consciousness of the nation. What happened to "All the News That's Fit to Print"?

First things first: The Book. Jerome Corsi was the mastermind behind Regnery Publishing's "Unfit For Command" (aka: the Swift Boat Book), that effectively derailed John Kerry's campaign in 2004 when coupled with extremely negative ad campaigning. Since then, Corsi has sued the parent company of Regnery over royalties ("They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers, causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community,” says Richard Miniter, co-plaintiff & fellow former-Regnery author) and crafted a new book with a new publisher (Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint, Threshold Editions) aimed at upsetting Barack Obama's campaign. Corsi's strategy tends to be one of filling a book with as much erroneous, libelous, inflammatory information as possible as to make sifting through and fact checking it all extremely time consuming. His hope seems to be that by the time his accounts have been debunked, the political damage has already been done - as was the case with John Kerry's campaign.

"The goal is to defeat Obama,” Mr. Corsi said in a telephone interview with the NY Times. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

So, as a result, most of Corsi's "arguments" seem to be pure speculation and truth-twisting, like his myopic focusing on Obama's college weed-smoking and coke-snorting. Corsi wonders whether Obama ever "really stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended to his law school days or beyond." When confronted with Obama's claim of not partaking in any extra-curricular drugs since apx. 1980, Corsi replied that "self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable.” (Wow, so we shouldn't take the current president at his word either, I guess, being a much bigger coke fiend than Barack ever was.) Other bullet points from Threshold's website include:

- Plenty more on the Rev. Wright affair, which is only news on FoxNews, these days - (Wright's) sermons have always been steeped in a rage...that Corsi shows has deep meaning for Obama.

- Obama's extensive connections with Islam and radical politics, from his father and step-father's Islamic backgrounds, to his Communist and socialist mentors in Hawaii and Chicago...

- Obama's naïve, anti-war, anti-nuclear foreign-policy, predicated on the reduction of the military, the eradication of nuclear weapons and an overconfidence in the power of his personality, as if belief in change alone could somehow transform international politics, achieve nuclear-weapons disarmament and withdrawal from Iraq without adverse consequences, for us, for the Iraqis or for Israel.

And my favorite: Meticulously researched and documented....

Yet, funny enough, in his own preface to "The Obama Nation", Corsi claims that his "fundamental opposition to Obama’s presidential candidacy involves public policy differences", not his pot smoking, his fake Islamic faith, or the color of his skin. In fact, most of that preface seems to be an attempt to document his positive efforts in the realm of racial politics as a way to deflect the obvious "racist cracker" label that will inevitably be slapped on him. Instead, he focuses more on Obama's supposed ties to the Muslim faith - while untrue, not actually a bad thing, being one of the three major religions of the world - offering proof in the form of Obama's middle name of "Hussein", the use of which has reportedly been suppressed by the fabled Left. So we're back to that one again. Great - so much for an informed, intellectual national debate.

As far as his well-calculated reasons for writing this, he says that his "preliminary decision to write this book was made in 2005", yet he later admits, that he "finalized the decision to write this book in March 2008." Four or five months to write after thinking it over for 3 years - plenty of time to prepare that "meticulous" research instead of just making shit up. Clearly this book was just a rush job attempt at a smear campaign - pretty sad.

As for the New York Times, I take issue with their placement and timing of this article, although not necessarily its writing. John Kerry made the fatal mistake in 2004 of ignoring Jerome Corsi and his Swift Boat friends for long enough for them to get a firm foothold in the national debate and raise enough questions about his war record for the truth to become irrelevant. I remember wondering, while all that was going on and crusty, old, white men from La Jolla were screaming at me every day, why Kerry didn't just step the fuck up and address the lies before things go out of hand. Obama certainly needs to address this, but it should be on his terms, not the New York Times' - a publication supposedly on his side. Front page placement of the cover of Corsi's book does not help the issue. The fact that someone read that article this morning and called Warwick's to have us hold him a copy, tells me that the message behind the article was lost on some folks. And the timing for bringing this up could not be any worse. While John McCain is warmongering over Georgia, Barack is on vacation in Hawaii - admittedly bad timing in its own right. The last thing he needs is a left-leaning newspaper giving free advertising to an issue that could potentially destroy his campaign for president and leave us all with four years of Bush-lite. In fact, I question the Times' motives completely - on the same section of their website, right below the article in question - is a post from The Caucus blog written by Patrick Healy. In this post, Healy writes about a fund-raising email sent out by Obama's campaign to supporters where a prominent financial supporter's name was misspelled. Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine, will be one of the guests at an event in New York next month - a $10,000 entry fee event - and in the email, not the actual invitations, her first name is spelled as "Ann". Woah, woah, woah - wait a minute! How did this scoop get relegated to The Caucus blog instead of the front page of the paper?! This is news, people!

I realize that a large swath of the country supports John McCain - and much of that swath may not be ready for a black man to be their president - but, frankly, I don't care what they want anymore. They've gotten what they wanted for the last eight years and we all need something to change - John McCain is not the man to herald this change. Interestingly enough, Jerome Corsi is not a McCain supporter - he is a Constitution Party member and plans on voting that way in November. For a bit of Corsi-perspective, part of the Constitution Party's mission statement expresses their desire to "restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations". I can see clearly now. Let's just not give this hate-mongering waste of paper any more traction than it already has.

Rock Bottom

I'm not sure how I missed the following sweet, golden nugget of information, considering how many times I have "googled" Stephen King's name for the purposes of mockery on this blog, but, in today's New York Times Magazine, in the course of a brief interview, respected author Amy Tan mentioned that she is in a band with several other authors, including Mr. Stephen King. The band, in existence since 1992, is called "The Rock Bottom Remainders" and its other members include: Mitch Albom, Dave Barry, Roy Blount, Jr., Greg Iles, Matt Groening (noooooo!), James McBride, Kathy Kamen Goldmark, Scott Turow, Ridley Pearson, and formerly Barbara Kingsolver. Holy shit, how did I miss this?

But it is for charity, so I can't mock this too hard - one of their "causes" is the ABFFE, which I wholeheartedly support. (See previous Catapult posts on censorship and Indiana.)

Ken Bruen Wins 2009 Booker Prize!

The 2008 Man Booker Prize longlist of 13 was announced on July 29, with some surprises, as usual. The biggest being the appearance on the list of Child 44 by Tom Robb Smith. Now, I enjoyed Child 44 for what it was, but I don't really think that it deserves a place among the best that the former Empire has to offer. Some snobbish book-types are up in arms over the inclusion of a "thriller" on the list, but the genre is not the issue I have, but rather that there are simply better overall books out there. As with any list made by other humans, there is always something put in that doesn't belong or something left out that should be there. This is why we like lists - so we have something to debate over and complain about. On the Prize's message boards, Jamie Byng, publisher of the snubbed Canongate Books, said, "...I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44, a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that...". This is going beyond mere complaint into the realm of straight-up whining. Mr. Byng is upset because his house's book, The Spare Room by Helen Garner, failed to make the cut, being that it is no Life of Pi, Canongate's lone Booker winner. His comments are bitter, sad, and oh-so snobby and pretentious. He later clarified that it was nothing against Child 44, it was just that he felt very strongly about The Spare Room and was disappointed. "One is entitled to care about a book if you are its publisher", he told theBookseller.com. Oh, poppycock. He's calling the judging panel out for picking a "thriller" because it's too mainstream - read: accessible or popular. This is behavior that ostracizes readers and is endangering the cultural significance of awards like the Booker. I, for one, think it's about time that crime fiction ditched the "Agatha Christie" softcore tag and was allowed to be recognized by the elitist literary scene. Do I think Child 44 is the book to bridge that gap? No, but it's the thought that counts.

I will admit that the Booker committees, especially of late, do not always get things completely right. For one, Tim Winton's Breath should most certainly be on this year's list - especially since he's been shortlisted before - usually a sure thing for all subsequent books, right Salman? And I'm still mad about the 2004 Prize which was awarded to Alan Hollinghurst's gay-Notting Hill-1980's Line of Beauty instead of David Mitchell's utterly brilliant, genre-smashing epic Cloud Atlas. Or 2003, when upstart D.B.C. Pierre beat out Monica Ali, Zoe Heller, and Margaret Atwood - which cost me a dollar bet. But, again, this is why we love lists so much - because We always think They are wrong. Here's the 2008 longlist:

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress - Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry
From A to X - John Berger
The Lost Dog - Michelle de Krester
Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs - Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
The Enchantress of Florence - Salman Rushdie
Child 44 - Tom Robb Smith
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz

Personal blog moment: Right now, I'm pulling for Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, which I am in the midst of as we speak (I also loved his The Hungry Tide from 2005) and The White Tiger, since I just read it, loved it and think that it smells a lot like "crime fiction" - a fact I don't think Jamie Byng is aware of. Maybe all the attention given to the genre-war going on with Tom Robb Smith will draw attention away from Adiga enough for him to slip in and steal the Prize. Viva India!

PS: Mr. Byng, if you are reading this, I am sorry. And, are you hiring?

Marko Approved - vol.3

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
A very funny, darkly compelling narrative of life among the lower classes in modern India. Balram Halwai considers himself the figurative “white tiger” – an anomaly that comes along only once a generation. He is the type of man who will buck the system, throw off the shackles of oppression, kill his boss, and seize his true entrepreneurial destiny. Tired of accepting his fate every time an election is fixed ("These are the three main diseases of this country (India), sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever”) or a rich man’s crime is pinned on him, Balram is determined to leave the Darkness behind and enter the Light - the world of wealth and prosperity just out of reach. He acts as our guide through a caste system world that most westerners don’t even know exists - and shows us the only way to break out of the confines of the Rooster Coop. An absolutely brilliant debut - and just announced as a long-list finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize.

Hate Has No Place Here

Pretty soon, everyone is going to know about this book - not because it is culturally, socially, or politically relevant to the national debate, but because the people at Regnery Publishing and every FoxNews "analyst" will be pushing it down all our throats. The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate by David Freddoso appears to be nothing but the pure, unadulterated hate-mongering garbage that is prototypical of Regnery. Here's a recap of their pathetic history as a publishing house, in case you've forgotten: In 2004, Regnery published the book Unfit For Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry and started the smear campaign that eventually derailed Kerry's anemic campaign for president. Following in the wake of attack television ads run by the anti-Kerry "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth", the demand for the book far outpaced the availability - an initial 85,000 copy print run - and booksellers took the brunt of the customers' ire. People screamed (quite literally) about bookstore "liberal bias" and vast left-wing conspiracies designed to quash the book's sales - since there was a 2 or 3 week period when no one could stock it, even if they wanted to. Frankly, it was horrible and now Regnery is trying to do it again - but now it's up to you, dear readers, to stay educated and decide for yourselves.

I read the publication of this book as sad desperation on the part of the right-wing propaganda machine, the wheels of which are clearly rusting off. The "unexamined agenda" of Barack Obama? May I suggest simply visiting barackobama.com, Mr. Freddoso? One of Freddoso's main points also appears to be "Obama's poor judgment of character and deceitful nature" reflected in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright affair. Really? We're still on that? Sad, sad desperation. Freddoso is a regular columnist on the National Review - a site featuring gems like the "Liberal Fascism" blog and incoherent reasoning like: "The two biggest factors at play (concerning the popularity of atheism) are money and radical Islam" (Thomas D. Williams). I find the whole thing offensive and pathetic.

Hand in hand with this book release is the McCain campaign's stepping up of their attack ads and limp-wristed mudslinging. Their current hit advertisement begs states that Obama is "the biggest celebrity in the world...but is he ready to lead?" Talk about sad - McCain is basically spinning Obama's overwhelming popularity with the American people as if it were a bad thing. If Obama is that popular, who is the ad directed at? If everyone likes him that much, what's the problem?

"All I can say is we’re proud of that commercial", said McCain at a town-hall meeting in Wisconsin. And, after Obama's response: "We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?", McCain's groupies called it the playing of the "race card" by Obama. Really? Guess what everybody? He is black. And race is an issue in this country, whether the inbred, pasty-white crackers in charge want to admit it or not.

But what really summed up the whole deal for me wasn't all of this political jibber jabber - it was when my mom told me she didn't trust McCain because he can't use a computer and he's "got too much melanoma on his face". Now that's mudslinging - and it's good enough for me.

Just for fun, here are some other current Regnery titles (with handy bullet points from their website) to help you keep this all in perspective:

The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About - Because They Helped Cause Them ("Liberals are partly responsible for the resurgence of malaria in Africa because they banned the pesticide that used to have it under control" and "The Left’s campaign to replace oil with ethanol is largely responsible for the recent food shortages and skyrocketing prices at the grocery store.")

Ten Books That Screwed Up the World ("How Hobbes's Leviathan promotes the belief that we have a "right" to have and do whatever we want" and "How Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa promotes promiscuity and divorce.")

And Our Good Name: A Company's Fight to Defend Its Honor and Get the Truth Told About Abu Ghraib. (Written by the CEO of CACI, the government contractor involved in the brutalities at Abu Ghraib, it "details the allegations against CACI, the media’s distortion of CACI’s involvement, and the company’s successful fight to clear its name. Delving into controversial issues of government and media accountability, Dr. J. Phillip London reveals the untold story behind Abu Ghraib—the story that didn’t make national headlines.") Well it's about time.

Later

Finally, a reason for me to high-five Manny - watching his dust trail leaving the AL East. Bye, jerk.

Marko Approved - vol.2

Black Flies by Shannon Burke
This is about as raw as a novel gets. Not raw in it's crafting - which is outstanding and meticulous - but rather in it's atmospheric depictions and it's harrowing exposure of what happens to trauma experts when they're exposed to too much trauma. The plot is really just a year in the life of the big city paramedic...and the mental descent that that involves. Burke once worked as a paramedic above 125th street in Harlem (after leaving a similar existence in New Orleans) – it is this resume item that allows him to write this novel with such visceral, resonant reality. In fact, knowing this, it reads more like a memoir than some memoirs of recent publication - you know that Burke is not making this stuff up, and that is some scary shit. Watching Ollie’s 11-month descent from med school-bound rookie to world-weary, shattered battlefield medic is swift & shocking, but seeing him decide whether to pull himself up off the street is even more arresting and profound. A surprisingly moving novel about the people who save our lives every day & are too often overlooked.
This was also featured as the cover review of the New York Times Book Review for May 25. Check it out.

Marko Approved - vol.1

The King's Gold by Arturo Perez-Reverte
The fourth in Perez-Reverte's "Captain Alatriste" series of swashbuckling novels set in 1620's Spain. After returning from the war with the Dutch in Flanders (the subject of last year's The Sun Over Breda), Alatriste and his mercenary compatriots find themselves in Seville, short on doubloons & looking for work. The Spanish treasure fleet is due into port soon and el Capitan is covertly tasked by King Phillip IV to steal one of the gold-laden ships before corrupt officials can steal it first, effectively undermining the wealth and power of Crown. This is another of Perez-Reverte's "Spanish pulp fiction" adventures - if you're looking for highbrow literature that will change your life, get lost - this is nothing but a good time - albeit well-researched and oozing authenticity - filled with mustachio-twirling bad dudes ("Gualterio Malatesta", how's that for an evil moniker?), long lost colorful curses & oaths ("God's teeth!" or "a pox on't!"), and enough sword-fighting and backstabbing (both literally & figuratively) to keep even the most jaded...Errol Flynn? fan entertained. Well, you know who you are.

Here We Come

Luke Scott's 10th inning, 420-foot, Eutaw Street walk-off home run.

Christopher "The Third" Reich

I've been debating whether or not to post on this subject over the last couple of days simply because of the work-related ramifications that may occur - since I was not present at the "event" in question, everything I am reporting on is strictly due to "interviews" I've conducted. I've decided to not really go into specific details, so as not to damage the reputation of any of my colleagues - the reputation of the author at the center of this shitstorm, well, that I couldn't possibly care less about. (His name is Christopher Reich. Oops.) For the record, the opinions in this post are no way representative of the staff, management, or ownership of Warwick's Books - it is solely Seth Marko's opinion. That opinion being: author Christopher Reich is an asshole.

I have never met this man - my opinion is based entirely on his behavior surrounding his book signing in San Diego this past week. Again, I feel that to delve into specifics is somehow crossing a line, so I will make some general comments: it is a shame that there are prima donna authors out there - people who are actually lucky enough to have had their books published and read by millions of people (currently at #13 on Amazon.com) - who do not have the good sense to acknowledge the hard, grass roots work that goes into making an author a bestseller. Without small independent booksellers putting debut novels in the hands of readers, 4th tier authors (which is pretty generous, believe me) like Christopher Reich would be lost in the squirming mass of humanity that is the world of published fiction - and they would never end up on a fascist radio talk show like The Glenn Beck Program. (Seriously, here's the transcript - of special note: the impending, totally justifiable war with Iran that they both are looking forward to.) I am not, nor will I ever be, the bookseller that wastes a customer's time with crap-tastic genre fiction like Mr. Reich's books, but there are enough booksellers out there who have taken the time to embrace his work for what it is and direct consumers to it who in no way deserve to have f-bombs rained down on them at a book signing for not having "enough" copies of the author's new book on hand.

Here's the process for a book signing: a bookstore confirms that an author will be making an appearance at their store. The bookstore then reviews the sales of the author's previous titles and makes a decision, based upon the experience of the book buyers and on the author's previous sales history, on how many books to purchase in order to have enough for every customer attending the event. If a store only sold 2 copies of the author's last novel, then the amount purchased for the event is going to be on the conservative side - maybe 30 - so as not to get caught with 100 extra copies of the book needing to be returned. Returning copies is not a hardship, per se, but there is simply no need to have an excess looming over the author during an event attended by 6 people. It is generally for the protection of both the author and the store - there is nothing malicious or stupid about this process. As the author: throwing a hissy fit over the amount of books available (say, sixty) for your signing is not appropriate behavior. Calling the employees of a 112-year old bookstore "incompetent" (or some variation thereof) is also not appropriate. Use of the word "fuck" in mixed company - say, to bookstore employees prior to your book signing - is generally considered inappropriate. Nor is it appropriate to actually laugh at the store employees working overtime to deliver 75 extra copies from Costco to the signing so that you stop crying. Why is that funny? Assholes behave like this.

Again, I was not in attendance during all of this, but I felt it needed to be written about. Sorry about all the swearing, but it was meant to be in the spirit of the event. And one last hint for authors out on tour: if you decide to spend $2500 of your own money on throwing a catered champagne-toast party for your book's release at a independent bookstore, do not throw that figure in the face of the event coordinator if you are unhappy about sales at the event. As in, "I didn't spend $2500 to sell 75 fucking books." (Yes, the f-bomb was part of the real conversation.) I've met hundreds of humble, grateful authors who would give their front teeth to sell that many copies at a book signing. (Very, very few of them would throw themselves a catered ego-party at a bookstore either - seriously, what's up with that?) Maybe 60 copies was not enough for your event, as you invited all 100 of your friends, but criticism laced with curses is not the best approach to remedying the situation. All that does is get your cheeks into the Book Catapult.

Breath by Tim Winton

"I couldn't have put it into words as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared."

I'm not a surfer. Being born on Long Island Sound, we didn't really have anything surfable, so the sport never had a pull over me like it does with some - it looked like fun, but it was never anything I looked to as an aspiration. Now, living amongst the surf culture in Southern California, I still don't follow the idiosyncrasies of surfing society, but I have grown to appreciate it for what it is. The old school surf philosophy has a distinct appeal - the understanding of your surroundings, a respectful meditation helping to forge a visceral connection with the sea itself. Being towed out to the big breaks by jet-skis seems like another activity all together - and completely off the mark. Too competetive, too sport-like for what surfing really seems to be about. This brings me to Tim Winton's newest book, Breath, which manages to conjure up that mythological one-with-the-ocean imagery & pull it together into a beautifully written novel.

I hate to call this a "coming-of-age" tale, as that conjures images of unappealing tripe like A Separate Peace or Dead Poets Society - a more friendly tag for this would be a "remembrance of the formative years of youth" novel. Yeah, I just made that up. Told as said "remembrance of youth" by Bruce Pike, EMT and self-proclaimed "old man" living in Western Australia, it follows him as a teen, learning the complexities of friendship, love, lust, and surfing - not necessarily in that order. Bruce pairs up with the wild-child and pub rat, Ivan "Loonie" Loon at age 11 and the two become inseparable - spending hours holding their breath underwater in the local river, as Pike is banned from the sea by his worrisome parents. It doesn't take long for this game to wear thin and the two boys rebelliously make their way to the ocean where the surfing bug bites hard. And once they meet the mysterious hippie big-wave surfer, Sando, ("It's about you. You and the sea, you and the planet.") they learn that there is more to surfing than just riding waves and saying "stoked" (although, no one uses "stoked" in late-20th century Western Australia, thankfully).

"I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momemtum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light. I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie's smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated. And though I've lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living."

It's truly transportative at times - again, "Marko don't surf", but Winton's descriptions of life among the big waves made me fleetingly wish that I had the ability and the courage to get out there. Much of the novel is just that - Pike, Loonie, and Sando learning to live by surfing the unsurfable. And, yes, there is an element of "coming of age" for young Brucie Pike (wink, wink), if you know what I mean. But it is Winton's capturing of that magical, indefinable element to surfing and laying it all out there for you in erudite, brilliant prose that makes this worth the read. My only complaints are actually compositional - mainly in the "introduction" and "conclusion" sections. These are told from "elder Bruce's" perspective, rather than as first-person "child Bruce". They attempt to alternately set up the tale and wrap things up neatly in the end, neither of which are necessary and both of which serve only to distract and deflect from the story as a whole. They never should have made the final cut, as they are just too neat in conjunction with the rest. But don't let that scare you off, gentle reader - read it if you love surfing, but also read it if you have never stood on a board in your life - if you take that deep breath, I think the latter group will get more out of it.

Indiana Goes Back to the Drawing Board

Well, it took a few months, but it seems that sometimes, the American judicial system actually does the right thing. A few months back, I wrote about the passage of an Indiana law - H.B. 1042 (see "Booksellers or Smutsellers?") - that would have forced retailers to register with the state if they would be selling any materials deemed to be "sexually explicit". It was an absurdly vague law without any defining boundaries, resulting in the drawing of a huge net across anyone selling any books or magazines with remotely sexual imagery or passages and forcing them to register like a sex offender. Thankfully, federal Judge Sarah Evans Baker saw the light - she had this to say in striking down the law: “A romance novel sold at a drugstore, a magazine offering sex advice in a grocery store checkout line, an R-rated DVD sold by a video rental shop, a collection of old Playboy magazines sold by a widow at a garage sale - all incidents of unquestionably lawful, non-obscene, non-pornographic material being sold to adults - would appear to necessitate registration under the statute.”

Though I'm still shocked at the margin with which this phony law passed through the Indiana senate: 44-2. If you live there, you really need to vote those clowns out as soon as possible. These are the kinds of questionable voting records that need to be seriously scrutinized come election time - something I fear that the American public tends not to do as often as we should.

Don Winslow

A relatively pointless post here, but as it is my birthday and this is my blog, I'll do what I want!

Just wanted to give a shout out to my main man Don Winslow - San Diego author, former Rhode Island resident, and really, really nice guy - I have to say, my favorite author to host for book signings. He's here with myself (on the right) and Steven (aka: "Stevesie"), my fellow pod-bot at the Wick and a a righteous member of the alternately named softball team "The Greatest Hits", "The Rainbow Shakers", "The Fighting Dan-tastics", or "The Flying Dodos". None of which has to do with Don Winslow. I bet he can crush the ball though....

Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

Every time I read another Paul Auster novel now, I worry that I will miss the point again - he tends to either wow me with his labyrinthine narrative and descriptive prose (The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions, or Brooklyn Follies) or just leave me bewildered, let down, and bored (Oracle Night or Travels in the Scriptorium). It seems that every other book is great for me, while the ones in between just leave me flat. Thankfully, Man in the Dark comes in the wake of the baffling, disjointed Travels in the Scriptorium.

In his typical fashion, there are many layers to the narrative in Man in the Dark - retired book critic, August Brill, is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. Truly a house of suffering, Brill has recently lost his wife of forty years, while his daughter has gone through a messy divorce and the boyfriend of his granddaughter has been brutally murdered. Understandably suffering from insomnia, Brill keeps his mind alert while in his darkened bedroom by creating a fictional narrative in his head. In this story, Owen Brick finds himself transported to an alternate universe in which September 11th never happened, but where there is a civil war ripping the United States apart. Owen learns that there is a man in Vermont who is creating the civil war and all its scenarios inside his head - as a fictional narrative, without even realizing it. Owen is tasked with killing this man to end the war - a difficult mission for a pacifistic man lost in the fabric of time, to be sure, and one that brings the story around, full circle, back to Brill, the "man in the dark". In the hours before dawn, Brill abandons the narrative (when Owen's mission is irreconcilably derailed) and is joined in the dark by his grieving granddaughter. We learn that her boyfriend, who had been working as a truck driver for a contracting company, was kidnapped and brutally murdered in Iraq. Thus the narrative swings back again - to the subject of war - grounded in reality.

It is just that - a fictional meditation on the realities of war. And through the maze of narration, I got the sense that Auster's point is that no matter the circumstances, war is an unnecessary evil - an evil that need not be, yet does exist in very real fashion. Whether in a parallel universe where New York secedes from the Union due to the 2000 election (a pleasant fiction, in many ways) or in the midst of the madness that is the Iraq War, the pain caused by the actions of war are unparalleled and cannot be altered by any one man. Unless he be the creator...then which is the reality and which is the parallel universe in all this? There is some truth even to the science fiction storyline - a war created by a man disconnected from reality, with no real sense of the consequences of his actions. Could this be the root of the war we are currently enmeshed in? Some dude making it all up in his head? A stretch, I know, but a scenario worth toying with, at least for the purposes of good fiction.

It is good fiction, although I can't pretend to understand all the intricacies of the complex narrative. Auster certainly offers more than your average novelist - you are always engaged in deep thought, trying to parse out the layers of the novelistic onion before you. Maybe I don't actually "get" all of the elements to this story - novels about war and the current state of the world are always rife with innuendo and double meanings. But I am certain that it is an anti-war novel - I'm smart enough to recognize that. And for that, it is worth the read.

City of Thieves

Most books have lulls within their pages - brief sections, little dips and valleys, that may not be as strong as the rest, or for whatever reason, fail to keep the reader's attention from faltering. Even the greatest novels seem to sometimes have these lapses, and maybe it's all within the reader whether the book can hold their attention for the duration - as a reader, I don't really know. I do know this: not once during David Benioff's City of Thieves did my attention slip from its pages.

City of Thieves is a story about two Russian men - a man and a boy, actually - who, during the 1942 Siege of Leningrad, are thrown in prison one evening - for relatively innocuous "crimes" - to stew over their respective fates. Assuming that they are facing certain execution in the morning, they are shocked when they are inexplicably brought before the commanding colonel of Leningrad, who tells them that he will set them free - washing them completely of their anti-government transgressions - if they can bring to him one dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake. An absurd task, to be sure, in the face of the horrors of war - Leningrad is surrounded by Nazi forces and bombarded every night, most people have not eaten a real meal in over 6 months, not to mention that there is no way that the city still has items as luxurious as chicken eggs - but this colonel, who holds their fate in his hands, is only concerned with the cake for his well-fed daughter, thus the only choice for Lev and Kolya is to complete their task.

"The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening. German corpses fell from the sky; cannibals sold sausage links made from ground human in the Haymarket; apartment blocs collapsed to the ground; dogs became bombs; frozen soldiers became signposts; a partisan with half a face stood swaying in the snow, staring sad-eyed at his killers. I had no food in my belly, no fat on my bones, and no energy to reflect on this parade of atrocities. I just kept moving, hoping to find another half slice of bread for myself and a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter."

I think that what struck me the most about this story was the fact that Benioff was able to construct a very real, visceral storyline around a completely ridiculous centerpiece - the search for these eggs. This is a story about the folly, the absurdity, of war, yet at the same time, it is about the horrors of war and the atrocities of men, as well. There is great humor in the interplay between Lev and Kolya - they recognize the nature of their task for what it is: a search for eggs - but they realize that failure either means death by Nazi bullet, or, worse yet, at the hands of their own. Once out beyond the city walls, they realize that they are very much alone and the only thing keeping them alive is the certainty that they must complete their task.

The writing is very crisp - the fog from the breath of the characters steams off the page - and the dialogue flows from Benioff's pen as though he were transcribing conversations from 60 years ago verbatim. I tend to steer clear of World War II novels - and it was the strength of Benioff's previous book, "When the Nines Roll Over" that forced my hand - but this is more than just simple genre fiction. It is a story of human beings, the way our lives intersect, and how we affect each other in ways no one can predict. It's brilliant.

Indiana Jones is Dead

Let me preface this post with a little background information about myself. I was 6 years old when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981. My parents went to see it with some friends one evening and when they came back, my father came and sat on my bed and told me all about it. He was a pretty good storyteller, so I can still remember trying to picture the cool, collected Indiana Jones, whip in hand, searching for adventure in the Amazon rain forest with "two scuzzy-looking guys", as my dad described them. Before I fell asleep, he filled my head with the opening scenes: the golden idol, the poison darts, the giant rolling rock - I was butter in Indy's hands before I ever laid eyes on the film itself. When Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom arrived in 1984, I went to see it with my dad, and although I think he could see the faults in it (Kate Capshaw, for one), he knew that my 9 year-old eyes only saw another Indiana Jones adventure and I think that's how he came to see it as well. As awful as that film was, it still had that Indy feel to it - throw caution to the wind and just enjoy the ridiculous adventure. Over time, I saw Part 2 as just a blip - a slight error in the trilogy - easily overlooked when taking all three films as a whole.

1989 brought Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I was now 14 and per tradition, I went to see it with my dad - Indiana Jones films were the only ones we ever saw in the theater together. It was exactly what we had hoped for - no Kate Capshaw, lots of adventure, lots of evil Germans, Sallah and Marcus were in it, everyone rides off into the sunset to live another day. In hindsight, this should have been it for the series - what else needed to be done? I have always been able to imagine other adventures Indiana may have had in later years, but never in the most absurd of those imaginings did I think I would ever see Indiana Jones watching a flying saucer take off out of a Peruvian hillside.

In the intervening 19 years between the third film and this latest, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas, and Harrison Ford supposedly decided that they would only make a fourth film if everything were perfect - all three had to agree, completely, on the script, otherwise it would not be worth making. Interesting back story, considering the abomination they came up with. To be fair, I obviously had my hopes set fairly high for this - I was convinced that there was absolutely no way it would be possible for them to make a movie that was worse than Temple of Doom. And for a substantial part of this fourth film, it is better than that, I'll give it that much. Harrison Ford is great, of course, but this was never an issue. Even in Doom, he shone - he's Indiana Jones, Han Solo, a Bladerunner - there's no way he could not do this right. It's the rest of the cast, the script & dialogue, and the driving plot that just flat out suck.

I'll lay out the general plot for you, since I'm not worried about giving anything away - it's better to be prepared going in than to be as stupefied as I was. We meet Indiana and his new friend, Mac, in 1957 as they are brought to Area 51 in the Nevada desert by a group of Soviets. The Russians are looking for a particular item in a wooden crate hidden inside a massive warehouse - apparently, Jones has some knowledge about the item and the Russians want him to find it. Cate Blanchett - a fabulous actress in her own right - is horribly miscast in the role of the Russian leader and psychic-in-residence, Irina Spalko. Her accent falters constantly, her bob-haircut is ridiculous, and, more importantly, she fails to exude the evil that is required of Indy villains. Right away this smelled like trouble. Indy is betrayed by Mac, an exciting action/escape sequence takes place inside the warehouse - yes, the same warehouse from the end of Raiders - and the opening ends with Jones surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a 1950's lead-lined refrigerator. Oh yeah, by the way, the contents of the mysterious crate was a dead alien.

Back at his teaching position, Jones is promptly fired due to the FBI's interest in his Russian connections. School dean Marcus Brody has died between films (Denholm Elliott died in 1992) and his replacement (played by Jim Broadbent) lacks that spark, that indefinable friendship element that existed between Jones and Marcus, so that you just don't care about him at all. And he calls Jones "Henry" - clearly not a friend. (Or is it that Jones has grown out of the "Indiana" moniker in the last 20 years? A sad prospect, to be sure.) Jones then meets the aptly named Mutt Williams, played by the vacant, waste of space Shia LaBeouf, who asks for his help in rescuing an old professor friend. The friend has been kidnapped in a foreign country and has sent along a coded message that only Jones can decipher - thus sending Indiana on an adventure that will begin with his rescuing his friend, but will ultimately open his eyes to something much larger. So, exactly the same general plot as The Last Crusade. At least until the wheels fall off in the second act.

Indiana ends up in Peru, searching for the gravesite of a conquistador - sufficiently Jones-like - but when he discovers a magnetic, blue-crystal alien skull hidden with the conquistador's remains, I became adrift in my own sadness. The skull has magic powers and the one who returns it to its proper place - apparently a headless alien skeleton in El Dorado, the mythical City of Gold in Central America - will be the recipient of those powers. I thought that the El Dorado plot was one which could have been expanded upon to create a fantastic Indiana Jones-as-archaeologist plot, but alas, the stage was set for an alien invasion. My hopes turned to Karen Allen's return as Marion Ravenwood, but the spark there was gone as well. The chemistry between Indiana and Marion is noticeably absent, no matter how Ford tries to make it appear so, and Allen appears stilted and wooden in her return to the screen. Shia LaBeouf offers absolutely nothing to the plot development - except a really stupid scene with his monkey army (clearly Lucas's idea) - and the Russian villains are hapless, insufferable, and without a scrap of malice or evil. Indiana is again betrayed by Mac in later scenes, but one has to wonder why he is surprised - Indiana Jones would never have trusted this guy! Who the hell is he? We have no context for him, so of course no one in the audience trusted him to begin with. It's not as if Sallah suddenly betrayed Indiana's trust - that we can empathize with - but this guy? Let the aliens have him.

Ah, the aliens. All other problems aside, this was the real crux issue for me. Of all the historically interesting archaeological myths in the world, none were interesting enough to make into a film, so they went instead with an overblown X-Files episode instead? Indiana Jones doesn't need flying saucers and crystal alien skeletons to be exciting - all he needs is a lost artifact in some jungle temple and a whip. It just seemed so out of context for the character - a character that we are infinitely familiar with - that, yes, it came off as completely implausible. I know, the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail don't seem plausible either, but here's the difference: Indiana was initially just out for the treasure in those earlier films, but gradually came to recognize the intrinsic value of what he was searching for. In this, it seems that once Jones gets to Peru, he is just rolling along with the plot, never once wondering what it is he is seeking. He carries the crystal skull around like the plastic prop that it is, never being asked to believe in anything and as a result, I didn't believe it either.

Everything wraps up "nicely" by the end - the bad guys are vanquished, although in incredibly lame fashion: the thirteen crystal alien skeletons come to life and literally blow Cate Blanchett's mind - and Indiana - well, Henry - Jones settles down to a more professorial life with his lady on his arm. But the mystique of "Indiana Jones" is gone from this ending - no room is left for imagining his further adventures like I used to do. It's sad, really, seeing Jones smile, wave, and go off to become "Dr. Henry Jones, Associate Dean" - there's an unnecessary finality to it. And it's not that every previous scene in the film is awful, let me be clear - Ford is again excellent as Indiana, delivering most of his lines with gusto and humor. ("Put your hands down, you're embarrassing me.") It's just that there's a certain vacuousness to the story and the characters - even Jones, who'd be nothing without Ford - that make it feel bloated and glossy. Gone is that feeling of 1930's film serials that supposedly was the impetus to this franchise in the first place. The fun has been sucked out of it completely and all we are left with is the hollow shell that used to be Indiana Jones. My dad would have hated it.

Hey Buddy, Whatcha Readin' Now?

It's really hard to keep up with writing a blog while living everyday life, so there are stretches where I am absent from The Catapult while off reading somewhere. And while I am absent, I know that there are those of you out there who actually look to this site for book reviews or suggestions on what's good to read in the book world. So, I've lumped together the books I've read since my last posted reviews (which were Ken Bruen's Cross, reviewed here and Nam Le's The Boat, reviewed on Culture Lust) and gave my thoughts on each - whether good or bad. Also, please note that most of these have yet to published so you may have to wait a bit to read them.

A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz
Horwitz writes with a slightly more-acerbic-than-Bill-Bryson casual wit that I find very appealing. His earlier book, Blue Latitudes, chronicled his somewhat drunken sail around the world following the wake of Captain Cook and was interspersed with enough historical insights go well beyond typical armchair travel. The premise of this new book stems from Horowitz's discovery, in mid-life, that he knew virtually nothing of the century or more between 1492 and the first Thanksgiving in 1620. Embarrassed by this fact, since he had been a history major in college, he set out across the land on a modern journey of discovery, tracking the routes of the conquistadors. Like most of us who are big enough to admit it, he didn’t know anything going in, so his writing is very funny, reflects that he has nothing to lose by learning, and is filled with information that you’ve never admitted that you didn’t know. (available now)

Alive In Necropolis by Doug Dorst
This was a book that I had great hopes for - the reasoning behind which is now quite lost on me. The plot sounds intriguing enough: a rookie cop in Colma, CA (the city where all the dead of San Francisco are buried) struggles with his sanity in a town where the dead outnumber the living 10:1. The jacket copy lured me with, "...all the playful sensitivity of Haruki Murakami and the haunted atmosphere of Paul Auster...". If only Doug Dorst could write half as well as either of those men, then this would have been even slightly compelling. Apparently, the rookie cop, Mercer, is able to see the dead - that's right, see them walking around, causing mischief - and takes it upon himself to fight their crimes on the side. Interesting enough, except for the way these scenes are crafted together - every time Mercer engages in some late night brawl with a ghost, we hear about it secondhand in the form of a police report. If this is a supernatural cop novel, then take the training wheels off and let it fly! Dorst spends too much time trying to playfully figure out if Mercer is crazy or not, but he's just not a skilled enough writer, so by the time it's sorted out, no one cares anymore and we all want the book to be over. (on sale in July 2008)


The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri by David Bajo
Just a really unusual, dreamy, erudite book that was truly able to transport me elsewhere, out of the real world while I read it. I do hate to be cliche, but it's sort of a smarter, sexier version of Shadow of the Wind, I guess, with a more ethereal beauty to it than that. The gist: mathemetician Philip has carried on a love affair with Irma - a book restorer by trade, to be simple - for most of his life. Even through his two marriages, she has always been a part of his life, whether physically present or not, and she has managed to leave a relatively positive impression on everyone in Philip's life. When Irma mysteriously disappears one day, she leaves Philip all 351 books in her library and he uses his own mathematical formula for selecting the order in which to read them, to better understand where Irma may have gone. He soon finds that she has left him messages imbedded in the books - most notably a specially bound version of Don Quixote - that lead him along a certain path, either to finding her or not - this being left up to Philip. Like I said, it has a great ethereal quality to it - almost like having a novel-length dream - that just lets you drift off amongst it's pages. It has a certain mystery element to it, but, like it does with Philip, this becomes secondary to learning more about who Irma and Philip are, both together and apart. A magnificent book - and a debut novel as well. (on sale June 2008)


The Ivory Grin by Ross MacDonald
I won't really review this, I just felt that I needed to acknowledge that I had read it. MacDonald wrote 18 crime novels from the 1940's to the 70's, featuring private detective Lew Archer and I have always been intrigued by them. I just picked this one up at random - most have been recently reissued by Vintage Black Lizard and look pretty fab - and I thoroughly enjoyed the pulpy escape to the land of dames, booze, and cigarettes. Great if you've read Chandler, Hammett, and their ilk and are looking to revisit that style.

Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
The seventeenth Dave Robicheaux novel. If you've read this blog before, you know that Burke is one of my favorites and that I usually drop whatever I'm currently reading to devour these books as soon as they arrive. I have even somehow convinced my Simon & Schuster rep that I am worthy of receiving the raw manuscript to read - this is printed a few months before even the bound galleys are available. This book sends Dave and Clete back to the mountains of Montana - the site of Burke's third Robicheaux novel, the Edgar Award-winning Black Cherry Blues - to inadvertently deal with some of the unfinished business from 20 years ago. Not as strong as the Katrina novel he wrote last year (The Tin Roof Blowdown), but still a great chapter in Dave's life. I think that since Dave has aged through these books, gone through severe personal crises, and that we have seen important, vital characters come and go, there is always that fear built in to these stories that someone won't make it home from the violent confrontation that is inevitable. Burke somehow manages to keep even the seasoned fan guessing and concerned for the characters' fates. That's hard to do. (on sale July 2008)

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
This one got a lot of hype from our Random House rep - who's usually a very reliable source for quality lit - as well as from the rest of the publishing house. There was a heated bidding war for this and Doubleday ended up paying $1.25 million for just the US rights - a lot of money, especially for a debut novel. Sorry to say it wasn't really worth the effort, the time, or the cash. It's good, but certainly not worth all the hype, at least to me. The deal: while recovering in the burn ward after being horribly burned in a car wreck, our nameless narrator is visited by the mysterious Marianne Engel, a Stevie Nicks-like crazy woman who claims to have known him for 700 years. But Marianne essentially keeps his soul alive by telling him tales of their lives together in centuries past, which has the effect of teaching him how to love another human being. I actually liked the sections that filled in the past lives - they were mysterious, engaging, and well written - but I was lost in much of the modern sections, especially once Marianne's character began to show her weirdness and the narrator seemed to be on board with it. Maybe it just wasn't my bag, I don't know. (on sale August 2008)

Once Were Cops by Ken Bruen
It seems that every time Bruen is screwed out of winning that Edgar Award (he was recently nominated for Priest), he turns around and produces another gem that proves he is worthy of substantial accolades. This stand alone novel is fast, furious, dark, and unabashedly hilarious - standard fare from Bruen and the reasons I keep coming back. A fullblown sociopath & murderer, Galway cop Shea somehow manages to finagle a transfer to New York City - a better setting to ply his sadistic trade. He teams up with an NYC hardass cop named Kebar and the two try to clean up the town with Bronson-like menace. Excepting the fact that Shea is certifiably insane and filled with unrelenting murderous tendencies - which may hamper his policing abilities, in the strictest sense. Prepare to be blindsided - although you know that Shea will eventually do something really, really crazy, there's no way that you're prepared for his level of sadism - or his intelligence and ability to climb the corporate ladder. (on sale in September 2008)

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollack
No one of any value or morality lives in the fictional town of Knockemstiff, Ohio. This is the lesson I learned from these interconnected short pieces - sort of a redneck, inbred, hillbilly version of Winesburg, Ohio. It seems fitting, after reading these, that Chuck Palahniuk has a blurb on the cover, as these resonate as no more than childish vignettes about stupid people who revel in doing disgusting things. Like Chuck, they are well crafted and well written, but the subjects are so deplorable, so...gross, that it just feels juvenile after awhile. There's only so much incest and bad decisions one reader can take. (available now)

O-Dear!

Yeah, yeah, I know this is supposed to be a blog about books, but it's baseball season, man, and my Birds are doing better than even I had hoped. Here is their response to the "Manny-being-Manny"/"Yay! High-five!" catch by Manny Ramirez in today's 6-3 victory over the Sox: How to win a baseball game.
Please note: this one is posted especially for Catapult fans, Robin and Rebecca. In your faces.

The Arrival

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 11:30 am - apx. 35 1/2 hours late. The sight of which can make 1000 12-year old girls weep with excitement.

Robust Growth

Just a piece of information I found in today's Publishers Weekly Daily that is absolutely in no way related to the post directly previous to this one. Not at all.

Hachette USA Has Good Start
-- Publishers Weekly, 5/7/2008
First quarter revenue at Hachette Livre rose 0.5%, to 413.3 million euros ($636 million), with results hurt by the weak dollar. Excluding currency fluctuations, sales were ahead 2.4%. Hachette parent company Lagardere said Hachette Book Group USA had another strong quarter, led by sales of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series as well as sales of Stephenie Meyer titles. In the U.K., there was “robust growth” in adult and children’s fiction, although sales were down in France. Lagardere said the outlook for the entire publishing division in 2008 is “good.”

My Little, Brown Mess

I debated keeping my mouth shut on this one, since it is work related, but it was so ridiculous and so infuriating, that I wanted people to read about it. It's really just a rant and this may not be interesting for anyone else, but that's what the ol' interweb is for, isn't it? And just for the record, none of this is official company rhetoric - it's all from my humble observations.

At the bookstore where I am gainfully employed - let's call it "W" - we are hosting a book signing event later this month with the Young Adult novelist, Stephenie Meyer. For the uninitiated, Meyer is like the second coming of J.K. Rowling, only for teens & tweens. She has written several very successful books about teen vampires and other things I can't relate to and has just now published her first adult novel, called "The Host". It is for this book that W is hosting her, no pun intended. When we were notified by the publisher - let's call them "Publisher X" - that we would be able to host an event with Ms. Meyer, we were informed that we could only do so if we were able to provide a venue large enough to hold 1000 people - a taller order than one might think - and that we would be required to purchase 1000 copies of "The Host" to sell to the attendees. It wasn't so much that we needed 1000 books - we'd be happy to sell that many, any day of the week - it was the "required" part that rankled me. And, although this was a requirement, if we were unable to sell all 1000 books, Publisher X would not pay the freight costs of shipping the remainder back to their warehouse. (An unusual requirement for a book signing.) So, if the book bombed like "The Lovely Bones II", we were screwed. Admittedly, the chances of this thing tanking were pretty much slim to none, it was just the attitude of requiring our compliance that just stank. But, this is why I am not in charge, I suppose.

Time marched ever onward - Ms. Meyer announced her very limited-engagement book tour via her website and the phones started ringing off the hook at the W. This was great, as we appeared to be rapidly headed towards capacity for the event. We sold the book in advance as a ticket - the book wouldn't be available until May 6, after which, we told customers that they could pick up their books and tickets at the store. Everyone was happy. May 5th rolled around. Typically, when a major book release is impending, the publisher will ship orders out in advance, so that bookstores have the book to sell on the actual date that it is released to the public. Prior to scheduling our event with Ms. Meyer, W ordered 40 copies of "The Host", just for the store's general stock. These 40 arrived on May 5. The 1000 did not. Okay, not the end of the world. We just assumed that they would arrive on the morning of the 6th and that the initial 40 would get us through the morning until the others arrived. I mean, we had to buy them, right? There's no way they wouldn't get here on time, that's ridiculous.

May 6. No books in the morning deliveries. Our stock of 40 held out for a few hours, but dwindled to 15 or so as people came to get their tickets. Imagine that. I was sent on the first of two Costco runs to get as many more as I could from the unsuspecting wholesaler. I ended up cleaning them out of the 40 they had. Our required 1000 still hadn't shown up by 2:00. And here's where I started to get really pissed off. When a representative from W contacted our sales rep for Publisher X to ask where our books were, the answer was somewhat less than satisfactory. The rep claimed 1) to have no way of tracking the shipment, 2) that the person responsible for said tracking was out of the office until tomorrow morning, and 3) that the rep was leaving town tomorrow at 5:30am and couldn't really do anything about this. But instead, let's 4) talk about the affidavit W needs to sign regarding the release of another book we are having an event for in June. Say what? Wait, on second thought, yeah, let's sign that affidavit saying we won't sell the book before it's release date since there's clearly no way that that's even possible with all of your books existing in some FedEx limbo where everything is untrackable. Send the paperwork right over as soon as you get back from your trip.

Here's the heart of my complaint: if we are required to purchase one thousand copies of a book - this alone is an over $14,000 tab - in order to be lucky enough to have an event with the author, you, as the publisher and the Maker of Demands, damn well better make sure that those books show up on the day the book goes on sale. We had a little girl start to cry today because her book wasn't in. She paid for it in advance and we told her she could pick it up on May 6th, but due to the incompetence of everyone down the line at Publisher X, we couldn't deliver. And that just sucks.

As of the close of business on the 6th of May, we still had not heard whether the books were even en route, let alone when we should expect their arrival. And we were contemplating a third Costco trip, as we were out of books again. You rock, Publisher X!

Sugar Gum

On Earth Day last week, of all days, while jogging through Balboa Park here in San Diego, I noticed that my favorite tree in the whole world was absent. Earlier this month, the city cut down the magestic 120-foot Sugar Gum tree that has lived in front of the Old Globe Theater since 1935. A significant portion of its top was dead & threatening to fall to earth - too much of the tree to cut off with out killing the whole organism. Every time I had passed that portion of the park, I always made a point to stop at the tree's base to admire its soaring heights. Now what will I do?








"The whole world is, to me, very much 'alive' - all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can't look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life - the things going on - within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood."
-Ansel Adams, February 1941

It's Raining Porn in Oregon

What is happening in this country? Is the Meese Commision still active? Another state - this time, the normally forward-thinking, bookseller-friendly, progressive state of Oregon - has passed a law (H.B. 2843) that restricts the display and sale of "sexually explicit" materials, such as books and magazines, to minors under the age of 13. Similar to the Indiana law passed recently - although, not as blatently idiotic - it's not so much that such a law is on the books, as children should be protected from graphic pornography such as it is, but more about the vagaries of the law that are the issue. If a 12-year old walks into a bookstore and opens a sex education book that just so happens to have some images related to human sexuality in it, under the Oregon law, this can be construed as "furnishing sexually explicit material to a child" and the bookseller can be prosecuted - up to a year in prison and/or a $6250 fine. Michael Powell, owner of Powell's Books in Portland: "It says a 13-year-old can legally buy these books, but it's a crime to sell them to a 12-year-old. How do I card a 12-year-old?"

The good part of this - and the reason I was made aware of the law's existence - is that the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and six Oregon booksellers are challenging the constitutionality of the law in a lawsuit filed this past week. It seems that everyone involved understands the intentions of the Oregon legislature, but feels that, again, the vagaries of the law are the issue. Because a book may have a "sexually explicit" passage, should this deem it "illegal"? Under the phrasing of H.B 2843, yes, the whole work will be judged on such a single passage. It's just left too wide open - how many books have you read that have descriptions of sex in them? Should all of those books be illegal to sell to a 12-year old? Not that seventh graders need to be reading "Lady Chatterley's Lover", but it should not be illegal to face it out on a shelf where they may see it. Maybe we should just burn all the books that are questionable, lest they fall into the hands of babes.
I just hope that once this and the Indiana law are brought before the courts, we won't be seeing such half-assed state legislation for awhile.

Sure dummy, keep dreaming.

Some Stolen Fiction (& A Plug)

So I return. I don't have anything profound to lay out at the moment, I just wanted to share this piece I have stolen out of Nam Le's forthcoming short story collection entitled, The Boat (Knopf, May 2008). I have always been a swimmer - though now I don't hit the pool as often as I should. So, this excerpt from Le's story, Tehran Calling, just leapt out at me. My full review of Mr. Le's collection is now available for your reading pleasure over at KPBS's Culture Lust.

To think about it now, the closest she'd ever come to real happiness had been by herself: swimming at the local indoor pool before work. She liked the silence of new morning, the crisp smell of chlorine, the high stained windows that, during summer, filtered the light through like bottled honey. Sometimes, when she was first to arrive, the rectangle of unbroken water shone with the hardness and sheen of copper. She liked the companionship she shared with the other swimmers - all serious swimmers at that hour - the feeling of being alone, unrequired to commit any of the compromises required of human interaction, and yet a part of them; her mere presence the stamp of her belonging. Here she belonged. She liked standing on the blocks, goose-pimpled, second-guessing, and then the irretractable dive into cold water - the sheer switch of it against her skin - she was wet now, cold - her hair wet - and there was nothing to do but to swim herself warm. Lap after lap she would swim: pure sound and feeling; matching the rhythm of her strokes to the pace of her breathing, the ribbed circuit of air through her body. Conditioning herself into a kind of peace. Then, afterward - home.

Booksellers or Smutsellers?

The latest shockingly disgusting thing to happen in the wide world of books this month happened in the state of Indiana where the legislature put forth bill H.B. 1042 and Governor Mitch Daniels proudly signed it into law. Here's a sampling:

A person, firm, corporation, association, partnership, limited liability corporation, or other entity that intends to sell sexually explicit materials, products, or services shall register with the secretary of state the intent to sell sexually explicit materials, products, or services and provide a statement detailing the types of materials, products, or services that are intended to be sold.
After receiving a registration described (above), the secretary of state shall notify the local officials of the county in which an entity described (above) intends to sell sexually explicit materials, products, or services.... For purposes of this chapter, materials, products, or services are "sexually explicit materials, products, or services" if the materials, products or services are entirely without redeeming social value....

In other words, if you sell a book that has what the Indiana legislature considers to be without "redeeming social value", you have to register - ala a sex offender - with the State, which will run you a $250 bill. Then you go on a list. If you do not register and are caught peddling said explicit materials, you are subject to a Class B misdemeanor, which could leave you in prison for up to 180 days and out $1000. All for ostensibly selling someone The Story of O.

Thankfully, in response, Chris Finan of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) issued the following statement: "It is un-American to force booksellers to register with the government based on the kinds of books they carry. It is also unconstitutional, and we intend to do everything we can to challenge this violation of the First Amendment rights of Indiana booksellers and their customers."

I can't imagine that this will not make its way through the courts on various appeals - in what way does the State of Indiana see this law as a constitutional one? I could be wrong, but this would seem to pretty much directly violate a person's First Amendment rights. Our fear of pedophilia and pornography - while relatively understandable, but not really in the same ballpark with each other - are constantly spilling over into the realm of normalcy, in this case, to your friendly neighborhood bookstore. Is the next step forcing consumers to register if they have any state-determined "sexually explicit" material in their homes? And who's interest is all of this in, exactly? Who is Indiana trying to protect, the theoretical, always-wandering-towards-the-precipice "children"? The law even excludes "public or nonpublic schools" since the are not selling anything - so where does the line actually get drawn? Who are these legislators to determine what is or is not appropriate reading material? Since Indiana's definition of "sexually explicit material" is so incredibly broad and shortsighted, one can only assume that booksellers are included as purveyors of smut. One would hope that the intent here is not to censor works of literature, but I just can't confirm that. The reality is that it's just sad that this sort of bogus legislation is able to make its way through so many levels of government - it passed 82-12 in the House, 44-2 in the Senate before the governor signed it. 44-2? That's just ridiculous. Or is it fascism?

If, like myself, you are curious about how such a horrible miscarriage of legislation was passed into Indiana law, I suggest that you ask Governor Mitch Daniels himself - use this helpful "Ask Mitch" section of the Indiana State Government's website. The only way that things like this will stop happening in this country is if the people speak up. So speak up!

In-Your-Face Bookselling