Ned

I first met Ned Blitvich in the tiny town of Ston, Croatia in October 2008. (Seen here, Ned atop the 14th century wall fortifications in Ston.) Ned, who spent half his year in Croatia and half at home with his wife in Temecula, CA, passed away last week, rather unexpectedly. He was the father of one of our stateside friends & we were lucky enough to spend a day with him in his hometown in Croatia last fall. He was incredibly friendly, generous to a fault, quick with an Old World wit, and one of the kindest souls I've ever had the honor of coming across. We spent an afternoon hiking the walls of Ston, drinking his powerful homebrewed wine, and gorging ourselves on his homegrown figs, which remain the best I've ever tasted. When we were soaked in wine & cutting things close in catching our bus back to Dubrovnik that afternoon, Ned drove us at breakneck speed down his winding, seaside road to the "highway" where the bus would stop. "Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! You gonna jump out, okay?!", he said as he skidded to a stop in the roadside gravel. I jumped out, flagged the bus, & made it in time, all due to Ned's superior pickup truck-driving skills. Just one of those days in life that you will never forget, you know?

To say that he will simply be missed would be a grave understatement.

*To see more pictures of Ned and Ston, Croatia, check out my Picasa site. Thanks.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Maybe I'm not supposed to talk about this, maybe it's okay that I do - there were no firm instructions given for this sort of thing. Last month, after crying and whining to and ultimately threatening my Random House sales rep, I was kindly sent a manuscript copy of David Mitchell's forthcoming novel, due to be published in the States on June 29, 2010. I don't want to post a full-on review, filled with information that will ruin things for anyone interested, but I did finish reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet last night. Holy shit, what a book.

All I will say at this point is this:  it does not have the complex, head-exploding machinations of some of Mitchell's past work (Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas esp.) but it does prove that Mitchell has been no fluke - his burgeoning talent has hit full stride at this point and Autumns showcases his immense ability to write in any genre he chooses and blow your socks off in the process. It is set in 1799 on the manmade, Dutch trading post island of Dejima off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. Jacob de Zoet is a clerk for the Dutch East India Company assigned to Dejima who just wants to do an honest job, make a little money, and work his way back home to his future bride. If only life in a David Mitchell novel were that simple.

The Dutch survive as Japan's sole trading partner through an uneasy alliance based on the certainty of supplies from the outside world - what happens when something goes wrong on the supply chain? Jacob is faced with internal corruption and vicious political manuevering, the delicate balancing act of the Japanese partnership, a daunting language barrier, the mysterious banishment of the woman he loves, the hushed-up financial collapse of his employer, and an imminent attack by foreign invaders, all of which test the limits of his faith - a faith strictly forbidden in Japan on the cusp of the 19th century. There are multiple narrators throughout, as is Mitchell's wont, but it is structurally done in such a subtle way that you hardly notice - you are just swept along in the flow, wondering, as a foreigner like Jacob, how much of the lush, inner world of Japan you will be allowed to glimpse.

My god, if this book isn't the one that earns him that elusive Booker prize...

Insert hilarious play on a Cormac McCarthy book title here

"For our next item up for auction we offer this lovely, broken Olivetti typewriter from Knoxville, Tennessee..."

Cormac McCarthy's 50-year old typewriter broke recently, so he is auctioning it off for charity at Christie's auction house on Friday. This clunky, rusted behemoth was the birthplace for every, single thing he has written since 1958. House estimates place the value at $15,000 to $20,000, so I think that if all the readers of the Book Catapult chip in, you can get it for me for Christmas. Granted, since there are so few of you, you may have to chip in several thousand dollars... but think how happy you'd make me!

For more, Google "cormac typewriter", visit Christie's, or read the Huffington Post, LA Times,  New York Times or any of the countless other articles on the subject, which is, again, a broken typewriter.

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(12/8/09) Quick update:  Cormac's typewriter sold for $254,500.

The Top Whatever of Whenever by Whoever

Every year around this time "we" - bloggers, reviewers, booksellers, readers, librarians, people with nothing better to do - start to discuss the pros & cons, the pluses & minuses, the acknowledgments & the snubs of the vast array of Top 10, Best Books, or Notable lists that are published by all the newspapers, blogs, magazines, and people with nothing better to do, myself included. We all love a good list - better yet, we all love to hate a bad list. When we do not like a list, we shake our heads, complain bitterly, and often run home, snot-faced & crying, to formulate our own list. (I am, of course, diligently working on my 4th annual Seth's Notable List - coming later this week.)  As fodder for the list you may be tabulating in your own little head, here is a short list of some of the "best books of the year" (and some "decade") lists that have been announced to date:

• The New York Times notable list isn't half bad this time around, although it did omit Catapult favorites Reif Larsen and Ron Currie in favor of NYT contributors, Jonathan Lethem and Nicholson Baker. Ms. Kakutani's personal list is surprisingly quite nice, including The Lost City of Z and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Although Janet Maslin has tossed her own credibility out the window - at least with me - by choosing Stephen King's Under the Dome as one of the ten best books of the year....

• PW's review editor, Louisa Ermelino: "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male." The PW Top Ten.

• Check out this craaaaaaaazy list from the Huffington Post. "Look at me! My list is different! I read books that no one else does and am more esoteric and eccentric than you are!"

• The San Francisco Chronicle gets a few choice books onto their short little fiction list: Pynchon, Doctorow. Blows it a bit with all the omissions and the addition of the (in my opinion) unreadable Nicholson Baker novel.

• Back in September, litblog The Millions selected the Best Fiction of the Millenium, so far. Controversial #1, to say the least.

• The UK's Times' 100 Best Books of the Decade. Top 10 features DVC (#10), Suite Francaise (#5), Barry Obama (#3), Persepolis (#2), and Cormac (#1). Pure and utter madness.

What about you, buddy?  You got a favorite for 09?

The Story of O, Concluded?

I would be remiss, I suppose, if I did not acknowledge Oprah's announcement last week that in 2011 she will be ending her run as Talk Show Queen of the Universe. Well, at least ending it in it's current format on CBS - she is starting up her own cable channel, The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), where it is presumed by many that she will host a new version of a talk show. But where does this leave the Oprah Book Club, I ask?

As a voracious reader by night and an independent bookseller by day, I have long had a love/hate thing going on with Oprah and her book selections. (For a good time, read the debate sparked on the Catapult by the Cormac pick in '07)  I have voiced a teensy little bit of resentment over her ability to force the hand of the book world so mightilly - out of pure self-preservation, we have to purchase her selections in advance of her announcements without knowing what the book will be. How do you know you won't get saddled with 50 copies of something crappy that no one wants to read? A moot point, really, as every book she has ever picked has done well enough to justify the numbers purchased. Her current Club pick, Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan has had modest sales, at best, although infinitely better than it had prior to O's involvement. The bottom line is - and this is a little hard for me to admit - Oprah gets people to read books, even if the snobby bookseller that I am resents the selections she makes - at least people are buying and reading.

So where will the industry land after O removes herself from the discourse?

Part of my Op-resentment has always had to do with her ability to get people to listen to her, unconditionally, and read the books she suggests, without questioning taste, either hers or theirs. Deep down inside, this is what every bookseller hopes for, but never achieves - if I were Oprah, Cloud Atlas would be a number one bestseller. So I'm just bitter. But, I will miss her when she's gone - unless, of course, she continues her book club selections on her new network, in which case, I will continue to harbor my mild resentment.  But if not, who will step up to tell the people what to read??!  Hello?  Is this thing on?

Honestly, this couldn't have come at a worse time for the indie bookseller - I suppose that if Oprah announced that she had purchased a Kindle...that might be worse.  Indies are trying to stay relevant in a world where the local marketplace is dwindling rapidly and more & more of our consumable goods are purchased from warehouse stores who only operate in cyberspace. Sadly, in this new world economy and electronic culture, we booksellers need someone - an advocate of sorts - to tell the people to read more books. Books made with paper and glue, sweat and ink. Is the independent bookseller that advocate? On a small, local scale, I'd certainly like to think so, but nationally....?

So, I don't have any answers to offer up in this post, just a lamentation for the possible dissolving of the only book club that pays my bills and recognizes the value of a simple book recommendation.

I Am Dead, Therefore, Publish

There's been a bit of discussion at Warwick's this week concerning dead authors and their posthumous works - an intensive, full-staff round-table discussion piece is under way for the Warwick's blog - stimulated by this week's publication of Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. The debate is over whether it's moral or not to publish a posthumous work if the author left explicit instructions for all unfinished work to be destroyed upon their death, as was the case with Mr. Nabokov.

When Nabokov died in 1977, he instructed his family to destroy what he had written and left unfinished - which, as it turns out, included a series of 138 notecards (as was his drafting style) of notations and passages for Laura. His widow, Vera, could not bear to destroy what he had written, so she had it placed in a Swiss bank vault, where it sat until his son, Dimitri, decided in 2008 to try and publish. The resultant work is rough, at best, put together in fancy-Chip Kidd style by...Chip Kidd with reproductions of the notecards on each page, accompanied by typed text "translations" of V.N.'s handwriting. Nabokov had some sort of personal numbering system to the cards, but the true order is unknown, so Kidd made each card perforated, so that the reader can pop them out & rearrange them into any order they see fit. (Who would do this, in actuality, I don't know.) In their review back in July, PW noted that "It would be a mistake...for readers to come to this expecting anything resembling a novel."  As a whole, I think it's fairly unreadable, relatively incomprehensible, and, well, unfinished, which is the point, really. I can see why Nabokov never wanted this to see the light of day - he wasn't done writing it.

The argument can certainly be made for the literary & social benefit of the posthumous work of other authors. We would never have the three full-length novels, The Trial, The Castle, or Amerika by Franz Kafka if his literary executor, Max Brod, had not ignored the author's wishes:

"Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread."

Is this moral, even in light of the work that was ultimately produced? I'm not so sure, even though the world may be a better place with those novels in it, who am I to go against the author's wishes? Perhaps when an author reaches a certain elevation in literary society, their posthumous work is fair game, but this was definitely not the case with Kafka during his lifetime. Some other well-known posthumous pubs:

• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen was published posthumously, although the author did try to publish it during her life.
• I know some people who would be incomplete as human beings had Papa Hemingway's posthumous A Moveable Feast never been published - Ernest had completed a final draft upon his death, although his widow edited it extensively. A moral quandry, that.
• I happen to disagree with the postumous publication of several "lost" Philip K. Dick novels in the last few years, which I was always under the impression that he did not want published. Although I'm a fan, I have not read these late additions and it's my understanding that they should have remained "lost".
• There is an unfinished murder mystery by Graham Greene that has been serialized in Strand Magazine this year, although, I'm not sure how one publishes an unfinished murder mystery.... 
• The unfinished second novel by Ralph Ellison, previously published in 1999 in shorter form as Juneteenth, is being released in its full, original, chaotic 1200 pages and hits the shelves with a thud in January.
• A 40-year old, faded, yellowed, manuscript of a literary thriller by the late Donald Westlake is being published in April 2010.
• And David Foster Wallace's final novel, The Pale King, will be published late next year, although I'm not sure which of the many, many draft versions his executors decided to go with.

I guess an argument can be made either way, on a case-by-case basis, depending on each reader's opinions. Sort of like anything else with a book, whether you loved or hated the protagonist, despised the jacket art, or loved the dialogue - it's all a matter of personal opinion. But...

What really lit a fire under me, as Chief Catapult Operator, has nothing to do with anyone so esteemed as Nabokov, Kafka, or Ellison, but rather with the late Robert Jordan, author of the "Wheel of Time" fantasy series. Jordan died in 2007 before he was able to finish his double-digit volume series, but wrote enough of the 12th volume that his executors were able to cobble together a final novel - or spread it out over three, actually - with the help of a ghostwriter. While I think it's a little ridiculous that his "final" novel is actually three books, what really irritated me was this title page:

Yeah, that's right, it sure looks autographed, right? Psych! It's a fake, digitized signature that they put in every copy of the book - I assume to simulate some sort of authentication. My first, mildly curious reaction was, "How is this signed? He's been dead for two years." Now that's immoral.

Autumn Readings

My reading in the last couple of weeks has slowed to a crawl, at least by my normally frantic pace. In those weeks, I've moved across town, which always takes more out of you than when you cross state lines and travel thousands of miles, and I've tried to maintain the Warwick's Twitter feed, Facebook page, and blog as much as possible during my days, which is proving to be just as hard as keeping the Catapult up to date. (Luckily, we have multiple contributors, so I don't have to produce quite so much content.) I've also written a few short reviews for KPBS's Culture Lust blog on Thomas Pynchon, Ron Currie, Reif Larson, Jonathan Lethem, and Jess Walter (coming soon) - most of which I've mentioned here already, but, of course this is my blog afterall. I've also started a "program" of sorts at the store where I rap at folks over coffee, discussing what's new & awesome in the world of books, interspersed, of course, with my own recommendations. Anyhow, I'll mention here a couple of the books I've read lately, leaving out the ones that aren't to be published until 2010 - a hazard of the job, I'm afraid. You will have to wait for my thoughts on Ray Banks' No More Heroes (March 2010), The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo (March 2010), If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr (March 2010), and John Burdett's The Godfather of Kathmandu (January 10, 2010). (Spoiler: they're all pretty awesome.)

The Museum of Innocence - Orhan Pamuk
There's no denying Pamuk's incredible gift for language - regardless of whether it's translated from Turkish or not, I suppose. I really enjoyed the clever, intricate My Name is Red, which I read after he was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, although I haven't been able to devote myself to Snow, which feels a bit more impenetrable on the surface. Previous work aside, I was giving his new book my full attention for about 10 days when I became thoroughly bogged down by the narrator's obsessions and self-flagellation - too much for anyone with anything on their plate. In 1975 Istanbul, Kemal is engaged to Sibel - a status of near sacred importance in Turkish society, second only to the sanctity of female virginity and purity. When he meets his distant cousin, Füsun, he falls into a secret, passionate love affair with her, shattering all cultural mores and threatening both of their futures in their homeland. When she breaks the affair off - for obvious reasons, really - Kemal reaches a level of obsession that is almost unwatchable, certainly unreadable, at least for me. I think that if you find yourself not wanting to pick the book up when you have the chance to get a bit of reading in, maybe you should give it a break. So I did. I may go back to it, who knows.

Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer
Novelist Foer (Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) has spent the majority of his adult life as a vegetarian - partially as a selective omnivore - but when on the cusp of first-time fatherhood, he began to question where it is that our meat comes from and whether he should raise his child as strictly vegetarian in light of those facts. This book is the result of his pondering research. Let me be clear: I am an omnivore. I don't eat a lot of meat, but I do eat it. And I thoroughly enjoy what I eat. What bothered me about his argument against eating meat was just that - it felt like an argument for argument's sake, without offering any real world solutions for those of us who currently have meat in our diets. Factory farming is a serious problem in this country - one which the majority of us are blissfully unaware of - and there's no doubt that real reform is needed. However, I got the sense that Foer was covertly trying to convince the reader that meat is bad - forcing us to gaze upon the bloody, violent slaughterhouses and the shit-stained chicken coops - rather than accepting the fact that some human beings are omnivores, even carnivores, and offering some guidance. It's easy to report back on the terrible conditions on the factory farms of America (Fast Food Nation?) but another thing entirely to have the journalistic responsibility to offer at least a conclusion to your argument, if not a solution to the very problem you present. Not to rag on him further, since I genuinely like the guy, but it all felt very disjointed, bouncing from tuna farming (just barely) to cattle to chicken to pigs, interspersing transcripted monologues from industry insiders and PETA members - none of it ever felt fully formed or cohesive. There are flashes of genuinely interesting pieces of information (that definitely have gotten me to rethink where my food comes from) but ultimately it disappoints with it's lack of definitive solutions.

The Kingdom of Ohio - Matthew Flaming
Unlike the rest of the books I've mentioned here, Flaming's book is not yet released, but I don't feel like I'd be ruining anything for you by telling you about it, since, to be honest, you more than likely won't read it anyway. This had tremendous potential, at least in my opinion: set in turn-of-the-century Manhattan as the intricate subway tunnels were being built and featuring Nicola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and alternate reality time travelers from a lost kingdom in Ohio, but it never really came together and even the historically based characters felt flat and wooden. (I say, watch David Bowie's incredible performance as Tesla in The Prestige instead.) The ending - when the whole time-travel, alternate-reality-thing should have come together - really fizzled and never delivered the goods.

The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
I've written quite a bit on this already - I have a post on the Warwick's blog and an upcoming review on Culture Lust - but it's becoming abundantly clear that this is one of the best books I've read all year. Walter, the author of the Edgar-winning Citizen Vince and the National Book Award-nominated The Zero, is clever enough to have created a wildly comic novel with a moving, very real, very human story at it's center. The moral is: selling weed is never the way out, no matter how good of an idea it may seem like, since you were probably just high when you thought of it anyway.

The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet - Arturo Perez-Reverte
I know that I previously, mildly bashed the author and his website in an earlier posting, but that had nothing to do with how I feel about the man's writing. I truly think that this series gets stronger with each book – Perez-Revete abandons the weighty period dialogue (1620’s Spain) and poetry readings a bit in this 5th "Captain Alatriste" novel, making it much more readable, leaving more room for the idiosyncrasies of Alatriste’s personality to shine and for narrator Inigo Balboa to begin to come into his own. In this episode, Alatriste ends up mired in dangerous, shadowy conspiracies when his favor falls on an actress fancied by King Philip IV. Unlike the others, this doesn’t rely so heavily on the previous books – you can certainly read this as a stand-alone. Great escapist reading for history buffs & mystery readers alike.

Friday Jibber-Jabber

As I try to juggle writing this blog, the Warwick's blog, pieces for KPBS's Culture Lust blog with packing my house for a cross-town move and reading 3 books at once, like an idiot, (Foer's Eating Animals, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, & Orhan Pamuk's dense tome, The Museum of Innocence) today I thought I'd just link to my short plea for independent bookstores over at my work blog. Feel free.

Other stuff of note:

• Random House's desperate-looking use of a blurb by the late Robertson Davies on the jacket of John Irving's new book made me laugh. Living critics used phrases like "the most disappointing wipeout of Irving's career" (Ron Charles, Washington Post) and "clunkety-clunk-clunk" (Entertainment Weekly). Probably a wise choice to use the dead guy.
• Publishers Weekly announced their first ever Top Ten books of the year, snubbing every woman who wrote a book in 2009. The list does include The Lost City of Z, though!
• Penguin's much anticipated, beautifully done new set of hardcover classics hit the shelves this week - check it.
• The big box retailers - Amazon, Target, and Walmart - that are severely discounting several new titles in November have decided to limit the number of copies one can purchase. The reasoning? Word got out that indie booksellers were planning on using the stores as distributors, cleaning out their stock, since the discounts are going to be so steep. Foiled again!
• And it's the first Tuesday in November, so Al Gore has a new book - Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis - as does David Plouffe, campaign manager of Obama For America. I might read them both, actually. Just not this weekend.

Crazy King Philip

Has the esteemed Philip Roth, one of our most respected living American novelists, gone insane, at age 76?  In this interview (see below) with Tina Brown, lately of The Daily Beast, Roth plays harbinger of doom and announces the death of the printed word - coming to you in the next 25 years.

Roth predicts that the culture of the book will be relegated to the darkened caves in the society of the future, there being little place for the printed word in a world dominated by television screens and computer monitors. While I agree that the bound book is headed for a major change in readership, his ideology that most modern humans lack the concentration and focus to be able to read a novel, thus being the impetus for the impending doom, is somewhat absurd. Is the number of casual readers (those reading for "fun") in the world, per capita, so different now than at any other point in history? Can we really make a blanket statement like, "people just don't read anymore", when there are so many more of us out there than ever before?

There are readers among us (hello!) who take umbrage at being referred to, even hypothetically, as "cultish" for preferring the bound book, as opposed to viewing or reading books on a "screen". Or worse yet, he equates the potential numbers of bound book readers in the future to be similar to the numbers that today "read Latin poetry". The weird part about his prediction is that he doesn't think e-readers will have a positive effect on readership at all - as if it is already too late for humanity.

"The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen, and it can't compete with the computer screen. Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn't measure up." (excerpted from The Guardian, UK)

Despite all that, the craziest, most alienating thing uttered by Mr. Roth was this: "If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really."  As if to somehow highlight his "fact" that people lack the proper concentration for novel reading. (Note that Roth's last three books have all been novella-sized. Coincidence?) I read fairly fast, but I guarantee that in over 2 weeks, I will still be reading Orhan Pamuk's new book. Does anyone out there think that I lack the "concentration, focus, and devotion to the reading" necessary to be a reader? You see Mr. Roth, books written by Nobel Prize winners should be savored for longer than 2 weeks. Sorry.



Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

Grub Street

Grub Street, a Boston-area non-profit creative writing center, has an annual "From the Desk Of" postcard auction, where they mail 30 authors blank 5x7 postcards and give them free reign to do whatever they want to them. The resulting artwork is offered up for auction on their site - grubstreet.org. This year's amazing crop includes postcards by Alice Hoffman (her postcard is seen here), Lorrie Moore, Susan Orlean, Daniel Wallace, Stewart O'Nan, Amy Hempel, Matthew Pearl, Elizabeth Strout, and Mr. Ron Carlson. Check it out - the bidding prices are fairly modest, so don't be shy!

Jesus' Son: Not Really About Jesus

"Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine."

While trapped on an airplane travelling from Detroit to San Diego last week, I read Denis Johnson's short story collection, Jesus' Son, cover to cover. This came on the heels of James Welch's Winter in the Blood, which shares a bit of a thematic thread with Johnson's short pieces about alcoholic, drug-addled fools living amidst the stink of America's sweaty underbelly. (Sounds harsh, I know, but that's what they're about.) Welch's Native American characters are almost all alcoholics, to a one, yet Winter is by no means an alcoholic's tale, nor is it particulary about addiction or the ramifications of having such an addiction. Johnson's stories however, are definitely about addiction and excess, there's no doubt about it. And addiction sucks.

It seems that a lot of Johnson's research for these stories can be directly traced to his experiences in Berkeley, California in the early-70's, living homeless, poor, and in search of drugs & beer. (Check out his brilliant New Yorker piece "Homeless and High" from 2002)  The characters of JS are all pretty deplorable, fairly stupid, poor decision-making alcoholics and drug addicts, but Johnson's skill for dialogue and rendering of true human nature makes each rather outstanding. Here's a run down:

Car Crash While Hitchhiking:  Just a glimpse into the sad sort of life the narrator leads - he's in the back seat of a family's car, sleeping off some hashish and speed, when they get into a violent collision late at night on an anonymous highway. "I lay out in the grass off the exit ramp and woke in the middle of a puddle that had filled up around me."

Two Men:  Upon leaving a dance at the local VFW, the paranoid narrator (most likely the first appearence of the character/narrator known as "Fuckhead") and his two friends find a drunken man sleeping in the back seat of his beat up Volkswagon. The man indicates through hand motions that he cannot speak or hear, but needs a ride home. FH and his companions comply and drive the man to several addresses where he is denied entrance, before arriving at some sort of farmhouse where they ditch him. FH then becomes obsessed with chasing down a dealer who sold him some "weird stuff", which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion.

Out on Bail:  Heroin has no happy endings.  "He simply went under. He died. I am still alive."

Dundun:  "I went to the farmhouse where Dundun lived to get some pharmaceutical opium from him, but I was out of luck."  Fuckhead instead ends up driving Dundun and McInnes, who has been shot in the stomach by Dundun, around in his car until McInnes dies. "I'm glad he's dead. He's the one who started everybody calling me Fuckhead."

Work:  "All the really good times happened when Wayne was around." Our narrator wanders into a bar one morning & meets up with Wayne, who offers him some work. The work consists of breaking into an abandoned home (Wayne claims, "This is my house.") and stripping all the copper from the wiring inside. Just as they finish, they see a nude woman with long red hair parasailing above the river. Then, back to the bar and the "grace and generosity" of the bartender.

Emergency:  The best of the bunch, in my opinion. Fuckhead is working as an orderly in an emergency room when a man is admitted with a hunting knife "buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye". Georgie, another pill-popping orderly, calmly removes the knife while waiting for the surgical staff to arrive. FH and Georgie then leave on a "fear & loathing" sort of car ride, getting lost in the snow, accidentally killing rabbits, wandering in graveyards, picking up hitchhikers.

Dirty Wedding:  There's something unsettling about this story - in comparison with the others, which all have similar characters, I can't put my finger on what it is about this guy that so unnerves me. Written as sort of a reminisce about the time the heroin-addicted narrator dropped his pregnant girlfriend off at an abortion clinic and then left to ride the elevated trains all night, searching the darker corners of his city for more skag. "When I coughed I saw fireflies."

The Other Man:  The narrator meets a man on the Puget Sound ferry who is pretending to be from Poland. Then he meets a woman "drunker than (he) was". The end?  I don't get this one.

Happy Hour:  "During Happy Hour, when you pay for one drink, he gives you two. Happy Hour lasts two hours."

Steady Hands at Seattle General:  Perhaps the best example available of Johnson's amazing knack for hilarious, drug-addled dialogue. It's only 4 pages - just pick the book up in the bookstore and read this while you're standing in the aisle. I guarantee you'll buy the book when you finish.

Beverly Home:  "All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us."

After gaining notoriety for Jesus' Son in 1992 (see below) and fading back into the ether, Johnson roared back onto the national scene with his 2007 novel, Tree of Smoke, winner of the the National Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer, and a 2007 Notable Book on this prestigious site. Johnson's work is not for everyone - I would think that a lot of the soccer moms who bought Tree of Smoke probably never got real far - but this collection especially resonates with the grim reality of a life of addition and general seediness.  These are not people you want to know, but they are out there - and they're closer than you think.

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I just discovered, while Googling the title of this book, that some of these stories were incorporated into the 1999 film, Jesus' Son starring Billy Crudup as Fuckhead. Damn, behind the curve again! How did I miss that? Jack Black, Dennis Hopper, and Dennis Leary were in that too? Hell, even Denis Johnson himself has a cameo as Terrence Weber, seen here with a knife in his eyeball. Oh well, its not as if anyone gets their news from the Book Catapult. Is this thing on?

Some Thoughts on James Welch

I had a friend leave me a note with a copy of the book, Winter in the Blood by James Welch, that read, "Tell me what you think of this little book - it speaks a sad & honest language to me."  Well...

Welch's 1974 novel is a sad, lean, & powerful tale of a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, drinking, fighting, lusting, wandering, searching for the identity of both himself and his people, whether he's aware of that fact or not. There is an unblinking, unflinching honesty to the story that keeps its eye trained on the narrator and his life, in all it's bitter emptiness.  

I began to laugh, at first quietly, with neither bitterness nor humor. It was the laughter of one who understands a moment in his life, of one who has been let in on the secret through luck and circumstance.  "You...you're the one." I laughed, as the secret unfolded itself. "The only one...you, her hunter..." And the wave behind my eyeballs broke.

Yellow Calf still looked off toward the east as though the wind could wash the wrinkles from his face.

It is not a bleak tale, really, but rather one of stark truth - one which we fear to look upon, yet cannot break away from. It is one that lodges firmly in your reader-mind not for its tragedy, but for its simple, honest reality. It is not "about" the plight of Native America - the life the narrator leads is one reached by choice, not just circumstance of birth. He has chosen his life of drink and wanderlust - and it is his choice whether to leave that life behind or not. Never did I sense the soapbox being shuffled into view from off stage - in fact, it never even occurred to me until I had finished, how devoid of politics and worldly events this story really is. It is sad and tragic for it's simple facts - life, lust, death.

Yet, as with most tales, there is at least a glimmer of hope and redemption, ultimately. It's not as if the narrator comes full circle, embraces his roots, and comes to realize who he really is - the steps are small and uncertain, but steps they are. The final two scenes - the cow in the mud and the funeral - are particulary poignant in illuminating this man's path towards the next step in his life. He is not changed as we would hope, but changed he is - can it really be for the worse?

I was surprised at the power of this little book that I had never heard of and its powerful, honest portrayal of a man who is good and true, at his core, even if he himself has never noticed.

---

"To be loyal to the earth and to the dead who loved you, to found yourself in all that is most dear, to observe without judging and write from your own direct core, is not ever the fashion. But it is always the right thing to do. Truth wears well, and Winter in the Blood is a true book." -Louise Erdrich, from the introduction to James Welch's Winter in the Blood.

Seth Marko Wins 2010 Booker Prize!

I would just like to extend a thank you - and maybe apologize a little - to all the folks who visited The Book Catapult this week who were Google-searching for information on the 2009 Booker Prize. As you are no doubt aware by now, Ken Bruen is not actually the winner of the 2009 Booker Prize, despite the information I had provided in the title of my post from August 2008, "Ken Bruen Wins 2009 Booker Prize!"  This post was actually about the controversy surrounding the 2008 Booker longlist, which included a "thriller" genre entry, hence the facitious title to the post itself. Yes, a joke, but one which has catapulted, if you will, this blog to the top of Google searchs for "2009 Booker" or "Booker Prize 2009" or variations thereof. Even though you were mislead in visiting the Catapult, I sincerely hope that you enjoyed your stay. Your visits on this past Tuesday - the day of the actual 2009 Booker Prize announcement - made it the most heavily trafficked day in Book Catapult history. I don't know if I'm happy or depressed by this fact...

Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, is the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, just in case there are people out there still landing on this site looking for that information. You can read my piece on this subject, as well as my thoughts on the obscure selection for the Nobel Prize for Literature and the meaning of such awards, over on the Warwick's blog.

The $150,000 Orwell Novel

Justin Gawronski, the Michigan teenager who sued Amazon.com back in August when they removed his e-copy of 1984, along with all of his homework on the subject, from his Kindle, (see earlier posts here and here) has been awarded $150,000 in his lawsuit. After paying his legal fees, he plans on stupidly donating the rest to charity, but that's beside the point. Jeff Bezos is out 150 g's and has had a whole lot of bad PR.  Good times.

I guess it remains to be seen if Amazon has 1) learned anything from all of this - which I doubt, judging by the relatively piddling amount they've had to pay out or if they've 2) circled the wagons so that they can remotely access the Kindles without people noticing. I know I'm being dramatic when I talk about Big Brother and all that (although, the choice of book was absurdly perfect for that purpose) but I still think this whole deal is cause for genuine concern. Before his lawsuit, Gawronski said, "Amazon has just proven that when I buy a book on the Kindle, I don't really own it." That's what's scary here.  Me, I'm stickin' with paper books.

Homer & Langley - E.L. Doctorow

Maybe I shouldn't have researched the Collyer brothers prior to reading this novel. (By research, I mean wikipedia.) And I probably should have changed the channel when the A&E program, Hoarders came on. This may have skewed my perspective of the lives of the real people fictionalized by E.L. Doctorow in Homer & Langley.  As it is, their story is sad, sad, sad as they say.

Doctorow, long one of my favorites, has a certain penchant for history - whether the roaring-20's of Billy Bathgate or Sherman's March of the 1860's and so on - he draws an immaculate, vivid picture of the world in that time period and populates it - often with historical figures - with incredibly well-drawn, if unlikable characters. Homer and Langley Collyer are not necessarily the greatest guys or the most appealing people on earth (certainly not Langley) but their story is compulsively compelling if for nothing but it's train-wreck appeal. (Can't stop looking! So much garbage in the house!) The life they chose is one which is hard to comprehend for the average human: born into the New York upper crust of the turn of the 20th century, they chose to seal themselves off from the world amid the squalor of their townhouse, their quality of life steadily degrading with the passage of time.

Over a 50 year span, with virtually no prompting from the outside world, the brothers - crazed, WWI vet Langley and blind, innocent Homer - collected every manner of object, paper, or item that either of them deemed necessary. A full Model-T in the living room, multiple pianos for Homer to play, and oh my god, the newspapers - the literal foundation of their empire of squalor. Langley was convinced (most likely from his experience breathing mustard gas during the war) that news could be condensed down to a few basic, archetypal storylines. He believed that every human story repeated itself so much that one could print a newspaper for all time, so to speak, with articles that would pertain to any possible story that could ever happen, anywhere. This paper would need to be published just one time, ever, since the stories are so cyclical. To research every possible storyline, in order to print such a masterpiece of humanity, Langley needed to read and keep, in perpetuity, every single newspaper printed in New York City. The Collyer home was eventually stacked, quite literally, floor to ceiling with these papers - a fact that would lead to their eventual demise.

I think that Doctorow's telling of the Collyer story is a shockingly true account of the lives of the real men themselves. There may be some slight differences (Homer was paralyzed at the end of his life, but perhaps not deaf, for example) but the real story is so fantastical, so hard to comprehend, that there was hardly a need to fictionalize any of it, it seems. Doctorow skillfully brings these people back to life - not necessarily out of his own head this time, but more from the ashes of American folklore, which is where their incredible story has ended up residing. Homer exudes such a simple innocence throughout his brother's madness that you cannot help but sympathize with his plight - a plight only made liveable by the simple fact that he cannot see any of it.  Again though, this fact is ultimately the undoing of both men and their odd, symbiotic relationship. The final paragraph - without spoiling anything for you - is one of the most arresting I have ever read, anywhere. Even though I knew how the real story of the Collyers ended, Doctorow's prose stopped me dead in my tracks, mouth agape. These men were magestic fodder for the very newspapers they collected - a story so bizarre, that even Langley couldn't possibly have found room amongst his archetypal "newspaper for all time".

And now...

A couple of notes on a lazy Thursday evening as the sun sets over the Pacific....

I have a new piece on KPBS's Culture Lust blog. I briefly discuss the virtues of Pynchon, Reif Larsen, and Ron Currie, although, if you're reading the Catapult, you know my feelings on those gentlemen already. Regardless, I'm happy to be contributing to Angela's site again, even if it's only this one time - although, of course I'm hoping it's not.

The Millions, an awesome lit-blog with tons of great content, has been running a series on the Best Fiction of the Millenium So Far - number 1 will be announced Friday morning.(*Update: it's The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.*) The panel that put this thing together is like a who's who of hipster authors, critics, editors, and bookies, including the likes of Gary Shteyngart, Benjamin Kunkel, Elise Blackwell, Patrick Brown from Vroman's bookstore, David Ulin from the LA Times, Margot Livesey, Arthur Phillips, Joshua Ferris, and, oh yeah, Reif Larsen. There are some primo-quality books on the list, things I've been blabbing about for years - Fortress of Solitude at #17, Middlesex #16, The Road at a somewhat surprisingly low #6, 2666 in at #4, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas at #3. And the contributors' short review pieces are revealing, insightful, and compelling for just about each - check it out.

And to again plug the Warwick's blog - we are fully up and running now, with new posts by fellow Warwickians Heather (our resident paranormal fiction expert - someone has to be) and Scott Ehrig-Burgess, who wrote a brilliant bit on Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Nocturnes. I also have a piece on Margaret Atwood, Lethem, and Auster with a little more Coetzee-bashing. We're also on Twitter - warwicksbooks - and Facebook, if you're so inclined to have anything to do with that.

I'm also midway through Jess Walter's new novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets and it is absolutely, riotously hilarious. There were definitely flashes of very dark humor in Citizen Vince & even The Zero, but nothing like this. I had no idea the man had such a capacity for black humor. Stay tuned...

Coming Soon: Captain Alatriste in WWII

I was hesitant to mention this because of my genuine affection for this author and his books, but I just can't let this pass, simply because I would hope that an author of historical fiction would be concerned with actual historical accuracy. (That and because neither he nor any of his people responded to my friendly emails.) Now, I'm assuming that this is an error due to some sort of translation mistake made on the part of the U.S. publisher, but it's still fairly inexcusable. The profoundly egregious* error I refer to is taken from the jacket copy of the latest Captain Alatriste novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte entitled, The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet:

"In the cosmopolitan world of 17th century Madrid, with its posh theaters and gleaming palaces, Captain Alatriste and his protégé Inigo are fish out of water. But the King and court are keeping Alatriste on retainer — he has proved useful in the past. As a veteran with no other livelihood, Alatriste chooses to remain, even as his “employment” brings him uncomfortably close to old enemies. Inigo, now a young man and veteran of the Hundred Years War..."

If Inigo is truly a veteran of the Hundred Years War, then he is at least 170 years old and probably English, rather than Spanish.

History lesson with Seth:  The Hundred Years War was fought from 1337 to 1453 and was concerning dual claims to the vacant French throne, while the Eighty Years War was fought between Spain and Holland between 1568-1648 and was the setting for one of Perez-Reverte's previous books, The Sun Over Breda. These facts could have easily been checked by either the jacket copywriter or Senor Perez-Reverte quite easily on the magical internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_years_war and  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighty_years_war.

Like I said, I was ready to let this be chalked up to the English translation of the book, but I saw the same reference on http://www.perez-reverte.com/ and decided to call him out on it. The author's Spanish language site thankfully makes no reference to the Hundred Years War, but in this age of Google and high speed information, there is no excuse for historical inaccuarcies from an author of historical fiction. At least read your own website!  Maybe I'm mad because I already read this book and didn't notice the jacket error until someone else pointed it out to me.

God, did I really just post that? Has the Book Catapult jumped the shark?

*None of this is either profound, nor egregious.

Plugin' Zeitoun

Just a heads up and a plug for the brand-spankin' new Warwick's blog:  I have a new review over there on Dave Eggers' Zeitoun. Check it out, yo.

"Eggers writes with a simple, straight forward grace, skipping the looming soapbox completely and offering a concise chronicle of Zeitoun's experiences in all their horror and inhumanity. Dare I say, a heartbreaking work of...well, if not genius, then satisfying competency. As I read this book, I quite literally had to keep reminding myself that this story actually took place in the United States of America of the 21st-century and not war-torn Sierra Leone or some other awful place."

Othmer's E-structions

James P. Othmer, author of The Futurist (a novel I loved & picked as one of my "Notables" for waaaaay back in 2006. Please note: this was the fifth post on the Book Catapult, so don't expect great writing. Well, don't expect that ever, really, but especially in 2006) and the brand new Adland: Searching For the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet, has a brilliant, bitingly hilarious op-ed piece in the September 14 issue of Publisher's Weekly entitled E-Structions: Suggested Protocol For My E-Book Signing.

"A few e-signing Don'ts: because time is limited, we ask that you please Don't make small talk when it is your turn at the e-table. Don't ask about sales, the weight of the author, the incident with the reviewer in Yakima, the death of the independent bookstore, the death of print or of any person, place or industry that is dead or likely to soon die.

Making eye contact with the author, while impossible, is discouraged nonetheless. It is recommended during your allotted 11 seconds that you fix your eyes somewhere between the tops of your Crocs and the undone belt on your terry cloth robe."

Now that's funny. I can't tell you how glad I am to see an author publicly recognize one of the downsides to the electronic book format. To me, not being able to have my book signed would be one of the worst aspects of Kindle-ownership - an aspect that is never discussed as detrimental. I have to say, too often, authors talk the talk, but can't manage to walk the walk. Usually, this has to do with professing an undying love of the independent bookstore, then having links to amazon.com and Barnes & Noble on their websites because those sites pay them for the click-throughs.  While Mr. Othmer has links to the afore mentioned evil-empire bookstores, he also has a link to Indiebound, even though the link takes you to a dead page on Powells.com....  Well, that part didn't work out, but at least the e-book thing is dead on!

Anyway, I would like to thank - nay, applaud Mr. Othmer for being so openminded in an age where too many people download before they think.

Pennsylvania Libraries Are Open!

This afternoon - actually, within the last hour - Pennsylvania passed their budget bill, effectively saving thousands of jobs and keeping their public libraries open!  Yeeehaw!

See the Free Library blog for more.

Pennsylvania's Congress Sux

It has been brought to my attention, by fellow book blogger Corey Wilde over at The Drowning Machine, that every single one of the public libraries in Philadelphia are being shut down as of October 2.  Apparently, there is a legistative issue with the state budget - as in, they don't have one and can't agree on one - which will result in the closing down of all public libraries in the city due to lack of funds. If this isn't indicative of everything that's wrong in this country, I don't know what is.  How does this happen here, right now? It's inconceivable, really, yet a firm reality. Baghdad is burning, Alexandria's library is lost, Philadelphia can't read.

Of course, this goes far beyond mere books. According to the Free Library of Philadelphia blog, the libraries are "the largest provider of internet access in a city where 41% of homes lack web connection" and over 700 jobs will be lost with the closings. How can a legislator in Pennsylvania get up in the morning knowing these facts, knowing that their complete inaction is leading to the closing of these vital institutes of learning, bastions of knowledge, and safe havens for Philadelphia's youth? I honestly don't care what the issues in the legislature are that are keeping them from passing a budget - it's irrelevant in the face of such disraceful, deplorable action. To make this pill even more bitter is the $34 million in federal economic recovery funds that the city has already spent - Philly is eligible for a grand total of $1.042 billion in recovery. Yet here we are, considering a Philadelphia - the birthplace of American freedom - with NO LIBRARIES?!

Just in time for Banned Books Week September 26-October 3.

I don't know what else to say about this - it makes me sick to my stomach & I can't even think straight. I will admit that to equate this story to atrocities like the burning of the Baghdad National Library in 2003 or the destruction of the library of Alexandria is naive and foolish, but I will do it anyway. Any loss of potential knowledge and free access to literature is cause for tremendous alarm. I can't imagine my own childhood without the freedom to escape into the stacks of my local library. Can you?

I know that sometimes its a drag to read an article and have someone just direct you to someone else's article, but you really need to read this impassioned post by author Cory Doctorow - it is far more eloquent and passionate than anything I am capable of composing.

For more information on all of this, especially if you live in Pennsylvania, check out http://www.freelibrary.org/ and the Philadelphia Free Library Blog.

Ken Bruen Has Not Won the 2009 Booker

Lately I have been busy working as the website & "social media" guy at my bookstore - which means that now Warwick's is on Facebook, Twitter, and we have a blog - warwicksbooks.blogspot. As a result, I have to split some things I would normally cover on the Catapult and talk about them on my work blog - in a much nicer, less-profanity laced way. For example, the Booker Prize shortlist was announced this morning and, since I was at work, the only way I could write about it in the moment was on the store's blog (here's that post). But since this is something I like to talk about, I'll do it some more here. The list:

• A.S. Byatt - The Children's Book
• J.M. Coetzee - Summertime
• Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze
• Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
• Simon Mawer - The Glass Room
• Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger

I mentioned in my work post that I had just read J.M. Coetzee's Summertime (the third "fictionalized memoir" by Coetzee) and found it "pretentious and way too self-indulgent" (is this plagiarizing?) which was true, although I did kinda like it. Sort of. Coetzee, being a Nobel Prize laureate and a rare two-time Booker winner, has long been an author I have wanted to read, come perilously close to reading, but never have mustered up the will to actually do so. I think that when I complained in an earlier Catapult post about the fact that the Booker nominees are often unavailable to American readers upon the longlist announcement, I of course was destined to have one fall in my lap within days. So I made a point of reading the Coetzee when I got one in the mail and, like I said, I kind of liked it, although by the book's conclusion, I was ready to pistol-whip at least the fictional Coetzee, if not his reality-based creator. Summertime paints a portrait of the John Coetzee of 1970's South Africa as a feeble, spineless, unsuccessful loser and a terrible son, family member, and lover. Should I sympathize with this man with his many social faults or should I loathe him for being so weak?  It is a novel idea, if you will, to blur the lines between fact and fiction - never moreso than in our current skeptical market of memoir reading - but I wonder if he is not so heavy handed with the self-deprecation that the reader comes away liking him even less for admitting that he is a successful author but "look at how pathetic I used to be". Its a little difficult to come away liking someone after reading several hundred pages of his self-loathing but the final passage - concerning a potentially fatal illness of his father's - just made me over-the-top incensed at the character's inhumanity and general unlikeableness.

"...if he will not be a nurse, he must announce to his father: I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye. One or the other: there is no other way."

Douchebag.

Well, regardless, there is no denying Coetzee's talents - the mere fact that he made me hate his character with such loathing is testament to that fact. I share all this because Summertime is still the only one of the shortlisted titles that I have read as of yet. I won't be reading Waters' ghost story and I have never felt a desire to get in touch with my soft Byatt-side, but the Mantel's Wolf Hall intrigues me for more than just the general plotline. I find it interesting that Coetzee, as a multiple Booker winner, is not the front runner in the British Booker betting underworld at the moment. Hilary Mantel is the leader with 11/10 odds of winning the Prize, while Sarah Waters is in second with 7/2 odds. Coetzee is a respectable 3rd at 4/1 but I would have thought him to be a clear favorite. Fascinating.

Plagiarized Real Estate

Plagiarism:  (noun) 1. the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.
2. something used and represented in this manner. (definition provided by Dictionary.com, thank you.)

Earlier this week, a customer shopping in the bookstore claimed that my one paragraph recommendation for Nam Le's The Boat, was taken almost word for word from a New York Times review. I was not present to defend myself while the allegations were made and the customer - a prominent citizen of La Jolla and a lax sponsor of a stretch of Route 52 cleanup - has of yet neither returned subsequent inquiring phone calls from the staff nor returned to the store. Since this person is unwilling to take the time out of her busy schedule to elaborate on her damning claims, I will now libel the shit out of her on the internet. 

No. No, I won't.

I will use this forum, however, to state my case, as plagiarism is an accusation that I take extremely seriously.

My case:  Between the dates March 20-27, 2008 I read Nam Le's short story collection, The Boat. On April 17, 2008 I posted an excerpt from Mr. Le's story Tehran Calling on this website - fully citing the source (although I did mention the word "stolen") and provided a link to a full review I had written for the KPBS blog Culture Lust, entitled A Defense of the Short Story. (This link is, unfortunately no longer available on Culture Lust, but I've added an excerpt below.) 

"These are seven stories, each set in vastly differing locales – Colombia, Iowa, the South China Sea - that are thematically tied together in such a way that you almost miss it at first glance. Each appears unrelated to the others, yet the emotional toll of living life manages to breathe through on every page, creating that thematic bridge."

I subsequently edited that review down to a paragraph and posted it as a "staff recommendation" with the copies of the book in the bookstore. Mind you, this is over a year ago - my recommends card has been with those copies every, single day since then.

On May 13, 2008, chief book reviewer for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, published her glowing review of The Boat.  On May 14, 2008, the Times ran a "human interest" story on Nam Le by Patricia Cohen. On June 8, 2008, author and guest reviewer, Hari Kunzru, published his lukewarm New York Times review of The Boat.

On December 19, 2008, I named The Boat as one of the ten best books I had read for the year (a list I have posted annually on The Book Catapult) although, this was 23 days after the New York Times named it to their annual "Notable" list but 24 days after I picked the jacket as winner of The Book Catapult's Best Book Jacket for 2008. Perhaps this can be construed as "plagiarism", I don't know.

Subsequent to the publishing of both my KPBS piece and my reference on Seth's Notable List 2008, the author's website, namleonline.com posted links to both.

I think what bothers me the most about this is that The Boat is a book that I have staunchly endorsed from the moment I opened it 17 months ago. People don't just buy short story collections from debut authors without someone recommending it to them. When I read it, it was a debut that had had no critical acclaim as of yet, no major book reviews, no national advertising that I could see - it just struck me as a beautiful, original collection of stories from an unknown author and a book that I wanted to share with anyone who would listen. That's what I do - I talk to people about books. Anyone who has ever spoken to me or read a single word I have written, knows that what I say and write comes from a single source: the dark depths of Seth Marko's brain. Read some of Kakutani's review - does that sound like something I could pull off as my own? And Kunzru's review?  I like the guy, but could he be any more esoteric and snobbish? He didn't even like the book!

Part of me is flattered that this customer believes that my writing is New York Times worthy, but I have to let her know that I wrote it myself. "Thank you for your mis-informed, offhanded, accidental compliment, but....take a hike, lady."

The extent of my original "staff recommends" card was this:

A brilliant, beautifully written collection of short stories that are interconnected in very subtle thematic ways – so much so, that by the end, you feel that you’ve read a complete novel, rather than separate stories. A profoundly moving book about the human condition and the best book I’ve read so far this year. You can read my full review on KPBS’s Culture Lust blog. -Seth

I later edited it a bit so that the last line read something like "Also selected as a Notable Book for 2008 by the New York Times."  (When I get back to work on Tuesday, I'll re-edit this and post the full text.) This may have been my undoing, as this customer clearly took the NYT reference and ran with it.

I ask you to please peruse the links to the NYT reviews I have provided and compare their text to what I have posted here as my own writing. If you can find where I have plagiarized or have even remotely used similar language, please let me know and I will mail you a copy of The Boat, with a forged signature by Nam Le in it.

The Lo$t $ymbol

Waaaaay back in aught-three and aught-four, before bookstores were equipped with barcode scanners, I rang up so many copies of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code that I inadvertently memorized the 10-digit ISBN - 0385504209. This is a depressing thing to have happen to a reader of fine contemporary literature who already has a chip on his shoulder. DVC was poorly written at best, rife with cliches and forced cliffhangers at the end of every 4 page chapter ("He spun to the driver. 'Take me there at once!'") - so much so, that in March 2003, I decided to stop reading the advance reading copy while trapped on an airplane in favor of the Skymall magazine. That's pretty bad. Sometime in 2004 I returned to the book just to figure out what the big deal was - I finished it, but I'm still not sure.

"So what, Seth?", you ask. So I spent 2 bitter years as a bookseller resenting the fact that Dan Brown buttered my bread, rather than Jonathan Lethem or David Mitchell. For every 100 DVC's I sold, maybe one copy of Fortress of Solitude went out the door. I was amazed, actually, at the staying power of the hardcover edition - even after 2 years, people would wander into the bookshop, blinded by the lights and all the brightly colored books, and ask, "Do y'all have a book called, I think it's like, The Da Vinci Connection or The Da Vinci Cornrow?" Seriously? It's sold over 30 million copies worldwide - where have you been? The phenomenon of DVC helped me become the bitter, angry bookseller that I am today - the resentment I felt over having to sell over 1400 copies in my humble indie bookstore helped me focus my power into clearly and concisely recommending and reviewing the books I felt passionate about, in order to usurp the throne of Mr. Brown. 0385504209 made me the man I am today.

Which brings me to my point - and there is one somewhere inside this rant, I assure you. For those of you unaware (and I can forgive this, as the book is not yet released), Dan has finally finished his DVC followup, titled The Lost Symbol, and it hits the shelves on September 15. Everyone who sells new books - who takes it seriously as a business, at least - is excited about this new book, as it is potentially capable of breaking the majority of the industry out of the financial funk of 2009. We have had no Harry Potter or Stephenie Meyer this year - couple that with the good ol' recession and you have a pretty awful year so far. While a tiny part of me appreciates that Random House has slapped a $29.95 price tag on The Lost Symbol - that's a hefty sum to bring into a struggling indie - the other part recognizes that 30 bucks is a ridiculous amount of money to charge for a novel of such mass marketed appeal. Will Amazon and Borders be charging $29.95 for such an item? Hahahahahahahahaha!

Amazon: $16.17 ($9.99 for the Kindle)

Barnes & Noble: $17.97

Borders: $17.97

Walmart: $14.50

Hell, even (former indie, turned chain) Powell's is selling it at $20.96 - 30% off the list price. Why would anyone in their right mind buy this book for $30 if you can find it - quite easily - for the price of a trade paperback? If an independent store is expecting this book to help them out in the failing economy, how can anyone expect them to offer a deep discount? Sure, we'll throw promotions at you, offer $5 coupons and midnight release parties, but there is no way for non-discounters to effectively compete with the prices offered elsewhere. And the crazy thing is, I don't really blame the deep discounters and the chain bookstores this time.

My rhetorical question to the greedy publisher is: Why make the price so exorbitantly high in the first place? No one is buying the book from Random House for $29.95 - we all get at least 40-50% off; this where our profit margin lies. It's the same with the ebooks being offered at the same high list prices by the pubs, but sold by anyone selling them at at least 50% off. The publishers are effectively pricing themselves out of the market and systematically killing the little guy. There has been quite a bit whining and complaining from them lately about cutting back, switching to print-on-demand, consolidating imprints, yet, we still think $29.95 is a reasonable price to ask of the consumer for 528 pages of potential drivel. (That's like 18 cents a page or 70 cents a chapter.)

The refusal by the large publishers (Random House, Penguin, Harper, Hachette, etc) to either lower the price of a hardcover book or cut back on the number of titles printed in that format will eventually destroy their industry. Historically, the design of books hasn't changed a whole lot, so the pubs are locked onto the formatting that they've offered for the last 100 years or so - hence the pigheaded refusal to offer an invisible, paperless ebook at a reasonable price. My genius solution? Cut in half the number of books published in hardcover - this will save pubs and consumers alike millions of dollars - and publish them instead in trade paperback. A $13-20 price point is much easier to swallow, especially in the current fiscal climate. Keeping the prices high just forces small stores to sell high in order to cover their costs and actually make money. Walmart doesn't care that they lose money on The Lost Symbol - as long as they get people in the door, filling their carts with other crap, they make their cash back a thousandfold. The small bookshop down the street doesn't have that option as books are usually their primary product source. And for the love of God, lower the price of the ebooks! Why is a paperless book the same price as a bound one? Ridiculous. This is the kind of stupid, blind greed that's going to shut down every independent and bankrupt the major publishing houses.

Well, I said that I had a point here somewhere, but this was apparently just another crazed rant. Sorry about that. All I want is a little fairness in the marketplace - that's my point. I implore you, dear reader, if you have an independent bookstore somewhere within reasonable distance of your home, please visit them. Buy something. Or they will die. Thank you.

Oh My NOLA

It's strange - today I inexplicably found myself thinking about New Orleans and I decided to read some of Dave Eggers' new book, Zeitoun, which chronicles the experiences of the family Zeitoun in the weeks and months that followed The Storm. Then it dawned on me that today just happens to be the same day that, in 2005, Katrina first touched the city in the waning hours before midnight.... Jen & I were safe in our new Southern California home, but my sister and her husband were still living in the Quarter - they rode out the storm itself, but their tales of "the walking dead" that prowled the police-less, darkened streets in the days that followed have haunted me since.

In case you're interested, here's my really old post about my first visit back to New Orleans in 2007. I think this is my favorite Catapult post ever, actually.

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"...a poignant, haunting, ethereal story about New Orleans in peril. Eggers has bottled up the feeling of post-Katrina despair better than anyone else - a simple story with a lingering radiance." -Douglas Brinkley

And Timothy Egan, in his New York Times review, said, "50 years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun."

Edward M. Kennedy: 1932-2009

"For me this is a season of hope - new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few - new hope. And this is the cause of my life - new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American - north, south, east, west, young, old - will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege."

Sigh.

Why Obama Doesn't Have a Kindle

President Obama has clearly been reading the Book Catapult (at least, according to the LA Times) as he took Lush Life by Richard Price and The Way Home by George Pelecanos with him when he went off on vacation this week. Where else would he have heard about these wonderful books if not from me?

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In other book news:
Sony announced their next foray into the e-reader universe with the Sony Daily Edition, to be released in December. The touch-screen Daily Edition will use non-Amazon-friendly open ebook formats, including the EPUB ebook format (the standard recognized by the world's publishers), allowing countless retailers, including independent bookstores, to have the capability to provide their customers with non-Kindle ebooks. Independent bookstores with websites managed by the American Booksellers Association (ABA) - like Warwick's, Vroman's, & 100's of others - will have the ability to sell EPUB ebooks by September - or so we've been told. Sony also announced plans to allow indies to sell the Daily Edition itself by the holidays, gradually chewing away at the legs under Jeff Bezos and his minions. Or so we hope.

"From the beginning, we have said that an open format means more choice for consumers," said Steve Haber, president of Sony's Digital Reading Business Division. "Now, working with other industry leaders, we can provide a device that is compatible with the widest selection of content available. Readers can shop around for what interests them rather than be locked into one store."

Now for the coolest part: the library finder service. This decidedly non-Amazon, non-commercial idea allows the user to access ebook collections at the library and download them for free. For free. Like a library. You can access your local library (provided they're linked in - over 9000 are, apparently - see overdrive.com for ones near you) download the licensing for the available ebook and keep it for 2-3 weeks. Yes, just like a library book. I don't think that this service will be coming to a Kindle near you any time soon.

Am I getting overly excited? Probably. But still, having other options in ebooks is really what I've been hoping for all this time. Being locked out of this aspect of the book industry has been immensely frustrating over the last six months and I'm relieved to see an option for the indie in sight. Not to mention the library option. I had a customer sheepishly tell me the other day that she had read a certain book, but that she had gotten it from her library. I laughed and told her that not only are libraries not a commercial threat to the life of the independent bookseller, but most of us embrace them as places filled with like-minded, book-loving people. This is a big difference from the big box chain retailers who also sell chicken and toilet paper or the internet-only retailer who looks at the book simply as a product line to be exploited. I'm amazed that Sony had the foresight to recognize that independent booksellers and libraries will be the way to compete with Amazon. Do I love the idea of a digitized book and it's heartless, cold, stainless steel ebook reader? Not at all, but at least it gets people reading and talking about books - which is all I can ask.

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

I have a mild confession to make: I have never even attempted to read a Thomas Pynchon novel before. His reputation for general incoherence and genitalia-aimed rocket launches never really piqued my interest. However, his latest, Inherent Vice, a smoke-filled, hippie-laden crime novel, is another story altogether. Although there is a fair amount of jibber-jabber, meandering plotlines, and countless, hilariously named characters, none stopped me from loving every single word of it.

Larry "Doc" Sportello is a pot-smoking hippie private investigator living in L.A.'s Gordita Beach circa 1970. When his "ex-old lady" Shasta shows up at his door asking for help finding her kidnapped boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann, Doc embarks on a bizarre, complex journey involving counterfeiting, drug-running, tax-dodging dentists (aka: "The Golden Fang"), blood-thirsty hitmen/loan sharks, swastika-tattooed Ethel Merman fans, revenge-filled, frozen-banana loving cops, zombie surfer bands, tripped out surf hippies, and undercover, reportedly-dead saxophone players. Populating this world with perfectly ridiculous names like Downstairs Eddie, Adrian Prussia, Bigfoot Bjornson, Puck Beaverton, Ensenada Slim, and Flaco the Bad (not to mention "Denis", misprounounced by everyone like "penis"), Pynchon has taken the crime novel, blown enough weed smoke in its mouth to kill a college sophmore, and created something wholly different, bizarre, and completely brilliant. As much as I hate to categorize (as that cheapens the whole deal), Vice is like an Electric Kool Aid Acid Test-ed Hunter S. Thompson novel about "The Dude" (Lebowski) with strong Phillip Marlowe tendencies.

The biggest injustice you could do to this novel would be to take it at all seriously. Or to try to follow along, word-for-word, with Doc's adventures. You're much better off just sparking up that joint (metaphorically, I think) and going along for the ride, because even Pynchon doesn't know where Doc is heading next, so the hell with it. Even though the plot is as gordian as knots get, it ends up not mattering one whit - this is just a day-in-the-life sort of thing and it's better to not question it. Let Pynchon guide you along - his is a remarkable talent for dialogue, character, hell, even Doc's space-out episodes are fascinating. (I found myself spacing out along with him, until another character snapped him back.) All I can tell you is that I loved every word I read - and I plan to read it all again. But I still don't want to read Gravity's Rainbow.

Not convinced by my rambling "review"? Check out the the promo video narrated by Pynchon himself:

More media & reviews:
-Be forewarned, this Pynchon wiki is not for the passive reader, but is "inherently" fascinating: http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/
-Another humorless review by the NYT's Michiko Kakutani.
-The LA Times take, The Guardian, Salon.com

2009 Booker Longlist

Alright, so I've been asleep for a week or so, dreaming up ways to destroy Jeff Bezos, so I missed the announcement of the 2009 Man Booker Prize Longlist:

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt (Oct.'09)
Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (Jan.'10)
The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (no date)
How To Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall (Sep.'09)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (available)
Me Cheeta by James Lever (available)
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Oct.'09)
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (no date)
Not Untrue & Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin (Apr.'10)
Heliopolis by James Scudamore (no date)
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin (available)
Love and Summer by William Trevor (Sep.'09)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (available)

Unlike last year's list, I have not read any of these, although Brooklyn by Colm Toibin is on my shelf, as he's well respected and several friends have had nice things to say about this latest. Some of my co-workers have liked the Sarah Waters, but as "the little stranger" appears to be a ghost, I'm going to have to pass. I'm glad to see that M.J. Hyland's This Is How was left off the list (here's my humble opinion of the first 168 pages) as it seemed destined for Booker infamy, not to mention that it was published by last year's grouchy crybaby, Jamie Byng. And I'm pretty sure that Me Cheeta has been shelved erroneously in New Hardback Biography for the last six months, with no one on staff (myself included) noticing the improbability of a chimp writing their own autobiography.

Again the relative snootiness of the Booker Prize is apparent in this list - most of the titles have not been published in the States yet, thus severely limiting the interest of the American reading public, most of whom are unaware of the Booker's significance. More annoying to me is the fact that I, as a fulltime bookseller, can't tell you anything about most of these books, as I have never seen them myself. I understand that this is really a British award for books published in the UK over the last year, but there's no denying the purchasing power of the American reading public, is there? I would love to read the Coetzee (sure to be the favorite), the O'Loughlin (thanks to Declan Burke for that), and maybe the William Trevor, but none have made it stateside as of yet. Compared with last year's list, with 8 or 9 recognizable titles on the longlist and a readily available winner in Aravind Adiga, 2009 seems to be decidedly un-friendly to the US reader, if you ask me. Now comes the scramble for the pubs to change the US release dates on all these books - once again, the publishing world has their heads buried deep in the sand. Can I get any of these for my Kindle?

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On a side note: hopefully this announcement and subsequent post on this site will steer some Google-ers towards the correct information, rather than to my most hit-upon post from last year, "Ken Bruen Wins 2009 Booker Prize!" That was a joke post title, folks, but thanks for clicking!

Big Bezos Is Watching

For anyone who has not seen this stuff yet (pretty much anyone reading this who is not an independent bookseller, I guess, as these are all the buzz lately), check out the hilarious Book vs Kindle videos that the folks at Green Apple Books in San Francisco have made: thegreenapplecore.blogspot.com My hands-down favorite is Round 3: Sharing.

In other Kindle news, that 17-year old kid who lost all his notes on 1984 when Jeff Bezos snuck into his Kindle under cover of night to take the ebook back, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon. Sweet! Michigan teen Justin Gawronski lost his homework when Amazon recalled their illegally sold ebooks of the Orwell novel and has decided to milk this thing for more than just a bit of week-long publicity. After filing, his attorney eloquently stated that "Amazon.com had no more right to hack into people’s Kindles than its customers have the right to hack into Amazon’s bank account to recover a mistaken overpayment." Fo-shizzle. It'll be fun to see how far this thing goes.

And it didn't take Oprah too long to weigh in (no pun intended) on the ebook issue: you can download a FREE ebook of Colum McCann's new novel, Let the Great World Spin, on oprah.com from 10:59am EST Monday 8/3 to 11am EST Wednesday 8/5. If you just want to read the book itself, you're on your own, loser.

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Some other small notes: Ron Carlson's The Signal, hyped repeatedly here on the Book Catapult, received a rave, albeit poorly written, review from the New York Times on Sunday. Check it out.

And, if you live in Southern Cal, come on by Warwick's on Wednesday, August 12 to meet the heady, relatively elusive National Book Award-winning author, William T. Vollmann in the flesh. Vollmann will be discussing and signing his new 1300-page book about life on the Cali-Mexico border, Imperial.

I've also recently read Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming Chronic City, Paul Auster's Invisible, and James Lee Burke's Rain Gods and I promise to let you know what I thought of them in the days ahead.

Cookies!

This week's sign of the impending apocalypse: this catalog copy for the upcoming Simon & Schuster title, The Christmas Cookie Club by Ann Pearlman:

"An irresistible and highly commercial debut novel about twelve women who meet on a snowy December night for a cookie exchange and the rich and complicated bonds of friendship that unite them."

I like that they admit to it's being "highly commercial", unlike all those other "indie house" cookie novels out there. Coming to a self-loathing bookstore near you on October 20th.

A Change of Review Briefs

(Or, "Now Some Brief Reviews")
And now, a few words on some of the books I've read recently:

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga
I now have no doubt that Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger was by no means a fluke - in fact, it just might be the tip of his talent iceberg, as this second book shows his emergence as a veritable literary force. These linked stories, set in the small Indian town of Kittur on the Arabian Sea, showcase Adiga’s considerable skill & the seemingly boundless population of fully formed characters at his fingertips. These tales read as if Kittur is the character itself, providing a broad-sweeping narrative on the intricate social caste system that is very much alive in modern India. A stunning, beautiful novel. (Really, "talent iceberg"? Sorry.)

Stone's Fall by Iain Pears
Pears, author of the brilliant, labyrinthine mystery, An Instance of the Fingerpost, returns with a similarly structured novel encompassing the life of wealthy turn-of-the-century industrialist, John Stone. When Stone dies under mysterious circumstances in 1909, a young reporter begins to dig into his life, not entirely sure what he is unearthing or who is pulling his strings. When the enigmatic Henry Cort directs him to pre-WWI spygames in Paris 1890 and Venetian industrial espionage in 1867, this incredible onion of a novel begins to gradually unfold. Who was John Stone, really? A challenging book, to be sure, clocking in at 800 pages, but ultimately a fascinating, meticulously researched, multi-layered masterpiece.

The City & the City by China Mieville
In a style similar to Philip K. Dick or Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music, Mieville expertly blurs genre lines in this science fiction crime novel of a bizarrely divided city. The city is one physical space, but partitioned by an otherworldly division – they merge & blend, but the residents always stay separate, avoiding eye contact, out of a collective fear of the spooky Breach, the overseers of this crazy sociological experiment. But what happens when a woman is murdered in one city, but her body is discovered in the other? There is not much negotiating with Breach, so the politics for Inspector Tyador Borlu are complicated, to say the least. A crazy cool novel.

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
A juicy, pulpy, complete departure for Johnson, the 2007 winner of the National Book Award (Tree of Smoke), that is still decidedly his style of writing, filled with his distinct brand of brilliant dialogue and skilled character development, even when none of them have any redeeming qualities. You can see that the completely asinine decisions being made by the main characters are destined to lead to worse & worse situations, but you just want to stick around to see how bad that train wreck gets. Some suggestions for the cast: Don’t shoot him! Don’t hit that guy with a shovel! For the love of god, don’t fall asleep in the car while dangerous people are looking for you! Great grit-filled summer reading.

The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith - not as well-written or as memorable as Child 44. The characters seem thin and stretched - transparent even. And these are mostly characters he introduced in the previous book. I don't know, maybe the amount of energy he put into his debut just wiped him clean, creatively. I can't even remember what this was about, really, so I guess I can't really recommend it.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (seen here) - recommended by David Benioff when he was at my store for a signing in April. These are short stories about the white trash underbelly of America - funny, dark, strangely realistic. Good for dipping into, but I had to take a break after about 5 in a row. They're pretty great though - Tower writes with a grim humor that I find particularly appealing, sort of like Palahniuk before he forgot how to write: "Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants." See?

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry - Jasper Fforde-Redux, since it may be impossible to be Jasper Fforde-Lite. Described as "Borges-ian" in the jacket blurbs - ridiculous. Just because an author makes their plot deliberately convoluted, doesn't mean they've moved into Borges' realm. That said, I did like it. Berry employs wonderful, vivid imagery to set his scenes: constant rain, wet socks, alarm clocks, umbrellas everywhere, wet leaves, circus tents. And this may sound odd, but I thought that there were simply too many characters - it just got to be exhausting trying to sort everyone out in time for the resolution and it all blocked out the imagery that Berry is clearly so good at transcribing.

The Way Home by George Pelecanos - my first foray into the realm of Pelecanos. I can see why other writers like him so much. This reminded me of Richard Price's Lush Life a lot, until I realized that they both wrote for HBO's The Wire. A great character study about averting life's bad decisions and the repurcusions when you don't.

And finally, This Is How by M.J. Hyland

What the F? Honestly, has anyone else been able to finish this book? I read 168 pages and was overwhelmed with an urge to strangle, stab, and shoot the stunted, foolish, selfish idiot of a protagonist. There are just some books that no matter how much you like the writing, you just cannot relate to the characters in any way - this was one of those for me. I've got enough going on in my own life without having to pick up the pathetic fictional baggage of Patrick Oxtoby. Barf.

Frank McCourt: 1930-2009

Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes, passed away Sunday at age 78. A lot of people are going to write about Mr. McCourt upon the event of his death, so who am I, really, to enlighten anyone further? (I'm only 1/4 Irish anyway, but it's the good 1/4.) His memoir of growing up in the slums of Limerick managed to put my own family's experiences in perspective a bit. I still know next to nothing of the lives my family left behind when they left Northern Ireland, so getting a first hand account of that life from someone as eloquent and witty as Mr. McCourt was particularly enlightening for me. I remember telling my mom and my Irish grandmother how funny I thought McCourt's book was & was greeted with mild shock, as his childhood was "awful, not funny". But damn it, he was funny! Really funny. And that's what allowed him to live through that life and come out the other side as the man he was. Humor makes the world turn, don't you know? I'm glad to have at least been on the same planet at the same time as he was.

More Kindling

To further illustrate the creepy behavior by Jeff "Big Brother" Bezos and his Amazonian company, check these quotes from regular folks interviewed for another NYT article on the subject from Saturday:

“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

In defense of Amazon's actions, Drew Herdener, spokesman for the company, said "We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances." Riiiiight. Sorry Drew, the seeds have been planted. Let the revolution begin.

It's not that I hate the ebook or the Kindle - I personally don't feel a need or a want for any of it - it's just that I don't want them to supplant the bound books that I love so much. Do we really need to print 2 million copies of every James Patterson novel, with half destined for the pulping mill? No, but I believe that they have a place in the digital world and have the right to be read by someone, somewhere. I would be an idiot to deny that there is a market for books of that caliber - not everyone reads 1984 for fun. (In fact, I recently had a full-grown man come into the store and ask for the very same book and react with disbelief & shock when I not only knew the author, but right where it was shelved.) And while there is a degree of panicky freakout going on in the book world as far as how quickly things are progressing, there is no denying that ebooks have a place, its just that we haven't figured out where that place is yet. Amazon has been force-feeding us on the virtues of their product to the point that no one has read the fine print to see what their rights of ownership really are. This recent debacle is just the first time we've been able to see behind the curtain a little bit and regardless of what the company spokesmen say towards appeasement, we should be greatly concerned over where this is all leading us as a society.

My librarian cousin Janet forsees things as this: "In the future, hardcover books will become prohibitively expensive to ordinary folk. Hence, the only place people can get access to hardcover books will be the public library. We are back to 1731, when Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia where he and his pals banded together to buy books." I don't think that's too far off if things continue on this current course. (Of course, Janet is just plugging the library.) Some of us - booksellers, mostly - have just been looking for that chink in the armor of Amazon where we can point and say, "Look! See what happens when you forsake the printed book!" None of us have figured out a way to combat or even embrace the coming ebook storm - it is pretty much a guarantee that many independent bookstores will go out of business due solely to the influx of electronic books in the world. That's the tragedy. Once they're gone and all you have left is the Kindle store....

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UPDATE July 21st: Barnes and Noble announced the opening of their sexy sleek new Ebook Store this morning. Ebooks are available for download from B&N, but are of course not compatible with the Amazon Kindle, so they have provided a free ebook reader that works with Mac, PC, Blackberry, & Iphone. Of course, being in direct competition with the Amazon juggernaut, most ebooks on B&N are $9.99, (advertised as 62% off! or what-have-you), essentially pricing themselves and everyone else out of the market down the road. It will be interesting to see where this takes things - of course, indies still don't have ebook capabilities via the Indiebound chain of websites....

One more thing: check out e-bookvine for fascinating info on the Kindle & the society it has spawned, including hacks written for pdf's and other ebook formats and a telling chart of ebook price changes over time at Amazon.

My Kindle Ate My Baby!

How to handle the E-Book Problem is an issue that is constantly being debated in the dusty, tome-filled aisles of independent bookstores everywhere these days. For the moment, most indies cannot sell e-books at all - as the technology for sales hasn't caught up yet - and none of them can sell the Amazon Kindle, the world's leading e-book reader. So, out of my disdain for the looming fall of the book industry as we know it, here is a Top Ten list of the things that I think are problematic about the Kindle. (Some - marked with an * - are not proven yet, but I believe that they are true and this is my website, so...)

1. It makes you go blind and it gets so hot that it leaves you with 3rd degree burns on your hands and lap.*

2. Toni Morrison, Oprah Friend, Nobel Laureate, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, loves her Kindle. (Watch the Amazon promo video of Morrison extolling on the virtues of her little electric friend.) Is there anything sadder than this? I can understand the appeal of being able to travel with multiple books all in a slim unit that fits in your carry-on bag (the big plus for her), but she claims to love the versatility it offers, with its "underlining" ability and notetaking features. Huh? Pencil? It scares me that someone so well regarded in the world of print would sell her soul to Amazon to such a degree. James Patterson I can get (he also has a video - say "delightful" again, James), but Morrison just leaves me baffled.

3. It is not a book.

4. It is not a book.

5. Independent booksellers cannot sell you one, nor can B&N or Borders, actually - Amazon has proprietary rights over the unit and the software. And indie bookstores with Indiebound websites still cannot sell e-books via the internet yet (this is an internal problem, not an Amazon one, but it still sucks.) Even if they could sell e-books, they wouldn't work on your Kindle anyway. The potential good news though, is that Google has entered the fray and announced that they are working on a method for selling e-books to customers via their site. Presumably, the Google supplied e-books will not be of a proprietary nature and you should be able to download them to the e-reader of your choice. Will they be any different that Amazon? Where is Steve Jobs on this? As for the large chain bookstores, as much as I despise them, depending on how the next few years go, this whole thing could drive them right off the map. Which would really be a death knell for the printed book.

6. You can't jump in the ocean & leave your Kindle on your beach towel. Someone will steal it. If they are a bookseller, they will most likely throw it in the ocean. (Seriously, think about that - do you ever read books in a public place? What a drag that would be to have to worry about some d-bag stealing your ENTIRE library while you're in the men's room...)

7. Did I mention that it makes you go blind?*

8. Amazon is deliberately selling e-books for a massive loss in order to force anyone else out of the market. Publishers - who you, the consumer, cannot buy directly from - are selling e-books for similar costs to the regular printed books - somewhere in the $25-30 range. Amazon sells them for $9.99. By selling the sleek Kindle unit and their ebooks for 10 bucks, no one can compete and still stay in business. Google plans to negotiate a lower-than-MSRP-rate with the pubs, but it will most likely be higher than $9.99. As for the indies - what small business can afford to sell anything at a 70% loss?

9. The e-book library will eliminate the ability of book snobs to judge other people by their physical libraries of books. How can I know what sort of man you are if I cannot sneer at your Anne Rice collection? What about judging a book by it's cover? Will it become "You can't judge an ebook by it's file size"? Barf. (Check this from the NYT a few months back.)

10a. (Since I couldn't limit myself to 10 problems) The following is perhaps the worst thing yet to come about concerning the Kindle. This announcement was posted by Amazon this week:

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell, published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.

Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. The clocks are striking thirteen! Big Brother can sneak into your Kindle while you sleep and take back the books that they don't want you to have. Is the reference lost on them? (At least Fahrenheit 451 is not available as an e-book yet...)

10b. This is perhaps related to 10a, as the Kindle is a product of a soulless, corporate giant that is attempting to run our lives. They are cold, lifeless, and will never love you back. (This one is true.) There's nothing - and I mean nothing - better than holding a book in your hand and escaping inside.

As a bonus, I've included this official Amazon video of the "Kindle Drop Test". I find it sort of cathartic.

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.
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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!
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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.