Citizen Reader

Tuesday housekeeping.

Yes, yes, I know, eventually I should talk about some nonfiction books. I have some all read that are sitting here staring me in the face, but I am just not motivated. So I will take care of some reading housekeeping instead.

In today's news, a new issue of the Reader's Advisor News, published by Libraries Unlimited and sponsored by the Reader's Advisor Online, is available, and it's a particularly good one this time around. There's a great article for librarians about the value of floating collections, and a very practical article on creating a mobile web site for your library. Do consider checking it out; it's an email newsletter that you can also subscribe to (should you so choose).

In other news, Stacy Horn's latest book Unbelievable: Investigations Into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Lab, is now out in paperback. Stacy Horn, you'll remember, is the author who so generously shared a lot of insight about the nonfiction book writing process with us (and whose book The Restless Sleep we read for the last Menage). Even if a book about the history of parapsychological research and the search for proof of life after death isn't your cuppa, do consider suggesting that your local library purchase a copy so others can enjoy it. Horn is everything a nonfiction author should be: independent, able to perform stringent research, the writer of thoughtful prose and complete endnotes, and whose books are often indexed. Unlike some nonfiction writers, like, say, Thomas Friedman (who I can't imagine has any use for his ill-gotten buckets of money other than stuffing hundreds into the mattresses in the many bedrooms of his 11,000-square foot home), Horn could actually use a few sales so she can keep writing new books.

I was also going to link to a hilarious interview between Jacquelyn Mitchard and Lorrie Moore, two of my least favorite women writers*, in this month's edition of the UW-Madison alumni magazine On Wisconsin, but the good old alumni association doesn't have their new issue online yet, so I can't. Sorry about that; I'll link someday when it's available. What's particularly funny is that most of Mitchard's questions are longer than Moore's answers. Gotta love an interviewer in love with the sound of her own voice. This is my favorite exchange:

 "Q: Which brings me to another question. If we write in the Common Era, as it were, are fiction writers obliged to give a nod to 9/11, as Bugs Bunny constantly referred back to World War II? (I regret the unfortunate example, but Warner Brothers cartoons were significant in my cultural anthropology.)"

A: Hmmm..."

Scintillating, ladies. And, Jacquelyn Mitchard? Stop using phrases like "cultural anthropology."

*Well, I didn't really mind Moore until I read A Gate at the Stairs, which I'm going to go out on a limb and call the most overrated novel of 2009.

Big exciting book news!

Okay, well, not all that big or exciting. But I am excited! As of today, my new reader's guide, Now Read This III: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction (co-authored with Nancy Pearl), is finally available! It can be had through either Libraries Unlimited (the publisher), or Amazon. I fully realize it's a big chunk of change for any individual to spend, but I would be honored if you would suggest that your local library purchase a copy for their collection. It's been a long time in the making and I'm pretty proud of it, and I hope that it is useful to readers' advisors and readers.

Last week I got asked by some librarians with senses of humor* if I was going to have a big book release party, but the answer to that one is, I've already had it. It consisted of way too many milano cookies and a beer (a strange combination, but it worked for me) when I sent off the manuscript. We each celebrate in our own ways!

If you're wondering what the book looks like inside, I can give you a sampler. Pearl and I considered fiction titles (mainstream, or literary, ones; other guides take care of the genres) from the past 5-10 years and organized them according to what readers might find most appealing about them: their setting, their characters, their story, or the language and writing style of the author. Then we annotated each title and provided "related reads" for it. A sample entry looks like this:

Cleave, Chris.
Little Bee. Simon & Schuster, 2009. 271 pages. ISBN 9781416589631.
Although the jacket copy implores those who have read this novel not to tell their friends the story (because “the magic is in how the story unfolds”), what can be divulged is that it is the story of two women, from different parts of the globe, whose lives collide once, violently, on a beach in Africa, and then come together a second time as a result of that first meeting. The narrative follows the exploits of Little Bee, a young woman from Nigeria, who makes her way to Great Britain, and through no little amount of ingenuity, ends up on the doorstep of Sarah O’Rourke (and her family, although Sarah’s husband Andrew commits suicide—seemingly just days before Little Bee’s arrival).

Subjects: Africa; Book Groups; British Authors; Family Relationships; First Person; Great Britain; Immigrants and Immigration; Marriage; Men Writing as Women; Multicultural; Multiple Viewpoints; Parenting; Quick Reads
Now Try: Cleave has written another novel centering on current political events, Incendiary. Critics have compared this novel to Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (primarily for its moving characters and plot, which make it a solid book club choice); other novels about moral choices and unforeseeable events might also be offered to these readers, including William Styron’s classic Sophie’s Choice and Anne Tyler’s somewhat lighter but still thoughtful Saint Maybe. Abraham Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone also follows a character from one continent to another; another formidable female character can be found in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Also of interest might be nonfiction titles from Africa, particularly Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his time as a child soldier, A Long Way Gone, or Helene Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, about her youth in Liberia and how she had to flee the country during its civil war (leaving behind an adopted sister).

The book will also be available for your inspection at the Libraries Unlimited/ABC-CLIO boothat the upcoming Public Library Association conference, held at the end of March, in Portland, Oregon (and I think they usually offer purchase deals there too). Last but not least, Nancy Pearl will be doing a book signing for the book on Thursday, March 25, from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.!

*My very favorite kind of librarians.

The infinite pleasures of the finite.

It's really sad that my soul-easing moments now seem to be happening in corporate behemoth stores, but hey, that's the state of our culture.

Over the past weekend Mr. CR and I visited our "local" Barnes and Noble; he had a gift card and I just had a jones to look at books.* Once we got inside we went our separate ways, as per usual, with Mr. CR peeling off for science fiction, fantasy, and magazines, and me pausing briefly at the new nonfiction tables before heading directly upstairs to the sale and used book section. So there I stood, looking over their selection of used books (I happened to be in the fiction and literature section, where they actually had some neat old used books and biographies of literary types). And as I was quite happily looking the shelves over, the Elvis Presley song "Can't Help Falling in Love" came on the radio, and I had a little moment of pure happiness.**

Yes, the Internet has everything. You need never look away from the Internet again and there will always be something to look at. But there is such pleasure in looking at a finite shelf of books; I had almost forgotten it. When you look at a shelf of books, particularly when it's nonfiction, it gives you the feeling that you might actually be able to read and know something about a subject. You read a book, you read a shelf of books, you might actually get somewhere. The Internet? You've never going to hit the end of that shelf, and you're going to feel like you're never going to know anything about everything, particularly as lots of other people out there know way more about everything you're interested in than you ever will.

So yes, I had a little moment of bliss in the belly of the corporate beast. That'll happen.

*You know, different books than the ones piled on our shelves and stacked on our tables and floor.

**In other "doing my soul good" news, my email interview with author Stacy Horn was posted this morning over at the Reader's Advisor Online blog; part 2 will run tomorrow. Please do check it out--not just because I love Stacy Horn and think you should too, but because she's got some really interesting things to say about books and author promotions.

Women's Nonfiction: Feisty Womyn Forever.

I recently got my copy of Jessica Zellers's new nonfiction reading guide, titled Women's Nonfiction: A Guide to Reading Interests, and it's spectacular.

Now, you should know, I am the new series editor of the Libraries Unlimited Real Stories series, of which this book is a part (although Robert Burgin edited this volume, and did a fantastic job of it to boot--thanks ever so, Robert, for leaving such big shoes for me to fill), and I LOVE nonfiction reading guides, so I am probably not ever going to give one of these books a bad review. But I think my appreciation for this volume (and Rick Roche's guide to biographies, Real Lives Revealed) goes beyond mere interest as the series editor. Even if they sometimes have small problems in execution (and all of these types of books do, mine included) I simply love that they are available. They not only make it possible to find great books to read, but I think they make it clear that knowing something about books and authors is a valuable and hard-earned skill. In a world that is increasingly fragmented and which moves too fast and in which people speak endlessly of boring things called "apps," I think it's refreshing to find, gathered in one handy collection, lists of books that are similar in both subject and style.

But I digress. Perhaps the most valuable thing Zellers does is explain what Women's Nonfiction is: "a reading interest comprising titles that speak to women's experiences." Her chapters, therefore, include titles that speak to women's experiences in several genres and formats: Biographies and Memoirs (Life Stories); Personal Growth titles; Health, Wellness, and Beauty; Women's History; Adventure and Travel; Feminism and Activism; Women at Work; and Women and Society. Looking for a book similar to Sue Monk Kidd's The Dance of the Dissident Daughter?* Zellers suggests titles like Judith Duerk's Circle of Stones: Woman's Journey to Herself; and also suggests other memoirs like Deborah Kanafani's Unveiled: A Woman's Journey through Politics, Love, and Obedience.

What I particularly love about this volume is Zellers's writing style; she's witty.** Consider this, from the introduction:

"I dimly recall from my tenth-grade English class that Hercules had to perform twelve impossible labors. If memory serves, one of those twelve labors was to cull through all of the titles that are, or might be, Women's Nonfiction."

Her book annotations are all like that too; of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, her description opens with "It began simply enough, with Eve Ensler chatting with her friends about sex."

What we have here, then, is that rarest of things: a reference book that's fun to read. I highly recommend it--and this, coming from someone who has never met a "goddess narrative" she enjoyed (or would read all the way through, for that matter), should be taken as the highest praise indeed.

*I won't be, as Kidd is not for me, but there's plenty of other books suggested here that I might try.

**I am trying to be the bigger person here and not admit how jealous I am of her ability to turn a phrase.

October 24.*

Well, you know that every October I have to re-read and talk about Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. My reading it this year was even better than usual because I had my very own copy, given to me by Mr. CR last Christmas with a card that said, "Now you have your very own copy!"

Why do I have to read it every fall? Well, because:

"So it was on this night that blew warm, then cool, as they let the wind take them downtown at eight o'clock. They felt the wings on their fingers and elbows flying, then, suddenly plunged in new sweeps of air, the clear autumn river flung them headlong where they must go.

Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door.

Jim and Will grinned at each other. It was all so good, these blowing quiet October nights and the library waiting inside now with its green-shaded lamps and papyrus dust." (p. 13.)

I love autumn, and Bradbury's book is like experiencing an especially intense prototypical autumn. Every year I re-read it, and every year I find something new in it, and every year something in it soothes me like you can only be soothed when you know what it is to be up at three a.m. with worry or sickness (and most adults know what that is) and need something both completely removed from your surroundings and something which gives you the strength to accept your surroundings.

This year what particularly struck me was remembering that this book stands as one of my greatest readers' advisory triumphs and one of my biggest failures. I gave it to my sister and now it is one of our literary touchstones ("it reminds me of that part in Something Wicked this Way Comes..."); we both thought our Dad, who always liked Arthurian legends and myths and fiction, would really take to it, and so passed it along. He hated it. Hated it from the very start. He just brought it up to me the other day as the weirdest book he's ever started, and what was I thinking giving it to him? So that just makes me laugh. Now, I know my Dad about as well as one reader can know another, and I still am capable of misfiring on what he'll love or hate (he recently read and loved the religious allegory The Shack, which I had no time for). So, all you readers' advisors out there? Give yourself a break if you can't always find readers books they love. Books are bigger than we can always define, and know, and really, so are readers. So don't be so hard on yourself.

*"One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight."

Favorite publishers.

The bigger and more efficient a business is, the less I like it. (I'm one of those snobby people who will not set foot in Wal-Mart. This is largely because I try not to set foot in any stores, not because I have so much money I can totally eschew bargain shopping. I do my bargain shopping at St. Vincent de Paul.) So it only stands to reason that I would like small, independent, quirky publishers who probably don't make a lot of money. I like Soft Skull, for instance. And I totally LOVE Paul Dry Books, which is based in Philadelphia. Why do I love Paul Dry Books? Because of books like Murray Browne's The Book Shopper: A Life in Review.

It's a totally fun little book memoir, by a man who seems like he's lived a quite fulfilled (if not always happy or content or untroubled) life, if not a hugely rewarding one financially. The book covers exactly the subject it promises: Browne talks about shopping for books, moving books, finding books and authors he loves, keeping or selling books, and talking about books with others--in short, all the topics that real book people can talk about for hours on end. There's nothing fancy here; in fact, his prose is delightfully straightforward and unfussy. Consider:

"For those of us who want to do a lot of perusing in a short time, the physical space of a bookstore works to our advantage. I can scan a bookshelf chock full of books in a minute or two, which I can't do on the Internet no matter how speedy my connection. If I see a book that interests me, I can pull the book from the shelf and give the table of contents, the index (if nonfiction*), and several paragraphs the quick once over, taking a special note of the author's style, which is a major selling point for me." (p. 42.)

There's nothing all that special about that paragraph, but it does indicate someone who takes his book reading and searching pretty seriously, and that's really all I need to love an author. (He offers another chapter titled "Book Lovers are Not Necessarily People Lovers," and I love him for that too.) So check this one out; I think I rank it somewhere slightly above Larry McMurtry's memoir Books and slightly below Lewis Buzbee's The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop.

And do spend a little time looking at Paul Dry's catalog. Two other of their titles that I loved were Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance and the wonderful photography/investigative/travel book The Rocky Stories, which actually made me want to travel to Philadelphia. Have a good weekend, all.

Books about Books: Now Read This 3

Sorry for the late post today, but I got all caught up in reading the comments from yesterday. Thanks to everyone for what I thought was the best comment thread ever--it was like the best spontaneous book conversation ever, with everyone suggesting titles and bookstores and talking about true crime and, most importantly, largely agreeing that Richard Dawkins needs to be served a large cup of shut the fuck up.* So thank you to everyone for that.

In other news, today I thought I'd announce why I've been reading fiction pretty hardcore for the last couple of years. It's because I've been working on a new book with Nancy Pearl called Now Read This 3: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction. Pearl, also known as the Librarian Action Figure and frequent book commentator on NPR, is the author of the first two volumes in the series, Now Read This (along with assistance from Martha Knappe and Chris Higashi) and Now Read This 2. They're the books (along with the Genreflecting series) on which I modeled The Real Story and The Inside Scoop: we list mainstream fiction titles, provide a summary or annotation for them, and then suggest similar books that readers might also enjoy. It's not quite done yet, and I notice in Amazon that the pub date's been pushed back a little farther than I thought it would be, but we're getting very close to finishing it and I couldn't be happier. How often does one get to work with not only an unparalleled reader (which Nancy Pearl most certainly is) but also a librarian icon? Not very often, and it's been so, so great.

I didn't completely ignore nonfiction along the way--I could never do that--the new Now Read This is going to include lists of nonfiction books that might particularly appeal to fiction readers, and we tried to make both fiction and nonfiction suggestions for most of the novels.

And with this announcement, I hereby end this week of somewhat garish self-promotion. Sadly, I have to finish the week out with some bad news: author Dominick Dunne, himself a true crime writer and brother of author John Gregory Dunne, has died at the age of 83.

*Sorry, Robert, I had to steal your line, it was too good not to use.

Books about Books Week: A call to arms.

Yesterday I reviewed Rick Roche's reading guide Real Lives Revealed (about biographies), and anyone who's had to sit through my painful self-promotion on this blog is aware that I've written two nonfiction reading guides, titled The Real Story (about nonfiction in general) and The Inside Scoop (about investigative and expose writing, such as that of William Langewiesche). When it is published I also hope to review Jessica Zellers's Women's Nonfiction guide. All of these books,* thus far, have shared a common series editor: Robert Burgin, a professor at North Carolina Central University's library school and editor of the titles Nonfiction Readers' Advisory and The Reader's Advisor's Companion.

I thought Robert was a fabulous series editor, which now scares me a bit, because with his recent retirement, I've been offered the opportunity to be the Real Stories series editor. Which is really cool. But also scary, because I have some big shoes to fill.

But there's no time like the present, right? Have you ever dreamed of writing a nonfiction reading guide? Do you know someone who has? It's helpful if you have library experience, as these books are written primarily to help library staff (and I mean all staff--I know that a lot of people on the front lines on libraries aren't necessarily "librarians"), but I don't know that it's absolutely necessary. If you have any interest, or questions about these books, please do write me at realstory@tds.net. The more the merrier! Alternatively, if you'd like to see what's involved before emailing, do check out Libraries Unlimited's proposal guidelines.

*If you're more familiar with the Genreflecting guides, written for fiction, these are very similar, except they cover nonfiction.

Books about Books Week: Real Lives Revealed

Last week I got my copy of Rick Roche's new nonfiction reading guide in the Real Stories series (from Libraries Unlimited), titled Real Lives Revealed: A Guide to Reading Interests in Biography.

It is stupendous.

Now, clearly, I am probably biased. I write for the Real Stories series (and more--tune in tomorrow). I also have the pleasure of knowing Rick and knowing what a dedicated and skilled librarian he is. But I'm pretty sure that even if I didn't know Rick from Adam this book would have blown me away.

These types of reading guide reference books are designed to help readers (and the librarians who help them find stuff to read, known by the library jargon of "readers' advisors") find titles they might enjoy. To that end, Rick has organized more than 600 titles into biography genres and subgenres, written wonderful summaries of them, given them subject headings (natural language subject headings, a bit easier to use than Dewey headings), and provided "read-alike" suggestions* for all of them. Consider the record for Jeffrey Meyers's biography Somerset Maugham: A Life (a book I've always wanted to read, as I find Maugham very interesting):

"Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was more than just a popular writer of novels, stories, plays, screenplays, essays, and travel books...he was also a doctor, a spy, Red Cross volunteer, art collector, and contract bridge player..Despite the appearance of perfection that he cultivated, he was an unhappy man with low self-esteem, torn between homosexual and heterosexual relationships. Jeffrey Meyers combines elements of the adventure story with celebrity reporting and pscyhological insight..."

That is an information-packed description, not only about Maugham, but also about the format of the biography. And then there's his "Now Try" suggestions for further reading:

"[After listing some of Maugham's most famous works]...Like Maugham, magician and escape artist Harry Houdini used his fame when he traveled to hide the fact that he was a spy. William Kalush and Larry Sloman detail Houdini's clandestine operations in The Secret Life of Houdini. British agent T. E. Lawrence traveled under assumed names and met with Arab rebels working to overthrow Turkish rule. Lawrence James tells how Lawrence played up his hero's role to the press and in his memoir in The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia."

That is FANTASTIC. Somerset Maugham to Harry Houdini to T. E. Lawrence. Now I'm not saying every reader who loves the first biography will follow up those suggestions, but they are interesting ones, and they are linked logically (secret lives, etc.). And they are suggestions that were made by a human. They were not simply spit out of a relational database based on sales numbers, and I defy you to find a library catalog that would ever link those books based on subject, even though they are tangentially related.

And that's just the book descriptions (included are such types of biography as Adventure, True Crime, War, Inspirational, Investigative, Coming-of-Age, Cultural, Celebrity, Historical, Political, Science, and Sports). I haven't even mentioned the unbelievable support material, including the timeline and history of biography, list of biography awards, list of biography series, and list of "top biographers," which includes authors' names and the biographies they've written.

Sorry for the length of today's post. I could go on a lot longer, though. All I can say, Rick, is, I am speechless. I've written a couple of these things and you have made me look like an amateur. I know that library budgets are tight right now, but if you work with readers at all I would buy this book for your collection--biographies are always popular with readers, so any tool that helps librarians understand them is well worth it. Especially when it's a tool as comprehensive as this one.

*Welcome to the world of librarianship and its jargon. "Read-alikes" are books that give the reader a similar "feeling" when reading them, while "related reads" are books related to one another primarily by subject. The Maugham and Houdini biographies are "read-alikes," Maugham's biography and Maugham's novels are "related reads."

Links about town, and giving up.

Any interest in business books? I've got a short article in Library Journal this week offering Business book "short takes." Although none of the books I reviewed set my world on fire, there were several serviceable choices published this summer. Two of the best were Daniel Solin's The Smartest Retirement Book You'll Ever Read and Julie Jason's The AARP Retirement Survival Guide: How to Make Smart Financial Decisions in Good Times and Bad. If you're doing any kind of budgeting, looking at your finances, or money planning (not just for retirement) you may want to take a look at either of those books.

In other news, I continue to struggle with Dan Simmons's Drood. I'm on page 400 now, and please note, I really don't have a problem with the story OR the writing. It's interesting enough so that I kind of want to keep going, and if there were only 100 or 200 pages left, I could do it. But 400 more pages? I was wondering what to do last night when I got an email from a friend whom I had earlier asked if he had read this book. And this is what I got back:

"Simmons is a primadonna glorified hack.  He's clever enough to hide his hackiness, but it's there to be despised...he can't edit his own work.  It's distasteful.  It's also indicative of hackiness.  Nobody these days needs to write a novel over 300 pages.  For any reason.  But I'm bitter, so maybe you should take my opinion with the proverbial grain of salt."*

Oh, so funny. So perfect. Everything I was thinking but hadn't articulated. That's it. I'm reading the last few chapters to hopefully achieve a tiny sense of closure, and then I'm going to go into my weekend unfettered to make all new reading choices. Thank you, my friend.

*Please excuse the quoting, you know who you are...if I made any royalties here I would share them with you. Plus? Bitter people are my FAVORITE. Keep up the good work, kindred spirit. You do my soul good.

Nicely said, Virginia.

Lately I've been finding myself a bit interested in Virginia Woolf. She keeps popping up in (seemingly) unrelated things I'm reading (last week it was a book for high schoolers on British economist John Maynard Keynes that I was indexing), so recently I got a book of her Collected Essays (vol. 2) from the library. And that's where I found this:

"But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance..."

She goes on to explain how readers, even more than reviewers, have a kind of responsibility to keep reading and to form thoughts about reading. But I wish more reviewers of all sorts would take her words to heart and review books in a way that is "vigorous and individual and sincere." Actually, that's not a bad mantra for trying to live one's life, I would think.

But she was barely done with that gem before she launched into this one: "I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards--their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble--the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.'"

Both quotes are from an essay titled "How Should One Read a Book." Both make me want to read more Virginia Woolf. Both give reading its proper due. "They have loved reading." Says it all, really, doesn't it?

But do we see him?

Over the weekend I read a novel titled Now You See Him, by Eli Gottlieb. I liked it quite a bit, and it had a lot of plot twistlets (more like little "ah-ha" moments than big plot twists). The narrator, a man named Nick Framingham, is not so much unreliable as he himself is uninformed, but I do love the air of suspense that even a vaguely unreliable narrator lends to a story.

The entire book follows Nick's struggle in the months after his former best friend Rob Castor shoots his former girlfriend and then himself. As he pieces the puzzle of Rob's life together, his own marriage starts to fall spectacularly apart, particularly when Rob's sister Belinda comes back to their small New York home town and turns to Nick for help (which is complicated by the fact that Nick and Belinda used to date).

I'm making it sound horribly dull; it's not. I think I'm starting to figure out that it's not so much that I don't enjoy reading fiction, it's that I find it very hard to talk about. When it's good, I like it very much, I immerse myself in the story, but when I'm done, I just want to be done with it. With nonfiction, I find myself often wanting to think more about the books and their subjects when I'm done, and that means I like to review and talk about them more. I wonder if I've become such a Puritan that I feel vaguely guilty to simply read and enjoy a novel, and therefore want to move on from it as fast as I can, whereas with nonfiction, I often feel like I've learned something and therefore the time was profitably spent.

Either way--it's a good novel. I'd be interested to hear if others have read it and if so, what they thought.

Now that's poetry.

So lately I have been trying to work more poetry into my regular reading schedule. I'm doing it the way I do everything--in a completely disorganized and unplanned manner, relying largely upon the serendipity of lucky discovery--but so far I've been enjoying myself.

Last week I became interested in the poet Sappho (after reading a Salinger novel in which she was quoted) and took a wander through my local library catalog to see what I could find. What I came up with is a slim volume called The Soldier and the Lady: Poems of Archilochos and Sappho, translated by Barriss Mills. I don't know anything about it, or who Archilochos was, but the last page of this book informs me it is only one of 400 that was printed by The Elizabeth Press. I love finding books like that. And the poetry's, well, rather blunt and lovely. Consider this:

"That bulge under your dress
makes it obvious to everyone
what you've been up to, slut.

Hipponax, the well-digger
knows all about it, and so
does your husband, Ariphantos.
(It's a lucky thing for him
he never did catch the thief
flagrante delictu.)

                            But he
had his eye on Aischylides,
the potter, while Hipponax
was getting his pick and shovel
in the door.

       Now the whole story's
showing, under your robe."*

That's a poem that'll make you sit up and take notice. I've read this book once (it's only about 40 pages long) but I'm going to read it again and just let it soak in. I've enjoyed it very, very much. Here's another poem, slightly less Jerry Springer-ish than the first: "Soul, o my soul, you're beaten down with trouble. Lift your chin and fight back against whatever torments you."

*Now that's poetry! This reminded me of the Simpsons episode where the psychiatrists are trying to get Homer to goad Ned Flanders into anger by having him read off a card that says "I slept with your wife/significant other," at which point Homer looks up and says, "now THAT'S psychology!"

Wanna read, wanna read, wanna read.

As you know, normally the only thing I feel like doing is reading. And normally, I feel like reading anything and everything, including nonfiction and fiction (although nonfiction remains my one true master). Very rarely, however, I'll admit, do I pick up either plays or poetry. I'll wander through some poetry as I find it, every now and then, but with the exception of being IN plays, way back in the dark ages of high school, I don't think I've ever actually READ a play.

That may have to change, as last night Mr. CR and I saw a performance of George Bernard Shaw's "The Philanderer," and it was AWESOME. Full of good stuff about the ongoing battle between men and women, and what it means to be a manly man and a womanly woman. (It was also quite funny, and, by play standards, relatively short, which also made me happy.) But in the second act I started to lose the thread of the conversations a little bit. So now, I think I may actually look into reading a play for the first time ever. Further bulletins as events warrant.

In other wanna read news, the other night I couldn't sleep and, as per usual, hooked up a little J.D. Salinger comfort reading, in the form of his novella Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. Of course one of my favorite bits in that book is his character's quoting of a line of poetry from Sappho: "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man." Other than being a bit concerned at the comparison of a bridegroom to the god of war, I think that's a stellar line of poetry. And now I may have to hook up some Sappho as well.

May you all have a good weekend, filled with things you want to read and actually get the time to read. And on Monday? Report right back here for our Book Menage, starring Michael Perry's Population 485 and Tom Bissell's The Father of All Things! I never say this about a Monday, but it's the way I feel: I can't wait!

Shameless self promotion: continued.

So are any of you librarian types out there going to the big ALA conference in Chicago this upcoming weekend?

If so, I certainly hope you have a great time. And, somewhere in between the sessions and the networking and the sneaking out of the conference to go eat in good Chicago restaurants, might I make a small suggestion? Please do pop by the ABC-CLIO booth in the Exhibits (they're in booth #3918, I'm informed) and see all the new readers' advisory books that Libraries Unlimited has published in the last year.

In addition to new guides for historical and women's fiction, I'm very excited to announce that my new book, The Inside Scoop: A Guide to Nonfiction Investigative Writing and Exposes,* will be there! This is really exciting to me (not only because it means I'm done writing that book, whew), but because it means that the Libraries Unlimited Real Stories series is now a reality. Just like LU's Genreflecting series, these books will examine different genres and types of nonfiction, and I say, it's about time too. Also at this conference will be Rick Roche's brand spanking new book Real Lives Revealed: A Guide to Reading Interests in Biography,** which I am dying to get a look at. So please do stop by the booth and check out these new guides--I'd love to hear what you think of them!

Also, don't be shy about asking anyone in the booth to show you their spectacular reading database, the Readers' Advisor Online. I've spent some time in the LU booth in the past and everyone who works there is always so, so nice, and they'd love to show you what they've got, and answer any questions.

And, of course, have a good conference. Safe travels!

*My first Libraries Unlimited book, The Real Story: A Guide to Nonfiction Reading Interests; will be at the conference at well; Jessica Zellers's Real Stories book Women's Nonfiction: A Guide to Reading Interests, will be published later this year.

**I intend to talk more about Rick's book after I've seen it--it's just been published.

Last of its kind.

For years Nick Hornby wrote a column in The Believer magazine about his monthly reading habits; in each column he would list the books he bought that month, the books he read (and those two lists seldom corresponded), and then shared his thoughts about what he was reading. Because he is British, he also somehow managed to work tidbits about the soccer matches he was watching into every column.* Previously, two books collecting his monthly pieces had been published, titled The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. Both were highly enjoyable reads.

So it's no surprise that Hornby's gone back to the well one last time, and published his last collection of Believer columns under the title Shakespeare Wrote for Money. (Subtitled: Two Years of Reading Begat by More Reading, Presented in Easily Digestible, Utterly Hysterical Monthly Installments.) And it truly is the last of its kind, as Hornby has stopped writing his column for the magazine (as of September 2008).

I don't know why he's stopping, but one guess is because, like anything else, it feels like the column has run its course. Although this was a very enjoyable read, I just don't think I enjoyed it the same way I enjoyed the first two books. Although this volume does have a hilarious introduction by Sarah Vowell, proving to me that I do like Sarah Vowell, just in small doses, and flashes of hilarity are still there, it just doesn't have that kick. Also, Hornby continues the Believer's policy of not sharing the titles of books he really disliked, which bugged me in the first and second volumes and continues to bug me, because I think it's dishonest.

But I'd still recommend it. For one thing, in this volume, Hornby discovers the entire genre of YA fiction, and is shocked by how much he loves it, and it's always fun to watch a passionate reader discover a new love (he read such books as M.T. Anderson's Feed and David Almond's Skellig, although I'm disappointed he never made it to John Green's Looking for Alaska). For another, parts of it are still just very, very good:

"I recently discovered that when my friend Mary has finished a book, she won't start another for a couple of days--she wants to give her most recent reading experience a little more time to breathe, before it's suffocated by the next. This makes sense, and it's an entirely laudable policy, I think. Those of us who read neurotically, however--to ward off boredom, and the fear of our own ignorance, and our impending deaths--can't afford the time." (p. 97.)

I hope you get some time this weekend for yourself, to read neurotically. Have a happy Fourth, everyone.

*The lust for soccer is one of the few attributes of the British soul that I don't understand. I have this theory that soccer is how Britons relase their aggression, just like I believe hockey is an outlet for Canadians, and Americans have, you know, handguns and shopping in Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving.

Is it me or is it the book?

Over the weekend I read Kate Atkinson's well-reviewed and bestselling novel Case Histories. It's a literary crime/suspense novel featuring former police detective and current private investigator, Jackson Brodie, and the three different cases he's brought in to investigate: a little girl's disappearance (which happened in 1970); the seemingly random attack on an eighteen-year-old office worker; and a woman's post-partum stress and her murderous attack on her husband.

It totally sucked me in; I wasn't really able to put it down until I was done. I liked the characters, including Jackson Brodie, and of course, Kate Atkinson is a British author, lending her narrative that certain British something that I can't define, but I usually recognize and always love.

And yet?

When I was done with the novel I felt bad. There's no more nuanced way to put it. And I don't know why that was. It just made me sad. It's not shocking in subject matter, but throughout the story the author does provide glimpses of the nasty underbelly of her stories. It was actually quite well done; Atkinson did a nice job of slipping the ugly in and not reveling in its descriptions. (I wonder if that didn't almost make it worse.) So what bothered me?

I gave it a little thought, and eventually shrugged and marked it up to the mood I was in the day I read the book. I do believe that one's mood can affect the reading experience, so I was satisfied with that. (Although doubts still niggle--I've read a lot uglier books, like Irvine Welsh's Crime*--and liked them, so is playing the mood card the easy out?) And, I can't say I was completely unpleased with my personal reaction. Sometimes I feel like I'm not much of a book "reviewer," in that I believe in saying what I think about a book, even if I didn't like it; but I do like to think there's a difference between calling a book bad and recognizing that a book is good, but simply not for me. (Hence the two categories in the sidebar; "Phoning it in" is for the bad books, "Not for Me," well, is self-explanatory.)

Case Histories was a good book. Why it made me so unhappy I don't know. When I want to figure it out I might pick up its sequel, One Good Turn, make a note of the mood I'm in when I read it, and see how it makes me feel.**

*Okay, this is really weird, but if you search Powell's for "welsh crime," the top titles, several of them nonfiction, all feature similar cover art of people holding hands with or standing near children, photographed from the back. Did the cover designer for Welsh's book know that?

**I know, life's too short to read books you don't love. But, honest to pete, charting my reading experiences and reactions is a hobby. Then, when people pick on me for not being very well-rounded in my hobbies, I have my own defense: "I don't only read." They don't really have to know that my other hobbies include making notes of my reading experiences, writing about reading, touring area libraries, visiting bookstores when I travel, and watching BBC adaptations of British novels.

Amen to that.

The other day I read something spectacular about the act of reading. It was this:

"That's the thing about books. They're alive on their own terms. Reading is like travelling with an argumentative, unpredictable good friend. It's an endless open exchange." (p. 2.)

I LOVE that. It's perfect. And I love that it's not only about books OR reading; it's about the two of them together. And the incongruity of "argumentative" and "unpredictable" and "good." Perfect. The line comes in Ali Smith's introduction to a new literature anthology titled (again perfectly) The Book Lover, which is a collection of poems and short excerpts from the literature and authors that have influenced Smith (herself an author--her latest collection of stories, The First Person, is an interesting book) over the years. Represented here you'll find glimpses of Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, John Keats, Grace Paley, Colette, Cynthia Ozick, John Donne, A.M Homes, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, Joyce Carol Oates and many, many more. Smith is a British author, and I don't know if that's the reason, but there are a great many names in her collection that I don't recognize at all...which is also kind of exciting.

But I'll admit it. The thing I've enjoyed most so far about this collection is Smith's introduction, and that fabulous line about reading.

I thought that would probably be it for the week, as far as fantastic quotes about reading went. But then I was perusing an article about the Amazon Kindle, by Sven Birkerts, at the Atlantic (link via Fimoculous), and I came across another one:

"I’m not blind to the unwieldiness of the book, or to the cumbersome systems we must maintain to accommodate it—the vast libraries and complicated filing systems. But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly."

Okay, that one's more about books. But I can't help it. I love reading...but I love reading books more. Either way, though, it's been a fabulous week for reading about reading.

Medical books have been ruined for me.

I get the feeling that Paul Austin's book Something for the Pain: One Doctor's Account of Life and Death in the ER is actually a pretty good book. I won't be able to tell for sure, though, because I'm not going to be able to read it.

Ever since I was in the hospital last year (and that was for a scheduled surgery; not an emergency room situation) I find that anything on medical subjects has been ruined for me. I can't watch Scrubs on TV any more; commercials for ER cause nearly instantaneous nausea; just the thought of typing "webmd.com" into the Internet makes my hands start shaking. Likewise, I can no longer read books on medical subjects. This is a shame, because I used to like books like Atul Gawande's Complications Pauline Chen's Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality, and Richard Selzer's Down from Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age. I have read all of Robin Cook's medical thrillers and loved them; I was never really a squeamish reader. But now? All I have to read is Austin's intro:

"Thirty minutes later, the CT technician wheeled Ms. Lowery back to her cubicle, and then walked over to the nursing station. The technician sat down next to me, and pulled her chair close. 'She's got a mass this big,' she whispered, forming a circle with her thumb and middle finger. 'It's the size of a golf ball. The radiologist's going to call you in a minute with the formal report, but the mass is pretty obvious.'

The radiologist called. I spoke with Dr. Davis, the neurosurgeon on call. He asked a few questions, and said he'd be right in. I was glad I'd be turning Ms. Lowery's care over to him. Some of the on-call doctors try to dodge admissions. They look for reasons that I should send the patient home or to another hospital--anything to keep from having to come in and deal with the admission...

I sat in the dictation booth, not looking forward to telling Ms. Lowery she had a brain tumor. But the sooner I talked with her, the sooner I could go home." (pp. 19-20.)

And...we're done here. I did read a little bit more; it's a memoir of how Austin became a doctor and how his work in the emergency room has affected him--and it is actually very good stuff. But I just can't do it. The frailty of the human body, the knowledge that any of us can go from having a headache to having a brain mass overnight, is something that I don't want to read about. Maybe someday I'll come back for it. But most likely not.

Audio book hijinks.

I thought I'd shake things up a bit in my continuing quest to read all of Ian McEwan's novels, so I got Amsterdam* as a book on CD and have been listening to it. And now, on the fourth and final CD, I can confidently say...

I have no idea what the hell is going on in this book.

Well, that's not true. I've just about figured out which character is Clive, and which one is Vernon, and how they're both semi-involved with getting pictures of a cross-dressing politician published in the newspaper. Oh, and there's also something about a woman they both loved, Molly, and how she was involved with the cross-dressing politician, and that's why Clive and Vernon want to take him down.

Okay, when you can't keep two main characters in mind, you know you're just not following the audio book. So now my question is, am I just not enjoying the book, or do I just not enjoy listening to novels? Usually, when I listen to books, they are nonfiction books, I'll admit. And when I listen to books, I'm typically doing the dishes or cooking--evidently I don't have enough brain power to both follow a storyline AND scrub plates? Interesting.

So I'm going to do a little experiment; I got McEwan's book Saturday on tape, and I'm going to try that too. Maybe it's just Amsterdam. Maybe it's just McEwan. Or maybe it's any fiction on tape. I'm going to find out!

*I was just reading about this book at Amazon, where I was reminded that this is the book for which McEwan won the Booker Prize. What? My long tradition of not enjoying Booker Prize-winners continues. Which hurts me, because it's a British award, and as such, I should be all over it.